KEY POINTS:
Two powerful women, a testy exchange, and an apparent unsisterly insult spotted only after the event are the recipe for a controversy preoccupying America.
Even in a country used to emotive political spats, the debate over whether US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was slighted by a comment during a Senate hearing on Iraq has become a highly charged row over feminism.
At a hostile hearing, during which Rice faced a wall of bipartisan criticism of the Administration's new strategy, Californian Senator Barbara Boxer seemed to suggest Rice's childlessness had an influence on her policies.
"Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price," Boxer, a Democrat, said. "My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact."
Rice did not take issue at the time, but later accused Boxer of setting back feminism.
"I guess that means I don't have kids ... was that the purpose?
"At the time, I just found it a bit confusing. But in retrospect, gee, I thought single women had come further than that. I thought you could still make good decisions for the country if you were single and didn't have children."
White House press secretary Tony Snow said of Boxer: "I don't know if she was intentionally tacky. It's a great leap backward for feminism."
Boxer said her comments had been misunderstood.
"What I was trying to do in this exchange was to find common ground with Condi Rice. My whole point was to focus on the military families who pay the price. I'm saying, she's like me, we do not have families who are in the military. What they are doing is a really tortured way to attack a United States senator who voted against the war."
Boxer read excerpts from a radio interview with a family who had lost a son in Iraq.
"You can't begin to imagine how you celebrate any holiday or birthday," she read. "There's an absence. It's not like the person's never been there. They always were there and now they're not and you're looking at an empty hole."
Claims and counter-claims about what Boxer meant have been extensively debated in US blogs and on cable channels.
Right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh also waded in, saying: "Here you have a rich, white chick with a huge, big mouth trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here."
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