Just in time for her mother’s appearance on every TV channel, website, newspaper, magazine and social media app on the planet, Chelsea Clinton has stolen a glamorous magazine cover of her own.
Whether Chelsea Clinton’s appearance on the next cover of Elle – just before Hillary Clinton announces her second run for the White House on Sunday – offers a glimmer of rivalry in the family or instead a hint of a conspiracy to saturate the media between now and November 2016 may depend on which publications her dad, Bill, and her daughter, Charlotte, star in over the coming weeks and months.
Chelsea Clinton strikes a poised and professional pose on the cover of the women’s monthly. Inside, an interview features her strong views on gender equality.
Wearing Gucci and Stella McCartney while talking women’s rights, leadership and motherhood, Clinton makes it clear she intends to be part of the 2016 election conversation both in public and behind the scenes.
“It’s challenging to me that women comprising 20% of Congress is treated as a real success,” Clinton told Elle.
“Since when did 20% become the definition of equality?”
Chelsea Clinton will grace the cover of the May issue of Elle, on sale from Tuesday. Her interview with the magazine covers how she influences her parents on issues such as gay rights, as well as topics ranging from whether she wants her mother to be the first female US president to what it’s like being recognised on the subway and the streets of New York.
Clinton declares that it is important to have a female president – “absolutely, yes” – for symbolic reasons but also to further an equality agenda in the US. She says, however, that she cannot guarantee that the first woman in the Oval Office will be her mother.
“One of the core values in this country is that we are the land of equal opportunity, but when equal hasn’t yet included gender, there is a fundamental challenge there that, I believe, having our first woman president – whenever that is – will help resolve,” she said.
She added that a female president would make a “substantive difference” to American society and that having more women in leadership roles helped to build long-lasting consensus on major socio-economic issues.
“Who sits around the table matters. And who sits at the head of the table matters, too,” she said.
Clinton calls her seven-month-old daughter, Charlotte, “the most remarkable little bubbly, perfect, chunky monkey creature ever” and said she and her husband Marc now understood why parents get so “bombastically” admiring of their children.
“Marc and I are like, ‘What did we do before we were parents?’” she said. Clinton married Marc Mezvinsky in 2010.
Clinton has studied at Stanford, Oxford, Columbia and New York universities. For a time she was a special correspondent for NBC, but she has now brought her ambitions back to the family fold and is working with the recently renamed Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, and the Clinton Global Initiative.
Last month, to mark the 20th anniversary of her mother’s famous speech to a United Nations conference in Beijing in 1995, in which the then first lady declared that “women’s rights are human rights”, Chelsea and Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates launched the “No Ceilings” project, which aims to analyze the gains and identify the remaining gaps in gender equality around the world.
In her Elle interview, Chelsea lamented the enduring lack of parity in the American workplace, while lauding continued progress in legal protections for working women.
She appears on the cover in a classic “little black dress”. Inside the magazine, she wears an elegant combination of designer trousers and sleek black-buttoned top that would put her mother’s infamous pantsuits to shame.
