As they waited for Hillary Clinton to "make history" for them this week, one or two of the panellists on CNN caught themselves on the point of calling it a world first. Just in time, some faded faces must have come into their minds, of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and maybe even one or two more recent names downunder.
Even in America, the panel agreed, the great thing about a woman winning a major party's nomination for President was that it didn't seem remarkable anymore. David Axelrod, who managed Barack Obama's campaigns, gently implied that Clinton didn't need to be talking about it. Obama, he said, left it to others to talk about the prospect of the first African-American President.
If Clinton's campaign team was monitoring CNN as she prepared for her victory speech on Wednesday, the advice came too late. They had the stage set for history and a show ready to go.
It started with a woman singing Star Spangled Banner off key, followed by a video of fuzzy black-and-white footage of little-known people and events, overlaid with some leaden, scripted messages from the candidate herself. Finally Hillary took the stage, to tell the predominantly female audience in Brooklyn, "we are standing under a glass ceiling here" and that they were giving every young girl in America the belief they can be President of the United States. As someone on the panel had said, girls in America probably already know that. Girls and boys today were more likely to find it odd that a woman had not been President before.
There are two strands of feminism, one strand uses it for political identity and the other does not. Ghandi and Meir, I think, and Thatcher certainly, belonged to the second strand. They spoke and acted as though their gender was of no importance to their election or to the job they wanted to do. Helen Clark, too, did not make as much of her feminism as she might have done, perhaps because the incumbent she defeated was a woman and Jenny Shipley was definitely a second-strand feminist.
