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Maria Katrina M. Mercado

Asst. Prof. Carson Jeffrey O. Cruz

SPCM 101 (Rhetoric)

17 May 2019

If You’re for Feminism, Why is it White? : A Critical Analysis of

Hillary Clinton’s Rhetorical Speech and Her Style of Feminism

Most known for her recent 2016 run for presidency in the United States of America,

Hillary Rodham Clinton is an American politician, diplomat, lawyer, writer, and public speaker

who was also the former First Lady when her husband, Bill Clinton, was seated as president. As

a democrat, Clinton holds views which are progressive enough to not be considered repressive or

conservative. Despite losing the presidency in 2016 to Donald J. Trump, Clinton is still seen as a

powerful woman in politics and perceived to be a feminist icon for women across the globe. She

has, however, garnered a number of criticisms on being a feminist icon—Liza Featherstone, an

American author, going as far as creating a book alongside other radicals and feminists entitled

“False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

In order for us to understand the analysis on Clinton’s speech and her style of feminism

that is (not) apparent in the said speech, we first must have a clear definition of what feminism is

—more importantly, what feminism is Clinton missing out on, making her a white feminist. bell

hooks, in her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, she speaks about what being

an authentic feminist entails which is to want “for all people liberation, female and male, from

sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression” (hooks, 1981). For Chimamanda Ngozi

Adichie, her definition of a feminist is “a person who believes in the social, political, and
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economic equality of sexes,” (Adichie, 2014) as said in her book We Should All Be Feminists. As

said by critics, these are feminist definitions and attitudes that Clinton does not possess, even as

she is a powerful woman in the sector of politics.

In her speech at a conference for the Professional BusinessWomen of California in 2017,

she discusses her experiences in the public and private sectors of business while, at the same

time, reflecting on women’s societal roles in the workforce and the things one must consider and

act on in order to achieve gender equality, especially in the workforce. In the speech, she

encourages women of business to demand