Originally published in the NY Daily News on April 12, 2015.
A sleeping giant is stirring out there — the rage of senior boomer women sickened by setbacks to women’s rights. Younger women are also waking up to the blatant bias being exercised by a new generation of Gen X male leaders.
Hillary Clinton is just the candidate to breathe fire into the giant and unleash a hard-charging neo-feminist movement.
I recently watched Clinton dive into the belly of the beast — Silicon Valley — to scold men for the “shocking” gender gap in “a place of big dreams . . . where faith in the future is so strong.”
She was the keynoter at the very first Watermark Conference for women, and she packed the ballroom with 5,000 professionals, many of them young refugees from the hostile world of male tech executives responsible for driving them out of the field. They swooned over her.
Weeks before, the actress Patricia Arquette had used her global platform at the Oscars to remind the world, “We have fought for everybody else’s equal rights, it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all!” She brought Meryl Streep and J.Lo to their feet.
And then came the Kleiner-Perkins verdict late last month, slapping down Ellen Pao’s suit against the venture capitalists for promoting male partners over her and for firing her when she complained.
“We are seeing a tsunami effect from these recent events,” I was told by Watermark CEO Marlene Williamson.
Renee James, the first woman president of Intel Corp., introduced Clinton at the women’s technology conference as “a modern-day suffragette.”
Hillary doesn’t have to use gender as a weapon, she can just benefit from the anger and the demographics.
In 2012, roughly one in five voters were boomer women. In 2016, there will be about 38 million boomer women in the U.S. And a lot of them would rather eat worms than go to their grave missing a second chance to see the first woman President.
But winning isn’t just about winning over women. Well aware of the perils of being a bulldog feminist, Clinton will be running on a new persona: the kick-ass grandma who will fight for a fair deal for middle-class families and children.
The big test: Will she be a progressive enough grandma to confront the truth middle-class Americans know — they have been rolled for the last quarter-century. Will she dare to tax the 1% who have reaped 95% of the gains in our postrecession recovery? Will she fight for universal preschool and community college? Will she be true to her own core principles?
Gail Sheehy is author of the biography “Hillary’s Choice.”
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