The Women Who Met Hillary, and Spotted a Future Political Star - New York Times
Ms. Piercy, representing the league, went on to attend the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1972, a key inflection point for female activists. “We realized that the only way we could be accepted as equals was to be in office,” she said. “But the parties were not interested in cultivating women. So we realized we would have to train them ourselves.”
Ms. Piercy was too inexperienced to do that; so was Elisabeth Griffith, another friend of Mrs. Clinton’s and Ms. Piercy’s from Wellesley, who had joined Ms. Piercy in the early stages of a project with that ambition. But while Mrs. Clinton was a law student supporting the presidential candidate Senator George McGovern in San Antonio, she met Ms. Wright, the person she thought could galvanize and prepare potential female candidates.
She soon became close to Ms. Wright, a seasoned political operative whose experience of sexism on the McGovern campaign was having a somewhat radicalizing effect on her. Often when Ms. Wright tried to raise an issue with a male staff member on the campaign, “It elicited some kind of crazy response about hormones,” Ms. Wright, now 73, recalled. “I was already a feminist, but that turned me into a raving feminist. I would go home and play Helen Reddy and go to sleep.”
Bill Clinton, who helped coordinate McGovern’s Texas campaign, had his own feminist aha moment while working on the race, when McGovern’s staff did not pursue Mrs. Clinton for a job for which Mr. Clinton had recommended her. “But she’s better than me,” he told Ms. Piercy at the time.
In meeting Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Wright said, she no longer just imagined a woman could be president, but believed she had met the very woman who would first reach that milestone. Many friends tried to talk Hillary out of marrying Bill for the sake of her political future; Ms. Wright went so far as to try to talk Bill out of marrying Hillary, for the sake of the feminist cause. “I told him it was always going to be a struggle for her to carve her own political direction,” Ms. Wright said.
Ms. Wright had previously worked on individual women’s campaigns. Yet it was Mrs. Clinton who suggested that Ms. Wright move to Washington to spread her expertise, by joining Ms. Piercy and Ms. Griffith to work for what would become known as the National Women’s Education Fund, a training arm of the National Women’s Political Caucus. “Hillary was saying they really did need to get somebody who understood local races,” Ms. Wright said. “And she strongly urged me to go.”
It was not an easy sell: Mrs. Clinton was asking Ms. Wright, a Texan, to move to Washington for a job that did not yet have the funding to support it. But persuaded by Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Wright ultimately accepted the position of executive director, backed by a national board of women working in politics.
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