The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Young Women and Hillary

That’s a great question, Emily. You’d kind of expect it to be the opposite: older women grown weary of the Clinton baggage, and younger women less inclined to see her as back to the future.

I wonder whether young women can’t get that excited about Clinton for the same reason many of them can’t get fired up about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned. This is the world they know. Younger women have no experience of an America without women at the helm of Fortune 500 companies and women in Congress.

The generation that lived through the 1960s knows what America was like before women really seized leadership professions, and they must see what Hillary is poised to do as nothing short of miraculous. Perhaps younger women see it as inevitable. In which case they can afford to wait a while for a woman who really does excite them.