Albright calls her comment about women in hell ‘undiplomatic’

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued a mea culpa for a freakish warning last weekend to women voters who would dare vote against Hillary Clinton – a line that backfired badly during Clinton’s failed New Hampshire campaign. My reasons for not supporting Hillary have nothing to do with her gender- and everything to do with her awful policies.

She explained “in the excitement of a campaign event” for Clinton in New Hampshire she trotted out a line she’d delivered “a thousand times” before to good effect. Late Tuesday night, Sanders led her among women by around 10 points, according to exit polls reported by CNN.

“We agreed that if we didn’t drive these kinds of issues, who would?” recalls Maine Republican Olympia Snowe in her memoir. “I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based exclusively on gender”, Albright wrote.

“I have spent much of my career as a diplomat”, the former secretary of state from 1997 to 2001 writes in an op-ed for the New York Times. “We have a special obligation to make clear what we stand for, which is why I think we should not make promises we can’t keep”, Clinton said. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you. Whether comments are taken out of context or a noted name misspeaks, feminists like Albright are under an intense amount of scrutiny to represent feminism without a misstep at all times. Democrat Martha Griffiths in the House and Republican Margaret Chase Smith in the Senate managed to outwit their colleagues in order to make it forever illegal to say: “We don’t hire women”.

As a Wellesley College student in the late 1960s, Hillary Rodham exemplified a brash new model of the young woman activist. But it is precisely because of the successes and the changes brought about by the courage and determination of women like Steinem and Albright that young women today don’t feel they have to think of gender first. It is women of my generation.

“I would love to have a conversation with Gloria Steinem”, she said, “if only to impress upon the fact that I truly do have her in the highest regard, and I respect her immensely”.

“There’s [been] this constant rhetoric in the past weeks from Clinton’s endorsements, that millennial women don’t understand the significance of having a female president”, Donaldson said.

All of the women in Congress, current and former, can tell stories of the difference they’ve made simply because they were in the room.

Susan Estrich is a law professor in Southern California and managed the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis.