Hillary Clinton says she had to learn to control her emotions early in life, a lesson that has become a double-edged sword as Americans have come to view her as cold and unemotional, even as they criticize her for shouting or laughing too loudly.
The Democratic nominee opened up about perceptions and likeability in a pair of posts for the wildly popular Humans of New York, a 6-year-old photo project with nearly 18 million followers on Facebook and 6 million followers on Instagram.
In one post, she recounted a story she has told before about taking the admissions test for law school as one of a handful of women in a room of hundreds of men.
“While we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real pile on,” she said. “One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.'”
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She described the moment as “intense” and “very personal,” but also instructive for a woman trying to break into a male-dominated field.
“I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional, but I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions,” she said. “And that’s a hard path to walk, because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.'”
It’s an issue Clinton’s confidants have often puzzled over, and one that’s becoming a problem now that she’s trying to win over voters. Despite having been in the spotlight for a quarter of a century and taken on many different roles, those who know her best say the perception many in the public have of the former first lady, senator and secretary of state is a far cry from the woman her friends and family know.
“Sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena,” she said. “And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”
In a second post, Clinton says she often feels the pressure of the comparison between her and two of the men she hopes to succeed as president — her husband, Bill Clinton, and her rival-turned-boss Barack Obama — who are considered some of the most-talented orators in recent memory.
“Both of them carry themselves with a naturalness that is very appealing to audiences,” she said. “But I’m married to one and I’ve worked for the other, so I know how hard they work at being natural. It’s not something they just dial in. They work and they practice what they’re going to say.”
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But she also believes her husband’s folksy affability and Obama’s soaring inspiration are things she can’t tap into.
“That can be more difficult for a woman, because who are your models?” she said. “If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens. It’s not bad. It’s just a fact.”
When men are “pounding the message and screaming about how we need to win the election,” the crowd eats it up. Not so for her.
“I love to wave my arms, but apparently that’s a little bit scary to people,” she said. “And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that.’ Which is funny, because I’m always convinced that the people in the front row are loving it.”
A top comment on one of the posts on Facebook pointed out that Clinton had tapped into an experience “women all over the world know … as fact.” Another said was a woman saying she found annoyed by Clinton’s tone in a speech, but then realized she “was conditioned to feel that way.”
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“If a man had the same tone, I would have thought nothing of it,” the commenter wrote. “We need to do better. Women do not have to smile and speak softly.”
Another suggested Clinton ought to do more to “pull back the curtain a little more often, because this is a person I can relate to.”
By Friday morning, the two posts together had been liked or loved more than 1.5 million times on Facebook and Instagram and shared nearly 240,000 times.
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Hillary Clinton Lets Humans of New York See Her Softer Side originally appeared on usnews.com
