Hanover
Madeleine Kunin, who was elected Vermont’s first and only female governor more than three decades ago, said she has been waiting for a long time for one of the major parties to nominate a woman.
“I was thrilled, and I’m still trying to absorb the reality,” Kunin said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “For people like me, this has always been the dream, and I was never sure whether I would live to see it, to tell you the truth. It was a special moment that is going to be recorded in the history books.
“It has taken generations to arrive at this point.”
Clinton claimed victory Tuesday night after winning four of six state primaries, including in delegate-rich California.
Even those not inclined to support Clinton noted the occasion’s importance.
“I think it is an historic event,” Suzanne Butterfield, a former longtime GOP Windsor County chairwoman, as well as a national delegate for John Kasich, said Wednesday. “She has every right to be excited and proud because she’s crashed through that glass ceiling she’s talked about.”
Butterfield, who said she was not a Clinton supporter, added later, “It’s a big event, and it just happens to be on the other side of the aisle.”
Despite the former secretary of state’s apparent lock on the 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination, her opponent, Vermont’s U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, on Tuesday said he would take the fight to the Democratic convention.
Kunin noted that Clinton’s first task will be to win over Sanders supporters, including many younger women who may be disappointed by the Vermont senator’s apparent loss.
Becca White, a 21-year-old selectwoman in Hartford, is one such supporter.
“I’m a Bernie supporter first and foremost, so my immediate reaction was tempered sadness because I wholeheartedly believe in what Bernie stands for,” she said.
But then, White said, she took a step back and considered how she would have felt if Sanders weren’t in the race and Clinton had just won.
“I’m extremely excited for the fact that we had our first woman nominated,” she said — and also “extremely upset” with Republicans’ choice: Donald Trump, a man often accused of sexism who feuded with a female Fox News anchor.
As a Selectboard candidate, White went up against two older men, who she said were “cordial and great.”
White said she had felt another knee-jerk reaction in the moments after she heard the news that Clinton had clinched the nomination: “If she gets elected,” she thought, “I would no longer be the first woman president.”
“It’s not an ambition of mine,” the Hartford selectwoman added, but “when women see other women being successful, they either feel competitive in some way or that they can’t accomplish the same thing.”
The feeling speaks, White and others said, to how society is still leveling its standards for women and men, as well as to the progress already made.
“I think a lot of us have had that experience in our life,” state Rep. Sharon Nordgren, D-Hanover, said: “that the expectations for women have not been measured the same way as for men and boys, as far as what you can do.”
Nordgren, who is in her 70s, said she remembered as a child hearing girls talking about becoming president, only to hear from boys, “No — you can’t do that.”
She said it was important for younger people — “Dartmouth students,” she said, “or students across the country” — to see that “this has been a long transition, a long journey, to get to where we are.”
Clinton acknowledged as much in her victory speech on Tuesday, recalling past activism and her late mother, Dorothy Rodham, a woman born into poverty who taught her daughter to expect more out of life.
“Hillary’s long journey to the nomination is sort of the frosting on the cake,” Nordgren said the following day. “Here we are. We’ve arrived.”
Although Clinton’s victory may be a symbol of progress, her campaign did expose a rift between the candidate’s generation and the youngest women voters in terms of how they view women’s rights.
“I definitely understand and hear a lot of what my generation says when we say, ‘Hillary doesn’t represent me in the (many) facets of my identity,’ ” White said, referring to those who are “young, rural and low income.”
Those in Clinton’s generation — at 68, she was on the leading edge of the baby boom — may have focused just on what it means to be a woman, White said, rather than on combinations of disadvantaged identities, such as “if you’re low-income and a woman of color, or if you’re low-income and a member of the LGBTQ community.”
Kunin, a steadfast Clinton supporter, said the nomination was a step toward equality for all women.
“It won’t happen without the first woman being nominated and elected,” Kunin said. “It’s just fact. I also think it will make a difference.
“It’s hard to put a percentage on that. Maybe just 5 percent,” Kunin said.
Kunin used her own record as governor as an example, pointing out that she had spent considerable time promoting child care and equal pay.
“Bernie may talk about women’s issues as well, but having lived it and having worked on these issues for her whole life … she’s not going to give up on them,” Kunin said. “They’re not going to be an asterisk at the bottom.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.
Correction
Suzanne Butterfield is a former chairwoman of Windsor County Republicans. An earlier version of this story misstated what county she lives in.