Daily Inspiration Quote by Eleanor Clift

Clift’s line lands like a small act of betrayal named out loud: the people you’d assume would be natural allies are often the sharpest critics. As a journalist, she’s not romanticizing “women supporting women”; she’s diagnosing a political reality shaped by scarcity, gatekeeping, and generational training.

The intent is bluntly corrective. When female candidates get picked apart for “likability,” voice, clothes, or ambition, Clift shifts the spotlight away from the usual male-centric blame and onto an internalized set of expectations that women have been taught to police in each other. The subtext is that sexism doesn’t only travel through institutions; it also travels through habits. Older women, “brought up in a different culture,” are framed less as villains than as carriers of a script written when female success required exceptionalism, caution, and a certain kind of palatability. If you survived by minimizing yourself, a woman who refuses to can feel threatening, even irresponsible.

Context matters: this is a media-era observation about electoral politics, where women candidates are still treated as symbols as much as individuals. Clift is also hinting at the psychological economy of the “first/only” woman in the room. When representation is rare, solidarity can curdle into competition: who “earned” it, who’s “ready,” who will “set us back.” The sentence “especially older women” is doing strategic work; it ties criticism to a cultural upbringing, not biology, arguing that attitudes can evolve as the culture does.