GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina waded deeper Thursday into her gender warfare with Hillary Rodham Clinton and the political left, suggesting it was time for America to redefine feminism and liberate women for liberal stereotypes that define success too narrowly.

“A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses,” Mrs. Fiorina told a free-market interest group dinner in Washington in speech that was billed as her first major policy address since declaring her candidacy May 5. “A woman may choose to have five children and home-school them. She may choose to become a CEO or run for president.”

Mrs. Fiorina also delved into abortion and birth control, suggesting liberals have a double-standard on women’s health issues.

“The left fights to protect late-term abortions and sues the Little Sisters of the Poor, but they oppose over-the-counter birth control,” she told the crowd.

Mrs. Fiorina, 60, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, has relentlessly used her perch as the lone woman competing for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination to attack Mrs. Clinton and to wade into gender issues with little hesitation.

She suggested repeatedly in her speech Thursday that feminist conservatives like herself, not radical finger-wagging liberals who’ve dominated the sexual equality battlefield for decades, are the people who best advance the legitimate interests of women in America. The “failures of progressive feminism,” she argued, are rooted in the fact that liberals are focused “more about winning elections than empowering women.”

Mrs. Fiorina’s pursuit of gender politics is built on the reality of the last few elections. Women accounted for 53 percent of voters in the 2012 presidential elections, with 55 percent of them voting to re-elect President Obama, exit polls reported.

She backs her passion for arguing for fairness for women in the marketplace and political arena with her own personal story. She headed the world’s largest technology corporation until getting ousted in a nasty internal fight with the Hewlett-Packard board. She fought a bitter race for a U.S. Senate seat from California, and lost. And she led, unpaid, the fundraising arm of the largest conservative organization in the United States and turned its financial fortunes right side up.

Political experts say, however, she will have to walk a narrow line between legitimate appeal to fairness and the perception she is whining about victimhood.

On Thursday, she straddled that line by trying to poke fun at corporate America for its dearth of women executives, noting there are only 23 female chief executive officers in the Standard & Poor listing of the top 500 corporations. “There are more CEOs named John than there are women,” she quipped.

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