On Thursday, Hillary Clinton shared a powerful story on the Humans of New York photo blog. Discussing why observers may find her “aloof or cold or unemotional,” Clinton recalled her experience taking the law school admissions test at Harvard. “My friend and I were some of the only women in the room,” she said. “I was feeling nervous.” She went on:
“And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room.”
Clinton let her story illustrate the constant calculations of being a woman, all while she acknowledged that she can come off as cold or emotionless. “But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions,” she said. “And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.'”
Clinton said she takes responsibility for her seemingly unapproachable nature. “I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”
(Via Humans of New York on Facebook)
