For many women, the choice of what to wear has been seen as a controversial—and sometimes political—act. And for the woman hoping to become America’s first female president, that’s no exception.
Hillary Clinton’s choice to wear white for the third general election debate has been widely interpreted to have an historic inspiration, referencing the long history of women’s suffrage. This isn’t the first time Hillary Clinton wore all white—on July 28, 2016, she accepted the Democratic nomination clad in an all-white pantsuit. Geraldine Ferraro, too, wore white in her history-making 1984 moment, when she delivered her acceptance speech as the first female vice president candidate for a major party ticket. Shirley Chisholm donned white in 1969 when she became the first African American woman elected to congress. Three years later, in the posters for her ground-breaking campaign as the first African American woman to run for president on a major party ticket, she also wore white.
