On the eve of the US election, we spoke to three successful older women about the struggles they’ve experienced in their lives – and what it would mean to see the first woman in the White House

Thelma Baxter, 70, retired school superintendent: ‘I had to overcome those hurdles’



Thelma Baxter defines herself first and foremost as a Harlem girl.

The wait is over for older women voting for a female president: 'I feel like crying' Read more

“Being a Harlem girl means that I consider that I have swag. I know that’s a term they reserve for Barack Obama, but I think women can have swag also. I take a lot of pride in the way I dress, the way I look, the way I carry myself.”

Baxter, who spent 31 years with the New York City board of education, was quickly taken out of her comfort zone: as a teenager in the early 1960s, she was a scholarship student at a highly selective Bronx-based private school named Fieldston. “I was the only black female in my class.”

Baxter, who came from a mixed family – with a white father and a part African American, part Native American mother – found it scary at first. Discrimination was evident. There were parties she wasn’t invited to, comments she was subjected to.

Discrimination followed her. After college, despite qualifying as a high school teacher, when it came to a final oral examination, she was failed. The board of examiners said her southern accent was an impediment to her being understood by students in the classroom. But Baxter didn’t have one; she had lived in New York her entire life.

The Guardian view on America’s choice If we had a vote, we would use it to elect Hillary Clinton as president. She's a thoughtful politician who has responded to concerns about her cautious centrism by committing to more radical plans. With decades of experience, she is a fitting successor to Barack Obama. It is also high time there was a woman president. By contrast Donald Trump is an irascible egomaniac, uninterested in the world. He has fought a campaign of abuse, riddled with racism and misogyny. He propagates lies, ignorance and prejudice. There are three particular ways in which electing Mr Trump is a step that should be spurned by any responsible American voter. First, it would mean a rightwing president governing with a rightwing Congress which would aim to restore a conservative majority on the ​S ​supreme ​C ​court. Progress on civil rights and equality would be reversed. Abortion rights would be threatened. Second, race remains America’s deep foundation sin, and a President Trump would deepen it. Last, electing the billionaire will make the world an even less safe place. The time for messing is over. America deserves much better than Mr Trump. So does the world. Mrs Clinton is much better. So elect her.

Baxter eventually qualified and rose up. Her crowning achievement? Besides her two daughters, she says that as a principal, she turned around a failing school in the Bronx in record time. In just three years, Baxter overhauled a 5,000-student school where many attendants lived below the poverty line – significantly improving grades, attendance and morale. The accomplishment won her an editorial in the New York Times, the title of which reads “Cloning Thelma Baxter”.

More broadly, it is birth control, Roe v Wade, and winning the battle of being in charge of our own bodies that she considers the most important victory she has seen in her lifetime.

Other victories, like childcare, and finding ways to balance careers with child-rearing, have yet to come. Baxter remembers her mother, a prominent journalist and then city government worker, suffering from that struggle. It is the same struggle she grappled with, that she now sees her daughters also face.

Baxter says Hillary Clinton has faced a vast amount of unfair scrutiny in the run-up to the presidential elections. Her own way of vanquishing such treatment was to keep on facing the challenges set before her. “I just had to overcome those kinds of hurdles. I had to constantly prove to people that I was qualified, well-prepared and that I wanted to do the job – and that I was up to doing the job. I think that’s a hurdle that all minority, black, or Hispanic women have to face, much more so than white women.”

And going to cast a vote for the first female president feels important as well as historic. “I will be very, very proud. Almost as proud as when I went to vote for Barack.”

Gloria Neuwirth, 82, lawyer: ‘It’s an uphill battle for women’

Sitting behind her large wooden desk, Gloria Neuwirth says she is cutting down her work hours at the Manhattan law firm where she has been a partner for the last 20 years. “I am cutting down from five days to four days a week,” she states, no movement of the eyelid detectable.

Neuwirth grew up in the South Bronx, the daughter of immigrant parents who owned a chain of pharmacies. She’s the product of the New York City public school system, and recalls riding the subway to go to piano lessons with a degree of freedom and independence.

In the mid-1950s, Neuwirth attended Yale law school: she was one of just 12 women in a class of 162 students. Her gender received frequent attention. “The question that I got from students and even some professors was: why are you here, taking the place of a man? I heard that question over and over again, the assumption being I was going to graduate and just go and raise a family.”

After graduating, finding a job was hard. “There weren’t many jobs available to women. It was the late 1950s.”

One company refused to hire her because they held occasional evening meetings they didn’t think would be suitable for her to attend. Another Wall Street firm declared they didn’t hire women, but told her she was pretty, so they’d be happy to talk to her.

Neuwirth eventually found a job as a researcher with Columbia University and the Bar Association. A little over a decade later, after taking time off to have four children, she once more struggled to find employment. She wanted work adapted to her family requirements – an almost impossible ask. The battle for flexibility and childcare is a gender battle that has yet to be won, she says.

Women have come a long way since she first qualified as a lawyer, Neuwirth points out. Nowadays, women make up a little over half of law school students. But then, she pauses, she also read of a law firm that had announced new partners, 14 out of 15 of whom were men. “So I would say it’s an uphill battle for women.”

As for having a woman in the White House, it will be “very exciting for girls as well as boys to see that a woman can be president”. However, America is hardly blazing a trail, she points out. “We are way behind the rest of the world. So many other countries have had women leaders, and we have never.”

Robin Morgan, 75: ‘People have died for the right to vote – women included’

Robin Morgan sits by the fire in her small, book-filled New York City apartment, and lets her gaze be drawn towards the small entrance to her bathroom, where a few framed letters have been placed.

The writer, feminist, activist organizer and radio show host nods. “Yes, those are copies of some of my correspondence with Simone de Beauvoir,” she confirms. “She was a wonderful woman.”

Morgan, a child actor who enrolled as a non-matriculated student at Columbia University aged 14, says her first adult job as a secretary at a New York literary agency in the late 1950s forced her to confront serious sexism.

Around the same time, like “a great many other idealistic young people”, she became involved in the civil rights and then anti-Vietnam movements. It was a rude awakening.

“We are doing all this work in civil rights and anti-war movements thinking that we are marching towards this brave new world with our revolutionary brothers where we would all be equal and free. And, not so much. Because we discovered that our revolutionary brothers thought women were a species apart.”

Morgan recalls men in both movements issuing derogatory come-ons to women. “Hey baby, give me a little of my civil rights tonight” and “Girls say yes to boys who say no” were lines that were all too common, she says. “If you think about it, of course, that statement pimps women.”

We discovered that our revolutionary brothers thought women were a species apart

In 1968, Morgan helped lead a protest at the Miss America pageant, decrying the degrading nature of the event. The protest, which attracted national and international coverage, threw the American women’s liberation movement firmly into the mainstream.

But for her, looking back, it is not the more than 20 published books that are her greatest professional accomplishment, but rather her participation in the establishment of a global women’s rights movement. “Women are aware now that they are part of a global movement. The United States did not invent feminism; it is not an export from the Americas. We are one mosaic tile in a grand mosaic.”

She mentions how slow some battles feel – against sexual harassment, for instance. “Every now and then you think: how can this still be happening?”

“Every woman in this country, I think every woman on this planet knows, has experienced some version of sexual harassment – some man has put his hands or looks where they shouldn’t have been, employment discrimination, whether it’s a job you have or a career.”

But she remains optimistic. “If you pan back to a historical perspective, change is happening very rapidly.”

And although Morgan believes electing a female president should not be perceived as the be-all and end-all – “We still have racism having had a black president for two terms, and we even have backlash” – it still feels like an exciting moment.

“I will vote with great pride, I will be moved to do so. Just to see a woman’s name on the ballot. And not any woman, but to see a woman who in a very real way comes out of the women’s movement, who was affected by the women’s movement, calls herself a feminist, stands for many of the things that we have put on the map. That’s a thrill I didn’t think I’d get to see.”