Women take issue with Clinton backers' remarks

KEENE, N.H. – "Ridiculous." That's what Keene State University junior Jess Chapman calls the notion that supporting any candidate other than Hillary Clinton amounts to selling out the sisterhood.

Chapman, who has yet to make up her mind between Clinton and Bernie Sanders in Tuesday's primary, was reacting to comments made the weekend by Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, and prominent feminist activist Gloria Steinem that ignited a firestorm of criticism.

“I laughed as I read it,” the American Studies major said Monday, though she added that she was a “little taken aback and offended.”

“There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” Albright, 78, said at a campaign rally in Manchester on Saturday. She became the nation’s top diplomat in 1997, under President Bill Clinton, when Pierce and many other Keene State women were babies or not even born.

Earlier in the weekend, Steinem, 81, accused young women of supporting Sanders for reasons other than his ideas.

“When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,'" she said.

Chapman said she found Steinem’s accusation sexist and noted that nobody was saying that young men were supporting Sanders only in order to meet women.

Steinem's and Albright's comments also upset Bridget Pierce, even though she plans to vote in the Republican primary. She has yet to settle on a candidate, but she drank from a water bottle plastered with John Kasich and Jeb Bush stickers as she worked on a paper at the Keene State student center.

Although she wants to see more women run for president, the Dover native said she cares more about policy and ideas than gender.

“A campaign should be genderless,” Pierce said.

Keene State is located in downtown Keene, a small city in southwestern New Hampshire, near the Vermont border. The city strongly favored then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 primary. He beat Clinton by more than 10 percentage points.

Pierce, who has gone to see several candidates who came through Keene — Sanders, Clinton, Bush and Kasich — said it was a “wee bit infuriating” to hear women tell her to support Clinton based on gender. The sophomore said she does like Sanders and would consider voting for him in the general election if he were to run against Republicans Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

She said she expects to see a woman in the Oval Office “at some point in the very near future.”

People vote for men as president based on policy, she said, and they will evaluate his presidential performance based on the same thing. But if a woman uses her gender to become president, gender will play into how she’s perceived as president, which Pierce thinks could be bad for women in the long run.

Steinem apologized Sunday through a Facebook post, writing that earlier in the show, she spoke about young women being "mad as hell," especially about growing student loan debt.

"Whether they gravitate to Bernie or Hillary, young women are activist and feminist in greater numbers than ever before," Steinem wrote.

Albright also tried to explain her comments. “When it comes to politics, you should vote for the candidate who best represents your views — regardless of gender,” she tweeted late Saturday night. “But if fair pay, reproductive rights and other issues that directly affect women are your priority, then there is no better candidate than Hillary Clinton.”

Chapman rejected Albright's explanation, saying that Sanders still is capable of representing the interests of women.

Sydney Shultz agreed. The junior from Nashua, sat on a set of couches with a group of male students as she worked on her sticker-festooned notebook computer. Her collection included a Bernie 2016 sticker, and she said she’s planning to vote for the Vermont senator, though she considers herself an independent.

“I don’t think you have to be a woman to support feminism,” she said. She saw Steinem's and Albright’s comments as pitting women against each other.

“That’s the opposite of what they should be saying,” she said.

When asked if she thinks a women will be president soon, she answered without hesitation. “Oh, absolutely,” she said, adding that she doesn’t think Clinton is the only chance to see a woman in the Oval Office anytime soon.

Although Albright tried to back away from her comments, former President Clinton went on the attack Sunday in Milford accusing Sanders supporters of attacking Hillary Clinton backers with misogynistic language.

He said people who have gone online to defend Clinton “have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat.”

Sanders was asked about the issue of his supporters launching sexist attacks on CNN on Sunday.

“I have heard about it. It’s disgusting,” he said. “We don’t want that crap.”

The senator said he doesn’t want any supporters who would launch a sexist attack.

“That’s not what this campaign is about,” he said.

That’s not what it’s about for Georgina Teming, a sophomore at Keene State who talked about Sanders excitedly in the student center Monday.

“He’s reaching an audience whose voices have been silenced for a long time,” she added, referring to minorities and LBGTQ people.

She and a friend joked about the possibility of Michelle Obama's running for president, but Teming added that she would vote for the first lady only if she agreed with her policies.

“Bernie just does it for me,” Teming said. "Hillary is not it."

This story was first posted online on Feb. 8, 2016. Contributing: The Associated Press. Contact Jess Aloe at jaloe@freepressmedia.com or 802-660-1804. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jess_aloe.