GREENFIELD — Esther White was 2 years old when the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution granted American women the right to vote. On Tuesday, at the age of 98, she cast her ballot for the country’s first major-party female presidential candidate.
“I think it’s great. She’s well deserving of it and she’s smart,” White said of Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton over a game of cards at the Greenfield Senior Center Tuesday.
This week, senior women throughout Greenfield took a moment to reflect on how women’s roles in politics and society have changed during their lifetime, and what it means that Clinton could break the glass ceiling by becoming the country’s first female president.
When Janice Colbert, 66, thinks about the next president, she wants someone who will be a good role model for her 4-year-old granddaughter. She hopes that person will be a woman. Colbert cast her ballot early to make sure nothing would prevent her from voting for Clinton.
“She’s the most qualified person to ever run for president — at least in my lifetime — but maybe in the history of the presidency,” she said, adding, “I think it’s way overdue. When you look at all the other countries in the world who have had female leaders, we are so far behind.”
Colbert said although change has been slow to come for women, she’s optimistic about the future. Women of her children’s generation have had it easier than those of her generation, she said, pointing out that when she was young, it was rare for women to go into male-dominated professions.
”I think that’s changed a lot,” she said. “I think that women still make less than men for the same work, and I’d like to think that having a female president would make some difference.”
Although she didn’t vote for Clinton, who she doesn’t think is right for the job, 79-year-old Natalie Patterson said that deep down in her heart, she would love to see a woman in the Oval Office. Sitting at a table in Poet’s Seat Health Care Center, where she now resides, Patterson told an emotional story of the unequal opportunities women had when she was growing up.
As a young adult who couldn’t afford to go to college, she said her dream was to join the Navy and become a nurse. When her brother, who was in the Navy, heard of her plan, he wrote a letter home to their mother saying that “good women don’t join the service.”
“It broke my heart,” Patterson said.
Years later, her second daughter came to her as a teenager, not knowing what to do with her future.
“I said, ‘I’m going to tell you a dream,’ and I told her what I wanted to do,” Patterson said. Her daughter joined the Air Force when she was 17 years old and served for 20 years.
“I’m so proud of her, because deep down, that’s what I wanted,” Patterson said.
Susan MacLeod, 68, said she thinks it’s about time for the U.S. to elect its first female president. She said when she was in high school, she couldn’t take mechanical drawing because she wasn’t a boy, and she couldn’t get a credit card when she was working because she was an unmarried female.
“At lot of that has changed over the years which is good,” she said. “I would just love the day when somebody can run for something, and it’s not the first woman or the first black man or the first this or first that — when we can just say, ‘They’re running. Good. Let’s vote.’”
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