Her Spot on the Mantle
Image courtesy of tidridge.com
Sept 26,2016
Originally published on Medium
When I was a kid, President John F. Kennedy’s toothy grin stared out from a coveted spot on our fireplace mantle. Nested between our latest school pictures, Holy Communion shots, my parents’ wedding photo, and preciously preserved images from the Old Country, President Kennedy was revered in our home, and in many Irish Catholic families, like a god. Indeed, the fact that he was assassinated fit perfectly into my Catholic understanding of martyrdom. Jesus suffered and died for us. So did Kennedy, (though the “us” in my familial narrative was really just Irish Catholics).
Kennedy achieved a near pontifical status: to be in his presence was to have a kind of holy experience. “You shook the hand that shook the hand of President John F. Kennedy,” my father would boast, overcome with pride and joy. During Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, Dad worked on the press bus for Western Union, using a telegraph to wire stories from the campaign trail to newspapers across the country.
He told me how the future President’s hands were chapped and bloodied from shaking thousands of hands a day. How he winced from back pain when no one was watching. “But he never stopped,” Dad would say. “He suffered, he did, but you never knew it. He was our president.”
For my family, President Kennedy stood for every Irish Catholic who came before him. He made the American dream — that anyone could make it here — a truth. Despite his early death, Kennedy broke a barrier, changing forever my first generation immigrant family’s notion of who we were and what we could become. African-Americans often talk about President Obama’s election in the same way: that no policy he could ever pass would be as meaningful, or as empowering, as the sheer fact of his success.
It’s 2016, and while my sons do have a President Obama action figure, they aren’t growing up with a crucifix above every bedroom door, or a framed portrait of JFK. Instead they wonder at all the men pictured on their American presidents kiddie placemats. “Where are the women presidents?” they ask. When I describe the struggle for women’s full empowerment to my eight- and ten-year-old boys, explaining, “that’s why we’re supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton,” I realize I sound to them the way my father sounded to me: in love.
Just as my father loved JFK for his Catholicism as much as for his politics, I support Hillary Clinton not only for her policies, but for what her win would mean to me as an American woman. Just as my father appreciated Kennedy’s suffering, I too appreciate what Clinton has endured to come this far. Unlike him, I can’t claim to have exchanged handshakes or gained insider knowledge from the candidate, but I know how it feels to get put down for showing confidence and competence. I know how it feels to try to do everything well; to run a business; parent my boys; be a good wife and daughter — all at the break-neck pace required of most working women.
I’m also acutely aware of how much harder working women’s lives are because Congress is 80% percent male (and GOP-dominated): no comprehensive paid family leave, no universal child care, no pay equity mandate, and constant attacks on our hard-won freedoms.
I am proud to be a working mother and a successful business owner, but after more than twenty years of fighting, I am tired of the double standard. I am tired of a national narrative that teaches women and girls that they are less than; that tells them they ought to lower their expectations; and that keeps them from holding positions of power. I’m making room on my mantle for a portrait of Hillary Rodham Clinton. And I am eagerly awaiting the day I will tuck my boys into bed at night with stories about how our President broke a barrier and changed everyone’s notions about who women are and what we can become.
