AKRON, Ohio — Staring out at more than 100 empty seats in the small downtown auditorium, Marion Wagner looked quizzically at the podium and its state-of-the-art sound system. “Do I really need to talk into a microphone if there’s hardly anybody here?” she asked.
Wagner, a regional director for the National Organization for Women, had driven seven hours from Indianapolis to speak here last week along with half a dozen other prominent feminists in a last-ditch effort to exhort female voters to get behind the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“The issue that’s not being talked about in this campaign is the blatant sexism,” Wagner said, her words echoing off the granite walls. “There are some people who promote Barack Obama because they want anybody but a woman. Would they like a white man instead of a black man? Of course. But they’ll take a black man over a woman. I never thought, in 2008, that we’d still be dealing with this.”
Although women have been the dominant force in the Democratic race, making up nearly six in 10 voters in caucuses and primaries, things have not gone the way Wagner and other feminist supporters of Clinton expected. The same campaign they once celebrated as a sign of tremendous progress, with its promise of the first female president in the nation’s history, has instead reinforced their impressions of gender inequity. (more…)
