Hillary the Harpy was, for the most part, a creature of campaign season.
Before Clinton was running for office, when she was Secretary of State—fourth in the presidential line of succession, one of the highest US political offices—she was literally the most popular politician in the country. Before that, she ran for president in 2008, and her favorability ratings dropped below 50 percent; before that, she was a sitting senator, and generally well-liked. “It’s not her success that seems to arouse ire,” writes feminist commentator Sady Doyle, “but the act of campaigning itself.”
The same pattern, Doyle points out, applies to Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren: She was wildly popular in office, widely derided on the trail. “Thus, the single worst thing a female politician can do to herself is to look for a job in politics,” Doyle writes. “We can accept women in power, but not women’s desire for more of it.”
Nobody here is against equality, or at least equality of a kind. We could all get along if women would take what was granted to them and no more. If the harpies would eat their own food. If the girl would stand somewhere else.
What makes a woman’s ambition predatory, grotesque, is the perception that it overflows its natural bounds. The harpy aspires to what does not belong to her. The allowable territory grows and shrinks with time: Once it would have been unthinkable to aim for a job at all, let alone leadership of a country. But wherever we draw the line for women, only a monster would look beyond.
Jess Zimmerman, “The Monstrous Female Ambition of the Harpy,” Catapult Aug 24, 2017, catapult.co/stories/role-monsters-harpy-women-ambition
