Ran across this today by accident while looking up something on the Bosnia trip. Lissa Muscatine had applied for a speech writer's job in the Clinton White House and then discovered she was pregnant. And then that she had twins. She assumed she was out of a job. Hillary apparently fought to hire her with the comment "If this is the best person, this is who we're going to hire, and I don't care if she has one kid or two kids or 10 kids.... If we can't make it work here, how can we possibly make it work for women in other places of employment?'" Maybe it's a fairy tale, you tell me.

Lissa Muscatine

So can I be as obtuse as you can hang out here and talk about how we're post-gender and how you should just get over it and stop being angry because haven't we come so far already and why don't women realize just how much opportunity they have in this country? You know, since all you ever want to do is try and play tit-for-tat before you bother to puzzle out how ridiculous your "argument" is.

EUexpat,

yes and of that 51% the majority being women of color. Thanks for that link.

I suppose you can read his comments as establishing a hierarchical frame to it. I took it as jabs at her privilege, and distance from the affected communities though.

Desidero,

Where do African American women fit into the picture you paint?

Well, I'm an Obama supporter, and I'll acknowledge that this is a place where Rev Wright certainly could have been more thoughtful. He dismisses Hillary much too quickly as privileged solely on the grounds of race, without thinking hard enough about the rest of her experience.

She's got certain kinds of advantages. But there's also no question that she's had to overcome obstacles, and she's done it well.

Moreover, I'm very pleased that yesterday she spent some time attacking McCain instead of *just* dragging down the party. If she keeps attacking McCain, I think you'll find that Obama supporters become positively civil.

Desidero:

Is your ultimate point that Hillary has it worse or that they both had it bad? If you say they both had it bad I can agree with you - I don't agree with Reverend Wright on that point about Clinton.

To say Hillary had it worse, I think is specious. It gets into what an earlier poster here said is the oppression olympics. Is it 15% worse to be a woman? Or is it 25% worse to be a woman? Or 23% worse to be black? And a black woman? Do we average?

They both had obstacles because of their race and gender - serious obstacles. Both had serious privilege - best elite schools in country, name recognition for Clinton to launch her Senate career, lousy Republican candidate ran against Obama.

So there, I think we are even.

Hi Bev, good to see you.
I think we had the tone a notch or two below this. To quote a famous Czech writer, "Don't shoot, there are people here".

Desidero-
So let me get this right, Rev Wright should get over his feelings of victimization because things have gotten better for Black folks, but women are still endlessly victimized so as a woman I must vote for HRC? Do you really not see the duplicity? That argument is so self serving it took a few minutes for it to really sink in....

A rising tide lifts all boats. If we as Democrats work for civil rights and economic fairness then all if these groups station in life will improve- along with a lot of white males, too. There is no contest to see who is the more disenfranchised, just a specious argument put forward by partisans hoping to keep an embarrassing story going.

What some older femninists are missing in this whole situation is younger women's ability to appreciate the struggles of those who came before us without being completely defined and obsessed with them. I'm a Title IX baby, I grew up knowing that I could play sports, go to college, work in corporate America, date an African American, even have an abortion legally if I so wished. I can honestly say that I have never experienced the rampant sexism or fear that you describe, and I live below the Mason Dixon line. In fact, I'm more than a little tired of being told by the HRC campaign that I'm a victim and only she can defend me.

HRC is an incredibly accomplished woman, but she does not have the experience she has claimed in this campaign. If I'm to be expected to vote for her as leader of the free world, she'd better be prepared to answer tough questions. You can make the "woman as victim, she has to work twice as hard" statement as much as you want, but the fact is that she has gotten caught on multiple occasions padding her resume and lying about her previous positions. I'm not going to give her a pass on that just because we share the same plumbing.

Thanks so much for sharing this, great for morale. I support Hillary, now and in years past, and when I see the possibility of what the US may be missing in the next 4 years, It saddens me. She has always inspired me, most of my contributions are to childrens charities and mostly because she has shown me by walking the walk. Thanks again.

Is Senator Clinton running against Rev. Wright or Senator Obama. I know you would like to make it against Rev.Wright, but he is not a candidate for President.

Senator Clinton is running for President and she has endorsed War Monger McCain as being qualified to be Commander in Chief, ahead of Peace candidate Obama of her own party.

That makes Senator Clinton still a war enabler. If she truly wants to see the Iraq War, which she voted for, ended, she could never state that the man who wishes to continue Bush's Iraq War would make a great Commander in Chief.

I don't care about which gender is in charge. I do care that there is only one true Peace Candidate. Senator Clinton voted for the Iraq War, and late last year she voted for the Kyl/Lieberman ploy to attack Iran.

Now she endorses War Monger McCain ahead of Democrat Obama. That makes Senator Clinton a traitor to her own party.

Hillary is the new Lieberman.

If he is the true "peace" Candidate can he please tell his "family" in Kenya to stop the genocide they are perpetuating?

Desidero, may I suggest you print out all of your posts and comments on Wright and submit them to Fox News as your resume for a commentator position. They are looking for people that can remove all context from a story, create straw man arguments for it, introduce new angles with no real connection, and can milk it until the cow is a bag of bones.

This might make you feel a little better Desidero, in addition to concluding your many doubts on Obama's position and understanding of women's issues.

Senator Barack Obama today released the following statement on Women's History Month:

Women's History Month isn't just a chance to celebrate women's history; it's a chance to honor the extraordinary role women have played in shaping American history. From midnight journeys on the Underground Railroad to marches for women's suffrage and civil rights, from the bomber assembly lines of World War II to the boardrooms of today, women have always shown us what we can achieve when we refuse to settle for the world as it is and choose to remake the world as it should be.

But despite the achievements we honor this month, we know we still have challenges to overcome. We need to build an America where women earn the same pay as men for the same work, and have time off to care for a loved one who's sick; where women have control over the health care decisions that affect their lives, and don't have to choose between their kids and their careers. It's not enough to have a holiday that honors women if we don't also make sure our laws value women.

This holiday is particularly meaningful to me because I would not be the person I am without the women in my life. I was raised by a single mother across two continents, and by a grandmother who instilled in me her own Midwestern values. And my wife Michelle - a woman who's overcome a number of challenges as a lawyer and hospital executive - continues to make me a better man.

Every night I'm home, Michelle and I tuck two little girls into bed. And we want to make sure that they have the same opportunities as every little boy in this country. That's the dream that women have fought for throughout our nation's history, and that's the dream I'll fight to make real as President of the United States.

Please visit Women.BarackObama.com to meet some of the incredible women supporting Barack Obama.

"If he is the true "peace" Candidate can he please tell his "family" in Kenya to stop the genocide they are perpetuating?"

Now that is a truly idiotic comment. Why is "family" in quotation marks? Obama's family aren't really family?

Louisville, you really think Obama's relatives are genocidaires? And that he can end the killings by telling his relatives to stop?

Or do you mean to say that all the Luo are Obama's "family", and they are perpetuating a genocide? Do you even read the paper? The candidate who won the election (but had it stolen from him) was the Luo. The incumbent who stole the election was a Kikuyu. So even if you want to blame an entire ethnic group for the political killings on both sides (which is pretty crazy given that the overwhelming majority of both groups weren't involved in any violence), it's hard to understand how you'd pick the Luo to blame.

Or do you mean "family" to include all the black people in Kenya? So Obama is an insincere peacemaker as long as any black people anywhere are doing any bad things?

In breaking news, the rioting there has been over for weeks. Thank God.

I've read almost half the comments, but can't wait any longer to express a couple of things. I'm a 51 year old white mother of 3 (one daughter). I identify myself as a feminist. Because of attitudes like the ones expressed in this post, though, I have never really made feminism the main focus of my political activism. Why? "Walking while female" for example. Perhaps that's a political problem that Hillary Clinton can solve, but I don't think so - but while we're talking about violence against a class of people, what color do you think most victims of crime are? "According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, in 2005 about 49% of murder victims were white, 49% were black, and 3% were Asians, Pacific Islander, and Native American". Blacks are 13% of the population. "According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, most murder victims were male, 79% in 2005." Of course, women are overrepresented in rapes, but that's the only violent crime that women are more likely to face than men. So, yeah, in some ways it sucks being female but my female bosses weren't any more understanding or compassionate than my male bosses about my household responsibilities, and my household politics have a lot to do with what I'm willing to put up with. Does gender play a role and could things be better? Yes, but as a matter of national policy, I'm not sure if Hillary has a "plan" to get us there. It's an issue complicated by social and religious attitudes rather than legal hurdles.

".... just where the hell are the women preachers anyway?

Actually there are a fair number of them.

The black churches in particular have been hospitable to women as preachers & pastors. Check these prominent black women ministers out:

Prathia Laura Ann Hall, pastor of Mt. Sharon Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Ironically, perhaps, an article in Ebony, written before the current fracas, quotes none other than Jeremiah Wright -- who says Hall is in "a class of her own," and lifts " the gospel to new levels."

Vashti M. McKenzie, pastor of Payne Memorial AME Church in Baltimore. In 2000 McKenzie became the first female bishop in the AME Church.

Some more: Suzan Johnson Cook, founder and senior pastor of Bronx Christian Fellowship Church, N.Y., Ann Farrar Lightner-Fuller, pastor of Mt. Calvary AME Church in Towson, Md., Delores H. Carpenter, senior pastor of Michigan Park Christian Church in Washington, D.C.

There are lots more. Note that these women are all pastors or senior pastors of their own churches. The pattern in many white churches that accept women pastors is that women pastors tend to be "associate pastors" or "youth pastors," etc.

More women go to college than men. More women are getting advanced degrees than men. After compensating for non-sexist factors, like years in the workforce, overtime and industry women earn more than 95 cents for every dollar men earn.

That 77 cent figure everyone was talking about last fall? When you actually read the fine print, you discover that it says that after compensating for the factors I mentioned, 25 percent couldn't be explained by anything other than sexism. But of course it was reported as women making 77 cents for every dollar men earned, as if the choices women made for themselves had nothing to do with the difference.

But I digress.

African-Americans of both sexes have lower life expectancies that whites, African-Americans are more likely to be victims of violence than whites, African-Americans are underrepresented in higher education, African-American men are many more times likely to be imprisoned than white men. Etc, etc, etc.

So you can stick your whole blog entry where the sun don't shine because that sort of crap may go down well with the women's studies set, but it doesn't stand up to the light of day.

Here's the line that shows me that you totally underestimate the burden carried by a black man:

"Blacks once they get the job go to lunch and drinks with the guys, are tied into the decision process."

I'm not defending Wright's comments about Hillary, or in any way denying the burdens which women carry in the workplace, but it's really naive to act like black men are immediately accepted into the power structure in business. There aren't a lot of women OR black guys out at the exclusive country clubs playing business golf.