First female president: How great a milestone? Women differ
Some see the possibility of Clinton becoming leader of America as a good step but not a big breakthrough
On the day Cheryl Lawson Walker graduated from college, she hadn’t thought too much about the future and her place in it — or the obstacles she might face as a woman.
The place was Wellesley; the year was 1969, and the women’s movement was just emerging as a force in America.
But on that day, for the first time, a student had been selected to address the commencement at the women’s school: Hillary Rodham, the student government president. The two women lived in the same dorm, where they’d chatted over their salads at communal meals.
Rodham’s speech sent a jolt through the class.
“We were just thrilled that she felt empowered enough and articulate enough” to speak so boldly, rebutting the remarks of the U.S. senator who spoke before her, which many had found condescending, Walker recalled. Rodham was “much more forward-looking” than many of her classmates, she said, and it would be some years before they, too, really recognized the obstacles they would have to overcome.
The speaker that day — now known as Hillary Clinton — is edging closer to breaking the ultimate glass ceiling as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Her election would surely be a major milestone for women. But her fellow alumnae don’t all feel the same way about its significance.
‘Import for all women’
To be sure, for some, the election of the first female president would be a thrilling moment they’ve been waiting for years to see, the culmination of a struggle that lasted much too long. “I can’t even articulate all the reasons it’s important,” Sarah Schlesinger Hirschfeld, 56, a New York doctor, said. “I think it’s tremendously important for all women, whether they know it or not, to see a womanin the most important leadership role in the country — and for men to see it, too.”
But to others, the milestone has been eclipsed by other advances — seeing women achieve positions of power in different arenas, or witnessing the election of the first African-American president.
Walker, now 68, supports Clinton, but falls into the latter camp. “I know some people are hugely excited by it, see it as symbolically an enormous step, but I don’t happen to be among them,” she said. “I just think it’s a good next step. Certainly not a milestone like it was when Barack Obama was elected.”
Andthe recently retired literature professor said her young female students, many of whom supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (as have her own children, ages 32 and 35), feel the same way: “For them, the idea of electing a woman is nowhere near as significant as electing the first African-American president was.”
A recent poll found that while threequarters of registered women voters felt America was ready for a female president, only about a third considered it very important to see one in their lifetime. (The poll was taken before Clinton clinched the nomination.)
“The numbers aren’t high,” Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said. She attributes it partly to a generational divide, with younger women having grown up accustomed to seeing women in positions of power. “It’s almost as if (some) people feel like it’s already happened, but it hasn’t,” she said of the milestone.
It’s going to happen at some point
You sense the divide when you talk to Wellesley women of various generations — from women in their 70s who left college years before feminism took hold, to contemporaries of Clinton, to women in their 20s now emerging into the workforce. Though the women interviewed all said they planned to support Clinton over Donald Trump, some were vocal supporters of Sanders in the primaries. Even among those who supported Clinton all along, their views on the milestone aren’t necessarily what one might expect.
Laurel Prussing sees the milestone as more of a logical progression — one that was always going to happen at some point.
“Listen, if it happened 20 years ago, it would be different,” said Prussing, who is the Democratic mayor of Urbana, Ill., and a supporter of Sanders. “But people are used to women now. There’s a whole new generation of young people who expect that women are equal.”
In a CNN/ORC poll conducted in March, just 35 percent of women voters said it was either “extremely important” or “very important” to them to see a woman elected president in their lifetime. (The number was 25 percent among male voters).
On the day that Hillary Rodham made her splash as a commencement speaker, earning a spot in a Life magazine spread on prominent graduates around the country, classmate Pamela Colony received her diploma, too.
A biology professor in Cobleskill, N.Y., who identifies as an independent voter, Colony said she looks at the rest of the world and sees women leaders.
“I mean, look at all the countries that have had a woman president. What’s wrong with us, this great, liberated country?”