I started my freshman year at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alma mater in the fall of 2006, after spending the spring semester of my high-school senior year interning in her Senate office. When Clinton announced that she was running for president in January 2007, I expected the campus to be energized and to support one of Wellesley’s own. We formed a Wellesley Students for Hillary group, but the campus as a whole didn’t do much else to acknowledge her historic campaign. Wellesley students didn’t necessarily behave any differently from the millions of college-aged women across the country who by and large supported Sen. Barack Obama.
I saw my own classmates display unbridled excitement toward Clinton only once, really, when she came to campus last November to kick off her youth-voter outreach. She shared stories of her time at the school, including one about a visit she made to Harvard Law School when she was trying to decide between Harvard and Yale Law. She recalled being introduced by a friend to a professor there. “This is Hillary Rodham,” her friend said. “She’s deciding between us and our nearest competitor.” The Harvard professor peered at her from behind his glasses, Clinton said, and replied, “We don’t have a nearest competitor, and we don’t need any more women.” The audience gasped.
But after Clinton left, reality set in. Most of the campus went from that collective gasp at what had happened not so long ago to what seemed like a collective shrug about a woman running for president right now. But why?
Luckily, I could put this question to an expert: Gloria Steinem.
She spoke at Wellesley in February, about a month after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times calling gender “probably the most restricting force in American life.” I asked her why young women tend to be more conservative than their mothers, Steinem replied. As they get older, they lose power. That is, she said, a very radicalizing experience.
