7 Feminist Questions Lena Dunham Asked Hillary Clinton

Lena Dunham, the star of HBO's "Girls" has been promoting her feminist newsletter, Lenny Letter, all summer and it finally apperared in every subscribers inbox this morning. PRIDE wrote about it back in August, and we had some queer suggestions for Ms. Dunham. She includes an interview with Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, 

In the inaugural letter, Dunham reveals why it was so important for her to include Hillary Clinton: 

"It started in 1992, when Lena wrote her third-grade term paper on Hillary’s controversial “tea and cookies” comments. That’s when Clinton told a reporter, during her husband’s presidential campaign, about why she kept her job as a lawyer while he ran for office: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

1. Clinton reveals that her father was a Republican, while her mother was a Democrat. She thought that she would follow in her father's footsteps, and even worked for conservative politican, Barry Goldwater.

"For the longest time, as a young girl, I thought that my father’s views were really the ones I wanted to follow. I had some teachers, one in particular, who were very adamant about being conservative. So I worked for Barry Goldwater when he ran for president. I was a Goldwater girl, which meant I got to wear a cowboy hat, which I thought was really cool."

2. When she went away to college at Wellesley, she found herself "evolving, moving towards a different set of beliefs." 

"I think that’s part of what your late teens and 20s are all about. You have to decide what you really believe. You can certainly carry with you some of the values that you’ve inherited, but you have to make them your own or you have to add or subtract from them. And that’s what I did."

3. She protested against limited visiting hours for men on her women's college campus at Wellesley. 

"These were people who really knew what they wanted. We were vigorously contesting the administration that wanted to keep doing things the way they had done them for a hundred years."

4. After graduating from college, Clinton worked at a salmon cannery in Alaska. Dunham told her that it seemed like a fairly "post-collegiate move" because everyone is a little confused about what to do after college. She asked her what inspired her to work there and how she worked through the confusion of her early twenties.

"I don’t trust anybody who says that they didn’t have some questions in their 20s. That’s a period of such exploration and often torment in people’s lives. And so, when I graduated from college, I had made the decision I was going to go to law school, but it was a hard decision. I wasn’t quite sure that was exactly the right thing to do, but I thought I would give it a try."

5. She met her husband, the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, at law school, but she says she wasn't sure it was the "right decision." 

"My 20s were very formative but by no means a clear path. I ended up after law school working for the Children’s Defense Fund, which I loved. Marian Wright Edelman is one of my personal heroes. And then I went to work for the impeachment staff that was investigating Richard Nixon. Then when he resigned, I had to decide what to do, and that’s when I took this big leap and said, “Okay, I’m gonna go try to find out what Arkansas is like and what it’s like to live there.” So I got a job teaching at the law school, and I just picked up and I moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas."

6. She turned down former POTUS Bill Clinton's marriage proposals twice before saying yes. She says she was terrified, and could have never predicted she would move to Arkansas, and live the life she's lived up till now. 

"If somebody had said when I was 20 or 21, 'Are you gonna marry somebody from Arkansas? And you’re gonna teach law school at the university there, and you’re gonna move there, and, you know, that’s where your daughter’s gonna be born ...' It would have never been in my mind. It’s just not something that I had ever imagined."

7. She is a feminist.

"And if you don’t believe that about yourself as a woman, please, go ask yourself: Why? What is holding you back? And it’s not going to be good for you as a woman to be denying the fact that you are entitled to equal rights. And so, yes, I’m a feminist, and I say it whenever I’m asked."

Read the full interview by becoming a subscriber of the newsletter at Lennyletter.com