DOVER, DEL. — Pauline McCloskey, 84, and Caitlin Zadek, 20, may be separated by six decades, but both profess a devotion to the ideal of gender equality -- the bedrock goal of the modern feminist movement. Yet in contemplating the Democratic presidential nomination contest, they have come to different conclusions.
For McCloskey, a retired secretary at a girdle factory here, a woman's rise to the White House is reason enough to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
For Zadek, a University of Delaware English major, the progress women have already made in American society frees her to support a more-inspiring Barack Obama.
Their split reflects a spirited national dialogue underway as women decide whether to send history's first viable female candidate to the White House.
Polls show women tend to favor Clinton -- a gender bias her campaign strategists are counting on. But Obama cut into that support in two of four early-voting states. Older women lean toward Clinton, younger ones toward Obama. Working women favor him, those with children at home like her. And then there is the factor of race, which helped Obama garner 54% of the female vote in South Carolina last week, with 78% support among black women.
Women carry a lifetime of slights, struggles and achievements into the voting booth, sometimes with unexpected results. How those experiences might influence the election could be heard in conversations with more than two dozen women one rainy afternoon, days before Delaware and more than 20 other states vote in Tuesday's primaries.
"It's about time we support a woman for president," McCloskey said over a hot lunch at the Modern Maturity senior center, a few blocks from the Playtex girdle factory where she hired on in 1944, after the young man she was to marry disappeared at Pearl Harbor.
While Clinton's generation of women was spouting fiery feminist rhetoric, burning their bras and plotting their careers, McCloskey sat with her steno pad, taking hours of dictation for the men who oversaw production of a nation's worth of ladies' undergarments.
The men's salaries went steadily up; hers stagnated. About the only perk afforded the Playtex working girls was a company discount, and McCloskey dutifully wore her 18-hour girdle, though at 5-foot-9 and 125 pounds, she hardly needed one.
