Any TV series that former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea called ‘Gutsy’ will naturally sound like an autobiographical documentary. That’s still the weight of her unputdownable image. But no. What Hillary Clinton and Chelsea do in the series streaming on Apple TV is meet other gutsy women across America.
In 2015, when she launched her presidential ambition, Hillary Clinton started a ‘listening tour’ in America. We can call Gutsy, a mother-daughter road trip, the second edition of the tour, this time on women.
String of gutsy women that isn’t a straight line
Hillary Clinton does pull up a formidable line-up of gutsy women in the eight episodes. She attends a drag prom with RuPaul’s Drag Race season 13 winner Symone, paints with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, goes bowling with comedian Wanda Sykes and talks humour with Amy Schumer, discusses love with iconic feminist Gloria Steinem, has a big-fat family lunch with labour rights organiser Dolores Huerta, visits a school with Brown vs Board of Education activists Minnijean Brown and Carlotta Walls LaNier, and takes a law test with the glamorous Kim Kardashian.
“Greatness isn’t always a straight line,” says Clinton.
Based on The New York Times bestselling book The Book of Gutsy Women, Hillary Clinton’s TV series is predictable, old-school, and sometimes boring too. Nothing that Hillary or Chelsea say in the series about feminism or women’s agency is jaw-dropping brilliant or edgy. This is 2022, and they appear a tad outdated. For the most part, it is made up of trite stuff. This is the era of Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib’s brand of feminism. In comparison, what Hillary Clinton sets out to do appears safe, touchy-feely, and even platitudinous. Her questions are banal and not about the deep structures of patriarchy. But then, she herself says that women suffer from an ‘affliction of perfection’. Maybe she didn’t try hard enough just to rid herself of it.
Sure, in another era, feminist firebrands like Steinem and Huerta broke the ceiling and young women of today owe them a lot. But if the series is about paying tribute to the pioneers, it does a superficial job of it. If it is about showing the way forward to women today, all it does is nod, clap, smile, and show thumbs up. It lacks impatience — the central motif of feminists — at how slowly things have moved even though it looks like a lot has changed.
It’s the Hallmark card version of feminism. Not deep, not nuanced, but just happy and grateful.
And there are some cheesy episodes too — in one, Hillary and Chelsea attend a session on how to make green rings out of wax in a gesture of women gifting themselves a ring. Or the concept of ‘forest bathing’ — a fancy, feel-good gibberish for a walk in the woods.
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An inside story of protesting, picketing
Gutsy is not entirely devoid of its moments either.
There is one strong acknowledgement of the fact that the battle isn’t over. Huerta is featured with her 11 grown-up children, talking of what she passed on to them — the idea of protesting and picketing.
“A family that pickets together stays together,” she says in an episode titled Gutsy Women Are A Bunch of Mothers.
In another wonderful episode called Gutsy Women Know How To Laugh, one female clown shows how she brings up the issue of consent on stage. Wanda Sykes speaks on race and gender, Maysoon Zayid about being Muslim and disabled, and Amy Schumer about romanticising pregnancy.
There are some very revealing moments like when Chelsea says she had many arguments with her mother when the latter stopped short of legalising gay marriages.
Or when Hillary Clinton explains why she wore pantsuits.
When she was First Lady, she used to wear skirt-suits in the beginning. And during one trip to Rio, some photographers took a photograph of her legs from a low angle, and later, the image was used on a billboard to advertise an underwear brand. That was it for Hillary. She moved on to pantsuits. It shows the volley of misogyny that was thrown at her at every stage. Her clothes, her hair, her laughter – everything was mocked and scrutinised unsparingly.
Chelsea responds to this saying she herself was learning something about her mother for the first time.
We learn that when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, she went forest bathing. Chelsea talks about how the media treated her when she was a child and her experience with school bullying.
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The big, uncomfortable question
Any documentary series by Hillary Clinton on feminists will not be complete without the central question that continues to linger in people’s minds even today. — why did she not leave her husband Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky controversy involving abuse of office and sexual misconduct?
Gutsy offers somewhat of an answer in a conversation with Rev. Whitney Ijanaten, a Black and queer wedding officiant. The gutsiest thing Hillary Clinton did was to stay in her marriage, the reverent says and asks her why she did it.
“It is so intensely personal. I had to make a decision that I thought was right for me,” Hillary replies. “The world was saying we know what she should do. You can’t know what is going on in any marriage let alone in their thoughts, hearts, and minds. You have to do the searching yourself. Getting to the decision is excruciating.”
Then the reverend asks if her marriage wasn’t such a subject of public scrutiny, would she have done the same thing?
“Absolutely. It was a decision about who I am. My thinking about it was that he is fundamentally a really good person, he is a loving, caring, thoughtful person, and I love him with all my heart.”
What if you were not in the public eye, would he have told you, comes the next question.
“Oh no. Because he was so embarrassed and really ashamed of it,” replies Hillary Clinton.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)