Clinton Chips at the Glass Ceiling in Primary Victories
Young and older women are split on whether gender even matters.
March 5, 2008 — -- Female baby boomers across the country have pinned decades of hope on Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, and last night their voices roared as she scored her first primary victories after 12 straight losses, with pivotal wins in Texas and Ohio.
But Clinton still trails in the delegate count and faces a tough struggle to gain the Democratic nomination. It's not unlike the struggle many old-school feminists have faced this year in weighing the role of gender in the voting booth.
Nancy Pierce, a 56-year-old school principal, says she's waited her whole life for a woman president. As the 2008 primary season dawned she looked forward to casting a historic vote.
As a feminist she was drawn to Clinton, but like Caroline Kennedy, Pierce was swayed by her children's passion for the youth and energy of Sen. Barack Obama.
She convinced herself to keep an open mind.
When a passionate young canvasser trudged through the snow to Pierce's rural New Hampshire doorstep in January, urging her to vote for Obama, Pierce was impressed.
"We live on a country road with three houses in five miles and she arrived on foot," said Pierce, who is director of the Contoocook School. "Her emotion was so powerful that when she left, I cried."
After a lifetime of fighting for women's causes, Pierce decided to follow her children's lead and back the charismatic Illinois senator. She even put an Obama sticker on her car.
But when Clinton slipped in the polls and had her teary moment in New Hampshire, Pierce wavered. "Hillary was stripped down to a real person, and I didn't know what I would do when I stepped into the voting booth."
No one was more surprised than Pierce when she voted for Clinton instead of Obama.
"It's almost as if I wanted to reach out to the next generation, but what about my own commitment over the years?" Pierce told ABCNEWS.com. "As mothers, we want something for our children, but I wanted this for myself."
The last-minute decison change typified this year's Democratic race. In Tuesday's primaries, Clinton won over voters who made up their minds in the final few days by 18 points in Ohio and 23 in Texas.
In addition to the late deciders, Latinos, working-class voters and women helped Clinton push back against Obama's recent winning streak.
With months to go before the Democratic convention, Clinton has chipped away at the glass ceiling and inspired many women who were trailblazers in the early years of the women's movement. But many of their daughters, who have arguably been the beneficiaries of the old-school feminists' hard-earned progress, say gender is irrelevant — at least when it comes to voting.
Clinton does better than Obama among older women voters by about 2-1, according to ABC polls. An estimated 61 percent of women over 65 support her campaign. But in the under-30 age group, 53 percent of women prefer Obama.
In a historic political year when barriers of gender and race are being broken, women are still trying to figure out what the Clinton candidacy means to their own identity and the state of the feminist movement.
The National Organization for Women reports that women's participation in both government and industry still lags far behind their male counterparts. Only 16 percent of the members of Congress and 18 percent of U.S. governors are women. Only 16 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and women earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.
"It's heartbreaking that it has taken so much time after Geraldine Ferraro to get back to a place where the public is willing to accept a woman," Pierce said.
Ferraro, now 72 and a New York City businesswoman, was hailed as a trailblazer for women when she became Walter Mondale's vice presidential running mate on the 1984 Democratic ticket.
Ferraro told ABCNEWS.com that sitting president Ronald Reagan's supporters "tried to destroy" the Democratic ticket by investigating her family's finances and personal life.
And sometimes women are the worst offenders, Ferraro said. Barbara Bush, wife of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, publicly referred to Ferraro as something that "rhymes with rich."
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