Yahoo Finance One Mom Saved Those Controversial Walmart ‘Woman President’ T-Shirts to Wear to Hillary Clinton’s Nomination
This week, Hillary Clinton officially became the first woman to be nominated for the office of U.S. president by a major political party. It’s a moment that will go down in American history, and also one that was predicted on a T-shirt Walmart banned back in 1995. The shopping giant pulled a shirt that depicted Dennis the Menace character Margaret saying, “Someday a woman will be president.” A buyer explained that the shirt was “against Walmart’s family values.” After backlash, the shirt was restored to shelves.
Wednesday evening, I was tagged in a tweet from Raya Elias-Pushett that included a picture of herself and her mother wearing the same T-shirts, with Clinton smiling in the foreground. “My mom saved these for 20 years waiting to wear them for this glass-ceiling-shattering moment,” she captioned the image.
Ellen Elias, the mom, retired high school teacher, and proud feminist who saved the shirts, tells Yahoo Style she wasn’t aware of the controversy behind them all those years ago. “I remember being surprised that I would find something like this at Walmart,” she explains. Elias is originally from Miami and lived in Israel for five years later on. She moved back to the States when her daughter was 3 years old. Elias recalls that when she would come back to the U.S. to visit her family, she would shop at Walmart because toiletries and other products she needed were more expensive in Israel. “While shopping there, I saw these shirts and bought one for me, one for my mom, and a child size for Raya,” she says.
Elias said her interest in politics, feminist convictions, and her desire to teach her students that women were capable of anything compelled her to keep the T-shirt. “I actually used to teach my students that there would be a black male president before a woman would ever get to the White House. … I was right, but I kept hoping that the country would move forward,” she says, noting that she especially liked to wear the shirt during women’s history month “as a subliminal message to my students.”
In 2008, when Clinton ran against President Obama to be the Democratic nominee, Elias remembered the old shirts. “I took the one from my mother in 2008 — with high hopes — knowing that Raya’s child shirt would never fit her.” Eight years later, Elias and her daughter wore the shirts with pride on Saturday at the debut rally for the Clinton-Kaine ticket at Florida International University in Miami. “We were able to be close enough, and Hillary was listening to everyone around the arena as she was shaking hands and leaving,” Raya, who has been attending rallies since she was a little girl, tells Yahoo Style. “My mom shared our shirt story with her, and [Hillary] asked for my phone for an aide to take a picture.”
And the rest, much like this past week, is history.
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