For a while there — especially during the tense days between Obama’s victory and Clinton’s belated exit — it looked as if American feminism might not recover from the Democratic primary contest.

The media were spotlighting feminist mothers and their “post-feminist” daughters bickering like, well, mothers and daughters. Hillary was holding hostage her “18 million voters,” the most coveted of whom were her fierce female supporters. Those supporters were behaving like unpleasant children, by turns petulant (“Hillary for V-P — or else!” read a typical graffito) and compliant (“We want you to continue to be our leader,” was the overwhelming message of 350,000 emails reportedly sent to the candidate that week).

The candidate who had run mostly away from gender — except to flash her cohones as a potential Commander in Chief — was being defended by this diehard sisterhood because she was a woman. They excused her vote for the Iraq war, her vow to “obliterate Iran” should it menace Israel, her Bushesque fear-mongering in that red-telephone advertisement. They even excused the racism (more on that later). The constituency that global-feminist activist and writer Ros Pachesky called “uterine feminists” excused Hillary because Hillary is a woman. And when she lost, in step with their ruthless leader they blamed a vast sexist conspiracy in the press.

Feminists, at least those most visible in the media, were coming across as a bunch of doddering, doctrinaire altecachers, the sexual-political equivalent of unreconstructed Bolsheviks.

Of course, that sexist conspiracy existed (watch this YouTube clip, for instance), even if its exact vastness is still in dispute. But not far from HRC headquarters or the viewfinder of Fox News’ cameras, a critique of another sort was going on: other feminists — not the aforementioned doddering ones — rumbling about what went wrong with Hillary and the groundswell she’d mobilized.

Besides her militarism, that wrong could be summed up in a word: racism. During a contest that was universally described as “a woman versus an African-American,” Hillary did nothing to challenge the assumption that she wasn’t just a woman but a white woman. “The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness,” wrote anti-racist feminist Zilla Eisenstein in a blog posted round the world. “She presents herself as a woman, but her real power . . . is as white.”

Worse than passively taking advantage of white privilege, Clinton chose to deploy racism to win votes — most glaringly when she lobbied superdelegates with the argument that she could win among “hardworking . . . white Americans,” and Obama could not. Many heard those words as not just description but prescription.

Then there was the red-telephone TV ad, which began with a ring in the middle of the night in a world where “something is happening” and ended with a confident Hillary, in suit and glasses, picking up the phone, protecting America. Orlando Patterson, writing in The New York Times, discerned racism as ominous as the phone’s ring. The sleeping children were blond or “vaguely Latino,” he noted; the threatening “something” was never named as “external terrorism.” The message: “An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience.” Rather, as a black man, “Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.”

Women who have struggled to erase the assumption of a universal white sisterhood and to forge a movement linking sexual, gender, racial and economic justice with international solidarity heard African-American lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s words echoing back over a quarter-century: “All the women are white, all the blacks are men.” The last part of Lorde’s sentence — “but some of us are brave” — decidedly did not describe Clinton. After all, what would it have cost her to ask for votes not because she is white but because she was the better candidate?

Clinton didn’t deserve feminist support, Eisenstein argued; she “does not share a political identity with women of all classes and colors and nations simply because she has a female body. She first needs to claim that body and demand rights for it — reproductive, day care, health, education, etc. She has no multi-racial woman’s agenda because she has no anti-racist agenda.”

That she appealed to a multiracial “uterine feminist” constituency only complicated the picture, Petchesky said at the June conference of the National Council for Research on Women. Visiting Las Vegas during the Nevada caucuses, Petchesky was struck that most of the people carrying Hillary placards were Asian-American and Latina hotel workers. When she asked a fiftysomething Filipina why she was supporting Clinton, the woman “looked at me like I was stupid and replied, with great gusto, ‘Because she’s a WOMAN — and WOMEN have the POWER!’”

Young feminists of all races were hipper than that. For instance, feministing.com, the blog that gives voice to millennial feminists, hosted a lively, supersmart gabfest lacing together race and sex during the entire primary season — and it’s still going on. The bloggers admirably resisted divisiveness, repeatedly calling Hillary on her racism, but also praising her when that was due. For instance, Courtney Martin, writing graciously on Hillary’s concession speech, described herself as a Clinton supporter and an Obama voter.

Nor did feministing.com’s contributors swallow the media depiction of the Clinton-Obama split among women as a generational divide. When Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice, a senior feminist herself, suggested in The Nation that a Hillary loss should signal Boomer feminists to quit the scene, the blog’s political editor, Jen Moseley, rose to respect her elders. “Obviously I support young women (or a wider perspective attributed to younger women) playing a more important role in the feminist movement,” she wrote, “but that doesn’t have to mean older women are kicked out entirely. Sheesh.”

This proliferation of talk — not just in feminist cybercommunities and conferences but on Slate.com and in The Washington Post and The New York Times — is itself occasion to send up fireworks. Yes, Hillary Clinton had inspired the passionate intensity of the worst, on both sides. But her candidacy has brought out, and brought back, the best, too.

Jo Freeman, a white civil-rights activist who became one of the founders of the second-wave women’s liberation movement, said as much in a celebratory op-ed circulated online. “That [Democratic primary] voters chose a black man and a white woman over so many outstanding white men is something of which we can all be proud,” Freeman wrote. “It illustrates what is good about America, at a time when many find it hard to see the good. It demonstrates that we can overcome historic prejudices, that we can change deeply buried values and attitudes.”

And if the blogospheric cretins and frat-boy pundits hoped to bury the girls under a shitload of misogyny, they have instead had a Miracle-Gro effect. Everywhere, people are broadcasting the word shamelessly, intensely and voluminously: Feminism. Say it again. FEMINISM! Didn’t hear you! FEMINISM!

Journalist Amanda Fortini described the experience of her peers, young women for whom gender inequality was a women’s history course they took in college. “The past few months have been like an extended consciousness-raising session, to use a retro phrase that would have once made most of us cringe,” Fortini wrote in, of all places, New York Magazine. “We’ve parsed the gender politics of the campaign with other women in the office, at parties, over email, and now we’re starting to parse the gender politics of our lives. This is, admittedly, depressing: How can we be confronting the same issues, all these years later? But it’s also exciting. It feels as if a window has been opened in a stuffy, long-sealed room. There is a thrill at the collective realization.”

The piece, headlined “The Feminist Reawakening,” ended with a question: “What next?”

And that’s where it gets really exciting.

First, to win those 18 million voters, Barack Obama has to speak about sex. So far, he has barely done so, though he leads by example — the proud son of a strong single mother, the husband of a powerful wife, the father of two apparently feisty girls.

He can reinject gender into those supposedly gender-neutral issues at the top of voters’ minds. Jobs, for instance. Yes, men are losing theirs. But even when employed, women earn less — and thanks to the Supreme Court, they now can’t do much about it. Last year’s ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber eviscerated a generation of anti-sex-discrimination law by requiring that a victim bring evidence of unequal pay within 180 days of hiring — in the real world, where paychecks are secret, impossible. The next president will have a lot of power to even the stakes when he nominates one, maybe two, new justices.

The mortgage crisis is another unequal opportunity afflicter. Writing in The Boston Globe, law professor Anita Hill showed how women — especially single, elderly and African-American women — are showing up disproportionately among those rooked by predatory lenders. Many of those women are losing their homes.

Nicholas Kristof suggested in the Times that Obama “show that gender issues are on his radar” by championing the combat against maternal mortality, “the orphan issue of global public health.” Yes, he should. But he can also embrace the broader issues of which maternal mortality is part: reproductive rights and even child care, which hasn’t been on “the radar” since Nixon.

Obama gets a 100 percent approval rating for his votes on choice; that’s why NARAL endorsed him. But it’s tough to find the word on his website (it’s hiding in the “Fact Check” section), and as far as I know he hasn’t uttered it since 2007, when he called abortion an “anguishing” decision involving a woman, her family, her doctor and her clergyperson. (It takes a village to have an abortion.) Say something about Roe, Barack. Hillary did, and it probably won her votes.

That’s what’s next for Barack Obama. What’s next for feminists?

How about this? We become what the Democratic Party has been longing for since the 2004 elections: its “moral-values voters.”

Not moral-values voters like “left-wing” anti-abortion evangelical Jim Wallis. Not the religion-on-your-sleeve values voters that Hillary called forth in 2004.

Not moral-values voters who will call for more censorship of pornography.

No, I mean the voters who care about everyday life — which is to say, all voters. Tom Franks was wrong in What’s the Matter with Kansas? The GOP didn’t distract people from the “real” issues with stuff like abortion and gay marriage. It reached people where they live.

People live in their bodies (thus the issues of abortion, racism, sexual and gender minority rights, health care, torture). They live in families and communities (gay marriage, immigration, child care, housing, food). They live as citizens and, increasingly, through symbolic communications (voting rights, “decency” and pornography, religion, the arts, surveillance).

I could go on — and hit numerous issues on which feminists do not agree (one fault line, especially for queers and people of color, opens along hate-speech laws). But the point is that feminists (and by this I mean internationalist anti-racist feminists) understand the intersection between the personal and political better than anyone — with the exception of conservative Christians.

So here’s my proposal: Feminists become for the Democrats and progressive politics what evangelical Christians have been for the Republicans and conservatism — its demanding, uncompromising base. Just as those religionists moved their party radically to the right, so can feminists push the Democrats — and if you can’t stand the Democrats, then progressives generally — more radically to the left.

I can imagine it now — politicians quailing before NARAL as they do now before the NRA. Teenagers wearing WWSTD (What Would Sojourner Truth Do?) bracelets. The first Vietnamese-African-American transgender president . . .

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

A women’s magazine I used to write for kept a large three-ring binder filled with story ideas. One section was called “Emo,” though, this being a women’s magazine, all the features were about emotions. Most of them were negative ones, which, presumably, the right shoes or handbag would clear right up (See: Accessories, page 116).

The problem was, the ideas rarely reflected anything like real life. At one point, the binder was stuffed with crying: “Have a good cry!” “There, there, don’t cry! “What if he cries?” And this one: “Women who cry at work.”

My editor was keen on the last one. “You know,” she said, “those girls who are constantly bursting into tears at the office.” I said I didn’t. After all, wasn’t holding it together for eight hours Job 1 for any employee? And if women were bursting into tears, might it be counterproductive to publicize that fact, given the still-fragile cause of workplace equality?

I didn’t do the piece. But I suspected then what I know now: that the media could generate endless copy (and ad revenue) keeping their sights on women on the edge, the edge between crying at work and rejecting the very idea of crying at work; between vulnerable, incompetent, manipulative or otherwise old-fashioned femininity and the sort of sexual equality that expects women to dish it out and take it, just like men.

I thought about those weeping workers when an exhausted Hillary Rodham Clinton teared up and — the pundits surmise — won the hearts of enough New Hampshire women to take the state’s Democratic primary. My first reaction was, What? Women voted for her because she cried? Had we gotten nowhere since the crying-at-work story? Maybe the anti-suffragists were right. Women are too sentimental to vote rationally.

Then I remembered that nobody votes rationally. In this most apolitical of nations, folks choose the person they’d relish having dinner with. It’s called “likeability,” and it’s apparently what won George W. Bush the White House in 2004. Even after Abu Ghraib, more than half the voters still wanted to eat a burger with the guy.

Gallup gauges our dinner-companion preferences with a “feeling thermometer,” whose scale of warmth and coolness ranges from zero to 100 degrees. In September 2007, Barack Obama was the only candidate whose readings averaged over 50 — 53, to be exact — among both Democrats and Republicans. But go figure: The vicious, petty and none-too-bright Rudy Giuliani was right behind him at 50, with Hillary trailing Rudy by a point.

Hillary’s scorching 82 degrees among Democrats was balanced by the coldest of cold shoulders nationally. The latter was surely an expression of sexism, nauseatingly evident on the Internet: “Stupid bitch,” her detractors call her. “Cunt,” “slut,” “lesbian,” “feminazi,” “Satan.” But even that 82-degree warmth wasn’t translating into the desire to vote for her. At least it hadn’t in Iowa.

The conventional wisdom about Hillary’s tears was that they “humanized” her. I don’t think so. I think they feminized her. Columnist and leading Hillary-basher Bill Kristol called the show of emotion stagecraft. But Clinton has been assiduously self-feminizing since Cookiegate, and anyone who’s paid attention can tell the real from the crocodile tears; these were authentic. Why, then, did she move so many women this time? My guess is they, too, were tired; and they saw in Hillary their own frustrations in the relentless, maybe futile, effort of balancing femininity and humanity. Let’s just say, feminism’s work is never done.

Still, feminism has knocked down some of the most rigid of gender’s strictures. For proof, look not at Hillary Clinton but at her Democratic opponent Barack Obama.

So far, Barack has suffered none of the personal scrutiny Hillary has. He is, as she admits, one likeable guy. But is he presidential? If he is, it’s not in the mold of any of his rivals. Obama is not a war hero like John McCain. He is not a Christian patriarch like Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. He’s not even a wise and world-weary father figure like Bill Richardson. He is not, in short, conventionally, presidentially masculine.

Indeed, I’d argue the quality that makes Barack Obama likeable — and potentially electable — is that he is not a particularly manly man. His youth makes him charismatic, but his is the youthful charisma of a generation that embraces metrosexuals and daddies with Snugglis. He is sexy, but he doesn’t swing his dick to prove it, like the strutting Dubya or the molasses-mouthed Bill Clinton or even like Obama’s hero, that other philanderer, Jack Kennedy. (The effect of this laid-back sexiness isn’t all pretty. It may also mitigate racist terrors among white men of the mythic hypersexual African.)

Hillary still must walk a skinny path between being a woman and looking like a (read: male) president. We’ve come a long way — she’s on the stump — but the story of her campaign would not be out of place in that Emo binder.

Meanwhile, the decades since the second wave of feminism have only broadened the emotional field for male politicians. One indicator: Since 1972, when an errant tear sank Edmund Muskie’s boat, the roster of presidents and presidential hopefuls who have wept includes Bob Dole, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Mitt Romney.

On this field, Obama is free to be both sweet and steely, diplomatic and belligerent. And if he wins the White House, his wife won’t have to squeeze her tall frame into the space left by the cuddly Laura Bush. Rather, Michelle Obama will assume the mantle of a professional, egalitarian First Lady, secured at considerable personal cost by her husband’s rival.

In the fickle calculus of American sexual politics, a female candidate may never hit the perfect balance between femininity and humanity. No wonder it moves so many of us to watch Hillary try, even when she looks clumsy doing so.

But I like her best when she stops trying. When she tells the world she’s just going to be herself: a woman, like most women and men of the 21st century, who lives somewhere between the genders. One of those moments came five days before the famous tears. It was during the last New Hampshire debate, when the moderator asked her to respond to critics who say she isn’t likeable enough to win.

“That hurts my feelings,” Clinton said, her mouth assuming a moue that both transmitted her vulnerability and parodied the very softness she was being condemned for lacking. Then she laughed and added, “But I’ll try to go on.” Not going on — that is, pausing to be wounded — may be tough for Hillary. But no one in that audience doubted she’d have to try very hard to go on. They laughed with her, the girl who refuses to burst into tears at the office.

Neither Clinton nor Obama is my ideal candidate (mine would never win in America), but I’ll be thrilled to vote for either of them. At this point, I’m leaning toward Obama because I believe he is marginally better on the war. But I’m trying to calculate how gender will factor in the final contest. Obama may be different enough from McCain to beat him, if McCain wins the Republican nomination. On the other hand, that Gen-X masculinity could be crushed by the machismo of the grizzled prisoner of war. Whereas Hillary may be man enough to beat McCain.

Early in the women’s movement, some wondered whether feminism would free men first. In this election we’re witnessing one way in which it has. I don’t begrudge Obama the advantage; I much prefer his brand of masculinity to the older kinds. But let it be acknowledged: The feminism that is an albatross around Hillary Rodham Clinton’s neck is giving Barack Obama wings.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.