Newsweek has a great collection of stories about Hillary this week. Some of it is positive, almost glowing, if you can believe it. (Meanwhile Hillary-hater and blustering sexist bully Andrew Sullivan takes his mad hyperbolic ravings to new lows.) I especially like this piece by Tina Brown which looks at the significance of Hillary's candidacy to boomer women:
Much has been written about how boomer women have rallied to Hillary's cause (she won an impressive 67 percent of the white women voting in Ohio; they were 44 percent of the total). It's fashionable to write off this core element of her base as rabid paleo-feminists fighting the tired old gender wars of the past. But Hillary's appeal to the boomer gals is wider and deeper than that. Cynthia Ruccia, a grass-roots political organizer in Columbus, told me that in these last beleaguered weeks, women started showing up in waves at Clinton headquarters—women who told her they had never volunteered in a campaign before. "There was just an outpouring about the way she was being treated by the media," Ruccia said. "It was something we hadn't seen in a long time.
We all felt, as women, we had made a lot of progress, and we saw this as an attack of misogyny that was trying to beat her down."
It's a revolt that has been overdue for a while and has now found its focus in Clinton's candidacy. In 1952, Ralph Ellison's revelatory novel, "Invisible Man," nailed the experience of being black in America. In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that's being written on your forehead every day is "Invisible Woman." All over the country there are vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women—women who possess all the management skills that come from raising families while holding down demanding jobs, women who have experience, enterprise and, among the empty nesters, a little financial independence, yet still find themselves steadfastly dissed and ignored. Advertisers don't want them. TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air. Hollywood studios refuse to write parts for them. Employers make it clear they'd prefer a "fresh (cheaper) face."
. . .[F]or their sake alone, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton should not give up the fight.
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Hillary Clinton Barack Obama Democratic Primary News Feminist Politics Misogyny Gender Sexism In America Boomer Women
