“What is to give light must endure the burning.” Eleanor Roosevelt
And so it comes to an end. While I haven’t been a Hillary supporter this season, I cannot help but be overcome with sadness at the completion of her campaign. We are often telling our children, two of them young girls, “You can be anything you want to be” – and Hillary would have been the living embodiment of the dream… the ultimate glass ceiling shattered.
As Hillary began Saturday night on stage with her mother and her daughter, I contemplated the generations of women in my family. When my grandmother received an academic scholarship to go to college, her father refused to allow her to attend. My mother began her education following a religious calling to be a nun, and ended with an MBA and working as an executive.
Perhaps it is this personal experience with glass ceilings that led many women in my mother’s generation to become ardent Hillary supporters. I do believe it is because of their success that members of my own generation did not identify as strongly with Hillary’s campaign. If not this woman, surely there will be another. . .
And yet when I consider that the opportunity has passed, this time, to put a woman in the White House, to be able to show my daughters a regular example on television and in print of a woman in the highest office . . . I feel a tremendous sense of regret.
And so tonight I toast to my grandmother, who never attended college, and at 94 will likely not see a woman as President in her lifetime. I toast my mother, who shattered so many ceilings herself, who identified closely with Hillary, and who is very disappointed at the lost opportunity. I want them both to know that I have not forgotten the struggle of women throughout our history. I do not take it for granted.
And finally, I toast to Hillary, who indeed has put “about 18 million cracks” in that last glass ceiling. Hillary, as you said, “the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”
Thank you for giving us light…
