When I was 11 years old, my girlfriends and I used to talk long into the night about how one of us was bound to become president of the United States.

We had no reason to believe that except that we were young girls watching and learning from the chaos swirling around us. It was 1968, and the change blowing across the country was kicking up quite a breeze in our own small Ohio town.

It seemed as if every other week, someone's older sister was getting suspended for wearing a see-through blouse. Mothers were starting to take jobs and earn their own paychecks. Heroes were murdered, and neighbor boys were leaving for Vietnam. Fistfights were breaking out behind the high school, where boys wore patches of the American flag.

My parents acted strangely, too. My father grew sideburns wider than matchbooks and didn't flinch when I used my baby-sitting money to buy The Beatles' "White Album." Only months earlier, he had grounded me for explaining the back story of "Mrs. Robinson" to my younger sisters, and now I was walking through the dining room singing, "Happiness is a warm gun, mama," and he didn't even look up from his newspaper.

My normally traditional mother bought a disposable dress and then modeled it for all the ladies from her canasta club. Being on the cusp of adolescence, I was concerned about it splitting in all the wrong places, but my mother assured me in front of her friends that she could sit down just fine.

"It has give ," she said, wiggling her hips as the women howled.

Lord.

I figured if my mother could shimmy in a sheet of paper and Dad wanted to look like Elvis, then the whole country was falling off its hinges. Talk about a door blown wide open. It was a time for dreaming.

Forty years later, I still am waiting for the first female president, and it's hard to imagine any 11-year-old girl dreaming of running if she's been paying attention to the current race.

I don't think every woman should support Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman. Smart women disagree all the time, and that's never been more obvious than in our heated discussions about Clinton.

I do, however, think every woman should support the notion of Hillary Clinton. That means judging her by her record and her plans for our future, not by her marital stamina, her choice in suits or her version of femininity. Even if we can't support her as a candidate, we ought to acknowledge the history that she is making — for us and for our daughters and granddaughters. And we ought to point out to them that making history sure has a downside.

Recently, I learned that some airport shops are selling a "Hillary nutcracker." She has a smile on her face and metal spikes between her thighs. I don't worry about the candidate, who has learned how to handle such misogyny, but I do dwell on the young girls who might catch a horrifying glimpse of those steel jaws and decide that no woman should invite such vitriol.

Last week, NBC suspended reporter David Shuster for accusing the Clintons of "pimping out" their daughter for her mother's campaign. How many girls saw or heard about that? How many decided on the spot that Chelsea Clinton was nuts for putting herself out there?

And then there are the books — by women. The latest slice-and-dice of Hillary Clinton is a volume of 30 essays. Most of these writers live on the East Coast, where it's apparently sport for educated, accomplished women to excoriate another educated, accomplished woman with such clever titles as "Elect Sister Frigidaire," "The Road to Cleavagegate" and "Hillary's Underpants."

Katie Roiphe writes that she has "yet to meet a woman who likes Hillary Clinton." Lorrie Moore calls Clinton "a freak." Amy Wilentz declares that Clinton's recipe for chocolate chip cookies "sounds awful" and that when Chelsea was a newborn, Hillary's hair was "a wreck."

On and on they go, bruising and battering the only woman to do what they — and the rest of us — could only dare to imagine.

All the while, 11-year-old girls watch.

And learn.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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