Four elderly women reflect on their lives through the decades and what a female president would mean to them Watch video
In the most vitriolic presidential campaign in generations, it is a theme that has all but been lost.
For the first time in the nation's 240-year-history, a woman is at the top of a ticket, competing for the highest office in the land.
The prospect of a female president is perhaps not such a remarkable leap to a younger generation of women, who grew up in an era of female governors, senators and chief executives.
But seen through the eyes of older women who felt the sting of sexism writ large, who were denied career choices and opportunity, who were expected to marry and become mothers and keep house, a woman on the top of the ticket is a reality they never expected to see.
In the weeks before Tuesday's election, NJ Advance Media interviewed four women about their lives -- their childhoods, the barriers they faced, their joys and hardships -- and about their thoughts on what it means to them to see a woman run for president.
The women, ages 82 to 95, are not overtly political. They have not campaigned for either candidate, though they have watched and read coverage of the election intently as the race between Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, has tightened dramatically in the campaign's closing days.
To these observers, it is a race not so much about politics as it is about a moment in history.
A Dream Deferred
You're only a woman.
Some 70 years after the words were spoken, Maxine Giannini says they remain as sharp and painful as the day she heard them.
The speaker was her father, a traveling salesman once celebrated as the world's amateur billiard champion, and he was succinctly puncturing her dream of attending the University of Pennsylvania, to which she'd been accepted.
"My father said to me, 'You're only a woman. You don't need to have a degree to have babies,'" Giannini said, adding her father refused to pay the tuition. "It rankled in my heart all my life."
The statement reflected the mood of the times, of course, and was not said with malice. But she saw her father's sentiment echo all around her.
In the eighth grade in Hillside, Giannini said, the principal called her mother into school to inform her young Maxine was a prodigy, that she had tested off the charts. Giannini was a skilled painter, singer, dancer, and, above all, piano player.
"Nobody gave a damn," said Giannini, now 87 and living in West Orange. "None of it was paid any attention to, and the attitude toward women was that, as I saw it, it wasn't good to be smart. It's sort of a dumbing down of women."
She saw that attitude, too, at Weequahic High School in Newark, where male peers judged young women not by their intelligence but by the size of their breasts, she said.
And she saw it in the workforce, where Giannini grudgingly took a typing job at an insurance company, chafing at the chokehold on her ambitions.
"I hated all of it," she said.
Giannini said she found solace in the piano and in her piano teacher, also a woman, who encouraged and nurtured her as she embarked on a successful lifelong vocation. Giannini continues to teach piano today.
"She said, 'My dear, your parents are Philistines,'" Giannini said. "She got me. She knew what I was doing, and she said, 'You are a born teacher.'"
She also considered art as an occupation, aspiring to be a portrait painter. At 19, Giannini said, she held her first exhibition and later had her own studio. But her marriage to a fellow artist, the late abstract painter Ugo Giannini, ended her plan.
"At that time, there wasn't room ego-wise for two painters in one family," Giannini said. "So even being a woman there, it changed the trajectory of my life. I was the one (who gave it up). The position of a woman is you do what you can for your husband."
Eventually, she followed her dream of attending college, graduating from New York University with a bachelor of arts degree at age 54. She called it one of the most rewarding experiences of her life.
She applauds the advances women have made in society. But even so, she said, while she was growing up and throughout most of her life she never expected to see a woman at the top of the ticket, let alone be elected.
"It didn't even occur to me that was a possibility," she said.
One More Milestone
She has lived through 17 presidencies, six major U.S. wars, the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Born in 1920, the year women at last were granted the constitutional right to vote, Laura Wooten has experienced the sweep of modern history, from Prohibition and school integration to the first moon landing and the digital revolution.
Now 95, Wooten said she would like to see one more milestone before she dies: a woman leading the nation.
"I would feel very proud and very grateful," said Wooten, a mother of five who grew up in Princeton and who now lives in Lawrence Township. "We never had one, and I just hope and pray that we get one."
She said she believes fervently a woman can perform as well as any man in a high-pressure job. She recalls a time when women weren't given that chance.
Wooten attended all-black schools in Princeton until high school, where white and black students mixed, she said. It was difficult enough to deal with racism. Wooten faced the era's inherent sexism, too.
Society, she said, "treated women very poorly at that time, because they couldn't do anything. Most of the women did housework."
She said many of her female contemporaries did laundry for Princeton University students, then all men and almost all white. Women weren't admitted to the university until 1969.
Wooten's family didn't have the means to send her to college, and her own expectations for a well-paying career weren't especially high because, she said, "I thought it wasn't possible."
She worked for a time as a waitress, then as a nurse's assistant in a hospital. More than two decades ago, while in her 70s, she began working part-time at Princeton University. She remains there today, 20 hours a week, checking student meal plan cards in a campus dining hall.
If there is a passion that continues to bring energy to her life, it is the right to vote, a singular act of self-determination. Every Election Day for the past 77 years, Wooten has worked at a polling place, checking names against voter rolls.
Last year, the League of Women Voters of New Jersey honored her with a lifetime achievement award, calling her the longest-serving poll worker in New Jersey, if not the nation.
On this Election Day, Wooten will arrive at her polling place, a firehouse on Route 206 in Lawrence, by 5:15 a.m. She will work past 8 p.m., when the polls close.
She expects the atmosphere this time around will be electric, as it was when President Barack Obama was chosen the nation's first black president eight years ago.
"I never thought I would live to see a black president, just as I never thought I would see a woman president," Wooten said. "I would like to see what a woman could do for the country."
'It's Time'
Helen Oxenberg thought her mother had to be wrong. Or at least confused.
Oxenberg was a teenager in Brooklyn, she said, when her mother, Mae Schron, told her she had lost her U.S. citizenship for marrying a foreign-born man years earlier. Oxenberg's father had come to the United States from Latvia.
"I remember saying to her, 'Ma, that can't be. You were born here!'" Oxenberg, now 91, said during an interview in her Monroe Township home.
Oxenberg later found out her mother spoke the truth. While a foreign-born woman who married a man with U.S. citizenship automatically became a U.S. citizen herself, American women were stripped of their U.S. citizenship if they married a man from abroad.
The practice was abolished in 1922 with passage of the Cable Act, named after the Ohio congressman who proposed it. The law is also known as the Married Women's Citizenship Act. After its passage, Schron's citizenship was restored.
The incident served as a lesson to Oxenberg.
"The men were in charge," she said.
Born in 1924, she'd already seen shades of that herself.
"I do remember once playing a game with other kids, and we were playing hospital or something, and the boy was going to be the doctor," Oxenberg said. "And I said, 'I want to be the doctor,' and he looked at me and said, 'You're a girl. You can't be the doctor. You can be the nurse.' It was a given."
Oxenberg did get the opportunity to attend college, earning a degree in journalism from Hunter College in New York. She wanted to be an investigative reporter. A career counselor at the school, Oxenberg said, instead suggested she marry and have kids.
Oxenberg found work as a proofreader in a large office with, as she described it, "a sea of typists."
"Every typist in the room was a young girl," she said. "There were no men. The men who came in were the bosses and administrators."
Over the decades, she bridled at the "macho" attitude, expressed even by her husband, that women should be content to cook, clean and raise children.
At one point, she said, her husband suggested she take a job as a sales clerk at Fortunoff. When she declined, he demanded to know why she needed to be a "professor," a euphemism for a professional career.
"Because I can be," Oxenberg said she angrily responded.
"I didn't want to be in a menial position," she said. "I had ambition somewhere. I wanted to be known a little bit."
Oxenberg and her husband had five children before divorcing. One of the children, a girl, was struck by a car and killed at age 7.
Later, in the 1970s, Oxenberg went back to school, obtaining a masters degree in social work from Adelphi University on Long Island.
The occupation -- helping people, earning her own way in the world -- brought her the professional satisfaction she had long sought.
It also kickstarted a writing career that continues today. Oxenberg writes an advice column, "Senior Solutions," that's syndicated in senior media outlets in several states.
Because of her life experiences, Oxenberg said, she is thoroughly engrossed in the presidential election. She said she leaves the television on in multiple rooms so she won't miss a word of the blanket political coverage as she moves about her condominium.
Oxenberg's hopes for Tuesday's outcome run deeper than politics.
"I think a woman has a sensitive gene in her, a little bit more of a sensitive gene to people's hurts and people's needs and people's longings," she said. "So let's give it a try. Certainly there have been wonderful male presidents, but it's time."
Persistence and Grit
Constance Holmes repeats the phrase like a mantra.
"I can. I can. I can."
It has been her life's guiding philosophy, pulling her through hardship and adversity, pushing her to persevere in the face of denial.
Hers was a comfortable childhood in Newark during the 1930s and 1940s. Holmes' family owned a store, insulating them somewhat from the deprivations of the Depression.
Cocooned in a loving home, she had little awareness of sexism until she entered the workforce after high school. And then it hit her full bore.
"I found all the things I didn't want to find," said Holmes, 82, who remains a Newark resident. "No matter how qualified you were, there were certain jobs that as a woman you could not get. There was certain pay you would not get."
She found work as a clerk at Western Electric, the now-defunct telecommunications giant, which had facilities in Kearny. But Holmes wanted to do more than type. She wanted responsibility, the chance to use her intelligence in a more challenging role.
Seeking a promotion to secretary, she was told no. She was given no explanation.
The fight in her stirred.
"If you tell me no, I will tell me yes," Holmes said. "And I will work toward that if it kills me."
Holmes said she knew angry confrontation would get her nowhere. But persistent reasoning might.
"If you can tell me why, then I have to accept it," Holmes said. "If you can't tell me why I'm not capable of doing something, then we've got a big problem. And that's how I went through that company."
She did win a promotion. And another. But even for a woman with fortitude and the desire to work hard, there was a ceiling.
Today, as she sees a woman at the top of Democratic ticket, Holmes is eager to see the ceiling shattered.
"Forgetting children and those kinds of things, I don't think anything could make me happier than to see us get a female president, because it will show then that we can do anything," she said.
As a mother of three grown children, as a provider for her family along with her husband, Holmes said she believes women are prepared to face any challenge.
"We know that if we can raise a child, we can do anything," she said.
As the days draw down in what has been a vicious campaign on both sides, Holmes said she identifies with Clinton's willingness to continue fighting.
"Things may be hard," she said. "Things may be uncomfortable. But if you have that stick-to-itive personality, you can move, you can go, and you can soar."
Mark Mueller may be reached at mmueller@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MarkJMueller. Find NJ.com on Facebook.