Hillary Clinton and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talk censorship, feminism, and Pizzagate

I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and I do conclude — and I write about it in my book — that there is this long, long history of trying to silence women. Literally in literature, in the western canon, it goes back to The Odyssey.

Penelope is holding the whole country together while Odysseus is taking his time getting back. She’s raising their son, Telemachus.

There’s a very telling scene where all the usual partiers and others are hanging around, hoping that she’ll finally decide that her husband’s dead and marry one of them so that they can take over. Telemachus is now about 17, so he’s a young man.

His mother comes down, as she always did, to greet people and listen to their complaints and to continue being the glue that held the country together. And her son greets her by saying, “Mother, go back upstairs. Speech is not for women.”

The really terrific classics professor Mary Beard — who some of you know, and if you don’t, look her up — has just written a book about women and power, in which she traces this whole line of being quiet: “Don’t speak. Don’t speak up.”

Now, for everyone saying, “Well, that’s a Hillary Clinton problem.” The people who they’d interview, saying, “Well, of course I would vote for a woman! Just not that woman.” In the last year and a half, what have we seen?

We’ve seen Elizabeth Warren ordered off the floor of the Senate by Mitch McConnell. I was in the Senate for eight years and I never saw that. Because she was reading a letter from Coretta Scott King about Jeff Sessions, and he told her to stop. She had every right not to stop, and when she didn’t, he literally had her taken off the floor. And one of her male colleagues — a really good guy, another Democratic senator — he came to the floor of the Senate and he began to read her letter, and nobody said a word.

Or Kamala Harris, who was doing her job and cross-examining Jeff Sessions and [was] basically told to stop talking: “Don’t do that.”

This is not about one woman and one election. This remains a very serious challenge to women speaking out, speaking up, trying to or already assuming positions of power and influence.

So when I hear that, I hear the echoes going back thousands of years. And I hear the unfortunate belief that people still have, that women’s voices are not particularly appealing. That women’s words are not particularly important.

And in my case, it was also because a lot of those same people who said, “Don’t talk,” they did not want to face what happened in the 2016 election. So getting me off the stage was a way of ignoring everything that had gone on.

I come at it very differently. If we don’t understand what happened in that election, we are doomed to see it repeated in future elections.

Why white women en masse have been trending Republican

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

I was thinking about you going to the inauguration — God bless you; I wouldn’t have — and just looking back: What do you think about the fact that 52 percent of white women voted for this president?

I say that because we knew he had shown us what he was. We knew. It wasn’t just theAccess Hollywood tape; it was a way of being and doing in the world.

I ask you this because you’re a white woman, but also because: Gloria Steinem in her memoir writes that many of the women she spoke to who were most opposed to you being president, many of them were white women who were very similar to you: they were educated, they were middle-class, they were about your age. And she was struck by that.

In reading about Trump, I wonder if these are the same women who voted for him. She writes that she tried very hard to humanize you to them, because of all this, “She’s too cold, she’s too ambitious,” and all of those things. Do you think about that?

Hillary Clinton

White women writ large, all white women, have been steadily voting Republican for decades. I actually got a slightly higher percentage of white women than President Obama.

White women have moved toward the Republican Party for a lot of reasons. In 2000 and 2004, there were reasons that had to do — especially 2004 — with the 9/11 attack. In 2008 and ’12, President Obama had an amazing campaign, and it turned out so many people of color that the fact that white women weren’t voting for him was not as salient.

As [for] my case, I actually got a majority of college-educated white women. It was, I think, exactly because these were the women who were most worried about what they’d seen of Trump during the campaign.

But for other women, particularly women who gravitate in presidential elections toward the Republican Party, there were a combination of explanations. They didn’t believe he’d be as bad as he said. They thought it was all political rhetoric. They thought he would bring real change. And as I say in my book, when you run to succeed a two-term president of your own party, it’s always an uphill struggle.

I think there were a number of factors at work in that. But what we’ve seen of the energy coming after the election, starting with the Women’s March and going into the political races of the last year and a half: We’ve seen college-educated, primarily suburban women moving away from the Republican Party because of the performance that they have now been able to watch.

On why Hillary Clinton describes herself as a wife first, and if she should

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

You’ve made many choices for love. In reading about your life, I was thinking about what if you hadn’t gone to Arkansas very very young.

I should say that I spend lots of time being very protective about you, and in my mind I call you my auntie. I get very protective of my Auntie Hillary, and when people talk about your personal life, I find it very irritating. And having read quite a bit of your own writing about your personal life, I think that you have a remarkable love story. I really do. It seems to me that you have this wonderful friendship.

However, I have to say that I’m guilty of being very interested in your personal life. And the one question I have about that is about your Twitter account.

So your Twitter account first of all describes you as a wife. And then it’s mom, and then it’s grandmother. And when I saw that, I have to confess that I felt just a little bit upset. And then I went and I looked at your husband’s Twitter, and the first word that he used to describe himself was not “husband.”

I wanted to ask if this was your choice, if it was something that you wanted to do, or maybe something that somebody thought would be good for the campaign. And if it’s your choice, whether you think it’s fair for me to have been a little bit annoyed by this.

Hillary Clinton

Well, when you put it like that, I’m going to change it.

You know, there’s always this — for me, I’ll just speak for myself, but I think it’s broader than just me — there’s always this internal conflict. When you are very committed to your relationships, your family — in my case, parents and siblings, and obviously my husband and my daughter and now my grandchildren — and your own identity, and how you feel about yourself and describe yourself.

Yesterday, I went to Barbara Bush’s funeral. She gave a very heartfelt speech at Wellesley in I think 1991 [ed. note: 1990], in which she said: At the end of the day, it won’t matter if you got a raise, it won’t matter if you wrote a great book, if you are not also someone who values relationships. She got a standing ovation after, [even though] there was a lot of concern and some protest about her being invited to come speak.

I’ve thought a lot about that. Because it shouldn’t be either/or. It should be that if you are someone who is defining yourself by what you do and what you accomplish, and that is satisfying, then more power to you; that is how you should be thinking about your life and living it. If you are someone who primarily defines your life in relationship to others, then more power to you. Live that life the way Barbara Bush lived that life, and how proud she was to do it.

But I think most of us as women in today’s world end up in the middle: wanting to have relationships, wanting to invest in them, nurture them, but also pursuing our own interests.

I loved the picture of Sen. Tammy Duckworth coming onto the floor of the Senate with her baby. I think that sort of summed it all up. She is both: She’s a mom, she’s a senator, she’s a combat veteran. She is somebody who’s trying to integrate all the various aspects of her life. That’s what I’ve tried to do for a very long time, and it’s not easy. But it is something that I’ve chosen to do, and I think is best for me, so I’m going to keep doing it.

But I am going to change my Twitter account.

“The overwhelming story was my candidacy and his behavior”

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

Do you remember Suzie O’Callahan, when you were very young? She’s a little girl who has bullied you, and you came in crying to your mother. And your mother said, “Go back out there, and if she hits you, you have my permission to hit her back.”

Reading that, I thought about your most recent campaign. Did you hit back often enough, do you think?

Hillary Clinton

I now think that I didn’t.

In the book, I write about that one particular incident when [Trump] was stalking me on the debate stage. People are saying, “You need to talk about the mistakes you made.” I’ve been pretty forthcoming about that, but one of the mistakes is that it was really difficult to figure out how to deal with the first reality TV candidate in a reality TV campaign.

I’ve been around people who run for president. I’ve supported them, obviously married one, worked for another. So I was used to what was the norm — only updating the technology, you do a better job communicating — but the norm was: You lay out what you’re going to do, you defend it, and at some point, usually in the debates, one of the questioners really nails you down. Like, “Okay, you say you’re going to give us universal health care coverage. How are you going to do it? How are you going to pay for it?”

We didn’t really get a lot of that in the campaign, because the overwhelming story was my candidacy and his behavior. So we were always trying to figure out how to break through.

On that debate stage, I remember so well thinking, “What do I do?” I did practice to say what I wanted to say in the short period of time we were given, and all of a sudden — I know what he’s doing. He’s trying to intimidate me, but he’s also sending a message to the audience. “This is what a president looks like. It’s a guy who is going to overpower people and be dominant.”

So I’m thinking, “What, do I turn around? Do I say, ‘Back up, you creep’?” But by then, I had enough experience. The coverage of it would have been, “She can’t take the pressure.” Or, “She got angry.” I say things in a normal tone and I’m always amazed when the press says, “She was so angry!” [Joking] You haven’t seen anything yet.

I was really struggling with it, and I concluded, as I was, I think, expecting myself to, “Okay. You just have to be calm and controlled. Ultimately, what the country wants is somebody who is not going to be blowing up in the Oval Office. They want somebody who is going to be in control of their problems.” As you know, that did not work out so good.