Sublime

When women got into positions of power, they calibrated and recalibrated tenderness and strength, modulating and correcting. Power and love didn’t often live side by side.

For the women who were managing households, raising children, and holding down jobs, the appeal of having it all had led most unexpectedly to the reality of having less and less.

Often the road to politics is through culture.

It was not the first time that motherhood provided the female version of civic virtue.

He then went on to explain that he’d long understood the connection between looking good and looking capable.

experience of womanhood.

More recently, the ideal woman has been whatever she wants to be as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure—of “lifestyle.”

Most women don’t have a community of badasses on whom they can rely, and the result is a continued massive pay gap and way fewer women business owners reaching seven figures in revenue.

Clinton’s loss, which I will mourn forever, might reiterate the importance of making space for the difficult woman. It might also point toward the way that valuing a woman for her difficulty can, in ways that are unexpectedly destructive, obscure her actual, particular self.