Joanna Weiss is a writer based in Boston and a former columnist for the Boston Globe.

The night Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination, as TV anchors gushed about the penultimate crack in the highest glass ceiling, I tried to lure my 12-year-old daughter into the living room. I wanted her to witness history. She wanted to play a quiz on her phone. So when I put her to bed, I gave her a personal history lesson.

Yes, I’d had plenty of career opportunities, and she would, too. But her grandmother, born in Hillary’s generation, had to fight to go to college, and her options afterward were limited to jobs considered suitable for a woman. Even for those of us who grew up with wider horizons, a female president often seemed like a fantasy, reserved for TV characters and aspirational Barbie dolls. And now, here on TV was an actual, live woman on the brink.


Clinton’s nomination, long coming as it was, still seemed to sock 40-something women like me with a wallop last week. I was a rarity among my peers in the 1980s, a latchkey kid with a working mom, so my thrill might have been especially acute. But it wasn’t just me: My social feeds are filled with attestations of tears and unexpectedly deep joy.

But to women younger than I am, to say nothing of girls my daughter’s age, the ramp-up to history has been decidedly ho-hum. Hillary’s struggle to capture the enthusiasm of millennial women is well-documented. So is the corresponding chagrin among older women. As college students flocked to Bernie Sanders last spring, the Clinton campaign recruited second-wave feminist icons like Gloria Steinem to rally their youngers, with limited success.

And though Clinton has now dodged the Bernie bullet, she still faces an enthusiasm gap that matters in the election. To counter Donald Trump’s popularity with older white men, she’ll need to bring younger women aboard. There are plenty of reasons why Clinton has had trouble reaching millennials: her long history as an establishment figure; her Clintonian triangulation; her self-inflicted wounds on the trust front.

But in what Gen Xers like me would recognize as a profound irony, enthusiasm for Hillary’s groundbreaking campaign has, in large part, been a casualty of empowerment culture itself.

Any parent of girls today can attest to the flood of girls-can-do messages: the pink engineering toys, the entrepreneurial Disney princesses, the minifig Lego girl scientists. In 2014, Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement asked 1,600 teachers how they handle gender in the classroom. Most said they emphasize the notion that boys and girls have an equal chance to be leaders, top students, class presidents.

“There’s enormous optimism, among young people, about who can make a difference,” Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, the center’s director, told me. “Being the egalitarian and equity-focused generation that they are, they really think that anybody can. Any gender, any race, doesn’t have to matter.”

This is exactly what the feminists of Hillary’s generation were fighting to see. But did it come too soon? It feels like progress eating itself: The vision of equality that we drill into girls’ minds has erased the idea of the struggle. Yes, women outnumber men in college and see wage parity early in their careers. But outside the happy bubble of young adulthood, there’s still a long way to go. The equality so easy to take for granted in the classroom still doesn’t extend all the way up through society. And it’s unclear if empowerment culture—which presents parity as a given—has given young women the drive to change reality.

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A few weeks ago, I crashed a lunch of summer interns at a Boston tech firm and asked them what they thought about Hillary Clinton. They were undecided and unenthusiastic, which wasn’t a deep surprise. But what was striking was their reluctance to see gender as even a fact worth noting, a factor to put on the balance sheet.

One woman grumbled that a Trump-supporting relative had insulted her deeply by asking, “So, are you going to vote for Hillary because you’re a woman?” Another declared that gender should never play into a political choice. “If they’re qualified, that’s really what it comes down to,” she said.

From the start, Clinton has struggled to overcome this anathema toward essentialism. Even Lena Dunham, Clinton’s most full-throated millennial fan, felt the need to hedge in an essay in Time. “I have no plans,” she wrote, “to blindly follow my uterus to the nearest polling station.”

I don’t feel quite so indifferent to my uterus, perhaps because of what it was doing in the not-so-distant past. Like a lot of midcareer mothers, struggling to balance work and home, I have a sense of what happens when early ambitions collide with reality: the reasons to lean out, the persistent double standards, the confrontations with bro culture. We see the dearth of women in critical mass at the top, and surmise that it’s one reason why meaningful change doesn’t trickle down.

We marvel at the lack of frustration from the up-and-comers. One of my friends, a high-powered scientist, has griped about the young postdocs in her Ivy League lab, who blithely dismiss the notion that gender might someday hold them back. “Report back to me when you’re 50,” she says.

It’s not that young women are blind to the obstacles ahead. A Pew survey from 2013 found that the vast majority of millennial women believe we haven’t yet reached gender equity in the workplace, and recognize that career advancement is harder for women with kids.

But that sense of inequality didn’t translate to the notion that, to bring about systemic change, it would help to have a woman at the highest reaches of power. In April, an ABC poll of millennial women found that, in the primaries, millennials who believe that society is biased against women supported Bernie Sanders over Clinton.

Here’s where the gender-equality messages get muddled, Kawashima-Ginsberg said. Young women tend to see imbalance in the workforce as a generational issue, perpetrated by older men—a problem that will take care of itself in a modern, enlightened age. “They don’t take the whole sexism thing as seriously,” she said. “They believe in their peers.”

And in this world of positive thinking, Clinton feels more like an anachronism than a pioneer: She was married to a president before running herself; she stood loyally by as her husband’s infidelity got dragged through the headlines. Mikayla Bodey, a 20-year-old organizer for Clinton at Ohio State University, told me she’s sometimes struggled to defend her candidate against her peers’ negative reactions. Some chafe at the idea of electing a former first lady, Bodey said: “It’s a little bit demeaning, like you only can be a successful woman because you were married to a successful man and he gives you the podium to speak.”

And many young women can’t fully relate to Clinton’s boomer brand of feminism, championed by mostly white, educated women, Bodey said. Her fellow students are most concerned with “intersectional feminism:” inclusion of different races, classes and sexual orientations, matters that some don’t fully trust will be Clinton’s priorities.

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In part, though, it’s the fight itself that makes Clinton seem out of step. Susan Adams, a professor of management at Bentley University, told me she was stunned last spring when she took a straw poll in a class about “leadership, power and politics,” and found that 29 of 34 undergraduate business majors backed Sanders. But after talking to her students, she realized that most couldn’t relate to Clinton’s persona: the driven crusader, calling out enemies, clawing her way to the top.

They grew up in an “age of inclusion,” she said, playing cooperative games and being forced to work on teams with people they disliked. “Collaboration is what they’re all about,” she said. And Clinton, battle-scarred and ever swimming upstream, is a stark reminder of what the climb actually takes.

Will young women keep their sunny worldview forever, or will they harden into Gen X-style cynics over time? “They may be in a bubble,” Kawashima-Ginsberg says. “We’ll see, 20 or 30 years from now.”

Or sooner? It doesn’t take much digging, after all, to see how far we are from meritocracy. Look at Serena Williams, struggling to persuade the world to define her as a top athlete, as opposed to a top “female athlete.” On the Republican side this year, there were 17 candidates for president, and only one of them a woman. The ruling class of investors, donors and corporate leaders—the people who could press for changes in workplace culture and social support for caregivers—is still overwhelmingly male. The ceiling might be cracked, but it’s still high and hard.

And for Clinton, the key to reaching younger women might be convincing them of the value of a good, old-fashioned fight. Sometimes, that realization comes with time—and age. Trish Fontanilla, a 32-year-old leader of young women in Boston’s startup scene, told me her a-ha moment came at a tech event, when she discovered that the line to the men’s room extended out the door and around the corner—and that the women’s room had been empty for so long that a light flicked on when she entered.

The trappings of female success are everywhere, Fontanilla told me. There are scholarships for women, clubs for women in coding, programs to get more women on corporate boards.

“Yes, we see all of this ‘women, rah-rah’ stuff,” Fontanilla said. “I think the number of initiatives have almost tricked people into saying that we’re at the OK point. No, actually, you have to go through the whole follow-through. You just threw the ball in the air. You have to actually see if it goes through the basket.”