“Geraldine Ferraro? What is that, Flip Wilson’s sports car?”
A plant if you get that. Another plant if you can say who I nicked it from.
Seriously. If my cultural signifiers were Tab, Virginia Slims, and a Bea Arthur character*, I’d probably be a little irritable too. But what the Ferraros and Steinems and the other folks from the age of ERA and “women’s lib” don’t seem to grasp is that there are a lot – a lot – of younger women who look at Hillary Clinton and see someone who was wrong on the war in Iraq, someone who stayed with a philandering husband to trade on his political credentials, someone whose political record outweighs the potential for breaking the ultimate glass ceiling. Maybe it’s a valid viewpoint, maybe it’s not, I’m not going to presume to read minds. But I have friends who are female and more experienced and better-educated than me who have made this point, which bears repeating: feminism in the 21st century doesn’t mean you have to close your eyes and pull the lever for whoever has the second X chromosome.
* No lie. I have seen anti-Hilary spam that is still name-checking “Maude” as a symbol of the horrors of women’s lib. Here’s a little nugget for all the Archie Bunkers out there: try not to build your argument on a show that got cancelled THIRTY YEARS AGO.