Why young women are so upset at Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem, explained

Unlike in her first shot at the presidency, Hillary Clinton has centered her second White House run on the allure of electing the nation’s first woman president. It’s a pitch she makes often, usually ending her speeches by conjuring an image of America in which “a father can tell his daughter, ‘Yes, you can be anything you want to be, even president of the United States.’”

It’s an immensely popular line with Clinton’s most ardent supporters – Democratic women in their 40s or older.

But over the course of this campaign, it’s become clear that young women don’t find the pitch quite as compelling.

Clinton and her chief rival for the nomination, Bernie Sanders, have both made a point of appealing to women on issues like reproductive rights or equal pay, and to young voters with their plans to eliminate student debt. But so far, Sanders’s sweeping calls for a “political revolution” have overshadowed Clinton’s more pragmatic get-things-done approach — and young voters, who still value idealism in their candidates, have flocked to his campaign in droves. In Iowa, 84 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 sided with Sanders, propelling the Vermont senator to a near tie.

That has created an awkward conundrum for Clinton: She has made inspiring women the core draw of her campaign, but many young women – the ones who would gain the most from the example of a woman president – are more sympathetic to the proclivities of their age than their gender.

This rift, between older and younger women, has only been compounded by Sanders’s good standing in the polls – which, in turn, sent several of Clinton’s most prominent female surrogates to plead for young women to change their minds.

The most recent rebuke came from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the first woman to be appointed to that role. She told young women at a campaign event this weekend, “Just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

But the line that really enraged women supporting Sanders came from Gloria Steinem, the 1960s feminist icon. In an interview with Bill Maher, Steinem said, “When you’re younger, you think: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’”

She quickly apologized for her remarks, calling them a mistake. But she couldn’t soothe the tensions she’d inflamed.

This growing divide – between older women who see defeating sexism as a top cause, and younger women who think electing a woman eventually is inevitable, and don’t feel a rush – is not totally new. We saw similar arguments reverberating during the 2008 campaign, when Barack Obama’s youth overcame Clinton’s experience.

Still, judging by the larger divides in polling and the vitriol that has colored the debate, this fissure, among a key constituency of the Democratic Party, is only growing. Addressing it may well force the party as a whole to choose which direction to set its course.

Simply put, young women supporting Sanders would say they prefer him to Clinton because they prefer his approach to politics.

These women, like the rest of their age cohort, are very liberal: They came of age during the recession, when their ability to find jobs seemed stymied by a capitalist system gone badly awry. It makes sense, then, why calls to break up Wall Street banks and have government ensure debt-free college resonate.

Sanders’s Democratic Socialism seems like a worthwhile antidote to a radically broken system, and these young people, many of whom were born after the fall of the Soviet Union, associate “socialism” more with prosperous Scandinavian countries than with autocrats who assassinated political opponents. That’s why they make up the only generation that approves of the “socialist” label more than the “capitalist” one.

All that is compounded by Sanders’s outsider-esque, give-no-shits presentation that matches their own mood. They love that he shouts in anger and doesn’t care how his hair looks. Especially compared with a well-coiffed, scripted Clinton, they see Sanders as the only candidate who can really own his stances – in a word, he’s “authentic.”

Sure, these young women think electing a woman to the nation’s highest office is important – but many also think it’s inevitable. Why pick Clinton if another, more progressive woman comes along in the future?

Some voters express discomfort about the scandals dogging the candidate – her emails, her vote to invade Iraq. Others say they’re concerned about Clinton’s involvement in her husband’s dismissal of at least one credible accusation of sexual assault.

“I don’t think she’s the woman to be representative of women,” one young woman told NPR.

To that end, what really riled up these Sanders supporters is that despite all their substantive reasons to pick him over Clinton, older women are still chiding them for not supporting the woman in the race. They view it as antithetical to everything the women’s movement fought for.

Women in the 1960s and ‘70s fought for women’s equality because they felt they were unable to determine the course of their own lives. For these same activists to suggest that young women don’t have a choice seemed hypocritical. To suggest – as Gloria Steinem did – that they were basing political opinions around their crushes on boys sounded downright sexist, the exact sort of attack feminists fought to silence.

“Because of you, we will never let anyone define our limitations based on our sex,” Salon’s Allison Glennon wrote in an open letter to feminists. “Because of you, we will be strong in the face of those who’d seek to judge us by our gender alone and not by our minds and our hearts.”

For women like Steinem and Albright, Clinton’s tangible shot at the presidency is the moment the feminist movement has been working toward for half a century.

Though her ascendance to the nation’s highest office would not represent full gender equality – women make up only a fifth of the Senate and 14.2 percent of top executives at S&P 500 companies – feminists see the value of role models, and there could perhaps be no better role model than a woman at the country’s helm. On that point, research backs them up: Young women tend to set higher goals for themselves when they have more visible women leaders.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, no one would even think about a woman being president,” a woman supporting Clinton, whose daughter was a Sanders supporter, told the New York Times. “Certainly, when I was 20 years old in the 1970s, I don’t think I would even have thought about it.”

Many women of this mindset sincerely do not believe that Sanders’s younger supporters recognize the pervasive sexism coloring the race. They point to gendered descriptions of Clinton – that she’s not “likable” enough, too scripted, too willing to “play the game.”

But women, they’d argue, don’t have room not to “play the game.” Clinton cannot yell, à la Sanders; she does not have the luxury of not caring how her hair looks. She appears scripted because to go off script, even momentarily, would expose her to an avalanche of criticisms from which most men are blissfully immune. And if young Democrats want to change that gender dynamic, it doesn’t help that they are attacking Clinton in the meantime.

They also believe, for the same reasons, that Sanders can get away with proposing more radical ideas.

“FREE COLLEGE FOR EVERYONE AND A GODDAMN PONY,” wrote Pajiba’s Courtney Enlow in what she called an “all-caps explOsion of feelings.” “YES, THAT SOUNDS FUCKING WONDERFUL BUT DO YOU THINK HILLARY COULD EVEN SAY THOSE WORDS WITHOUT FOX NEWS LITERALLY BURYING HER ALIVE IN TAMPONS AND CRUCIFIXES?”

A lot of these women like Sanders, too. They appreciate his message of economic inequality – they just don’t think Clinton’s vision is all that much different.

Steinem, the star in this latest saga, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times eight years ago, nearly to the month. Titled, “Women are never front-runners,“ the piece argued that Obama would not have been elected with his thin résumé if he were a woman:

I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule.

Steinem was certainly not alone in sensing sexism – as the nominating contest stretched on for months, numerous outlets documented sexism among some Obama supporters.

“I’ve been really bothered by what I perceive as sexism [among some male Obama supporters] and have spent hours defending [Clinton],” one female Obama supporter told Salon at the time. “A lot of guys just can’t stand Hillary, and it’s the intensity of their irritation with her that disturbs me more than their devotion to Obama.”

The critique sounds eerily similar to one made by Clinton supporters of Sanders supporters, whom some have pejoratively nicknamed “Bernie Bros.“ Clinton’s supporters accuse people not supporting their candidate of sexism, and that, in turn, causes people in the other camp to respond with heightened contempt.

And the divide this go-around appears to be growing even starker. In 2008, Clinton lost the same demographic, young voters in Iowa, by “only” 46 points. And Sanders, unlike Obama, is not himself youthful – quite the opposite.

So the fact that an even larger percentage swung for Bernie should serve as a wake-up call for party elites. The rift is real, and it’s growing.