Abortion and why MEN want it abolished

[ShazzieB]

9. This reminds me of the story Hillary Clinton has told about the day she went to take the LSAT.

Hillary:

I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And 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.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room.

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. 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.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. 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.

https://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/150127870371/i-was-taking-a-law-school-admissions-test-in-a

This happened over 50 years ago. (Hillary's senior year in college was 1968-1969.) Nowadays, at least half the people in that room would be women, and they would not face this kind of heckling. The kids born from the 80s on are used to women doing everything men do and would find it perfectly normal for women to be there.

I firmly believe things are getting better in a lot of ways, albeit much more slowly than we would wish. We have to keep fighting so that the old coots who still hold positions of power aren't able to take us ALL THE WAY back to the 1950s before they finally drop dead. We shouldn't have to, and it sucks that we do, but that's the reality.