The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Paula Radcliffe Lesson

I've been thinking about Hillary's dilemma, if that's what it is, through the prism of Paula Radcliffe. Radcliffe won the New York City Marathon last weekend after running up to the day before she gave birth to her 10-month-old daughter, and then taking exactly 12 days off after the birth to recover. I confess that I kind of hate her. Shouldn't pregnancy and birth be one time when women give themselves a break and, yes, accept the attendant biological limitations?

At the same time, Radcliffe's feat is cause for celebration, I suppose, precisely because she exceeded those limitations. Isn't she the ultimate liberated woman, having figured out how to be a mother and a running rock star? Somewhere in here lies an imperfect Hillary parallel. She is also the woman who is breaking the country's biggest gender barriers, and in that sense, she has won my admiration and the support of a lot of women. And yet to do that, she has to be utterly singleminded, and try to mask her female identity in certain key ways. That's key to proving she can be commander in chief. So then when she says she's being ganged up on by a bunch of men, just that claim is enough for a dust up, even if she didn't explicitly play the gender card. But she doesn't take a hit from women in the polls, because a lot of them do see the dilemma.