Hillary Clinton’s Sentiments

Hillary Clinton’s emergence as the first woman presidential nominee evoked from the former First Lady an affecting reverie about two little sisters. It is recounted by Gail Collins in the Times this morning. Ms. Collins, in an interview for her column, sprang on the former First Lady a friendly mind game: To whom from the time of the struggle for suffrage would Mrs. Clinton like to be able to report that there is finally a woman nominee?Mrs. Clinton picked her own mother, Dorothy Howell, who had been born on the day in 1919 that the Senate passed the amendment giving women the vote. As an unwanted child of eight, Dorothy had been sent, with her younger sister, Isabelle, west by train to live with a relative. “Imagine Hillary Clinton going back in time,” Ms. Collins writes. “She sits in the train next to a frightened little girl, and delivers the news about what happened this week.”We found the reverie arresting, as were Mrs. Clinton’s own remarks last night at Brooklyn. The Secretary spoke of Seneca Falls, where in 1848 the first conference on women’s rights met and issued its Declaration of Sentiments. That document is too little taught. It echoes cadences of the Declaration of Independence and enumerates the grievances that animated its authors, speaking of men and women in the third person singular.“He has,” the enumeration begins, “not ever permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men — both natives and foreigners. Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.”Those were but the beginning of a long bill, and we don’t gainsay any of it. But one of the hurdles Mrs. Clinton faces is that many of the grievances enumerated at Seneca Falls have been addressed — by the Congress, the President, the states, and the courts. And for that matter the United Nations. So Mrs. Clinton enters the lists for President with the wind at her back on the Sentiments but facing headwinds on the rest of it. What comes after the declared sentiments in respect of the hard policy choices America is facing?If we believe in the Declaration of Sentiments, how do we feel about supporting an appeasement of the Ayatollahs in Iran? If we believe in Seneca Falls, how do we feel about the Clinton Foundation scarfing up, while Mrs. Clinton is in office, tens, even hundreds, of millions of dollars in charitable contributions from medieval countries, including some in which women are treated like chattel?Then again, too, what about her apologetics for her philandering husband? It happens that we’ve been consistent on this head for a full generation — the right venue for those questions to be worked out is the private realm of the Clintons’ own marriage. But Mrs. Clinton has left herself open to attack from this quarter by attacking Donald Trump on his own personal behavior. Even the Times is editorializing that many in the “newest generation of American voters” are saying of Mrs. Clinton that they “don’t trust her.”It is not our intention here to make or withhold an endorsement of either one of the candidates. We are happy enough to savor the moment Mrs. Clinton has reached. Let us, though, mark the cautionary note in the penultimate particular of the Declaration of Sentiments: “He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.” Maybe that will inspire Mrs. Clinton to hearken to that other set of siblings in the news, the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Hillary Clinton’s Sentiments

Hillary Clinton’s Sentiments

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