On the Huffington Post blog, Nora Ephron described "Hillary resisters" (and she is one) as women who disapprove of her tendency to triangulate, deplore her position on the Iraq war and "don't trust her as far as you can spit."
In the spring, University of Michigan communications studies professor Susan J. Douglas wrote an essay for the liberal journal In These Times called "Why Women Hate Hillary." And in an interview with LA Weekly last May, Jane Fonda called Clinton "a ventriloquist for the patriarchy with a skirt and a vagina."
Some politics experts are baffled by the antipathy. Perhaps women hold each other to an unrealistic standard, said Ruth B. Mandel, an expert on women and politics who is director of the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University and counts herself among the baffled.
"I do feel that people are just grumpy about her," Mandel said. "It is complex ideologically and psychologically -- 'I am mad at her because she didn't divorce her husband, I am mad at her because she didn't vote against the war.' "
Seeking the perfect female candidate, concluded Mandel, could be called "Waiting for the Goddess." And because politics at the highest level requires compromise, a certain centrism and inevitably sullying hands-on experience, she added, "You could spend a lifetime waiting for the perfect person to come along, and in politics, that's not gonna happen."
Ann Lewis, Clinton's director of women's outreach, is upbeat about Clinton's progress with this sector of voters and thinks it's only a matter of time till they come around.
"I do believe that what you are describing are women on a different arc," Lewis said. "They take longer to make up their minds. They want to make sure you are not going to let them down."
'A tragic figure'
But the Hillary resisters -- who say they will vote for her if she becomes the nominee -- already feel that Clinton has let them down.
"Hillary, in a sense, is a tragic figure," said Clara Oleson, a 65-year-old retired lawyer and union educator in West Branch, Iowa, who supports Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). "She seems to feel she needs to be a social male -- aggressor, commander in chief."
Oleson takes umbrage at the assumption expressed by many of her women friends that she should vote for Clinton because she is a woman. "That is a phrase I have fought against my entire life!" said Oleson, a politically active feminist for decades.
