NYT, pg1: Gender Issue Lives On as Clinton’s Hopes Dim

[DeepModem Mom]

Gender Issue Lives On as Clinton’s Hopes Dim
By JODI KANTOR
Published: May 19, 2008


(Todd Heisler/NYT)
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton greeted supporters at the Bowling Green airport on Sunday after a rally on the campus of Western Kentucky University.

....Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now in what most agree are the waning days of her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. To use her own phrase, she has been running “to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling” in American life, and now the presidency — even a nomination that once seemed to be hers to claim — seems out of reach. Along with the usual post-mortems about strategy, message and money, Mrs. Clinton’s all-but-certain defeat brings with it a reckoning about what her run represents for women: a historic if incomplete triumph or a depressing reminder of why few pursue high office in the first place.

The answers have immediate political implications. If many of Mrs. Clinton’s legions of female supporters believe she was undone even in part by gender discrimination, how eagerly will they embrace Senator Barack Obama, the man who beat her?...

As a former first lady whose political career evolved from her husband’s, Mrs. Clinton was always an imperfect test case for female achievement — “somebody’s wife,” as Elaine Kamarck, a professor of government at Harvard and a Clinton supporter, described her. Still, many credit Mrs. Clinton with laying down a new marker for what a woman can accomplish in a campaign — raising over $170 million, frequently winning more favorable reviews on debate performances than her male rivals, rallying older women, and persuading white male voters who were never expected to support her....

(Doris Kearns) Goodwin and others say Mrs. Clinton was able to convert the sexism she faced on the trail into votes and donations, extending the life of a candidacy that suffered a serious blow at the Iowa caucuses. Like so many women before, she was heckled (in New Hampshire, a few men told her to iron their shirts) and called nasty names (“How do we beat the bitch?” Senator John McCain was asked at one campaign event). But the response may have been more powerful than the injury. In the days after Mrs. Clinton was criticized for misting up on the campaign trail, she won the New Hampshire primary and drew a wave of donations, many from women expressing indignation about how she had been treated....

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Her candidacy split Democratic women, not to mention prominent feminists. (Last week, the abortion-rights group Naral Pro-Choice America endorsed Mr. Obama, setting off protest from other women’s groups.) The cleft was largely along generational lines, with older women who had waged their own battles showing more solidarity and younger ones arguing that voting for a male candidate over a female one was itself a sign of progress and confidence....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/us/politics/19women.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1211258361-yRGONnqGSNH4Kg1mQCYdGw&pagewanted=all