What Happened

On Being a Woman in Politics

In these pages, I put to paper years’ worth of frustration about the tightrope that I and other women have had to walk in order to participate in American politics. I have a lot to say—I could fill an entire book—and not all of it is upbeat or even-tempered. But there is joy and pride to be found in this chapter, too. My experiences as a woman in politics have been complex and disappointing at times, but ultimately rewarding beyond measure.

In politics, the personal narrative is vital.

My husband had a powerful story to tell: he lived for a while on a farm with no indoor plumbing, his father died before he was born, he stopped his stepfather from beating his mother, he became the first in his family to go to college.

Barack Obama had a powerful story to tell: he was raised by his teenage mom and grandparents, his father was Kenyan, he spent part of his childhood living in Indonesia and grew up to become a community organizer and law professor whose story could have been written only in America.

Few people would say that my story was quite so dazzling.

I grew up in a white middle-class family in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago. My dad served during World War II and left every morning for his small business in the city along with all the other fathers in our neighborhood heading to their jobs. My mom stayed at home to take care of my brothers, Hugh and Tony, and me, like all the mothers in our neighborhood. And my life looked like the lives of all the girls I knew. We attended excellent public or parochial schools, where first-rate teachers had high expectations for us. I went to our local Methodist church for Sunday services and youth activities all week long. I was a Brownie, then a Girl Scout. I got my first summer job when I was thirteen, working at a park three mornings a week. My hangouts were everyone’s hangouts: the public library, the local movie theater, swimming pools, skating rinks. My family watched TV together at night. When the Beatles performed for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, my friends and I gathered together around the screen, alternately silently captivated and shrieking with glee.

It’s a story that many would consider perfectly ordinary. Don’t get me wrong: I loved my childhood, and every year that passes, I appreciate more how hard my parents worked to give it to me. But my story—or at least how I’ve always told it—was never the kind of narrative that made everyone sit up and take notice. We yearn for that showstopping tale—that one-sentence pitch that captures something magical about America; that hooks you and won’t let go. Mine wasn’t it.

Yet there is another story of my life; one that I believe is as inspiring as any other. I wish I had claimed it more publicly and told it more proudly. It’s the story of a revolution.

I was born right when everything was changing for women. Families were changing. Jobs were changing. Laws were changing. Views about women that had governed our lives for millennia were changing—finally! I came along at just the right moment, like a surfer catching the perfect wave. Everything I am, everything I’ve done, so much of what I stand for flows from that happy accident of fate.

The fact that the women’s movement happened alongside the civil rights movement—indeed, was entwined with it in many ways, compelling America to reckon with entrenched notions of human value and opening doors of opportunity that had previously been sealed shut to millions—made it that much more thrilling and meaningful.

I know that for a lot of people, including a lot of women, the movement for women’s equality exists largely in the past. They’re wrong about that. It’s still happening, still as urgent and vital as ever.

And it was and is the story of my life—mine and millions of other women’s. We share it. We wrote it together. We’re still writing it. And even though this sounds like bragging and bragging isn’t something women are supposed to do, I haven’t just been a participant in this revolution. I’ve helped lead it.

I was one of just 27 women out of 235 students in my class at Yale Law School. The first woman partner at the oldest law firm in Arkansas. The first woman to chair the national board of the Legal Services Corporation. The person who declared on the world stage that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” The first First Lady to be elected to public office. The first woman Senator from New York. In fact, for a few weeks, I was both. By a quirk of the calendar, I was sworn in before Bill left office.

And I was the first woman to be nominated for President by a major political party and win the national popular vote.

I never figured out how to tell this story right. Partly that’s because I’m not great at talking about myself. Also, I didn’t want people to see me as the “woman candidate,” which I find limiting, but rather as the best candidate whose experience as a woman in a male-dominated culture made her sharper, tougher, and more competent. That’s a hard distinction to draw, and I wasn’t confident that I had the dexterity to pull it off.

But the biggest reason I shied away from embracing this narrative is that storytelling requires a receptive audience, and I’ve never felt like the American electorate was receptive to this one. I wish so badly we were a country where a candidate who said, “My story is the story of a life shaped by and devoted to the movement for women’s liberation” would be cheered, not jeered. But that’s not who we are. Not yet.

Maybe it’s because we take this story for granted—yeah, yeah, the women’s movement happened, why are we still talking about it? Maybe it’s too female. Maybe it’s at once too big (a sweeping historical shift) and too small (just another middle-class Midwestern girl finding her way in the world).

But I do think it’s special.

It’s not a typical political narrative, but it’s mine.

This has to be said: sexism and misogyny played a role in the 2016 presidential election. Exhibit A is that the flagrantly sexist candidate won. A whole lot of people listened to the tape of him bragging about sexually assaulting women, shrugged, and said, “He still gets my vote.”

But Donald Trump didn’t invent sexism, and its impact on our politics goes far beyond this one election. It’s like a planet that astronomers haven’t precisely located yet but know exists because they can see its impact on other planets’ orbits and gravities. Sexism exerts its pull on our politics and our society every day, in ways both subtle and crystal clear.

A note here on terminology. Others might have a different view, but here’s how I see the distinction between sexism and misogyny. When a husband tells his wife, “I can’t quite explain why and I don’t even like admitting this, but I don’t want you to make more money than me, so please don’t take that amazing job offer,” that’s sexism. He could still love her deeply and be a great partner in countless ways. But he holds tight to an idea that even he knows isn’t fair about how successful a woman is allowed to be. Sexism is all the big and little ways that society draws a box around women and says, “You stay in there.” Don’t complain because nice girls don’t do that. Don’t try to be something women shouldn’t be. Don’t wear that, don’t go there, don’t think that, don’t earn too much. It’s not right somehow, we can’t explain why, stop asking.

We can all buy into sexism from time to time, often without even noticing it. Most of us try to keep an eye out for those moments and avoid them or, when we do misstep, apologize and do better next time.

Misogyny is something darker. It’s rage. Disgust. Hatred. It’s what happens when a woman turns down a guy at a bar and he switches from charming to scary. Or when a woman gets a job that a man wanted and instead of shaking her hand and wishing her well, he calls her a bitch and vows to do everything he can to make sure she fails.

Both sexism and misogyny are endemic in America. If you need convincing, just look at the YouTube comments or Twitter replies when a woman dares to voice a political opinion or even just share an anecdote from her own lived experience. People hiding in the shadows step forward just far enough to rip her apart.

Sexism in particular can be so pervasive, we stop seeing it. It reminds me of the opening anecdote from author David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. Two young fish are swimming along. They meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, until one looks at the other and asks, “What’s water?”

“In other words,” Wallace said, “the most obvious realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

I’d say that sums up the problem of recognizing sexism—especially when it comes to politics—quite nicely.

It’s not easy to be a woman in politics. That’s an understatement. It can be excruciating, humiliating. The moment a woman steps forward and says, “I’m running for office,” it begins: the analysis of her face, her body, her voice, her demeanor; the diminishment of her stature, her ideas, her accomplishments, her integrity. It can be unbelievably cruel.

I hesitate to write this, because I know that women who should run for office might read it and say “no thanks,” and I passionately believe that the only way we’re going to get sexism out of politics is by getting more women into politics.

Still, I can’t think of a single woman in politics who doesn’t have stories to tell. Not one.

For the record, it hurts to be torn apart. It may seem like it doesn’t bother me to be called terrible names or have my looks mocked viciously, but it does. I’m used to it—I’ve grown what Eleanor Roosevelt said women in politics need: a skin as thick as a rhinoceros hide. Plus, I’ve always had a healthy self-esteem, thanks no doubt to my parents, who never once told me that I had to worry about being prettier or thinner. To them, I was great exactly how I was. I don’t know what magic they performed to make that stick in my head all these years—I wish I did, so that parents everywhere could learn the trick. All I know is, I’ve been far less plagued by self-doubt than a lot of women I know.

And yet… it hurts to be torn apart.

It didn’t start with running for office. When I got glasses in the fourth grade—way smaller than the Coke-bottle ones I wore later in life—I was dubbed “four-eyes.” It wasn’t the most original taunt, but it stung. In junior high, a few unkind schoolmates noticed the lack of ankles on my sturdy legs and did their best to embarrass me. I did talk to my mom about that one. She told me to ignore it, to rise above, to be better. That advice prepared me well for a barrage of insults later on.

At college, I was spared some of the hostility many young women face because I went to Wellesley. Being at a women’s college offered me the freedom to take risks, make mistakes, and even fail without making me question my fundamental worth. It also gave me opportunities to lead that I wouldn’t have had at a coed college at that time. But once I left Wellesley, things changed.

When my friend and I went to take the law school admissions test in 1968, we were among the only women in the room. We were waiting for the test to start when a group of young men started harassing us. “You don’t need to be here.” “Why don’t you go home and get married?” One said, “If you take my spot at law school, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.” It was intense and personal. I just kept my eyes down, hoping the proctor would come to start the test, trying hard not to let them rattle me.

There was a professor at Harvard Law School who looked at me—a bright and eager college senior, recently offered admission—and said, “We don’t need any more women at Harvard.” That’s part of why I went to Yale.

When I started out as an attorney, I would take cases in small rural courthouses in Arkansas, and people would come to watch the “lady lawyer”—it was such a novelty. You could hear them commenting from the gallery on what I was wearing and how my hair looked. One time in the early 1980s, I was trying a case in Batesville, Arkansas, and in the middle of the trial, in walked six men in full camouflage. They came in and sat right behind the lawyers and just stared hard at me. As any woman who’s experienced that kind of staring knows, it was truly unnerving. Afterward the bailiff explained that it was deer season and these hunters had come into town from their camp for supplies. When they heard that a woman was trying a case in court, they had to see it for themselves.

I thought of that a few years later, when a woman doctor came to Arkansas from California to be an expert witness in a trial for my firm. She had short, spiky hair. My boss, the lead attorney on the case, told her to go buy a wig. Otherwise, he said, the jurors wouldn’t be able to hear what she had to say. They’d be too focused on how she didn’t look like a “normal” woman. I remember how taken aback she was at this request. I would have been too, not so long before, but by then I wasn’t. That saddened me. I’d become used to a narrower set of expectations.

Once Bill entered politics, the spotlight on me was glaring and often unkind. I’ve written about this before but it’s worth saying again: one of the reasons he lost the Governor’s race in 1980 was because I still went by my maiden name. Let that sink in for a moment and please imagine how it felt. I was naïve. I didn’t think anyone would care. Maybe people would even respect what it said about our marriage: that I wanted to preserve my pre-Bill identity, that I was proud of my parents and wanted to honor them, that Bill supported my choices. When he lost, and I heard over and over that my name—my name!—had played a part, I was heartsick that I might have inadvertently hurt my husband and let down his team. And I questioned whether there was room in public life for women like me, who might appear slightly unconventional but still had so much to offer.

So I added “Clinton” to Hillary Rodham. I asked my friends for hair, makeup, and clothing advice. That’s never come easily to me, and until then, I didn’t care. But if wearing contact lenses or changing my wardrobe would make people feel more comfortable around me, I’d try it.

Later, when Bill was running for President for the first time, I stumbled again. I now had the right name, wore makeup, styled my hair. But I hadn’t tamed my tongue. One of Bill’s opponents in the primary attacked my job at a Little Rock law firm as a way of going after Bill. This really got under my skin. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” I told the press in exasperation, “but what I decided to do was pursue my profession.” That did it. Suddenly I was in the middle of a full-blown political firestorm, with self-righteous moralists saying I had insulted American mothers. As someone who believes in supporting mothers, fathers, and families of all kinds, this hurt. And once again, I feared that my pursuit of my individual dreams—in this case, my career, which meant so much to me—would end up hurting my husband.

None of these experiences made me retreat from my beliefs. But I’ve never really been naïve again. Not much surprises me anymore. Throughout the 2016 campaign, my staff would come to me wide-eyed. “You’ll never believe what Trump said today. It was vile.” I always believed it. Not just because of who Trump is but because of who we can be at our worst. We’ve seen it too many times to be surprised.

In my experience, the balancing act women in politics have to master is challenging at every level, but it gets worse the higher you rise. If we’re too tough, we’re unlikable. If we’re too soft, we’re not cut out for the big leagues. If we work too hard, we’re neglecting our families. If we put family first, we’re not serious about the work. If we have a career but no children, there’s something wrong with us, and vice versa. If we want to compete for a higher office, we’re too ambitious. Can’t we just be happy with what we have? Can’t we leave the higher rungs on the ladder for men?

Think how often you’ve heard these words used about women who lead: angry, strident, feisty, difficult, irritable, bossy, brassy, emotional, abrasive, high-maintenance, ambitious (a word that I think of as neutral, even admirable, but clearly isn’t for a lot of people).

The linguist George Lakoff both identified this problem and embodied it when he said about Senator Elizabeth Warren, “Elizabeth has a problem. She is shrill, and there is a prejudice against shrill women.” How about we stop criticizing how she speaks—which is just fine, by the way—and start paying attention to what she has to say about families and the economy?

We’re also called divisive, untrustworthy, unlikable, and inauthentic. Those words ring powerfully for me. As the campaign went on, polls showed that a significant number of Americans questioned my authenticity and trustworthiness. A lot of people said they just didn’t like me. I write that matter-of-factly, but believe me, it’s devastating.

Some of this is a direct result of my actions: I’ve made mistakes, been defensive about them, stubbornly resisted apologizing. But so have most men in politics. (In fact, one of them just became President with a strategy of “never apologize when you’re wrong, just attack harder.”)

I’ve been called divisive more times than I can count, and for the life of me, I can’t understand why. Politics is a divisive business, it’s true, and our country has gotten more polarized with every passing year. But what specifically did I do that was so unacceptable? Run for office? Lots of men do. Work on health care, one of the most contentious issues in America? Same. Cast votes as a Senator? So did my ninety-nine colleagues. When it comes to some of my most controversial actions—like my vote giving President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq—I was far from alone. That doesn’t make it right, but it also doesn’t explain the venom targeted at me specifically. Why am I seen as such a divisive figure and, say, Joe Biden and John Kerry aren’t? They’ve run for President. They’ve served at high levels of government. They’ve cast votes of all kinds, including some they regret, just like me. What makes me such a lightning rod for fury?

I’m really asking. I’m at a loss.

I know some of the distrust people feel toward me is because they’ve watched as I’ve been sucked into partisan investigations over the years—Whitewater, Travelgate, emails—each one carried out at significant taxpayer expense, each amounting to exactly nothing, but all of them leaving a mark on my reputation nearly impossible to erase.

But I think there’s another explanation for the skepticism I’ve faced in public life. I think it’s partly because I’m a woman.

Hear me out.

Historically, women haven’t been the ones writing the laws or leading the armies and navies. We’re not the ones up there behind the podium, rallying crowds, uniting the country. It’s men who lead. It’s men who speak. It’s men who represent us to the world and even to ourselves.

That’s been the case for so long that it has infiltrated our deepest thoughts. I suspect that for many of us—more than we might think—it feels somehow off to picture a woman President sitting in the Oval Office or the Situation Room. It’s discordant to tune into a political rally and hear a woman’s voice booming (“screaming,” “screeching”) forth. Even the simple act of a woman standing up and speaking to a crowd is relatively new. Think about it: we know of only a handful of speeches by women before the latter half of the twentieth century, and those tend to be by women in extreme and desperate situations. Joan of Arc said a lot of interesting things before they burned her at the stake.

Meanwhile, when a woman lands a political punch—and not even a particularly hard one—it’s not read as the normal sparring that men do all the time in politics. It makes her a “nasty woman.” A lot of women have had that spat in their faces (and worse) for saying not that much at all. God forbid two women have a disagreement in public. Then it’s a catfight.

In short, it’s not customary to have women lead or even to engage in the rough-and-tumble of politics. It’s not normal—not yet. So when it happens, it often doesn’t feel quite right. That may sound vague, but it’s potent. People cast their votes based on feelings like that all the time.

I think this question of “rightness” is connected to another powerful but undefinable force in politics: authenticity. I’ve been asked over and over again by reporters and skeptical voters, “Who are you really?” It’s kind of a funny question when you think about it. I’m… Hillary. You’ve seen me in the papers and on your screens for more than twenty-five years. I’ll bet you know more about my private life than you do about some of your closest friends. You’ve read my emails, for heaven’s sake. What more do you need? What could I do to be “more real”? Dance on a table? Swear a blue streak? Break down sobbing? That’s not me. And if I had done any of those things, what would have happened? I’d have been ripped to pieces.

Again, I wonder what it is about me that mystifies people, when there are so many men in politics who are far less known, scrutinized, interviewed, photographed, and tested. Yet they’re asked so much less frequently to open up, reveal themselves, prove that they’re real.

Some of this has to do with my composure. People say I’m guarded, and they have a point. I think before I speak. I don’t just blurt out whatever comes to mind. It’s a combination of my natural inclination, plus my training as a lawyer, plus decades in the public eye where every word I say is scrutinized. But why is this a bad thing? Don’t we want our Senators and Secretaries of State—and especially our Presidents—to speak thoughtfully, to respect the impact of our words?

President Obama is just as controlled as I am, maybe even more so. He speaks with a great deal of care; takes his time, weighs his words. This is generally and correctly taken as evidence of his intellectual heft and rigor. He’s a serious person talking about serious things. So am I. And yet, for me, it’s often experienced as a negative.

Even some fair-minded people who want to like me feel that there’s something too controlled about how I speak. Often, it’s just about finding the right words. And impulsive doesn’t mean the same thing as truthful. Just look at Donald Trump.

Still, there’s no denying that my cautiousness has had the effect of making some people feel like they weren’t getting the unvarnished me, which in turn prompted the question “What is she hiding?” This frustrated me to no end, and I never figured out how to solve it. I’m not sure there was a solution.

It’s another variant on the impossible balancing act. If we’re too composed, we’re cold or fake. But if we say what we think without caution, we get slammed for it. Can you blame us for feeling like we can’t win, no matter what we do?

Consider another emotional act: crying. I can think of many male politicians who have teared up from time to time. Some have been mocked for it; Senator Ed Muskie’s political career was all but scuttled by his tears in the 1972 New Hampshire primary, even though it may have just been snow blowing in his eyes. But many men have been treated with compassion and even admiration for their displays of emotion. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, my husband, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—they’ve all welled up at moments of high sentiment. That makes sense because they are humans, and sometimes humans cry.

But when a woman cries, it can be viewed far less charitably. I remember what happened to Pat Schroeder, the talented and hilarious Congresswoman from Colorado who considered running for President in 1987. She ultimately decided against it, and when she held a press conference to announce that, she cried for about three seconds. Today, when you type “Pat Schroeder” into Google, the very first suggestion is “Pat Schroeder crying.” Twenty years later, she was still receiving hate mail because of it—mostly from women who felt like she let them down.

I had my own famed tearful moment, just before the New Hampshire primary in 2008. I didn’t even cry, not really. I was talking about how tough running for office can be (because it can be very tough), and my eyes glistened for a moment and my voice quavered for about one sentence. That was it. It became the biggest news story in America. It will, no doubt, merit a line in my obituary someday: “Her eyes once watered on camera.”

Interestingly, many would say that my tears turned out to be a good thing for me. Dozens if not hundreds of pundits have commented about how that moment “humanized” me. Maybe that’s true. If so, I’m both fine with that and a little beleaguered at the reminder that, yet again, I—a human—required “humanizing” at all.

Still, some sought to capitalize on my perceived vulnerability in the press and on the campaign trail. When he was asked about my tears, former Democratic Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who was still in the presidential race at the time, jumped at the chance to call me weak. “I think what we need in a Commander in Chief is strength and resolve,” he said. “Presidential campaigns are a tough business, but being President of the United States is also a very tough business. And the President of the United States is faced with very, very difficult challenges every single day and difficult judgments every single day. What I know is that I’m prepared for that.” Shortly after, he dropped out.

In any case, this whole topic of “being real” can feel very silly. I wish we could just dismiss it and go about our business, whoever we are, without worrying about whether we are satisfying some indefinable standard of realness. As the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes, “It’s not your job to be likable. It’s your job to be yourself.”

Yet the issues of authenticity and likability had an impact on the most consequential election of our lifetimes, and it will have an impact on future ones. So there’s something extremely serious going on here, too—especially since crude, abusive, fact-free rhetoric was characterized as authentic in 2016.

I’ve tried to adjust. After hearing repeatedly that some people didn’t like my voice, I enlisted the help of a linguistic expert. He said I needed to focus on my deep breathing and try to keep something happy and peaceful in mind when I went onstage. That way, when the crowd got energized and started shouting—as crowds at rallies tend to do—I could resist doing the normal thing, which is to shout back. Men get to shout back to their heart’s content but not women. Okay, I told this expert, I’m game to try. But out of curiosity, can you give me an example of a woman in public life who has pulled this off successfully—who has met the energy of a crowd while keeping her voice soft and low? He could not.

I’m not sure how to solve all this. My gender is my gender. My voice is my voice. To quote Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the U.S. Cabinet, under FDR, “The accusation that I’m a woman is incontrovertible.” Other women will run for President, and they will be women, and they will have women’s voices. Maybe that will be less unusual by then. Maybe my campaign will have helped make it that way, and other women will have an easier time. I hope so.

Near the start of my campaign, I met with my friend Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, who has thought about these issues a great deal. She told me that if there was one thing she wanted everyone to know from her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, it’s this: the data show that for men, likability and professional success are correlated. The more successful a man is, the more people like him. With women, it’s the exact opposite. The more professionally successful we are, the less people like us. Hearing it put that simply, with data behind it, felt like a lightbulb turning on. Here was proof of something so many women have felt intuitively throughout our lives.

Sheryl shared another insight: that women are seen favorably when they advocate for others, but unfavorably when they advocate for themselves. For example, there’s virtually no downside to asking for a raise if you’re a man. You’ll either get it or you won’t, but either way, you won’t be penalized for trying. A woman who does the same is more likely to pay a price. Even if she gets a salary bump, she’ll lose a measure of goodwill. The exception is when a woman asks for a raise on someone else’s behalf. Then she’s seen as generous and a team player. This, too, resonated with me. People like me when I’m in a supporting role: campaigning for my husband, serving as a member of President Obama’s Cabinet. It’s okay for me to be a fierce advocate in those capacities. But when I stand up and say, “Now I’d like a chance to lead,” everything changes.

You have a steep mountain to climb, Sheryl warned that day. “They will have no empathy for you.”

It’s not easy for any woman in politics, but I think it’s safe to say that I got a whole other level of vitriol flung my way. Crowds at Trump rallies called for my imprisonment more times than I can count. They shouted, “Guilty! Guilty!” like the religious zealots in Game of Thrones chanting “Shame! Shame!” while Cersei Lannister walked back to the Red Keep. As Susan Bordo, a Pulitzer Prize–nominated gender studies professor, put it in her book The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, “It was almost medieval.” Mary Beard, the Classics professor at the University of Cambridge, observed that this venom harkened back to an even earlier time. One popular image among Trump supporters, found on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs, depicted Trump holding up my severed head, like Perseus from ancient Greek mythology, lifting high the head of Medusa.

What in the world was this? I’ve been in politics for a long time, but I was taken aback by the flood of hatred that seemed only to grow as we got closer to Election Day. I had left the State Department one of the most admired public servants in America. Now people seemed to think I was evil. Not just “not my cup of tea” but evil. It was flabbergasting and frightening.

Was this all because I’m a woman? No. But I believe it was motivation for some of those chanters and some of that bile.

Later I read an interview with Margaret Atwood, the prescient author of The Handmaid’s Tale, which put the campaign into yet another historical light. “You can find websites that say Hillary was actually a Satanist with demonic powers,” she said. “It’s so seventeenth century that you can hardly believe it.” The Puritan witch hunts may be long over, but something fanatical about unruly women still lurks in our national subconscious.

That doesn’t just affect me and other candidates. It affects our supporters. Nearly four million people joined a Facebook group supporting my campaign, fittingly called Pantsuit Nation. It was a secret group. It had to be. Otherwise its members were exposing themselves to vicious sexist online harassment, from both the right and the left.

You can hardly open a newspaper these days without reading another grim story: female engineers reporting blatant harassment in Silicon Valley; women entrepreneurs making pitches to investment firms and being propositioned in response; a new study finding that women are given a harder time than men in job interviews; another finding that women are penalized when they decline to reveal their salary history, while men end up making more when they do the same.

That’s why it’s so maddening that the basic fact that sexism is alive and well should still be up for debate. I can’t count the number of times that good-hearted men who should know better dismiss the notion that sexism and outright misogyny are still potent forces in our national life. “But things have changed,” they say, as Donald Trump brags about groping women and a few weeks later wins the presidency, as his rally-goers chant “Trump that bitch,” as the White House proudly releases photos of old white men gleefully deciding which health services to take away from women.

And on that fundamental question of whether it would be good to see a woman—any woman, not just me—become President, the electorate is deeply, depressingly divided. A 2014 Pew Research Center poll found that 69 percent of Democratic women and 46 percent of Democratic men (not terrible, but you can do better than that, Democratic men!) said they hoped to see a female President in their lifetime, but only 20 percent of Republican women and only 16 percent of Republican men did. In 2008, researchers found that more than a quarter of the population expressed anger or upset feelings at the mere thought of a female President. And after the 2016 election, the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas put out a report on the impact of sexism on the race. Researchers asked people to respond to five statements that reflect sexist thinking, including “Feminists are seeking for women to have more power than men” and “Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States.” In results that surprised no one, more than a third of respondents gave answers that were sexist. Trump voters were more sexist than Clinton voters. Republicans were far more sexist than Democrats. And not just men; women were quite sexist, too.

On that note, beginning even before I ran, political commentators wondered whether I’d inspire an unbeatable wave of women to come out and vote for me, in the same way President Obama inspired record-breaking black turnout. I hoped I would, of course, but I had my doubts. Gender hasn’t proven to be the motivating force for women voters that some hope it might be. If it were, we’d probably have had a woman president or two by now, don’t you think? In the end, I won an overwhelming majority of the votes of black women (94 percent) and Latino women (68 percent), and I won women overall by a safe margin (54 percent). But I failed to win a majority of white women, although I did better with them than Obama did in 2012.

So yes, things have changed. Some things are a lot better. But many are still bad. And they are connected—the bad is the backlash to the good. Women’s advancement has set into motion vast changes that inspire intense feelings of all kinds. Some of us are exhilarated. Others feel a whole lot of rage.

The good news—and there is good news—is that there’s another side to all of this. It can also be deeply rewarding to be a woman in politics. You know that just by being in the room, you’re making government more representative of the people. You’re bringing a vital perspective that would otherwise go unheard. That always made me stand up a little straighter. It’s why I love the song “The Room Where It Happens” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical Hamilton:

It felt really good to be in rooms where things happen—the Oval Office, the Senate chamber—as an advocate for issues that mattered to me: education, equal pay, health care, women’s rights. Maybe those issues would have been close to my heart even if I were a man, but maybe not. Life naturally pushed me in their direction. A young mom interested in policy often ends up working on kids’ issues. A First Lady is often involved with women’s issues. That was okay with me. Some might have found it limiting, but I consider these real-life issues that affect us all.

Later, I moved into different realms: working to rebuild New York after 9/11 as a hometown Senator, supporting our troops and caring for our wounded warriors and all our vets as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, keeping our country and world safe as U.S. Secretary of State. I moved into different rooms: the Situation Room, foreign ministries, the United Nations. And I found that the decades of work I had done on women and families served me well in all those places, because it meant that I understood the intricacies of people’s lives. I knew how governments could help or hurt families. I knew how to marshal resources and support to the people who needed them most. It turned out that my work on so-called women’s and children’s issues prepared me well for nearly everything else I’ve ever done.

I also believe the fact that I’m a woman is one reason why so many people open up to me about the details of their lives and families. They tell me about their children’s medical diagnoses, their caregiving of aging parents, troubles in their marriages and family’s finances, painful experiences with sexual harassment and discrimination. Warmhearted male politicians also receive these confessionals, but from what I can see, women hear them more often. Maybe it’s easier to cry in front of us. Maybe it feels like talking to a girlfriend. All I know is that a lot of people have grabbed my hand and told me their worries and dreams, and that’s been a unique privilege.

There’s another thing that women confide in me about, and that’s stories of their reproductive health. No essay about women in politics could be complete without talking about this. It is such a central part of women’s lives: whether we become mothers and at what age and under what circumstances. Reproductive health in all its complexity—pregnancy, fertility, birth control, miscarriage, abortion, labor, birth—can comprise some of the most joyful and terrifying moments we will ever experience. But a lot of the time, we process these moments in silence. These stories go unspoken, even among women. Then I meet women at rallies or dinners or fund-raisers, or just taking a walk, and they take a deep breath and let it all out.

At this moment in America, more than forty-four years since Roe v. Wade, women’s access to birth control and abortion is still under constant threat. I saw the effect of this in the 2016 election. Reproductive health was rarely mentioned in any of the primary debates, and when it was mentioned, it was often because I brought it up. I was dismayed when Bernie Sanders dismissed Planned Parenthood as just another part of “the establishment” when they endorsed me over him. Few organizations are as intimately connected to the day-to-day lives of Americans from all classes and backgrounds as Planned Parenthood, and few are under more persistent attack. I’m not sure what’s “establishment” about that, and I don’t know why someone running to be the Democratic nominee for President would say so.

After the election, Bernie suggested that Democrats should be open to nominating and supporting candidates who are anti-choice. Other topics, such as economic justice, are sacrosanct, but apparently women’s health is not. I don’t mean to criticize only Bernie here—a lot of progressives join him in thinking that reproductive rights are negotiable. And to be clear, I believe there’s room in our party for a wide range of personal views on abortion. I’ve been working for a quarter century with Democrats and Republicans alike to reduce the number of abortions, in part by expanding access to birth control and family planning, and we’ve made progress. And I picked as my running mate Tim Kaine, a Democrat personally opposed to abortion because of his Catholic faith but supportive of women’s rights as a matter of law and policy.

But when personal views on abortion become public actions—votes on legislation or judges or funding that erode women’s rights—that’s a different matter. We have to remain a big tent, but a big tent is only as strong as the poles that hold it up. Reproductive rights is central to women’s rights and women’s health, and it’s one of the most important tent poles we’ve got. And remember: it’s a constitutional right as defined in Roe v. Wade.

There’s overwhelming evidence about what happens when these rights are denied. Texas has defunded Planned Parenthood and refused to expand Medicaid, and maternal mortality doubled between 2010 and 2014. That’s the worst in the nation, and it’s higher than the rate in many developing countries. Six hundred women have died in Texas—not from abortions, but from trying to give birth. The number of Texas teenagers having abortions actually increased when support for family planning was cut. In one county, Gregg, it went up 191 percent between 2012 and 2014.

Ultimately, I’m pro-choice, pro-family, and pro-faith because I believe that our ability to decide whether and when to become mothers is intrinsic to our liberty. When government gets involved in this intimate realm—whether in places like China, which forced women to have abortions, or in Communist Romania, which forced women to bear children—it is horrific. I’ve visited hospitals in countries where poor women have no access to safe and legal abortion. I’ve seen what happens when desperate women take matters into their own hands.

As I see it, this issue comes down to the question: Who decides? We can debate the morality of abortion forever—and I have spent many hours engaged in such debates and surely will spend many more—but at the end of the day, who decides whether a woman gets or stays pregnant? A Congressman who has never met her? A judge who has spoken with her for maybe a few minutes? Or should the woman be able to make this momentous decision about her life, her body, her future, for herself?

Someone’s got to decide. I say let women decide.

I’m not sure what we call our current era of feminism—I’ve lost count of which wave we’re in. But there’s a lot that feels new. There are all these new words. Mansplaining. The second I heard it, I thought, “Yes! We needed a word for that!” Intersectionality: an academic term for that vital idea that feminism must engage race and class. Revenge porn Trolls. Modern twists on ancient harms.

While we’re defining things, let’s take a moment for feminism: “the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” Not domination. Not oppression. Equality. Or as the English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft put it 225 years ago, “I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.”

Then there’s emotional labor. Now, that’s a good one. It describes all the unpaid, uncounted, often unseen work that people—overwhelmingly women—perform to keep their families and workplaces humming along. Organizing office birthday parties. Arranging the kids’ summer camp. Coordinating visits with in-laws. Helping the new employee feel welcome and included. The list is endless: all the little details without which life would devolve into chaos and misery. Not all women take on these tasks, and that’s fine, and some men do, and I salute them—but it’s largely women’s work. Finally, someone thought to name it.

In my marriage, I’ve definitely been the one to perform the bulk of the emotional labor. I’m the one who schedules family visits, vacations, and dinners with friends. Bill has many positive qualities, but managing the logistical details of a household is not one of them. Of course, our situation is unique. For years, he was a Governor, then the President. He wasn’t going to be the parent keeping track of the SAT registration deadline, although he always knew exactly what Chelsea was studying in school. We’ve also been privileged, since moving into the Governor’s mansion years ago, to have people helping ensure that we’re well fed and taken care of. Neither of us has had to make an emergency run to the store to pick up milk in decades. Still, even our privileged lives require a lot of small but vital actions and decisions to keep rolling along, and I’m the one who tends to handle them.

That labor extends to my friendships. In March 2017, a few of my close girlfriends came to New York for the weekend. A new friend joined us and asked, “How do you all know each other?” That led to my friends going around the table explaining in great detail how I have lovingly interfered in their lives over the years. “When I got sick, Hillary hounded me until I went to her doctor and called me immediately after for a full report.” “That’s nothing! When my little girl cut her face, Hillary insisted I get a plastic surgeon and then called back ten minutes later with the best one in Washington on the phone.” They knew me well.

It happens at work, too. I make sure everyone has eaten, that my staff is wearing sunscreen if we’re at an event in the baking sun. When reporters who traveled abroad with us got sick or injured, I made sure they had ginger ale and crackers and would send the State Department doctor to their room with Cipro and antinausea drugs.

None of this is unusual. I’ve seen women CEOs serve coffee at meetings, women heads of state walk tissues over to a sneezing staffer. It’s also not new. It was women like Dr. Dorothy Height who did a lot of the unglamorous work of the civil rights movement, recruiting volunteers and organizing workshops and coordinating sit-ins and freedom rides. It is women who do a lot of the daily knitting in Congress, identifying problems, bringing together stakeholders, building effective coalitions. It’s often women who handle constituent outreach, answering phones and responding to letters and emails. And in my experience, a lot of women make those calls and write those letters to Congress. We’re not just the designated worriers in our families; we’re also the designated worriers for our country.

I think all this may help explain why women leaders around the world tend to rise higher in parliamentary systems, rather than presidential ones like ours. Prime ministers are chosen by their colleagues—people they’ve worked with day in and day out, who’ve seen firsthand their talents and competence. It’s a system designed to reward women’s skill at building relationships, which requires emotional labor.

Presidential systems aren’t like that. They reward different talents: speaking to large crowds, looking commanding on camera, dominating in debates, galvanizing mass movements, and in America, raising a billion dollars. You’ve got to give it to Trump—he’s hateful, but it’s hard to look away from him. He uses his size to project power: he looms over the podium, gets in interviewers’ faces, glowers, threatens to punch people. I watched a video of one of our debates with the sound off and discovered that, between his theatrical arm waving and face making and his sheer size and aggressiveness, I watched him a lot more than I watched me. I’m guessing a lot of voters did the same thing. I also suspect that if a woman was as aggressive or melodramatic as he is, she’d be laughed or booed off the stage. In the end, even though I was judged to have won all three of our debates, his supporters awarded him points for his hypermasculine, aggressive behavior.

As for me, when it comes to politics, my style can be viewed as female. I’ve always focused on listening over speaking. I like town hall meetings because I get to hear from people and ask follow-up questions to my heart’s content. I prefer one-on-one or small group conversations to big speeches and finding common ground over battling it out.

When I was a Senator, I spent a lot of time getting to know my colleagues, including gruff Republicans who wanted nothing to do with me at first. In 2000, Trent Lott, the Republican Leader, wistfully wondered if lightning would strike and I wouldn’t take the oath of office. By 2016, he was telling people I was a very capable lady who did a good job—and he told my husband that I had done more to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina than anyone outside the Gulf Coast. A number of other conservative Republicans also came to like me when I was their colleague in the Senate, helping them pass bills, refilling their coffee cups in the Senate Dining Room, or sitting beside them in the Senate’s private prayer meeting. One ultraconservative Senator came to see me to apologize for having hated me and saying terrible things about me over the years. He asked, “Mrs. Clinton, will you forgive me?” I know that might sound incredible now, but it’s true. I told him that of course I would.

Dramatic spiritual conversions aside, emotional labor isn’t particularly thrilling as far as the political media or some of the electorate is concerned. I’ve been dinged for being too interested in the details of policy (boring!), too practical (not inspiring!), too willing to compromise (sellout!), too focused on smaller, achievable steps rather than sweeping changes that have little to no chance of ever coming true (establishment candidate!).

But just as a household falls apart without emotional labor, so does politics grind to a halt if no one is actually listening to one another or reading the briefings or making plans that have a chance of working. I guess that might be considered boring. I don’t find it boring, but you might. But here’s the thing: someone has to do it.

In my experience, a lot of the time, it’s women. A lot of the time, it’s dismissed as not that important. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

“This is not okay,” I thought.

It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.

It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit Pause and ask everyone watching, “Well? What would you do?”

Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space?

Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say loudly and clearly, “Back up, you creep, get away from me, I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.”

I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard.

I wonder, though, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm—biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.

Of course, had I told Trump off, he surely would have capitalized on it gleefully. A lot of people recoil from an angry woman, or even just a direct one. Look at what happened to Elizabeth Warren, silenced in the Senate chamber for reading a letter from Coretta Scott King because it was critical of Jeff Sessions, a male Senator, during his confirmation hearing for Attorney General. (Moments later, Jeff Merkley, a male Senator, was allowed to read the letter. Funny how that worked.) Senator Kamala Harris was derided as “hysterical” for her entirely coolheaded and professional questioning of Jeff Sessions (him again) during a Senate hearing. As one writer put it, she was being “Hillary’d.” Arianna Huffington was recently interrupted in a meeting of the Uber board of directors when she was making a point about—of all things—how important it was to increase the number of women on the board! And the man who talked over her did so to say that increasing women would only mean more talking! You can’t make this up.

In other words, this isn’t something that only happens to me. Not even close.

It also doesn’t just happen to women on the Democratic side of politics. Trump made fun of Carly Fiorina’s face because she competed against him for President. He lashed out against Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski in gross, physical terms because they challenged him. Maybe that’s why Nicolle Wallace, White House Communications Director for George W. Bush, has warned that the Republican Party is in danger of being “permanently associated with misogyny” if leaders don’t stand up to Trump’s treatment of women.

This hearkens back to a powerful ad we ran during the campaign called “Mirrors.” It shows adolescent girls looking tentatively at themselves in the mirror—tucking their hair behind their ears, evaluating their profile, trying to decide if they are okay-looking, like so many girls do when they see themselves. Over their images, we ran a tape of cruel things Trump has said on the record about women over the years: “She’s a slob.” “She ate like a pig.” “I’d look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers.” Was this the voice we wanted in our daughters’ heads? Our granddaughters’? Our nieces’? Or our sons’ or grandsons’ or nephews’ heads for that matter? They deserve better than the toxic masculinity Trump embodies.

Well, he’s in their heads now. His voice resounds far and wide.

Now it’s on all of us to make sure his ugly words don’t damage our girls—and boys—forever.

Two days before the debate, my team and I had finished a grueling morning debate prep session. We had taken a break for lunch. The television was on in the room, with no volume. Then a commentator came on to warn viewers that they were about to hear something vulgar. Boy, was that true.

I don’t have a lot to say about the Access Hollywood tape that hasn’t been said. I will just note that Donald Trump is gleefully describing committing sexual assault. That got somewhat lost in the shock of it all. Too many people focused on his boorishness—such a crude man, so vulgar. True. But even if he were the height of elegance and graciousness, it wouldn’t make it okay that he’s describing sexual assault.

For many, hearing the Donald Trump tape was literally sickening. As for me, it made me sad—for women and girls, for men and boys, for all of us. It was… horrible, just horrible. It still is. And it always will be, because that tape is never going away. It’s part of our history now.

To divert attention from his own ugliness, Trump brought to our second debate three women who had accused my husband of bad acts decades ago, plus a woman whose accused rapist I had been ordered by a judge to represent back in Arkansas. It was an awful stunt.

I don’t know what the Trump campaign was hoping to accomplish other than the obvious: dredge up old allegations that had been litigated years before, divert attention from the Access Hollywood tape, throw me off my game, and distract voters from the election’s unbelievably high stakes. He wasn’t trying to make a stand for these women. He was just using them.

This was a presidential debate. That’s a big deal. We were supposed to talk about issues that mattered to people’s lives. Instead, Trump used this moment to get back in his comfort zone. He loves to humiliate women, loves to talk about how disgusting we are. He was hoping to rattle me. I was determined not to give him that satisfaction.

Before I stepped onstage, Ron Klain said to me, “He’s trying to get in your head.” I said, “Ya think?” Then I went out there and won the debate.

Something I wish every man across America understood is how much fear accompanies women throughout our lives. So many of us have been threatened or harmed. So many of us have helped friends recover from a traumatic incident. It’s difficult to convey what all this violence does to us. It adds up in our hearts and our nervous systems.

A few years ago, the hashtag #yesallwomen was trending for a while. It spoke to me, like it did to so many others. In college and law school, we had a million defensive habits: hold your keys like a weapon when you’re out alone at night, walk one another home no matter what. Many women I know have been groped, grabbed, or worse. It even happens to members of Congress. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has written frankly about how Congressmen have leered at her and grabbed her waist in the congressional gym.

I’m very lucky that nothing too bad ever happened to me. One time in college, I went on a blind date with a young man who wouldn’t take repeated nos for an answer, and I had to slap him to get him away from me. But he did back off, and I went to bed that night shaken but not traumatized. And when I was twenty-nine, working for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in Indiana, I had dinner one night with a group of older men who were in charge of the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote operation in the state. I had been pestering them for a while for information about their Election Day plans, and they were annoyed with me. I started explaining once again what I needed to know from them and why. Suddenly one of the men reached across the table, grabbed me by my turtleneck, and yanked me toward him. He hissed in my face, “Just shut up.” I froze, then managed to pull his hand from my neck, tell him to never touch me again, and walk out of the room on shaking legs. The whole incident probably lasted thirty seconds. I’ll never forget it.

Yet that’s nothing compared to the violence that millions of women and girls across our country endure on a regular basis.

About four months before Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was released, a very different message went viral. An unnamed woman known as Emily Doe who had been sexually assaulted while unconscious wrote a letter about her ordeal and read it in court to her attacker, a Stanford athlete. A friend forwarded the letter to me. I read it once, then immediately went back to the beginning and read it again. I hope I can meet the author someday and tell her how brave I think she is.

“To girls everywhere,” she wrote, “I am with you…

Early on the morning of November 9, when it came time to decide on what I’d say in my concession speech, I remembered those words. Inspired by them, I wrote these:

“To all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.”

Wherever she is, I hope Emily Doe knows how much her words and her strength meant to so many.

There’s yet another side to the matter of women in politics. It’s not just that politics can be rewarding for those women who choose to enter it. In the long run, it also makes our politics better for everyone. I believe this as strongly as I believe anything. We need our politics to resemble our people. When the people who run our cities, states, and country overwhelmingly look a certain way (say, white and male) and overwhelmingly have a shared background (wealthy, privileged) we end up with laws and policies that don’t come close to addressing the realities of Americans’ lives. And since that’s a basic requirement of government, it’s a pretty big thing to get wrong.

In other words, representation matters.

Is representation everything? Of course not. Just because I’m a woman, it doesn’t mean I’d be a good President for women. (I would have been, but not only because of my gender.)

But it does matter, and often in concrete ways. I remember when I was pregnant with Chelsea, working at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, and repeatedly went to my superiors to ask about their maternity leave policy. They avoided the question until there was no longer any way to avoid it, then stammered that they didn’t have a policy. “No woman who’s worked here has ever come back after having a baby.” So I wrote my own. I was a new partner and had the power to do that. But what about more junior lawyers or support staff? Would they have been expected to come in a few days after giving birth, or not come back to work at all? It took a woman in the room to notice a huge hole in the firm’s policies and care enough to fix it.

Representation matters in less visible but no less valuable ways, too. I remember being riveted as a little girl whenever a woman appeared in our history lessons: Abigail Adams, Sojourner Truth, Ida Tarbell, Amelia Earhart. Even if it just amounted to a sentence in a dusty book—and often that’s all they got—it thrilled me. The great men in our history books thrilled me too, but it meant something different, something quietly momentous, to learn that a woman had done something important. It opened the world up a little more. It made me dream a little bigger. I remember coming home from school and opening Life magazine to read about Margaret Chase Smith, the gutsy Republican Senator from Maine who stood up to Joe McCarthy. Years later, when I became First Lady, I wrote her a fan letter.

As a young woman, I was moved and inspired watching Barbara Jordan speak out eloquently for the rule of law on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings; Geraldine Ferraro stand onstage as the vice presidential candidate for my party; Barbara Mikulski shake up the U.S. Senate; Dianne Feinstein take on the NRA; and Shirley Chisholm run for President. What hadn’t felt possible suddenly was.

When Chelsea was a little girl, I saw the power of representation through a new lens. I watched her leaf through the pages of her children’s books, searching intently for the girl characters. Now little girls have a new group of fictional heroines to look up to, including Wonder Woman and General Leia (she got a promotion from Princess). Slowly but surely, Hollywood is moving in the right direction.

That’s why it meant so much to me to see all the little girls and young women at my campaign rallies and all the moms and dads pointing and saying, “Look. You see? She’s running for President. You’re smart like she is. You’re tough like she is. You can be President. You can be anything you want to be.”

After the election, I received a letter from a medical student named Kristin in Dearborn, Michigan. She wrote,

To this day, even knowing how things turned out, the memories of all those proud and excited girls—and the thought of the women they will become—means more to me than I can express.

I know that there are some reading this who will sneer. Representation! It’s so soft, so wimpy, so liberal. Well, if you can’t imagine why it would matter for many of us to see a woman elected President—and that it wouldn’t matter only to women, just like the election of Barack Obama made people of all races, not just African Americans, feel proud and inspired—I’d simply urge you to accept that it matters to many of your fellow Americans, even if it doesn’t to you.

I wish so badly that I had been able to take the oath of office and achieve that milestone for women. Still, there were many feminist moments in this election we shouldn’t forget. I will always remember Bill’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. At one point, he uttered the memorable words, “On February 27, 1980, fifteen minutes after I got home from the National Governors Association conference in Washington, Hillary’s water broke.” Watching from our home in New York, I had to laugh. That was the first time that had ever been said about a presidential nominee. I thought it was about time.

There’s another moment I want to note that a lot of people missed when it happened but which I will never forget.

A few days before election night 2016, Beyoncé and Jay-Z performed at a rally for me in Cleveland. Beyoncé took the microphone. “I want my daughter to grow up seeing a woman lead our country and know that her possibilities are limitless,” she said. “We have to think about the future of our daughters, our sons, and vote for someone who cares for them as much as we do. And that is why I’m with her.”

And then, that infamous 1992 quote appeared in giant block letters on a huge screen behind her. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was pursue my profession.”

Something that had been controversial was being reclaimed as a message of independence and strength—just like I had meant it to be all those years ago!—right before my eyes.

Thanks, Beyoncé.

Will we ever have a woman President? We will.

I hope I’ll be around to vote for her—assuming I agree with her agenda. She’ll have to earn my vote based on her qualifications and ideas, just like anyone else.

When that day comes, I believe that my two presidential campaigns will have helped pave the way for her. We did not win, but we made the sight of a woman nominee more familiar. We brought the possibility of a woman president closer. We helped bring into the mainstream the idea of a woman leader for our country. That’s a big deal, and everyone who played a role in making that happen should feel deeply proud. This was worth it. I will never think otherwise. This fight was worth it.

That’s why I am heartened that a wave of women across America have expressed more willingness to run for office after this election, not less. I’ll admit, I was worried that it would go the other way. And I will always do my part to encourage more women to run and to send the message to little girls, teenagers, and young women that their dreams and ambitions are worth chasing.

Over the years, I’ve hired and promoted a lot of young women and young men. Much of the time, this is how it went:

These reactions aren’t innate. Men aren’t naturally more confident than women. We tell them to believe in themselves, and we tell women to doubt themselves. We tell them this in a million ways, starting when they’re young.

We’ve got to do better. Every single one of us.

Motherhood, Wifehood, Daughterhood, Sisterhood

I don’t know what it’s like for other women, but growing up, I didn’t think that much about my gender except when it was front and center. Like in eighth grade, when I wrote to NASA to say that I dreamt of becoming an astronaut, and someone there wrote back: Sorry, little girl, we don’t accept women into the space program. Or when the boy who beat me in a student government race in high school told me I was really stupid if I thought a girl could be elected President of the school. Or when I heard from Wellesley College: I was in. On these occasions, I felt my gender powerfully. But most of the time, I was just a kid, a student, a reader, a fan, a friend. The fact that I was female was secondary; sometimes it practically slipped my mind. Other women may have had different experiences, but that’s how it was for me.

My parents made that possible. They treated my brothers, Hugh and Tony, and me like three individual kids, with three individual personalities, instead of putting me in a box marked “female” and them in a box marked “male.” They never admonished me for “not acting like a girl” when I played baseball with the boys. They stressed the importance of education, because they didn’t want their daughter to feel constrained by tired ideas of what women should do with our lives. They wanted more for me than that.

Later in life, I started to see myself differently when I took on roles that felt deeply and powerfully womanly: wife, daughter to aging parents, girlfriend, and most of all, mother and grandmother. These identities transformed me yet somehow also felt like the truest expressions of myself. They felt both like pulling on a new garment and shedding my skin.

I don’t talk a lot about these pieces of my life. They feel private. They are private. But they’re also universal experiences, and I believe in the value of women sharing our stories with one another. It’s how we support each other through our private struggles and how we find the strength to build the best possible lives for ourselves.

These roles haven’t been easy or painless. Sometimes they’ve been very painful indeed. But they have been worth it. My goodness, have they been worth it.

On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in July, my daughter introduced me to the nation. I was backstage, ready to walk onstage the instant she was done. At least, I was supposed to be ready. But I couldn’t pull myself away from the television, where her face filled the screen. Hearing her talk, I was grateful for waterproof mascara. The fact that my poised, beautiful daughter was also standing up there as Charlotte and Aidan’s mother—she had given birth to her son only five weeks earlier—made this even more special.

During a burst of applause near the end of her remarks, Jim Margolis, who was keeping his eye on the clock, yelled to me, “We’ve gotta go!” But Chelsea wasn’t done, and I didn’t want to miss any of it. Finally, Jim yelled, “Now we’ve really gotta go!” I snapped to attention, and we raced down the hall and up the stairs in the dark. I stepped out onstage in the nick of time.

From the moment she was born, Chelsea has captivated me. I suspect a lot of parents know what I mean. My child has me hooked. That night was no different. She looked so happy recounting stories of growing up. It’s always interesting to me to hear her perspective of her childhood. You try so many things as a parent. I remember how hours after she was born, Bill walked around the hospital room with tiny Chelsea in his arms, explaining everything to her. We didn’t want to waste a moment.

Here’s what Chelsea talked about at the DNC: Our weekly trips to the library and church. Lazy afternoons outside lying on the grass and spotting shapes in the clouds. Playing a game of her invention, Which Dinosaur Is the Friendliest? She says I warned her not to be fooled, that even seemingly friendly dinosaurs were still dinosaurs. That sounds like me: wasting no opportunity to impart some practical advice, even in absurd circumstances.

She talked about her favorite books that we read to her and those she later read by herself and told us all about, like the science fantasy A Wrinkle in Time.

Mostly Chelsea talked about me always being there and how she always knew how much we loved and valued her. I cannot express the happiness it brings to hear my daughter say that. This was my number one priority every day of her childhood: making sure she knew that nothing was more important than her. I worried about this, because Bill and I were extremely busy people. We worked long hours, we traveled frequently, and the phone in our house rang constantly, often with urgent news. It wouldn’t be unexpected for a little girl growing up surrounded by all that to feel overlooked. Over the years, I’ve met politicians’ kids who say, “I was pretty lonely. I had to compete with the whole world for my parents’ attention.” That was the worry that kept me up at night when Chelsea was young. I couldn’t bear the thought.

One way we handled that was by not excluding her from our work. We talked about issues and politics with her starting from a young age. In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, she described how hard it was to see me lose the fight for health care reform in 1994, when she was fourteen. She was there to comfort me and help provide diversions, like watching Pride and Prejudice together.

For me, becoming a mother was the fulfillment of a long-held dream. I love children—love just sitting with them and being silly, love bringing smiles to their sweet faces. If you’re ever looking for me at a party, you’re likely to find me wherever the kids are. Before I even met my husband and thought about starting a family, I was a lawyer and advocate for children. When Bill and I learned that we were going to be parents, we were ecstatic. We jumped around our kitchen like we were kids ourselves.

Getting pregnant was not easy for me, but pregnancy itself was blessedly uneventful. Chelsea arrived three weeks early. I was gigantic and more than ready to meet my little one. Neither Bill nor I cared a bit whether the baby was a boy or girl. But when the doctor said, “It’s a girl!” I felt so happy, it was like a sunburst beaming out of my chest. A girl!

I hadn’t realized how much I wanted a daughter until she arrived. She was a wish so secret, I didn’t even know that I had wished it. Then she was here, and I knew: she was what I always wanted.

If we’d had a son, I’m sure I would have been just as over the moon. I would have realized at once that I had always wanted a son—a sweet little boy to raise into a strong and caring man.

But that’s not what happened. We had a daughter. And not just any daughter but someone who brought such joy and love into our lives. It felt like fate. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me by a mile.

There’s just something about daughters. From the very beginning, I felt a rush of wisdom that I wanted to impart to her about womanhood: how to be brave, how to build real confidence and fake it when you have to, how to respect yourself without taking yourself too seriously, how to love yourself or at least try to and never stop trying, how to love others generously and courageously, how to be strong but gentle, how to decide whose opinion to value and whose to disregard quietly, how to believe in yourself even when others don’t. Some of these lessons were hard-won for me. I wanted badly to save my daughter the trouble. Maybe Chelsea could skip all that and arrive more quickly at a place of self-assurance.

My desire to be the best mother in the world didn’t translate into knowledge about how to do it. At first, I was pretty inept. In those early days, she wouldn’t stop crying. I was nearly frantic. Finally, I sat down and tried my best to make eye contact with this squirming infant. “Chelsea,” I said firmly, “this is new for both of us. I’ve never been a mother before. You’ve never been a baby. We’re just going to have to help each other do the best we can.” Those weren’t magic words that stopped her wailing, but they helped, if for no other reason than that they reminded me I was completely new at this and should be gentle with myself.

Over the years, I’ve met so many frazzled new mothers who can’t figure out how to soothe their babies or get them to nurse or sleep, and I see in their eyes that same discombobulation I felt in those early days of Chelsea’s life. It reminds me all over again how having a newborn is like every switch in your body being flicked on simultaneously. Your brain becomes a one-track mind—is the baby okay, is the baby hungry, is the baby sleeping, is the baby breathing—playing on an endless loop. If you’re a new mother reading this, sleep-deprived and semicoherent, maybe wearing a tattered sweatshirt and dreaming of your next shower, please know that so many of us have been right where you are. You’re doing great. It’ll get easier, so just hang in there. And maybe ask your partner or mom or friend to take over for a few hours so you can have that shower and get some sleep.

Chelsea was born in 1980, a time when opportunities for women were greater than ever before in human history. She wouldn’t face some of the closed doors I had. Bill and I were determined that our daughter was never going to hear “Girls can’t do that.” Not if we could help it.

What I couldn’t know back then, holding this tiny baby in my arms, is how much she would teach me about courage, confidence, and grace. Chelsea has an inner strength that amazes me. She is smart, thoughtful, observant, and even under stress or attack, conducts herself with poise and self-possession. She is gifted at friendship, always eager to meet new people but also comfortable with solitude. She trusts her mind and feeds it constantly. She stands up for what she believes. She is one of the toughest people I know, but her toughness is quiet and deliberate, easy to underestimate. That makes her even more formidable. Her smile is full of real joy.

Bill and I had a hand in all of this, I’m sure. But Chelsea has been Chelsea from the very start. I think most parents find that their children are more formed when they arrive than we expect. It’s like Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “Your children are not your children. They come through you but not from you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you, for life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.”

Like all moms, I wanted to protect Chelsea from illness and injury, bullies, disappointments, and a dangerous world. I also had a different set of threats in mind, which are particular to the daughters of public figures. She grew up on the front page of newspapers. She was attacked by right-wing personalities on the radio and mocked on television when she was just thirteen years old—it still makes my blood boil. There were plenty of nights when I wondered if we had made a terrible mistake by subjecting her to this life. I worried not just that she’d feel self-conscious but also that she’d become too practiced in the art of putting on a happy face for the cameras. I wanted her to have a rich interior life: to be sincere and spontaneous; to own her feelings, not stifle them. In short, I wanted her to be a real person with her own identity and interests.

The only way I knew how to do that was to make her life as normal as possible. Chelsea had chores at the White House. If she wanted a new book or game, she had to save her allowance to buy it. When she was bratty—to her credit, an extremely rare occurrence—she was chastised and sometimes punished. Our go-to was no TV or phone privileges for a week.

But there’s a limit to how much you can make life normal for the President’s daughter. So we also decided to embrace and celebrate the incredible opportunities that her unusual childhood and adolescence afforded. She went on visits overseas with us: touring the Forbidden City in China, riding an elephant in Nepal, having conversations with Nelson Mandela. She even found herself at fourteen discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude with Gabriel García Márquez. Since she had always been interested in science and health, Bill made a point of introducing her to just about every scientist and doctor who visited the White House. She relished these conversations and experiences. “This is so cool!” she said the first time we saw Camp David, on her first flight on Air Force One, when she came along as I led the U.S. delegation to the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway. I watched her—the questions she asked, her excited reflections on everything we saw and experienced—and was delighted. She never grew bored or acted entitled. She knew how special it all was.

Perhaps most important to me, Chelsea never needed to be reminded to thank everyone who made our lives both extraordinary and ordinary: the White House staff, her teachers, her Secret Service detail, her friends’ parents. She treated them all the exact same way—even heads of state. Her gratitude toward the people in her life ran deep. It led to many “proud mom” moments for me, as the kids would say.

Over the years, I worried about Chelsea less and less, as it became clear I didn’t have to. I also learned from her more and more. In stressful moments, she’s the calmest person in the room. She also seizes every chance to be silly with her friends and, now, her kids. These are the actions of someone who understands that life will throw a lot of challenges your way, and you should build up your inner resources of peace and happiness whenever you can.

And as was particularly evident in the 2016 campaign, she’s intrepid. Chelsea traveled far and wide campaigning for me, and she did it with Aidan, whom she was still nursing. It’s like that line from the late Ann Richards, the Governor of Texas: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, just backward and in high heels.” Chelsea did everything an energetic campaign surrogate would do, just with a tiny baby attached to her and all the gear that he required.

She’d call me from the road to tell me everything that she was seeing and hearing. “I’m not sure we’re breaking through,” she said, both during the primary and the general. “It feels really hard to get the facts out.” Her time on the 2016 campaign trail started with a bang. On her very first day, when she politely raised questions about Bernie’s health care plan—she has a master’s degree in public health and a doctorate in international relations with a focus on public health institutions, so she knows what she’s talking about—she got absolutely hammered for it.

I remember our conversation on the phone that night. Chelsea was frustrated with herself that her words didn’t match what she knew or felt. (I can empathize!) She left some people with the impression that she thought Bernie wanted to get rid of all health care—an absurd notion and of course not what she meant or said. She felt awful—awful that she had left a false impression about anything, with anyone, and especially because it was related to something that she understands and cares about deeply. I wished I could give her a big hug. Instead, we talked it out.

Our conversation might seem a little different from the average mother-daughter talk, but underneath, it’s a lot like anyone’s. We started in problem-solving mode. We reviewed the policy and how better to talk about the differences between Bernie’s plan and mine. Chelsea had been right on the specifics that day: at that stage in the campaign, Bernie’s health care plan called for starting over to get to single payer, which is what she said. But we both knew that wasn’t going to matter at this point. We returned to the basics: why my plan to improve the Affordable Care Act and add a public option was the right one to get to universal coverage. As you can tell, Chelsea and I are thought partners on this topic in particular, and her approach to thinking through problems and solutions is a lot like mine. (We recently shared a smile and a sigh when we heard Bernie called for improving the Affordable Care Act immediately by embracing the approach that I proposed as a candidate: a public option in fifty states and lowering the Medicare age to fifty-five.)

We gave ourselves a few minutes to vent about all the hate that at times seemed visceral toward me, our family, and all women stepping out. Then we switched gears and put the frustrating day behind us. We laughed about a photo of Charlotte at ballet class that Marc had sent us. We talked about how glad we were that Chelsea’s low-level nausea seemed to have passed. (She was a few months pregnant.) And we said our I-love-yous and hung up, knowing that tomorrow would be another opportunity to make our case and grateful that we had each other’s backs.

Every day, I was humbled by her fierce support of me. As a candidate, I was glad to have her in my corner, working diligently to explain important issues and why she believed so deeply in my plans—and me. And as her mom, I was and am so proud that she continues to rise above the attacks hurled at her every single day.

More than anyone else, it was Chelsea who helped me to see that my stance on same-sex marriage was incompatible with my values and the work I had done in the Senate and at the State Department to protect the rights of LGBT people. She impressed upon me that I had to endorse marriage equality if I was truly committed to equal human dignity, and as soon as I left the State Department, I did. Later, when I received the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign, I thought of her. And it was Chelsea who told me about the Zika virus long before it was in the newspapers. “This is going to be a huge problem,” she said, and she was right. We’re still not doing enough.

When Charlotte was born, I felt the joy that comes with seeing your child take the great reservoir of love she has and enlarge it to include her own children, along with a true partner of her own. Marc is a great dad, and together they are fantastic parents. Sometimes Chelsea and I do a dance that I expect is familiar to a lot of new moms and grandmothers out there: I’ll go to put the baby down for a nap or feed the toddler a snack, and Chelsea will swoop in. “Mom, that’s not the way I do that.” She can recite the latest American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines on sleep, infant feeding, and screen time, and I get to enjoy the special pleasure that comes from being a grandparent and knowing you don’t have to worry about the baby, because your child is handling the worrying. You can just focus on being the most loving and helpful grandparent you can be.

Chelsea has been by my side at every difficult moment since she arrived on this planet, and I’ve leaned on her more than I ever thought I would. Late on election night, when it was clear I had lost, she was sitting next to me, looking at me with a face full of love, sending all her considerable strength and grace toward me as hard as she could. As always, she helped see me through the darkness.

I was confident that Bill would be great at parenting. His father died before Bill was born; he knew how lucky he was to have this chance that his own father never had. Still, a lot of men are thrilled to be dads but not so thrilled about all the work that a child requires. The writer Katha Pollitt has observed how even the most egalitarian relationships can contort under the strain of child rearing, and all of a sudden the mom is expected to do everything, while the dad pitches in here and there. She calls it becoming “gender Republicans”—a nifty phrase, if perhaps a little unfair to all the feminist Republicans out there, who really do exist.

I knew that I had enough energy and devotion for two, if it turned out that Bill wasn’t a co-equal in the child-raising department. But I really hoped that wouldn’t happen. Our marriage had always been a true partnership. Though he was Governor and then President—jobs that would seem to “beat” a lot of others, if you were the kind of person who ranked jobs like that—my career was important to me, too. So was my time and, more broadly, my identity. I couldn’t wait to become a mother, but I didn’t want to lose everything else about myself in the becoming. I was counting on my husband not just to respect that but also to join me in guarding against it.

So it was a wonderful thing when Chelsea arrived, and Bill dove into parenting with characteristic gusto. We arrived at the hospital with Bill clutching the materials from the Lamaze classes we had attended together. When it turned out that Chelsea was breech, he fought to be in the operating room with me and hold my hand during the C-section. Being Governor came in handy when he asked to be the first father ever permitted by that hospital to do so. After we brought her home, he handled countless midnight feedings and diaper changes. We took turns making sure the parade of family and friends who wanted to spend time with Chelsea were looked after. As our daughter grew up, we both read her good-night stories. We both got to know her teachers and coaches. Even when Bill became President, he rearranged his schedule as much as he could to have dinner with us nearly every night that he was in Washington. And when he was somewhere else in the world, he’d call Chelsea to talk about her day and go over her homework with her.

Every year, our daughter adored her father more and more. As she entered adolescence, I wondered if that would change at all. I remembered how my own dad and I grew somewhat distant from each other once I became a teenager. I provoked him with a lot of fiery political arguments. He was at a loss to navigate the occasionally stormy seas of teenage girlhood. Would that happen with Chelsea and Bill? As it turned out, no. He lived for their debates; the fiercer the better. He didn’t leave me to deal with the “girl stuff”: heartache, self-esteem, safety. He was right there with us.

Did I handle more of the family responsibilities, especially while Bill was President? Of course. He was President. This was something we’d talked through before he ran, and I was more than up for it.

But I never felt like I was alone in the work of raising our wonderful daughter. And I know a lot of wives of busy men who would say otherwise. Bill wanted to be a great President, but that wouldn’t have mattered to him if he wasn’t also a great dad.

Every time I see my husband and daughter laugh over some private joke that only they know… every time I overhear a conversation between them, two lightning-quick minds testing each other… every time I see him look at her with total love and devotion… I’m reminded again that I chose exactly the right person to have a family with.

My marriage to Bill Clinton was the most consequential decision of my life. I said no the first two times he asked me. But the third time, I said yes. And I’d do it again.

I hesitated to say yes because I wasn’t quite prepared for marriage. I hadn’t figured out what I wanted my future to be yet. And I knew that by marrying Bill, I would be running straight into a future far more momentous than any other I’d likely know. He was the most intense, brilliant, charismatic person I had ever met. He dreamt big. I, on the other hand, was practical and cautious. I knew that marrying him would be like hitching a ride on a comet. It took me a little while to get brave enough to take the leap.

We’ve been married since 1975. We’ve had many, many more happy days than sad or angry ones. We met in the library at Yale Law School one evening and started chatting, and all these years later, that conversation is still going strong. There’s no one I want to talk to more than him.

I know some people wonder why we’re still together. I heard it again in the 2016 campaign: that “we must have an arrangement” (we do, it’s called a marriage); that I helped him become President and then stayed so he could help me become President (no); that we lead completely separate lives, and it’s just a marriage on paper now (he is reading this over my shoulder in our kitchen with our dogs underfoot, and in a minute he will reorganize our bookshelves for the millionth time, which means I will not be able to find any of my books, and once I learn the new system, he’ll just redo it again, but I don’t mind because he really loves to organize those bookshelves).

I don’t believe our marriage is anyone’s business. Public people should be allowed to have private lives, too.

But I know that a lot of people are genuinely interested. Maybe you’re flat-out perplexed. Maybe you want to know how this works because you are married and would like it to last forty years or longer, and you’re looking for perspective. I certainly can’t fault you on that.

I don’t want to delve into all the details, because I really do want to hold on to what’s left of my privacy as much as I can.

But I will say this:

Bill has been an extraordinary father to our beloved daughter and an exuberant, hands-on grandfather to our two grandchildren. I look at Chelsea and Charlotte and Aidan and I think, “We did this.” That’s a big deal.

He has been my partner in life and my greatest champion since the moment we met. He never once asked me to put my career on hold for his. He never once suggested that maybe I shouldn’t compete for anything—in work or politics—because it would interfere with his life or ambitions. There were stretches of time in which my husband’s job was unquestionably more important than mine, and he still didn’t play that card. I have never felt like anything but an equal.

His late mother, Virginia, deserves much of the credit. She worked hard as a nurse anesthetist, held strong opinions, and had an unmatched zest for life. As a result, Bill is completely unbothered by having an ambitious, opinionated, occasionally pushy wife. In fact, he loves me for it.

Long before I thought of running for public office, he was saying, “You should do it. You’d be great at it. I’d love to vote for you.” He helped me believe in this bigger version of myself.

Bill was a devoted son-in-law and always made my parents feel welcome in our home. Toward the end of my mother’s life, when I wanted her to move into our house in Washington, he said yes without hesitation. Though I expected nothing less, this meant the world to me.

I know so many women who are married to men who—though they have their good qualities—can be sullen, moody, irritated at small requests, and generally disappointed with everyone and everything. Bill Clinton is the opposite. He has a temper, but he’s never mean. And he’s funny, friendly, unflappable in the face of mishaps and inconveniences, and easily delighted by the world—remember those balloons at the convention? He is fabulous company.

We’ve certainly had dark days in our marriage. You know all about them—and please consider for a moment what it would be like for the whole world to know about the worst moments in your relationship. There were times that I was deeply unsure about whether our marriage could or should survive. But on those days, I asked myself the questions that mattered most to me: Do I still love him? And can I still be in this marriage without becoming unrecognizable to myself—twisted by anger, resentment, or remoteness? The answers were always yes. So I kept going.

On our first date, we went to the Yale University Art Gallery to see a Mark Rothko exhibit. The building was closed, but Bill talked our way in. We had the building entirely to ourselves. When I think about that afternoon—seeing the art, hearing the stillness all around us, giddy about this person whom I had just met but somehow knew would change my life—it still feels magical, and I feel happy and lucky all over again.

I still think he’s one of the most handsome men I’ve ever known.

I’m proud of him: proud of his vast intellect, his big heart, the contributions he has made to the world.

I love him with my whole heart.

That’s more than enough to build a life on.

I’ve met a lot of strong people in my life but no one stronger than my mother.

People say that about their mothers all the time. But consider the life of Dorothy Howell.

Starting when she was three or four, her parents would leave her alone all day in their fifth-floor walk-up in Chicago. When she got hungry, she had to bundle herself up, walk down all those stairs, go to a nearby restaurant, produce a meal voucher, eat, and then walk all the way home. Alone.

At age eight, she was put on a train headed to California. Her parents were getting divorced, so they sent her and her three-year-old sister to live with their paternal grandparents. The little girls made the journey by themselves—no adults. It took four days.

Her grandmother wore long black Victorian dresses. Her grandfather hardly said a word. Their rules were incredibly strict. When my mother dared to go trick-or-treating one Halloween, the punishment was confinement to her bedroom for a full year, coming out only to go to school.

By the time she was fourteen, my mother couldn’t take it anymore. She found a job as a housekeeper for a local family. She looked after the children in exchange for a place to live. She had one blouse and skirt that she washed every night. But the family was kind to her—finally, a little kindness. They encouraged her to keep going to high school.

When Mom graduated from high school, she moved back to Chicago because her mother sent her a letter suggesting that maybe they could be a family again. Despite everything, she missed her mom and wanted badly to be reunited. But when she got there, her mother made it clear that what she really wanted was a housekeeper. Something broke in my mom’s heart forever. Still, she was a good daughter, and we dutifully visited my grandmother a few times a year.

Mom moved into a small apartment, found an office job, and met my dad, Hugh Rodham. They married in 1942 and after World War II had me, followed by my two brothers. We lived in a house in the suburbs. Mom, a homemaker, was a blur of constant energy, cooking, cleaning, hanging laundry, doing dishes, helping us with our homework, and sewing clothes for me. When I was in high school, she made me a dress—white with a print of red roses—that I thought was the prettiest I’d ever seen. She loved us intensely and worked hard to make our childhoods meaningful and fun. We played lots of games, read lots of books, went on lots of meandering walks, and talked about everything under the sun.

Back in the day, kids and their parents didn’t consider each other friends. That’s not how it worked. They were the parents. We were the kids.

But when I look back, there was no question that she was my best friend.

Even as a little girl, I saw how strong she was. She was so competent. When Mom said something, you knew that she meant it. When she told me to stand up for myself with a neighborhood bully, I did. She was so determined that some of her determination rubbed off on me.

She was not a huge personality. She didn’t pound her fists on the table or yell like my dad did—that’s not how she made her presence known. But she knew what she believed. She lived her values. She would do anything for us, and we would do anything for her. All of that made her powerful.

When I got older, the full extent of her loveless, lonely childhood hit me. I wondered if I could have survived such an ordeal with my spirit and dignity intact. She knew that she was worthy of love and decent treatment, even though the world told her otherwise for a long time. How did she hold on to that self-respect in the face of all that disregard? The most important people in her life told her she was nothing. How did she know that wasn’t true? I marveled at the mental strength it must have taken to keep believing that a better day was coming, that she would find her place, that hard work would see her through, that her life had meaning despite how unfair fate had been to her.

When I became a mother myself and discovered how much patience and resilience it requires, I saw my mother’s strength in a new way. She was raised with such neglect, to the extent that she was raised at all. How did she learn how to give my brothers and me such a loving and secure childhood? We talked about this. She said she carefully observed every family she ever met, including that family she worked for as a fourteen-year-old all those years ago. She paid attention to how the parents spoke to each other and to their kids. She saw that gentle firmness was possible and that families could actually laugh together, and not just sit in stony silence. Mostly, she figured it out on her own. It wasn’t hard for her, she said. She loved us and was so happy to be around us, it was easy to show it.

But I know other people whose parents had cruel childhoods and who internalized that cruelty and dished it out to their own kids later. That’s how abuse gets passed on through the generations. That’s probably what happened with my grandmother, in fact. My mom single-handedly stopped that cycle dead in its tracks.

In my experience, as people get older, either they start looking after their parents or their parents keep looking after them. My parents kept looking after me. When they visited, they fussed over me: Did I need a sweater? Was I hungry? I’m generally the one who looks after everyone else, so it was very sweet and rather amusing to have the roles reversed.

We were close. After Bill became Governor of Arkansas in 1979, my parents moved to Little Rock. Dad was retired, and they were ready for a new chapter to unfold, preferably as near to their beloved baby granddaughter as possible.

Dad died just a few months after Bill became President. I begged Mom to come live with us in the White House, but it wasn’t surprising that she said no thank you. She was too independent for that. She did come visit us for weeks at a time, staying in a bedroom on the third floor. She even traveled a few times with Bill, Chelsea, and me on foreign trips.

After I became a Senator and we left the White House, Mom moved close by, to an apartment building in Northwest Washington, D.C. She loved walking around town; going to museums and the zoo (they’re free in Washington!); having dinner with Bill and me a few nights a week; and seeing a lot of my brother Tony, who lives in Virginia just outside Washington with his wife, Megan, and my nephews Zach and Simon and niece Fiona.

A few years later, I asked again, and she finally agreed to come live with Bill and me, because it was getting too hard for her to live on her own. Mom had some heart problems, which meant that unpacking groceries or folding laundry could leave her breathless. She who was always in ceaseless motion now moved gingerly, and she worried about injuring herself.

I was glad that Mom agreed to live with us without my having to fight her on it, but I was ready to fight her on it. Her independence was important, but so were her health and safety. When she still lived alone, there were times I’d be at work in the Senate and realize that I hadn’t heard from her all day and panic a little. Had she fallen? Was she okay? At our house, there were always people around. If Mom moved in, we wouldn’t have to worry as much anymore.

Except it wasn’t as easy as that. We discovered something many parents and children find out late in life: that the balance between them is different once the child is grown and the parent is aging. Mom didn’t want to be mothered; she still wanted to mother. I didn’t want to encroach on her independence and dignity—the thought horrified me—but I also wanted to be straightforward with her about what I thought she could and couldn’t do anymore. No more walking down the basement steps alone; they were too steep, she could fall. She did it anyway. She bristled at any restriction and largely ignored my suggestions. Any time I felt impatient, I reminded myself that I would be just as stubborn as she was.

There was one major fact that kept the balance steady between us: I still needed my mother. I needed her shoulder to lean on; I needed her wisdom and advice. I used to come home from a long day in the Senate—or, in 2007 and 2008, from a day on the campaign trail—and slide in next to her at our kitchen table and let all my frustrations and worries tumble out. Mostly, she just listened. When she gave advice, it always came down to the same basic idea: you know the right thing to do. Do what’s right.

Mom lived with us for five years, and I treasured every day. The whole family did. Our home was a busy place thanks to her. Grandson Zach came by after school to see her all the time. Tony and Megan brought Fiona and Simon over frequently or took Mom back to their home for the weekend. She relished her time with them. She talked to my brother Hugh, who lived in Florida, every single day. Same with Chelsea—not a day went by without a phone call, and every week, Chelsea and Marc came to see her. She enchanted all our friends. Several of Chelsea’s male friends adopted Mom as their honorary grandmother and would stop in to check on her and stay for dinner, debating the finer points of philosophy or The Sopranos. She was good company: quick-witted and well read. The day she died at ninety-two, she was halfway through The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks.

We were so lucky to have her with us for so long. Many of my friends had lost their mothers by then, but here was mine, greeting me every morning and night with a sweet smile and a pat on the hand. I never missed a chance to tell her that I loved her. On a lot of nights, I made the choice to put aside my briefing books for an hour or two so we could watch something on TV (she adored Dancing with the Stars) or have a late dinner together. Briefing books could wait. This time with Mom was precious. I would have given anything to have that kind of time with my dad; I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.

I was grateful for her long, full life, grateful for every moment we shared, grateful that I had the means to care for her the way I did, and grateful for the deep love she shared with Chelsea and the wise advice she gave her. I can’t count the number of people across the country I’ve met who would love nothing more than to have their aging parents living comfortably at home with them. But they can’t afford it, or they don’t have the room. We had the room. We could afford it. I feel extraordinarily lucky for that. We didn’t leave anything unsaid between us. I feel lucky for that, too.

After Mom died, even though I was Secretary of State, I felt just like a little girl again, missing my mother.

Isn’t it funny how that happens.

Every single one of these experiences—the joys and struggles of marriage, motherhood, and daughterhood—I have shared with my friends.

My friends are everything to me. Some have been by my side since I was five; I’m still friends with Ernie, who walked with me to kindergarten the first day. They’ve seen me at my worst, and I’ve seen them at theirs. We’ve been through it all: divorces, remarriages, births of children, deaths of parents and spouses. Some of my closest friends have passed away, and I miss them every single day, which makes me value the friends who are still with me even more. We’ve sat at each other’s hospital bedsides. We’ve danced at our children’s weddings. We’ve drunk good wine and eaten good food, gossiped and hiked and read books together. We have, in short, been an indivisible team.

Some of these friends are men, and some are women. And I want to take a moment to celebrate my male friends, who have been in my corner over the years come hell or high water. There are some out there who say women and men can’t really be friends. I can’t understand that. I don’t know what I’d do without the men who challenge me, encourage me, hold me to account, and make me laugh so hard I can’t breathe.

But my girlfriends… my girlfriends are something else entirely.

In my experience, there’s a special strength at the heart of friendships between women. We get real with each other. We talk about raw and painful things. We admit to each other insecurities and fears that we sometimes don’t admit even to ourselves.

Here’s an example: I loved motherhood passionately. But there were days when it felt—there’s no other way to say this—very, very boring. I would read the same children’s book twenty times in a row and feel myself become duller. My colleagues were doing interesting, challenging work, and I was at home singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” for the millionth time. I wondered if I was a monster for feeling this way, so I asked my friends. Their verdict: nope, just a normal mom.

When I struggled to get pregnant, I talked to my girlfriends. When Bill and I had trouble in our marriage, I talked to my girlfriends. When I lost the 2016 election, I talked to my girlfriends in a particularly open way about how it felt to fail. I have never hesitated to be honest with them, even if what I had to say was gloomy or blunt. They know who I am deep inside, so I’m never scared of losing their good opinion. There are a lot of people for whom I put on a happy face, but not my friends.

It’s bewildering to me when female friendships are depicted in movies or on TV as catty or undermining. I’m sure there are relationships like that, but in my experience, they’re not the norm. Friendships between women provide solace and understanding in a world that can be really hard on us. The pressure to be a perfect wife, mother, and daughter can be unbearable. What a relief it is to find people you can share it all with and be reassured that you’re doing just fine.

If you’re unconvinced that friends are worth it, consider the data. (Here is where my friends would say, “Of course Hillary has data.”) Studies show that when seniors interact on a regular basis with friends, they have fewer problems with memory and depression, greater physical mobility, and are more likely to get regular checkups. Now that I’m officially in the senior category, I’m holding on even more tightly to my friends. They’re literally keeping me strong.

Making friends in adulthood can be hard for anybody. For Bill and me, there are added complications. Do we let people into our lives who we don’t know very well? What if they just want to get to know us in order to have a good story to tell? We’ve been burned by people who’ve done that. It’s not fun to feel used.

Then there’s the risk that people face when they become our friends. If you go out to dinner with me, your picture might be in the paper. You might be hounded by trolls online. You might lose friends who detest me because of my politics. You might even need to hire a lawyer. I almost want to offer a disclaimer to new friends: these side effects may occur.

It’s for reasons like these that a lot of well-known public figures don’t really make new friends. They close the circle. It’s understandable. And yet I try to keep making new friends. Just in the past year, I’ve become close to a few new people, including a mystery writer I’ve been reading for years who is now my pen pal. For me, it’s worth the risk. I get so much from my friendships: I learn so much, I laugh so much. And it feels really good to build my community, to feel connected to an ever-larger web of people from different backgrounds and different chapters of my life. I don’t want to spend time just with politicians. Who in the world wants that?

I have spent so much of my life in the public eye, keeping a tight hold on what I say and how I react to things, that it is such a relief to have friends with whom I can be vulnerable and unedited. I don’t just enjoy that, I need it. It keeps me sane.

It comes down to this for me: I don’t want to live a narrow life. I want to a live a big, expansive one. I think of the poet Mary Oliver’s question about what each of us plans to do with our one wild, precious life. To me, that answer includes staying open to new friends—hearing their stories and sharing mine in turn.

There’s a special group of women I’ve met over the years I want to mention: other First Ladies, women Senators, and Secretaries of State. I wouldn’t say we’re intimates, but we know and understand one another in a way few others do. We know what it’s like to see our husbands attacked and our marriages questioned relentlessly and have to explain that to our children. We know what it’s like to be outnumbered in a vastly male-dominated field and to stay dignified and cheerful despite being patronized or talked over on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter what political party we belong to. We’re connected in a deeper way.

It reminds me of what Sandra Day O’Connor, who for a long time was the only woman on the Supreme Court, said when Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined her there: “The minute Justice Ginsburg came to the court, we were nine justices. It wasn’t seven and then the women. We became nine. And it was a great relief to me.”

The women who have walked the paths I’ve walked have been a relief to me, too. And I hope I’ve been the same to them.

I don’t believe any of us gets through life alone. Finding meaning and happiness takes a village. My friends have been my village. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Turning Mourning into a Movement

They radiated strength. They were proud women who had seen a lot, cried a lot, and prayed a lot. I walked around the room, introducing myself one by one to the dozen mothers who had come from all over the country. I listened to their stories and took in their quiet, fierce dignity.

It was November 2015. We were in the homey Sweet Maple Cafe on Chicago’s West Side. Each of the mothers around the table had lost children to gun violence or in encounters with police officers. They had come to talk about what happened to their kids and to see if I would do something about it—or if I was just another politician after their votes.

Later, some of these mothers would form a traveling sisterhood: the Mothers of the Movement. They told their stories in churches and community centers and onstage at the Democratic National Convention. Their courage, their generosity of spirit, their refusal to give up—all of it inspired and motivated me.

Thanks in part to the Mothers’ example, I ended up speaking frequently and forcefully throughout the campaign about gun violence, racial justice, police reform, and mass incarceration. These are complicated issues, substantively and politically, but listening to the Mothers’ stories and watching the steady drumbeat of mass shootings and deadly police incidents that continued throughout 2015 and 2016 convinced me that they were too important to ignore. So I made criminal justice reform a priority with my very first policy speech, stressing the need for communities to respect the police who protect them and for the police to respect the people they serve. I also criticized the powerful National Rifle Association for its extreme opposition to commonsense gun safety measures. Going after the NRA is dangerous for candidates, but I felt compelled to speak out on behalf of the dead and injured victims of gun homicides, accidents, and suicides. If I had won, we could have made progress toward keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and domestic abusers and making sure fewer parents have to bury their children the way the Mothers of the Movement did. My profound disappointment that I couldn’t deliver that outcome will never go away.

The Mothers’ stories, and the stories of others who lost loved ones to gun violence, deserve to be told and heard. We’ve got to keep saying their names. In that first meeting in Chicago, there was no press and no audience—just us. I was accompanied by my senior policy advisor Maya Harris and director of African American Outreach LaDavia Drane.

Sybrina Fulton, whose unarmed seventeen-year-old son Trayvon Martin was shot and killed outside a convenience store near Orlando, Florida, in 2012, kicked things off. “We’re just regular moms,” she said. “We don’t want to be community activists, we don’t want to be the mothers of senseless gun violence, we don’t want to be in this position—we were forced into this position. None of us would have signed up for this.”

Trayvon was killed while wearing a hooded sweatshirt and taking a walk to buy some Skittles candy at the corner store. Jordan Davis was shot in Jacksonville, Florida, while listening to music in a car that a white man thought was too loud and too “thug.” Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was playing in a Cleveland park with a toy gun when he was shot by a police officer. Eric Garner was choked to death by an officer after selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street. Some of the stories were about criminal gun violence; others, excessive force by police officers. These issues require different policy solutions and different political responses. But the common theme that ran through all the stories was race. And the anguish all these mothers felt was the same—anguish that no mother, no parent, should have to bear.

Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath, remembers comforting her son after they heard about Trayvon’s murder on the news. Jordan didn’t know Trayvon. They lived in different parts of Florida. But the news hit him hard. “Mom, how did this happen to Trayvon? He wasn’t doing anything wrong,” he asked. Lucia didn’t have a good answer. Nine months later, Jordan was dead as well. Now Travyon’s and Jordan’s moms were sitting at the same table.

“We lay in bed, and on our bad nights, our dark nights, we stare at the ceiling and cry,” Gwen Carr told me. She’s the mother of Eric Garner. “We replay in our heads over and over what happened to our children.”

Hadiya Pendleton was a fifteen-year-old honor student when she was randomly shot in a Chicago park. Just a week before, she had performed with her high school band at President Obama’s second inauguration in Washington. “There are no words for what we go through every day just waking up,” her mother, Cleo, told me. “I didn’t have a voice after Hadiya passed. For like three or four days, the only thing I could do was open my eyes and scream, literally at the top of my lungs.”

My throat tightened as I listened to the Mothers tell these stories, watching them remain composed despite the shattering pain behind their words. The writer Elizabeth Stone says that having a child is like deciding to have your heart go walking around outside your body. The thought of something happening to your kid is unimaginable to any parent. These mothers had lived that nightmare.

They also faced different, deeper fears that I never had to think about. My daughter and grandchildren are white. They won’t know what it’s like to be watched with suspicion when they play in the park or enter a store. People won’t lock their car doors when they walk by. Police officers won’t pull them over for driving in the “wrong” neighborhood. Gangs aren’t likely to settle their feuds on the streets where they walk to school.

“As people of color, we feel the greatest impact of this injustice, of this inhumane treatment,” Gwen Carr said. “Some people say that we’re racist because we say ‘Black lives matter.’ We know that all lives matter, but we need people to understand that black lives matter also. So treat us as such. Don’t just treat us like common animals. We’re not. We’re American citizens, and we deserve fair treatment.”

Treating everyone with care and respect is especially important for the men and women charged with keeping us all safe. I feel strongly about this: the vast majority of police officers are honorable, brave public servants who put their lives on the line every day to protect others. As a Senator, I spent years fighting for first responders who served at Ground Zero and later suffered lasting health effects. They paid a terrible price for serving the rest of us. I also have the unique experience of being guarded around the clock for more than twenty-five years by highly trained men and women committed to take a bullet for me if a threat ever came. If that doesn’t teach you to respect the courage and professionalism of law enforcement, nothing will. The officers I’ve known have been proud of their integrity, disgusted by the use of excessive force, and eager to find new and better ways to do their jobs. Every time a police officer falls in the line of duty—something that happens with sickening frequency—it’s a reminder of how much we owe them and their families.

Throughout the campaign, I had many meetings and discussions with law enforcement members to hear their views about what we could do better. In August 2016 I met with a group of retired and current police chiefs from across the country, including Bill Bratton from New York, Charlie Beck from Los Angeles, and Chuck Ramsey from Philadelphia. They stressed the importance of building relationships between their officers and the communities they serve. They also stressed that part of what we owe our officers is honesty and a willingness to confront hard truths.

One hard truth we all have to face is that we all have implicit biases. I have them, you have them, and police officers have them: deeply ingrained thoughts that can lead us to think “Gun!” when a black man reaches for his wallet. Acknowledging this during the campaign may have cost me the support of some police officers and organizations, who seemed to think my concern for dead children and other victims showed a presumption of wrongdoing by police. That stung. But I was grateful for the support of other law enforcement officers who wanted to rebuild bonds of trust that would make them and all of us safe and who thought I was the best candidate to make that happen. Dallas Sheriff Lupe Valdez said at the Democratic National Convention, “We put on our badges every day to serve and protect, not to hate and discriminate.” She and other officers believe, as I do, that we can work together to improve policing without vilifying the men and women who put their lives on the line to do it.

As a candidate, I worked with civil rights advocates and law enforcement leaders to develop solutions that would help, from body cameras to new training guidelines for de-escalating tense situations. I also spoke often about the importance of trying harder to walk in one another’s shoes. That means police officers and all of us doing everything we can to understand the effects of systemic racism that young black and Latino men and women face every day, and how they are made to feel like their lives are disposable. It also means imagining what it’s like to be a police officer, kissing his or her kids and spouse good-bye every day and heading off to do a dangerous but necessary job.

This kind of empathy is hard to come by. The divisions in our country run deep. As Maria Hamilton said to me, “It’s been like that for five hundred years, Hillary. People just haven’t been talking about it.” Her unarmed son Dontre was killed in 2014, shot more than a dozen times by a police officer in Milwaukee after a scuffle in a public park, where he had fallen asleep on a bench. Her words were a reminder that for these mothers and generations of black parents before them, the killing and mistreatment of young black men and women was tragic but not shocking. This has been the reality of life in America for a long time. But we can’t accept it as our inevitable future.

Maria’s words pointed to the complex relationship between race and gun violence. It is not a coincidence that it is the leading cause of death for young black men, outstripping the next nine causes of death combined. That is the result of decades of policy choices, neglect, underinvestment, gangs and thugs, and adversarial policing in communities of color. That said, it’s a mistake to think that gun violence is a problem just for black people or poor people or only in cities. Gun violence touches every class, color, and community, with thirty-three thousand people dying from guns each year—an average of ninety a day. That’s a particularly devastating fact because gun violence is largely preventable. Other developed nations don’t have this problem. They have commonsense laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Those laws work. They save lives. The United States has made a cruel choice as a country not to take simple steps that would help prevent—or at least lessen—this epidemic.

The Mothers know this all too well. Consider the story of Annette Nance-Holt. She worked hard to rise through the ranks of the Chicago Fire Department, becoming a battalion chief. She and her ex-husband, Ron, a Chicago police commander, did everything they could to give their son, Blair, a safe, comfortable, middle-class life. They taught him to be generous and humble, and to feel grateful for all he had. By the time he was sixteen, Blair was a kind, hardworking, music-loving high school student on the honor roll. He was planning to go to college to study business, the first step to accomplishing his dream of being in the music industry.

Even though Annette and Ron devoted their lives to keeping their city safe, in the end, they couldn’t protect their beloved child. One day in 2007, Blair was riding a public bus from school to his grandparents’ store, where he sometimes helped out. A young gang member opened fire on a group of teenagers, aiming for someone in a rival gang. A friend sitting next to Blair jumped up to run to the back of the bus, but Blair pushed her back into the seat. He saved her life, but was killed himself.

All the mothers around the table with me that day in Chicago had stories like that. And they each had decided to do whatever she could to protect other children from suffering the fate of their own. They were focused intensely on curbing gun violence, reforming policing, and ensuring accountability for these deaths. Sybrina Fulton founded the Trayvon Martin Foundation to support families and to advocate for gun safety reforms. Geneva Reed-Veal, whose twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Sandra Bland, died after being jailed for a minor traffic violation, redoubled her community work through her church. All of the mothers were discovering that their stories and moral authority could make them powerful public advocates. As Cleo Pendleton put it, “When I found my voice, I couldn’t shut up.”

But progress was far too slow. They were understandably frustrated by how hard it was to even get a hearing from local authorities and the U.S. Justice Department, let alone action. Too many of them had been brushed off or insulted, and even attacked in the media. Sybrina and her ex-husband had to listen to their son’s killer tell the press they “didn’t raise their son right” and later make a small fortune auctioning off the gun that killed Trayvon.

“We need better laws,” Gwen Carr told me. “If there’s a crime, there should be accountability, whether you wear blue jeans, a blue business suit, or a blue uniform. We need accountability across the board, and we’re not getting that.”

The others agreed, and they clearly weren’t sure I’d turn out to be any different from the other politicians who’d already let them down. Still, they had accepted my invitation to this meeting in Chicago and were generous with sharing their stories. Now they were waiting to see what I’d do.

Lezley McSpadden was direct with me. Her eighteen-year-old son, Michael Brown, was shot and killed in 2014 by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. “Are we going to see change?” Lezley asked. “Once again we’re around a table, we’re pouring our hearts out, we’re getting emotional, we tell you what we feel—but are we going to see any change? Are we going to see some action?”

The politics of guns have been toxic for a long time. Despite the fact that, according to a June 2017 Quinnipiac University poll, 94 percent of Americans support comprehensive background checks for gun sales, including 92 percent of gun owners, many politicians have shied away from taking on the NRA. The vocal minority of voters against gun safety laws have historically been more organized, better funded, and more willing to be single-issue voters.

In the 1990s, my husband fought hard to pass both a ten-year ban on assault weapons and the Brady Bill, which, for the first time, required background checks on many gun purchases at federally licensed firearms dealers. In the years since, that law has blocked more than two million purchases by convicted felons, domestic abusers, and fugitives. The NRA funded an intense backlash to the new safety measures and helped defeat a lot of Democratic members of Congress in the disastrous 1994 midterm elections. Then, in 2000, the NRA helped beat Al Gore.

After these searing political experiences, it became conventional wisdom that it was safer for Democrats to say nothing at all about guns and hope the NRA stayed away.

I never agreed with this approach. I thought it was wrong on the policy and wrong on the politics. I’ve always hated gun violence on a gut level and was proud that Bill’s administration had taken on the NRA and won. My commitment to stopping senseless gun violence deepened after going to Littleton, Colorado, in 1999. Bill and I visited with grieving family members of teenagers killed in the Columbine High School massacre. We huddled together over coffee cups and memorial books in a local Catholic church. I had thought about those kids every day since I’d heard the news a month earlier. I was especially moved by the story of seventeen-year-old Cassie Bernall. Press accounts at the time said that one of the student-killers asked her if she believed in God. After Cassie said yes, he shot her. When I met Cassie’s mother, Misty, I gave her a big hug and asked her to tell me about her daughter. We sat down together and started looking at photos. Some of the Columbine families talked to Bill and me about what more could be done to keep other schools and families safe from gun violence. I believed we needed new measures that would go even further than what the Clinton administration had accomplished.

Later, as a Senator, I represented rural upstate New York as well as the cities. I understood and appreciated the perspective of law-abiding gun owners wary of any new regulations. I remembered my father teaching me to shoot in rural Pennsylvania, where we spent summers when I was growing up. I also lived in Arkansas for many years and went on a memorable December duck hunting expedition with some friends in the 1980s. I’ll never forget standing hip deep in freezing water, waiting for the sun to rise, trying to stave off hypothermia. I did manage to shoot a duck, but when I got home, Chelsea, who had just watched Bambi, was outraged by the news that I’d shot “some poor little duck’s mommy or daddy.”

These experiences reinforced for me that, for many Americans, hunting and gun ownership are ingrained in the culture. Many see them as links to our frontier past and to the age-old American ethic of self-reliance. For a lot of people, being able to own a gun is a matter of fundamental freedom and self-defense. It’s also a source of security and confidence in a chaotic world. I understand all that. It’s why this issue is so emotionally charged. For people on both sides of the debate, it’s intensely personal.

In all my political campaigns, I’ve done my best to strike a fair balance between standing up for commonsense gun safety measures and showing respect for responsible gun owners. I’ve always said that I recognize the Second Amendment and have never proposed banning all guns.

Yet, even before I got into the 2016 race, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre promised his organization would “fight with everything we’ve got” to stop me from becoming President. He warned that if I won, it would mean “a permanent darkness of deceit and despair forced upon the American people.” All he was missing was a tinfoil hat.

Wayne LaPierre helped make the NRA one of the most reactionary and dangerous organizations in America. Instead of being concerned with the interests of everyday gun owners, many of who support commonsense safety protections, the NRA has essentially become a wholly owned subsidiary of the powerful corporations that make and sell guns. Their bottom line and twisted ideology are all that matters to them, even if it costs thousands of American lives every year.

I had a healthy appreciation for the political damage the NRA could do. I’d seen it before and expected worse this time. But I also knew that a lot of swing voters, especially women, were as horrified by gun violence as I was, and were open to smart solutions that would keep their families and communities safer. So I shook off the threats and got to work.

My team and I collaborated with gun safety advocates such as the organization Moms Demand Action to develop new proposals for keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and other violent criminals. I called for universal background checks, barring anyone on the terrorist no-fly list from buying a gun, and giving survivors and families the right to hold gun makers and sellers accountable. For example, I believed that families who lost children in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, should be able to sue Remington Arms for marketing its AR-15 assault rifle to civilians. It infuriated me that a special law gave gun manufacturers immunity from such suits.

After the massacre of nine parishioners at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015, my team focused on why the twenty-one-year-old white supremacist killer was able to buy a gun despite having an arrest record that should have been flagged by the required background check. We found that, under current law, if a background check is not completed after three days, a store is free to sell a gun with no questions asked. This is the result of an amendment the NRA designed and pushed through Congress during the debate over the Brady Bill in 1993. Experts say that more than fifty-five thousand gun sales that should have been blocked have been allowed to proceed because of what we started calling the “Charleston loophole.” I made closing it and other gun loopholes a major part of my campaign.

Listening to the Mothers’ stories in Chicago, I was more sure than ever that taking on the gun lobby was the right thing to do, whatever the cost. I told them about some of the reforms that my policy team had been working on, and asked them to stay in touch with us and not be shy about sending ideas and criticisms. I said how much hearing their stories meant to me and how determined I was to be their champion. I’m sure my words failed me, but it was hard to express how honored I felt by their willingness to open up so completely with me. “We’re better than this, and we need to act like we are,” I said.

As our meeting broke up, the Mothers started talking intensely among themselves. Soon they were taking photos and making plans. Many of them had never met before, but they were already bonding like sisters. I saw how powerful they were together. Later, when they decided to go on the road for my campaign, traveling around South Carolina and other early primary states to speak on my behalf, I was moved and grateful. The Mothers of the Movement were born.

Over the months that followed, I always looked forward to running into the Mothers out on the trail. On hard days, a hug or smile from them would give me an extra boost. And I made a point to be upbeat around them. I figured there was enough sadness in their lives, so the least I could do was to be cheerful with them.

But it wasn’t easy. New tragedies kept unfolding. In July 2016 a black man named Philando Castile was shot seven times during a traffic stop in the Twin Cities, while his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter sat in the car. Later, video showed the little girl pleading with her mother to stay quiet so she wouldn’t be killed as well. “I don’t want you to get shooted,” she said. “Okay, give me a kiss,” Diamond responded. “I can keep you safe,” her tiny daughter assured her, before starting to cry. Two weeks later, I met with the grieving family in Minnesota and heard about how beloved Castile was in the community, including at the magnet school in Saint Paul where he worked, and that he and Diamond had planned to get married.

That same month, five police officers were ambushed and killed by a sniper in Dallas while protecting a peaceful protest march. I was horrified by the news and quickly canceled an event I had been planning to do with Joe Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It didn’t feel right to go to a campaign rally on the day after such a tragedy. Instead, I went to a conference of ministers in Philadelphia and paid tribute to the fallen officers and offered prayers for their families. I called Mayor Mike Rawlings and offered my support. Dallas Police Chief David Brown urged Americans to stand with the brave men and women who risk their lives to keep the rest of us safe. “We don’t feel much support most days. Let’s not make today most days,” he said. I agreed completely. Less than two weeks later, another three officers were ambushed and killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And as I’m writing this, a New York City police officer, a mother of three, was gunned down in cold blood. This violence—against police, against young black men and women, against anyone—must stop.

Since the election, I’ve often thought about my time with the Mothers of the Movement. Whenever I’ve started to feel sorry for myself, I’ve tried to remember how these mothers persevered through infinitely harder circumstances. They’re still doing everything they can to make our country a better place. If they can, so can I and so can we all.

I think about how I felt standing with them in a prayer circle, like we did at the Trayvon Martin Foundation’s annual dinner in Florida. Eight of us leaning our heads together, clasping hands, looking downward in contemplation. One of the Mothers led us in prayer, her voice rising and falling as she thanked God for making all things possible.

I remember something Gwen Carr said on our visit to the Central Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina. In the first days after losing her son, Eric, she couldn’t even get out of bed. But then, she said, “The Lord talked to me and told me, ‘Are you going to lay here and die like your son, or are you going to get up and uplift his name?’ ” She realized in that moment that none of us can rest as long as there are others out there to be helped. She said, “I had to turn my sorrow into a strategy, my mourning into a movement.”

Guns became a flash point in both the primaries and the general election. Bernie Sanders, who loved to talk about how “true progressives” never bow to political realities or powerful interests, had long bowed to the political reality of his rural state of Vermont and supported the NRA’s key priorities, including voting against the Brady Bill five times in the 1990s. In 2005, he voted for that special immunity law that protects gun makers and sellers from being sued when their weapons are used in deadly attacks. The NRA said the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was the most important gun-related legislation in more than twenty years. Then-Senator Barack Obama and I had voted against it. I couldn’t believe Bernie continued to support the law ten years later when he ran for President.

I hammered him on the issue every chance I got. We had a revealing exchange in a town hall debate in March 2016. A man stepped up to the microphone to ask a question. His fourteen-year-old daughter had been shot in the head during a shooting spree outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant. After a few scary days on life support, she pulled through and ended up being the lone survivor of the attack. The father asked what we were going to do to address the epidemic of gun violence stalking our country.

“I am looking at your daughter, and I’m very grateful that she is laughing and she is on a road to recovery,” I said. “But it never should have happened.” I told him about some of the steps I wanted to take to keep families safe, including repealing the immunity protection for gun manufacturers. The moderator then asked Bernie his thoughts about a new lawsuit challenging that corporate immunity. To my surprise, the Senator doubled down. He argued passionately that people like me who talked about suing gun makers were really talking about “ending gun manufacturing in America.” To him, the idea that a manufacturer could be held liable for what happens with its guns was tantamount to saying that “there should not be any guns in America.” I couldn’t have disagreed more strongly. No other industry in our country has the kind of protection he supported for gun manufacturers. And in every other situation, he was the loudest voice in the room calling for corporations to be held accountable for their actions. Why was this one issue so different? As I told the crowd, it was like he was reading straight from the NRA’s talking points. After months of pressure from activists and victims’ families, Bernie finally said he would reconsider his vote.

Bernie and I disagreed on guns, but the Republicans were far more extreme. Just days after terrorists shot and killed fourteen people and seriously injured twenty-two others at an office holiday party in San Bernardino, California, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to stop individuals on the no-fly list from buying guns and explosives. I thought it was a no-brainer that if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you’re too dangerous to buy a gun! But the Republicans refused to defy the NRA.

Then there was Donald Trump. From the start of the campaign, he did everything he could to ingratiate himself with the gun lobby, which may have been wary that a New York billionaire with a history of being sympathetic to gun control wouldn’t be a natural ally. So he overcompensated. He promised to force schools to allow guns in classrooms and to overturn efforts President Obama made to strengthen the background check system. After the rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, in which eight students and one professor were killed, Trump called the attack horrible but didn’t seem to think anything could be done about it. “You’re going to have these things happen,” he said flippantly. After the June attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that killed forty-nine young people, many of them LGBT people of color, Trump said it was “too bad” that people at the club “didn’t have guns attached to their hips”—even though all the research and a growing body count prove that more guns mean more deaths.

Republicans liked to rile up their base with tales about how I was going to shred the Constitution and take away their guns. It didn’t matter that I said the opposite as clearly as I could, including in my acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: “I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I’m not here to take away your guns. I just don’t want you to be shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place.” I was used to being the gun lobby’s favorite villain. But as he so often did, Trump took it to another level. In August 2016, he told a rally in North Carolina that if I were elected President, there’d be no way to stop me from appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. Well, he said, maybe the “Second Amendment people” might find a way to stop me. Many of us took that to mean: maybe someone would shoot me.

Trump’s remark caused a stir in the press. I was particularly concerned that if a “Second Amendment person” came after me, he’d be coming after my security detail of Secret Service agents. His campaign tried to downplay the comment, but everyone heard the innuendo loud and clear. Later, there were reports that the Secret Service told Trump’s team to get their candidate to knock it off.

As for the NRA, it kept its promise to do everything it could to stop me. All told, the gun lobby spent more than $30 million supporting Trump, more money than any other outside group and more than double what it spent to support Mitt Romney in 2012. About two-thirds of that money paid for more than ten thousand negative ads attacking me in battleground states. The organization didn’t have the guts to take on my specific policy proposals—which were widely popular, even with a lot of gun owners. Instead, it went for fearmongering and demonizing. In one ad, a woman is alone in bed when a robber breaks into the house. “Don’t let Hillary leave you protected with nothing but a phone,” the narrator warns, suggesting falsely that I would have stopped law-abiding Americans from having a gun.

I’m sure that some of my fellow Democrats will look at this high-priced onslaught and conclude, as many have in the past, that standing up to the NRA just isn’t worth it. Some may put gun safety on the chopping block alongside reproductive rights as “negotiable,” so as not to distract from populist economics. Who knows—the same might happen to criminal justice reform and racial justice more broadly. That would be a terrible mistake. Democrats should not respond to my defeat by retreating from our strong commitments on these life-or-death issues. The vast majority of Americans agree that we need to do more on gun safety. This is a debate we can win if we keep at it.

As I met more survivors of gun violence and the families of victims, I was amazed at how many shared the Mothers of the Movement’s conviction that they had to channel their private pain into public action.

One of the most powerful voices came from someone who had trouble speaking: former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head in 2011 while meeting with constituents in the parking lot of a Tucson supermarket. Before the shooting, Gabby was a rising political star: brilliant, magnetic, and effective. After the shooting, she had to persevere through intense physical therapy and relearn how to walk and talk. Nonetheless, she and her husband, the former astronaut and fighter pilot Captain Mark Kelly, became passionate advocates for gun safety. I loved campaigning with them and watching crowds fall in love with Gabby, just as I had. “Speaking is difficult for me,” she would say, “but come January, I want to say these two words: Madam President.”

Other advocates were less famous but no less courageous, including the families of Sandy Hook Elementary victims in Newtown, Connecticut. Every time I tried to talk about the massacre of little children that happened at that school in 2012, I started to choke up. I don’t know how some of the grieving parents found the strength to share their experiences at campaign events, but I will always be grateful that they did.

Nicole Hockley joined me at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. Her six-year-old son, Dylan, was shot to death despite a special education teacher’s heroic efforts to shield him from the bullets. After the massacre, Nicole became the managing director of Sandy Hook Promise, an organization that has trained nearly two million people across the country to identify potentially violent behavior and intervene before there’s a dangerous attack.

One of Nicole’s partners at Sandy Hook Promise is Mark Barden. His seven-year-old son, Daniel, was killed that day. Mark remembers how, on the morning of the shooting, Daniel woke up early so that he and Mark could watch the sunrise together. And when it came time for his older brother, Jake, to go to school, Daniel ran down the driveway to give him a hug and kiss good-bye.

After the shooting, Mark and his wife, Jackie, were the ones who sued Remington Arms, the company that makes the military-grade weapon the killer used in the attack. They argued that Remington should be held responsible for selling and marketing military weapons to civilians. (The case has been dismissed and is now on appeal.)

Then there’s Nelba Márquez-Greene, who spoke with me at an event in Hartford, Connecticut. She lost her six-year-old daughter, Ana, at Sandy Hook. The night before the shooting, she and her husband took Ana and Isaiah, Ana’s younger brother, out for a family dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. They splurged and ordered two rounds of dessert. Isaiah, also a Sandy Hook student, heard the shots that killed his sister from a nearby classroom. The family buried Ana two days before Christmas, her unopened gifts sitting under the tree.

Nelba, a therapist for troubled youth, now runs the Ana Grace Project, which trains teachers and schools how to reduce social isolation and create safe and welcoming communities for students. At the start of the school year following the shooting, Nelba wrote an open letter to the teachers in their district. “When you Google ‘hero,’ there should be a picture of a principal, a school lunch worker, a custodian, a reading specialist, a teacher, or a bus monitor,” she wrote. “Real heroes don’t wear capes. They work in America’s schools.”

One of those heroes was Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary. When Dawn heard the gun shots, she raced into the hallway. She saw the gunman and lunged at him to knock the weapon out of his hands. She died trying to protect her students.

During the campaign, I met Dawn’s grown daughter, Erica Smegielski. When she died, Dawn had been helping Erica plan her summer wedding. Erica couldn’t imagine walking down the aisle without her mom. But slowly she pieced her life back together and managed to have a joyous wedding celebration. Then Erica went to work at Everytown for Gun Safety, Mike Bloomberg’s organization that advocates for commonsense gun laws. Erica threw herself into my campaign, speaking all over the country and telling her story in a powerful television ad. She once told me that I reminded her of Dawn. It’s a compliment I’ll never forget.

As hard as the politics of guns are, and as divided as the country feels, we’ve got to do better. The NRA can spend all it wants. Donald Trump can pal around with Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who has called the Sandy Hook massacre a hoax. What a despicable lie. They’re on the wrong side of justice, history, basic human decency. And it’s because of the Sandy Hook parents, the Mothers of the Movement, Gabby and Mark, and so many other incredibly brave survivors and family members that I know in my heart that one day we will stem the tide and save lives.

I think about something I heard Erica say during the campaign. She was explaining how she picked herself up after the loss of her mother and decided to devote her life to gun safety. “What if everyone who faced tough odds said, ‘It’s hard, so I’m going to walk away’?” she asked. “That’s not the type of world I want to live in.”

Me neither, Erica