AP Photo 2016 Why Millennials Don’t Care That Hillary Clinton Is a Woman

Molly Roberts is a senior at Harvard and a columnist for the Harvard Crimson.

I want to be a part of history in 2016. And by history I mean: The first woman in the White House. But most other liberal millennials—the same young people, by the way, who flooded ballot boxes and the National Mall for Barack Obama in 2008—don’t. They’re breaking for Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old white man, instead of the candidate who could usher the nation into a new era by becoming the first female president.

Hillary Clinton’s presidency would be epochal—the first time in 227 years of American history that a woman would lead the White House’s West Wing rather than the East. So why do young people see this election cycle’s “outsider” as another gray-haired white guy?


The easy way to answer this question is that Hillary Clinton doesn’t preach radical change. Barack Obama did, and Bernie Sanders does. Millennials like that.

But there’s more to it than just young people’s attraction to radical change. And in particular, there’s more to Clinton’s support problem among women. Feminism has changed, especially on campus, and among the left-leaning. The fact is, among certain segments of the liberal millennial population, Clinton’s gender is simply not enough to make her a groundbreaker. She might be a woman, but she is also white, and well-off, and straight. If she were black, or gay, or poor—as well as female, some young liberals might be more inclined to vote for her.

When I wrote a column recently for the Harvard Crimson explaining why I think many young women don’t like Clinton—and why they should—I got pushback from people who thought I was focusing too much on Clinton’s gender and not enough on the ways in which, despite being a woman, she has a leg up on most Americans. One online comment read: “Establishment Harvard student exhorts her peers to support establishment Democratic candidate.” Another critique came in a Facebook status accusing me of ignoring the perspectives of minorities. “Clinton is labeled, with no real attempt to address the concerns of poor and minority women, a strong advocate for people of her gender,” the author wrote.

This vein of criticism is part of a concept that’s been around since the 1980s but just recently come into campus vogue—“intersectionality.” The word is shorthand for the idea that it’s impossible to separate social identities, or the oppression that surrounds them. Gender, race, class and more overlap—or intersect—so intensely that focusing on one necessarily neglects another. A woman’s gender, in this way of thinking, cannot be considered separately from her race. Clinton may be a woman, but she is also white—and thus privileged.

The theory holds particular sway in the newer strains of feminist thinking: Mainstream feminism, the argument goes, cares only for the concerns of the white, middle-class women who founded the movement and, because of their privileged race and socioeconomic status, have had more of an opportunity to shape it. Oftentimes, the policies that mainstream feminists put forth end up helping these white, middle-class women more than they help their non-white, lower income counterparts—or, by focusing solely on gender, these policies leave out issues important to groups marginalized in other ways. When Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright stand up for Clinton and urge young women to get behind her, they seem understandably shocked that women aren’t rallying together to help break through another final, uncracked pane of the glass ceiling. When a modern campus feminist watches the same scene, she sees a group of older, privileged white women circling the wagons around one of their own. The problem they’re solving is real, but it might not be the most important one anymore.

To many on the left, then, Clinton’s gender is simply not enough to make her exciting. She doesn’t belong to enough categories of disenfranchised people. In fact, some argue, the ways Clinton does fit into the establishment outweigh the way she doesn’t. She may understand the concerns of some women, but she does not understand the concerns of those women who have suffered the most oppression—the poor ones, the non-white ones, the gay ones. Add to that Clinton’s past public endorsement of her husband’s incarceration and welfare reform policies, critics say, and it’s not just that Clinton doesn’t personally embody intersecting identities—it’s that as a politician, she’s been part of the problem.

Ironically, this turn in modern feminism hurts Clinton so much precisely because she is a woman. As a white man, Bernie Sanders has the luxury of lower expectations: When young women everywhere are expected to back the female candidate because “women help other women,” Clinton in turn is expected to help them—those of every race, sexuality or socioeconomic class. When she is perceived as not having done so, these voters resent her more than, say, a white male.

Still, many of the intersectionalist arguments against Clinton as a politician ignore how her positions have evolved since the 1990s. Worse, they ignore the other ways Clinton has advocated for women of all backgrounds for decades. For one thing, Clinton deserves much of the credit for pushing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP—a program that certainly benefits more than only wealthy white women—through the Senate as first lady. Even earlier, in Arkansas, Clinton made it her mission to expand early childhood education for those who could not otherwise afford it. And today, Clinton’s full-throated support for repealing the Hyde Amendment puts her on the frontline of reproductive rights for low-income women.

These young liberals who criticize Clinton also take for granted that all women—black and white, gay and straight—still have a long way to go. Maybe it’s easier for people in a generation where more women than men are graduating from college to forget how difficult it once was to be female in the United States. The focus on hardship has shifted from sex to privilege as the country has moved forward on gender equality.

But, when women still struggle for equal pay and equal representation in government and industry, the country hasn’t moved forward far enough. Though it’s important that women be represented by black women, queer women and poor women, it’s surprising to me that, before any woman has even made it close to the White House, so many are spending time finding fault with the kind of woman who just might get there.

That doesn’t mean all women, regardless of their preference for policy or platform, should support Clinton. What it does mean is that for people concerned about making sure that women of all backgrounds have the ability to succeed in the world, Clinton’s womanhood alone should be exciting enough—for now.