A placard of Hillary Clinton in a 'pussyhat'. Credit: Bastiaan Slabbers / NurPhoto/Getty
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There is happy news for misogynists on International Men’s Day. The feminist movement is splintered between the third wave — the shopping and sex positive wave — and the fourth wave: the angry intersectionalist wearing knitted vaginas when not on Twitter wave.
The goals are unclear. Do we want equal pay and equality of caring responsibilities — my dull Generation X ideal — or do we want a revolution that will, among other things, abolish all prejudice, and many men?
Two new books poke the swamp and lead me to the conclusion: we aren’t really at war. We are, rather, in furious agreement with each other.
The first is The Book of Gutsy Women: Favourite Stories of Courage and Resilience by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton. It is an epic made of fake humility, for these are feminists of the most important kind. It is a 442-page homage to “brave, resilient women”, including Mary Beard, whom AA Gill called too ugly for television, and Greta Thunberg, for obvious reasons. Ellen DeGeneres is included because she makes Hillary laugh, and because some people, including Hillary, think that celebrity endorsement doesn’t make feminism look ridiculous, but they are all wrong. Consider, for instance, Angelina Jolie and various drooling male politicians failing to stop rape in war. They didn’t stop rape in war because they were busy staring at Angelina Jolie, who was also the reason they turned up.
Mostly though, it is about female pioneers; it is possible that DeGeneres was the first ever person to make Hillary laugh. And, if you can bear the earnest and repetitive prose in Gutsy Women, a world of female humiliation almost emerges from its pages, because it often sounds anaesthetised. The female Clintons are attacked so often for being both Clintons and female, their writing seems designed entirely to pre-empt attacks, which is a tragedy. They have produced a glassy and humourless plea for justice, and that is interesting by default. You could call it the book of multiple Hillary Clintons, all brave, all wronged, reflected back at her.
There are nurses and inventors and minor politicians who suffered because they were women but endured anyway – as she did. It is the book of them, and of herself and, because of that, it is a minor masterpiece by mistake.
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