Girl Power?

In case I haven't mentioned this before, I am obsessed with watching CNN. My husband got me into it when we got married. Before we were married, I would watch MTV in the morning while getting ready for work, now he got me into his routine of watching CNN and I love it. However, he's been threatening to shut it off because I have the tendency to yell at the screen and start rambling on about the stories they report. Lately, I've been trying to sneak it in during the afternoons too.

Yesterday afternoon, they did a story about Hilary Clinton's final speech. While I didn't get a chance to watch it, I was glued to the TV to hear the bits and pieces they aired. While I don't consider myself political, and like many of the youth in America I was never really up to speed with politics, this election as particularly caught my attention because of the history making aspects of it. To be perfectly honest, I really don't favor one democratic candidate over the other, I think they are both strong people, but since the beginning I have been interested in watching Hilary's campaign and how it unfolded. My mom and I always said that if all the women in the country united, they could easily elect a woman based on their numbers alone (face it, we rock!), so I have been watching CNN non-stop for the past couple of months.

Last night, they were speaking about Hilary, and her speech. I thought her speech was fantastic and very moving, it made me yell out a boisterous "You go girl!" at the screen. And then they answered the question that I had been wondering about since she lost the democratic primary...Why didn't more women vote for her?

The explanation was this, apparently women between the ages of 18- 29 for Obama, women between the ages of 30- 40 something were 50/50 between Obama and Hilary, and women 40 something and up were all for Hilary. I found this so interesting and couldn't understand why, and then one of the correspondents answered that this could be due to the fact that the younger generation has not encountered as much "glass ceiling" discrimination as the older generation of women.

I made me wonder, "Is this true?". Looking into my own life, I have to admit that at the ripe age of 24, I have nowhere near encountered the same amount of discrimination as my mother or for that matter, my grandmothers. Perhaps, as the years go on, I will encounter it more, or will it not be as bad? To tell you the truth, I don't know. I found this explanation astonishing, and thought about it the rest of the night, which is why I am posting about it today. During all my watching of CNN, I would continuously see women in their 80s and 90s rooting for Hilary, but I never connected the dots, and it has now hit me. We forget what our grandmothers went through, and in essence how strong they are because of it. So while Hilary might not have won the primaries, I appreciate the effect it has had, and hopefully it will resound with all generations of women in some way.