Hillary Clinton attributed her “walled off” reputation to the years of sexism she experienced in male-dominated settings in an account published Thursday on the popular photography blog “Humans of New York.”
Clinton recounted to photographer Brandon Stanton how a group of men heckled her and a female friend while she waited to take an admissions test for Harvard Law School, telling the women they didn’t “need” to be there and even that the men could be drafted to the Vietnam War if women took their spots.
“I couldn’t respond,” the Democratic nominee said. “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. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. 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.’”
Read the full account below:
