Hillary Clinton's Invisible Woman Misogyny

I've been frankly amazed at Hillary Clinton's resiliency this election. She's dramatically come back from the brink three times thus far: after losing the Iowa caucuses, after Barack Obama's South Carolina victory, and after winning Texas and Ohio last week.

You'd think the Hillary spin this week would be "you ain't seen nothin' yet"!

But no, the latest meme's that Hillary's burdened by her age, stereotyped as a washed-up over-50 "invisible woman." Or at least that's what Tina Brown argues at Newsweek:

Much has been written about how boomer women have rallied to Hillary's cause (she won an impressive 67 percent of the white women voting in Ohio; they were 44 percent of the total). It's fashionable to write off this core element of her base as rabid paleo-feminists fighting the tired old gender wars of the past. But Hillary's appeal to the boomer gals is wider and deeper than that. Cynthia Ruccia, a grass-roots political organizer in Columbus, told me that in these last beleaguered weeks, women started showing up in waves at Clinton headquarters—women who told her they had never volunteered in a campaign before. "There was just an outpouring about the way she was being treated by the media," Ruccia said. "It was something we hadn't seen in a long time. We all felt, as women, we had made a lot of progress, and we saw this as an attack of misogyny that was trying to beat her down."

It's a revolt that has been overdue for a while and has now found its focus in Clinton's candidacy. In 1952, Ralph Ellison's revelatory novel, "Invisible Man," nailed the experience of being black in America. In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that's being written on your forehead every day is "Invisible Woman." All over the country there are vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women—women who possess all the management skills that come from raising families while holding down demanding jobs, women who have experience, enterprise and, among the empty nesters, a little financial independence, yet still find themselves steadfastly dissed and ignored. Advertisers don't want them. TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air. Hollywood studios refuse to write parts for them. Employers make it clear they'd prefer a "fresh (cheaper) face."

Even Oprah abandoned them when she opted for Obama. Am I alone in suspecting that TV's most powerful 54-year-old woman just might have endorsed him so fast for reasons of desirable viewer demographics as much as personal inspiration? Certainly, no TV diva in her 50s who values her ratings wants to be defined by the hot-flash cohort.

What saddens boomer women who love Hillary is that their twentysomething daughters don't share their view of her heroic role. Instead they've been swept up by that new Barack magic. It's not their fault, and not Hillary's, either. The very scar tissue that older women see as proof of her determination just embarrasses their daughters, killing off for them all the insouciant elation that ought to come with girl power in the White House.

It's not just Tina Brown.

Leslie Bennetts at yesterday's Los Angeles Times boosted the over-50 misogyny angle as well:

This is not how the story line was expected to go, dammit, and the impatience of the (mostly male) punditocracy is palpable. Doesn't Hillary Clinton know she was supposed to lose decisively in Ohio or Texas last week so that Barack Obama could unify the Democratic Party and sail to victory in November?

Except that she didn't lose -- and, boy, are some people annoyed about that! Why doesn't she just get out of the way? The media have sorted it all out so neatly: He is young, glamorous, charismatic and funny; he represents the future. She is older, strident, earnest and humorless; she is the past. He inspires; she hectors. Ugh!

Not only is Clinton well beyond the age when our culture deems women to have lost most of their value, but so are all too many of her supporters -- and there are few things this country is less interested in than aging women. America requires that females be (or at least appear) young and sexually desirable. Once they've passed the age of facile objectification and commodification, they're supposed to disappear. How dare they not cooperate with our national insistence that older women become invisible?....

So why won't Clinton just scram? I mean, you can't drive a stake through that woman's heart! She just keeps getting up and fighting on, like some incredibly irritating pop-up doll that won't stay down, no matter how many times you smash it to the ground. Not only does "the bitch" (as one McCain supporter memorably called her) insist on staying in the race, but her supporters are getting all riled up and defying the pressure to make her go away. News reports chronicle the anger of older female voters who are simply refusing to go along with the triumphalist narrative of Obama's inevitability. Who do they think they are?

In most of the news coverage, the idea of representation -- the fundamental point of democracy and the reason ours exists, if memory serves -- never even comes up. But the fact is that an enormous segment of the electorate spends most of its time below the radar of American culture. Younger women may be the tip of the iceberg, the part we're able to see, but its hulking body -- the vast cohort of older women we so rarely hear from -- remains submerged.

Many people would like to keep it that way. A quarter of a century ago, the wife of a major Hollywood mogul told me that she couldn't stand Los Angeles because women here became invisible after they passed the age of 25. Although that number may be somewhat higher elsewhere, a good case could be made that such attitudes have permeated our entire society in the intervening years. How many major studio movies (not indie films; that's cheating) have you seen lately that star older women? How many presidential candidates have you heard talking about the needs of older women?

Well, there it is, the invisible woman!

I must be pretty removed from gender studies, but Hillary's campaign illustrates to me that we need more women in politics. We should be seeing less stress on gender - "are you running as a woman" - and more on experience, qualifications, and platform.

Hillary looks good and she's obviously got the physical stamina and fire in the belly to out-campaign most men her age.

Not only that, some in the youth cohort are "Hot for Hillary"!