Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

GAHANNA, Ohio—Ann Sentilles had flown here from Dallas to knock on doors to help her friend from college get elected president of the United States.

Wearing black Brooks sneakers and a badge on a lanyard identifying her as a canvasser for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Sentilles, 68, took from a nearby field office in Columbus a list of names of registered Democrats who either hadn’t voted early or were playing hard to get. She headed with her husband for this swing spot in this swing state—middle-class to lower-middle-class neighborhoods, not far from a main drag with pawn shops and dollar stores, Latin and African groceries and a Lutheran church with a marquee that said, “WE PRAY FOR OUR NATION,” where each person she would talk to was at least potentially the difference between President Hillary Clinton and President Donald Trump.


“It’s too close for me to say I could’ve done something,” Sentilles had told me on the phone from Texas. And so here she was. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, the leaves on the trees blazing shades of red, yellow and orange. Work trucks sat in driveways, plumbers and painters, electricians and masons. Trump signs in some yards seemed to stare down Clinton signs in others. Many doors flashed warnings of NO SOLICITING.

The first house on the list had two cars in the front and a “ do not try to sell us anything” message on its door. Sentilles knocked. No answer. “Inaccessible,” she marked on her sheet, leaving voting materials on the porch.

Next up on the list was a woman in her 30s. A man answered the door.

“Not a good time, guys,” he said.

“Can Hillary count on your vote?” Sentilles asked.

“Nope,” he said, popping the p.

Down the street, a young man, white, too, using a roaring leaf blower while sporting bulky, noise-canceling headphones, looked up just long enough to shake his head no and wave them away.

Sentilles is more than a typical, devoted Clinton volunteer, one of the thousands who knocked on 6.2 million doors for the Democratic nominee over the weekend. She, like so many of Clinton’s Wellesley classmates and contemporaries, was a “first woman”—the first woman, in her case, to be an on-air television reporter, right here, in the Columbus media market, in 1970. She decided, though, after she got engaged, to quit her job and start a family—and she grappled for decades with the consequences of that choice. Clinton made a different set of decisions, which led to a different set of outcomes, and she did so in a hyper-public forum that has brought her to the brink of a most historic moment.

Sentilles kept knocking. A white woman with white hair—the list said she was 75—opened her door. She looked wary, until she saw Sentilles’ badge, and then her face brightened. She said she hadn’t voted yet, but she would, she told Sentilles, and she flashed a thumbs-up—and a knowing, expectant look.

“It’s been a long time coming,” the woman said.

“It has,” Sentilles said.

There are many demographic groups that will play a role in deciding whether Hillary Clinton breaks the highest, hardest glass ceiling—millennials, Hispanics and black voters among them. But for a certain group of women, like the woman with the white hair here on Raccoon Drive, support for the 69-year-old former secretary of state, former senator and former first lady is not only an endorsement of Clinton’s unique resume. Clinton’s triumph, Sentilles and other women like her have told me for months, would be a collective validation of the lives of what has been a transition generation in the history of women’s roles and rights—a bridge from where this singular breakthrough was unthinkable to where it now feels imminent and real.

“Her route was at a different level,” said Sentilles, “but it was the same route we all took.”

***

Sentilles, the daughter of a surgeon who grew up near Cleveland, went to Wellesley because she was smart. She was Ann Sherwood then, and she wanted to be a journalist. She worked for the student newspaper, for which she wrote about the student government—making her the first reporter ever to have covered Hillary Clinton, who at that point, of course, was Hillary Rodham, president of the student body. “Miss Rodham” and “Miss Sherwood” are mainstays in the minutes of those meetings kept in the archives on the campus in Massachusetts.

But I’m not sure we had any idea how hard it would be for any woman to make progress, in any field, over the next 50 years. The world we encountered wasn’t quite ready for us.”

Between their junior and senior years, they each had internships in Washington—Rodham with the House Republican Conference, Sherwood at NBC News—and they lived together in the George Washington University dorms. Both of them were out far more than in, Sentilles said—always on the move, eager to graduate and go to work.

Back on campus, two weeks before their commencement in 1969, the class had a meeting with a woman from career services. “And she said, ‘Oh, by the way, you better take a typing class, because you might have to start as a secretary,’” said Sentilles, who was en route to Columbia for a journalism master’s degree. “That was a huge hit to me. It was like, ‘What? Really?’ And that was at a school that got all these girls into med school, into law school.

“It was a real awakening,” Sentilles told me. “But I’m not sure we had any idea how hard it would be for any woman to make progress, in any field, over the next 50 years. The world we encountered wasn’t quite ready for us.”

Sentilles talked to a TV station in Providence. A woman reporter, she was told, was “an unnecessary luxury.” What was she supposed to do? Sue? It would have killed her career, she thought, before it ever began.

She got her break in Columbus. She had a news director who put her on meaty stories about city politics and integration in the local schools. But the same news director, a married father of five, one evening came to her apartment uninvited and kissed her and groped her in her kitchen.

This, though, was the man who had “helped me break the glass ceiling in the television newsroom,” she would write decades later—and so “I went back to work the next morning as if nothing had happened, and I said nothing.”

Ann Sentilles and her husband, Irwin. | Photo by Michael Kruse

After she got engaged to Irwin, who was at law school at Yale—in Rodham’s class, although they didn’t know each other—Sentilles left her job. She moved to New Haven to be with her future husband, to start their life together. Today, she told me, her four grown children—three daughters and a son—can’t understand why she would have done such a thing. But that’s how it was: “When you got married,” she said, “you went where your husband was going.” She worked as a teller at a bank, but found it dull compared to reporting, and she stopped when she got pregnant.

While Rodham, down in Arkansas by then, made her own compromises—changing her clothes and her hair and taking her husband’s name to help him win elections—Sentilles stayed home, raised her kids and coordinated the 1969 class notes for the Wellesley alumnae magazine. She followed along closely as classmates became first this and first that, and she wrestled with her own second-guessing, insecurities and justifications. “I beg your indulgence and intellectual tolerance,” she wrote in an edition of the class notes in 1977, “and suggest that all professions, homemaking and motherhood included, be equally important parts of our notes.”

In 1980, she moved again, to Dallas, where Irwin had gotten a great job at a top firm—and on the drive down, coming through Little Rock, she called Rodham. She reached her at her law office. Rodham, still two years from taking her husband’s last name, was a new mother, and she wanted to know how many children Sentilles now had. Three, she said—6 and 3 and an infant, in a car headed for a new life in Texas—and Sentilles told me she retains a vivid recollection of Rodham’s response. “I remember her saying, ‘Well, you have a lot to say grace over,’” Sentilles said.

But it was hard sometimes for her to feel grateful.

“Moving to Dallas was one of the hardest things I ever did,” she would say later. “I had no help, no support, and I had a husband who was in a new job, and that was taking all of his emotional energy and physical energy, too.

“I didn’t do anything right about it. I did a lot of crying and raging and screaming, and I’m not proud of that time in my life. It was not good for the marriage, it was not good for my children—I mean, I began to wonder if my children would ever be happy because they never saw me happy.”

It hit her hard: “I had given up several things that were important to me. My independence. My career.”

Putting together the class notes continued to make her acutely aware of the successes of her peers—especially Hillary Rodham, now Hillary Clinton, the first lady of Arkansas, on her way to becoming the first lady in the White House, and beyond.

“You spend a day running car pool,” Sentilles said in 1994, “and say, ‘Hillary doesn’t do this—and I think, ‘What’s my life? Do I measure against Hillary?’”

It took time and age, she told me, for these feelings to subside.

“Now,” she said to author Miriam Horn for Horn’s 1999 book Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary’s Class—Wellesley ’69, “I’m aware of everybody’s compromises …”

“You need to find peace in your own decisions, and the way you took advantage of your own opportunities,” Sentilles told me. “I think it’s been a life’s work.”

***

For five years in the mid- to late ‘90s, Sentilles was the editor of Dallas Family Magazine, and in 2003, when Clinton wrote her first memoir, Living History, Sentilles went to a signing at a Borders bookstore in Dallas and said hello. Clinton gave Sentilles a big hug.

Five years later, during the primaries when Clinton was running for president for the first time, Sentilles went to fundraisers in her area and traveled to Philadelphia and Indianapolis to canvass.

And throughout this election, she has been especially active, donating as much money as she could—$2,700 in the primaries, $2,700 in the general—“because I rode the so-called second wave of feminism with her and I know her and like her and admire her,” she wrote this past February on her blog. She called it “my story, too.”

In June, when Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination, she got text messages from her three daughters.

“I’m bawling my eyes out.”

“This is history!”

“Your girl did it, Mom!”

Sentilles wept.

Photo by Michael Kruse

After the conventions, as Trump only ramped up his sexist, misogynistic rhetoric, her excitement started to curdle with anger. The early October revelation of the lascivious Access Hollywood tape pushed her over the edge, prompting her to write about her experience with her news director three and a half decades ago. “Grab them by the pussy,” Trump had said on the tape. “I just want to touch you,” her boss had said in her kitchen.

“I was powerless,” she wrote.

But not anymore.

“This is what I can do,” Sentilles told me, walking from house to house on Sunday afternoon. “This is something I can do for her.”

Women like Sentilles feel the same way. Wellesley women of Clinton’s era are out in force. They are canvassing in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, in Florida. Together, dozens of them wrote more than 7,000 postcards to women in politically critical Cuyahoga County, Ohio, around Cleveland—an effort organized by classmate Kit Sawyer, who lives there.

“I have a granddaughter who’s two years old,” she told me. “It’s important to me that she grows up knowing a woman can be president.”

“A lot of us have had parallel lives,” said Avis Miller, a Wellesley grad who is three years older than Clinton and who had five children in seven years before she went on to become the first woman in the U.S. in the Conservative rabbinate to hold a pulpit position in a prominent congregation—Adas Israel in Washington, in 1986.

Nancy Wanderer, a friend and classmate of Clinton’s, got married in college and had children—then went to law school when she was 38, then got divorced, then started living with a woman, her partner now for decades. “It feels euphoric,” Wanderer told me recently when I asked her about the prospect of a woman—of Hillary Clinton, of Hillary Rodham—becoming president. “It feels like we’ve all been on this journey, and now we’ve done it. That’s what it feels like. We’ve done it.”

***

Now, near the end of a long road, here in the suburbs of Columbus, Sentilles moved with purpose from house to house. She and her husband—now retired and willing to follow her—discussed what they were seeing, snapshots of a changing America, talking to white people and black people, Hispanic people and Asian people, watching four little brown girls playing in their yard while wearing brightly colored dresses and head scarves.

One house had a banner proclaiming Happy Diwali, the annual Hindu festival of lights celebrated in the fall. Another had a Buddha statue prominently placed on its stoop. Another had a car in the driveway with a bumper sticker saying its driver was an “ordained Dudeist priest.” And another had a sign in the grass citing Romans 10:13. “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the lord shall be saved.”

A young black woman answered the door.

“Hillary,” she said, announcing her intended pick. “Hillary.”

Sentilles and her husband talked to a young white woman with rainbow hair who wouldn’t tell them who she would vote for. They talked to a young white man with a tank top and lots of tattoos whose wife was the Democrat in the house. “No,” he said with a flat tone and a stern face, he would not be voting for Clinton. They talked to a white man the same age across the street, and he nodded. “Yes,” he promised, Clinton would have his vote. “And thank you for canvassing this neighborhood,” he said, glancing at some of the other houses. “We appreciate it.”

The most enthusiastic people, though, by far, were the women in their 60s and 70s. The women like Sentilles. The women like Clinton.

“Can Hillary count on your support?” Sentilles asked.

“More than ever,” said a 64-year-old white woman in a tan stucco house on a corner lot.

“Can Hillary count on your support?”

“Hundred percent,” said a 71-year-old white woman who came to the door of her low-slung apartment smelling like cigarette smoke and with a Swiffer Sweeper in her hand.

“Can Hillary count on your support?”

“I’m with her,” said a 60-year-old black woman who said she would be voting on Tuesday. She was glowing. “I’m definitely with her.”

The interactions were brief. But Sentilles and these women didn’t need them to be any longer. They knew what they were saying.