After speaking with author Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie Sunday, Hillary Clinton said she will be changing her twitter bio so that its first word is no longer “wife.” The author said seeing that word as Clinton’s first descriptor upset her feminist sensibilities.
“So your Twitter account first of all describes you as a wife,” the author pointed out, saying, “And then it’s mom, and then it’s grandmother. And when I saw that, I have to confess that I felt just a little bit upset. And then I went and I looked at your husband’s Twitter, and the first word that he used to describe himself was not ‘husband.’”
She asked Clinton if the bio was her choice and if so “whether you think it’s fair for me to have been a little bit annoyed by this.”
“Well, when you put it like that, I’m going to change it,” Clinton replied and went on to explain why the bio was the way it was.
“There’s always this internal conflict,” she explained. “When you are very committed to your relationships, your family — in my case, parents and siblings, and obviously my husband and my daughter and now my grandchildren — and your own identity, and how you feel about yourself and describe yourself.”
She quoted Barbara Bush’s 1990 speech where she said, “At the end of the day, it won’t matter if you got a raise, it won’t matter if you wrote a great book, if you are not also someone who values relationships.”
“I’ve thought a lot about that,” Clinton said. “Because it shouldn’t be either/or. It should be that if you are someone who is defining yourself by what you do and what you accomplish, and that is satisfying, then more power to you; that is how you should be thinking about your life and living it. If you are someone who primarily defines your life in relationship to others, then more power to you. Live that life the way Barbara Bush lived that life, and how proud she was to do it.”
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“Most of us as women in today’s world end up in the middle: wanting to have relationships, wanting to invest in them, nurture them, but also pursuing our own interests,” she said.
She praised Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) for recently bringing her newborn baby to the floor of the Senate.
“I think that sort of summed it all up,” she said. “She is both: She’s a mom, she’s a senator, she’s a combat veteran. She is somebody who’s trying to integrate all the various aspects of her life. That’s what I’ve tried to do for a very long time, and it’s not easy.”
“It is something that I’ve chosen to do, and I think is best for me, so I’m going to keep doing it,” she concluded. “But I am going to change my Twitter account.”
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