UPDATED: Protestors to Clinton: “Iron My Shirt”

JUST IN! GET IT WHILE SUPPLIES LAST! Here’s the very latest in misogynistic expression that’s “Made In the U.S.A.”:

Me? I’d rather send that $24.99 to Emily’s List, which supports pro-choice women candidates across the country.

ORIGINAL: “Protesters ask Clinton to iron shirts,” A.P./Yahoo News:

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign stop was interrupted on Monday when two men stood in the crowd and began screaming, “Iron my shirt!” during one the New York senator’s final appearances before New Hampshire voters cast primary ballots Tuesday. [...]

“Ah, the remnants of sexism — alive and well,” Clinton said to applause in a school auditorium.

The two men were removed from the hall after raising a pair of signs that said, “iron my shirt!” They also shouted the same slogan. [...]

The overflow crowd burst into applause and some began shouting, “Iron my shirt” as the two were taken from the hall.

“As I think has been abundantly demonstrated, I am also running to break through the highest and hardest glass ceiling,” she said.

The United States ranks 67th in the world in the number of women it has elected to office — between Zimbabwe and Turkistan, according to BBC World News.

Will we ever come to grips with the rampant sexism still alive in this country, and how it punishes women through lower wages, fewer opportunities, stereotypes, sexual assaults, and lost dreams? Will we ever let women be who they really are, instead of forcing them to be twice as good to get half as far, while expecting them to be simultaneously smart and sexy, tough enough to issue an order to a general while sweet enough to charm your socks off? Let me tell you a couple stories:

I was fortunate to be selected to be a page in the Washington state legislature. But I’ll never forget the hand of the white-haired senator who fondled and pinched my rearend in the elevator. And I’ll never forget how, back then, it never dawned on me to complain to anyone — because we women didn’t complaint about such abuse back then. It scarred me, and I dwelled on it, but there was no relief for me.

There was nowhere to complain back then. Now, I could complain. Now, I could get action. Hell, I perhaps could even sue if I wanted to. I might even end the senator’s career. These days.

So how did we get from “those days” to “these days” — even as imperfect as they are? Especially in the United States?

We got there in good part because of women like the courageous feminists who spoke out, and through women like Hillary Clinton and me, who began to speak up and demand change.

It blows my mind that young women, these days, have so little awareness of just how far we’ve come. They don’t know how hard it was.

They haven’t heard, like I did, young men at one of the nation’s top universities say that what a certain uptight female student needed was a “good rape.” They haven’t heard, like I did, the men at an Esalen Institute weekend seminar brag about how they’d held one inhibited woman down and forcibly had sex with her to get her to loosen up. They haven’t heard, like I did, that it was unfortunate that I wrote “like a woman.”

Hillary Clinton knows. She remembers. What’s so incredible about her is that she has never let it stop her. Even when they call her a “bitch” and a “lesbian” and every other name in the book. But she remembers. Oh yes she does:

Growing up, there were sports we couldn’t play, schools we couldn’t attend, and jobs that essentially had a “men only” sign on them.

As an eighth grader I was captivated by space-travel. I wrote to NASA asking how to apply to be an astronaut — they wrote back explaining that these positions weren’t open to women. Well today, Iowa’s own Peggy Whitson has been appointed the first female Commander of the International Space Station.

Years later, when I was deciding where I wanted to attend law school, I was coolly informed by a Harvard Law professor, and I quote, “We don’t need any more women at Harvard.” So I went to Yale. [laughter] And my entering class at Yale Law School — where I decided to go instead — had 235 students, of whom just 27 were women.

Today, women are the majority of students in law schools. As a young lawyer, when I told a colleague that I might want to practice courtroom law, he replied that, that was impossible, because I didn’t have a wife. … Read more of her speech on “WOMEN’S RIGHTS: Mary Louise Smith Lecture at the Catt Center for Women and Politics,” Iowa State University, October 24, 2007

Perhaps that is why she spoke out so courageously — with such rich anger — for women in Beijing in 1995:

“HILLARY CLINTON, IN CHINA, DETAILS ABUSE OF WOMEN“:

Speaking more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on Chinese soil, Hillary Rodham Clinton catalogued a devastating litany of abuse that has afflicted women around the world today and criticized China for seeking to limit free and open discussion of women’s issues here.

“It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights,” Mrs. Clinton told the Fourth World Conference on Women assembled here.

“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls,” Mrs. Clinton said, or “when women and girls are sold into slavery or prostitution for human greed.

“It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small” she continued, or “when thousands of women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.”

While her comments concerned abuses that have taken place around the world — the burning of brides occurs in India for example, and rape has most recently been a tactic of war in Bosnia — her words took on a special resonance here in China, where the Administration has muted its public criticism of human rights abuses and is struggling to patch up frayed political relations.

China has been widely criticized for forcing women to be sterilized or have abortions as part of its policy of one child per family, and there are wide reports of female infanticide by parents who want a son. [...]

Mrs. Clinton’s gravity and directness seemed to please both Democratic and Republican members of the United States delegation here, and thus the speech may trump the political disputes that have plagued both Mrs. Clinton’s decision to travel here and the Administration’s approach to China.

She delivered her remarks after joining hundreds of delegates in a morning workshop on “women and health security.”

Addressing the full conference in the afternoon, Mrs. Clinton expanded on a theme that Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, raised on Monday when she told the delegates that violence against women thrives when there is a “crisis of silence and acquiescence.”

As Mrs. Clinton recited her litany from the podium, many delegates applauded, some cheered and others pounded the tables.

Continuing with references to domestic violence, genital mutilation, coercive abortions and sterilizations, Mrs. Clinton told the delegates from more than 180 countries, “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.” …

She can do more than iron shirts. Can’t she.

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For more on Hillary Clinton’s decades-long work for women and children, click here.