I Am Woman, Hear Me Snore

"I don't understand," wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in his diary in late 2000, "why educated and professional women, otherwise intelligent and tolerant, are so unreasonably possessed by Hillary-hatred … I cannot extract a clear statement of why they all detest her."

After reading a new book that addresses precisely this question—a collection of essays titled "Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers"—neither can I. In fact, after reading all 30 essays, I don't want to know anymore.

The essays—written mostly by New York intellectuals, and edited by Susan Morrison, The New Yorker's articles editor—dissect Clinton's femininity, sexuality, clothes, mothering, marriage, mystique and, of course, likability. Or, more precisely, why so many educated, middle-class women have a visceral response to her. "My generation definitely has a Clinton problem," writes Amy Wilentz in an essay on Clinton's clothes, or "costumes."

The reasons for their suspicion outlined here are mostly personal—she doesn't have a hobby, aside from cleaning closets and completing crossword puzzles. She doesn't appear to have been deeply attached to her family pets. She lacks sensuousness. She showed a hint of cleavage. She wore turquoise earrings with a yellow pantsuit. She liked prim headbands. She changed her maiden name. She married Bill Clinton. She stayed married to Bill Clinton. She is still married to Bill Clinton. Even her voice, Marie Brenner writes, "reminds us of the fifth grade teacher we despised."

Imagine if men wrote a book about Clinton containing this kind of minutiae—the same women would turn and savage them for trivializing her.

And herein lies the conflict. Many of these authors would have expected to support a female presidential candidate. They came of age in the 1970s, were buoyed by the tumult, thrill and promise of the women's movement, but are now puzzled and discomfited by what appears to be the result of their labors, or their hopes—the polished, private, pragmatic Clinton. Her journey from Helen Reddy to Céline Dion may have been a necessary one, they concede, but is still symbolic of a slide from sister to sellout. As Katie Roiphe writes: "If Clinton is in many ways the embodiment of certain feminist ideals, then it may be that many of us don't like feminism in its purest form."