Viewpoint: The Tracks of Her Tears

By Dahlia Lithwick

It's been about 100 years since Sigmund Freud first asked in exasperation, "What do women want?" This week voters in New Hampshire answered that query definitively: A tissue.

When Hillary Clinton defied all odds to nab New Hampshire from the Barack Obama juggernaut, the punditocracy was quick to attribute the reversal to a moment the day before, when Clinton teared up at a diner in Portsmouth, N.H. Responding to a question on how she remained so "upbeat and wonderful," Clinton, voice cracking, said, "This is very personal for me. It's not just political. It's not just public."

In a nanosecond, women who had swooned for Obama did a double take for Clinton. In Iowa, Obama had tidily won female voters, 35% to Clinton's 30%; five days later, those numbers flipped, and Clinton carried women, 47% to 34%. More striking still was the turnaround among unmarried women -- somewhat snottily referred to as the "spinster" vote -- whom Obama had won by 13 percentage points in Iowa. That demographic swung 30 points in Clinton's favor in New Hampshire.

The mere opening of a tear duct seemed to expose the gender issue that had percolated under the surface of this Democratic race. The media have been quick to repackage New Hampshire as a referendum on feminism. On the day of the primary, feminist icon Gloria Steinem scolded New York Times readers for abandoning the cause, warning women that the "sex barrier [is] not taken as seriously as the racial one."

The folks who have always accused the Clintons of being phonies quickly pronounced the incident a ploy. William Kristol: "She pretended to cry, the women felt sorry for her, and she won." Maureen Dowd: "Can Hillary cry her way back to the White House?" For those of us, particularly women, who had waited to see what would happen if Hillary offered a glimpse of who she really is, hearing her blasted for being manipulative when she finally lowered her cast-iron shield might have cut too close to the bone.

But the gender card resonated, mostly because it turned the men around Clinton into brutes. Whether it was Obama's sounding a rare sour note by assuring the candidate she was "likable enough" or John Edwards' implying that her Portsmouth tears rendered Clinton somehow unfit for the "tough business" of governance, every woman who's ever been asked whether it's that time of the month must have felt some kinship.

It's not clear to me that the women who took a second look at Clinton last week did so because she cried or because the media chose to turn a single checked tear into a sprawling metaphor. I suspect that what actually happened was that Clinton finally revealed she wasn't an android programmed to spit out polling data and talking points as well as the boys. Until New Hampshire, Clinton seemed to carry herself like a President trapped inside a woman's body. Punishing the real Hillary for struggling out is not the way to appeal to women voters.