Time's up, Bill

Back to Bill Clinton: It often feels like every woman who was alive during the Lewinsky scandal — and some who weren’t — has been asked to justify how she reacted to it. Feminists, including Gloria Steinem, who took Clinton’s side 20 years ago, have been asked to reconsider and recant. Chelsea Clinton has been asked about her father’s sexual past during both the 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns of her mother. In 2018, conservative women publicly objected to Anita Hill heading up the Time’s Up legal task force, because she’d told Tim Russert in 1998 that Bill Clinton’s harassment had to be evaluated in the context of “the totality” of his presidency and “how he has been on women’s issues generally.”

All these women still have to apologize for not having been tough enough on Clinton, yet last fall, when Kirsten Gillibrand — who’d go on to be the first to request that Franken step down — was asked by the New York Times whether she thought retrospectively that Clinton should have resigned the presidency and answered yes, she was attacked by the Clintons’ long-time aide Philippe Reines for her ingratitude and hypocrisy, while political strategist Hank Sheinkopf called her “traitorous,” a “political opportunist,” and “disloyal.”

As a feminist journalist who’s written extensively about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns and about #MeToo, I, too, am regularly entreated to offer up my own judgments of Bill Clinton’s behavior, as well as to judge how Hillary reacted, how feminists of the time reacted, how contemporary feminists react to Hillary Clinton’s reactions …