Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Republican women during the Newmark Civic Life Series event at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, implying they are subservient to the patriarchy.

The comments were made earlier this month and were in response to moderator Margaret Hoover’s question about what advice Clinton would give to the first female president.

“Well, first of all, don’t be a handmaiden to the patriarchy, which kind of eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few, Lisa Murkowski, there’s a few,” Clinton said.  

She then discussed the challenges of getting a woman elected president.

“Look, first, we have to get there, and it is obviously so much harder than it should be,” Clinton, who lost in 2016 to President Donald Trump, said. “So, if a woman runs, who I think would be a good president, as I thought Kamala Harris would be, and as I knew I would be, I will support that woman.”

The conversation then pivoted to immigration, birth rates, and the Trump administration. Clinton targeted remarks from presidential adviser Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance.

Clinton said there was a concerted effort to “basically send a message, most exemplified by Vance and Musk and others that, you know, what we really need from you women are more children … and what that really means is, ‘You should go back to doing what you were born to do, which is to produce more children.’”

She also claimed it was all out of the political playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a commonly referenced item that Democrats heavily criticized during the 2024 presidential campaign.

“This is another performance about concerns they allegedly have for family life, but if you had read the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, despite Trump saying he knew nothing about it, if you had read it, it’s all in there. It’s all in there,” Clinton said. 

“‘Return to the family, the nuclear family, return to being a Christian nation, return to producing a lot of children’ — which is sort of odd because the people who produce the most children in our country are immigrants, and they want to deport them,” she added. “So none of this adds up.”

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She also said the Trump administration was regressing society, claiming it would work toward a society that replicated the “1950s,” if not even further back.

“So, this is just another one of their, you know, ‘Make America Great Again’ by returning to the lifestyles and the economic arrangements of not just the 1950s, I mean, let’s keep going back as far as we can,” Clinton said.