Hillary Clinton had not been on stage for more than 10 minutes, but my mother had already dropped her cane several times to clap more ferociously. The cane kept falling on me; I was sure I'd be black and blue by the end of the night. She also had her picture taken with a life-sized cardboard Clinton cut-out, and turned to glare daggers at the man behind us who dared to speak during these sanctified moments. This was her Woodstock.
When Ms. Clinton, standing before a sold-out crowd in Toronto, said, "The only way to get sexism out of politics is to get more women into politics," I worried my mother would applaud her way to apoplexy and I would feel guilty forever about the first aid I never learned.
I had paid $160 for the two of us to sit on hard plastic folding chairs in a cavernous convention centre to hear Ms. Clinton speak, the first on a three-stop Canadian book tour. It was the best thing I could do for my mother, apart from giving her another grandchild (not going to happen) or introducing her to Placido Domingo (also not happening.) The hall was packed with women wearing "I'm With Her" t-shirts, women in pantsuits, women with their daughters, with their friends and colleagues and moms. At a certain point, women began to colonize the men's washrooms. Now that's a revolution I could get behind.
My mother, Mildred, is what you'd call a super-fan: When Ms. Clinton became the first woman to secure the presidential nomination of a major U.S. party last summer, I phoned her and heard her voice choked with tears. "You weren't this emotional when any of your eight grandchildren were born," I joked, and waited for her to correct me. She did not.
Now it's almost a year after the presidential election, and my mother has had a hard year for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the election of a U.S. President whose name she can barely bring herself to speak. She prefers "that buffoon" when she has to call him something. Interestingly, Ms. Clinton also seems to have trouble referring to him as "the President" or "President Trump." As I listened to her speak, I realized she refers to him as "he," or, quickly, "Donald Trump." It's an interesting psychological tic; I hoped someone would ask her about it. No one did.
Few psychological insights are revealed during Ms. Clinton's speech, which is a kind of greatest-hits tour through her new memoir, What Happened: the cyber-meddling by the Kremlin, the over-emphasis on her use of a private e-mail server. She talked about how false information had been weaponized as a political strategy and spread through social media. "Wow," whispered my mother, whose fiercest epithet is usually: Jesus, Mary and Joseph. "She really got screwed."
I looked over at her, about to make some sarcastic comment along the lines of "No kidding!" but I stopped. Mildred is a news and political junkie, but one of her many admirable qualities is an ability to maintain optimism about human endeavour in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I think of the progress she's seen in her life: She was born only 12 years after women were granted the right to vote in federal elections (shamefully, it took many more years for Asian and Indigenous people to be granted that right.) The year she was born, Agnes Macphail was the only woman in the House of Commons. When my mother was a young nurse working at a Toronto hospital, she was required to stand when the male doctors came to the nursing station. She booked their golf games. That's almost unimaginable now. She has seen the world spin forward.
Hillary Clinton often talks about the influence of her beloved mother, Dorothy Rodham, who died at 92 and did not see her daughter almost – almost – crack that highest, hardest glass ceiling. One of the most poignant moments in What Happened comes when Ms. Clinton reveals the acceptance speech she would have given if she had won the election: In the speech, she imagines herself going back in time to comfort her mother, who had been abandoned as an eight-year-old girl and stuck on a train to go live with her grandparents. She imagines telling Dorothy that she will be happy, that her miserable childhood will not last forever: "And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become President of the United States."
Of course, that didn't happen. But one of the lessons she learned from her mother was perseverance, and on stage now, Ms. Clinton talked about how she planned on sticking around, to the chagrin of her critics: "I'm not going anywhere, except right into the middle of our future, because I believe that in the United States and in Canada, extremism and authoritarianism are no match for democracy and free-thinking people.''
At the end of the evening, Mildred pushed herself to her feet to join the standing ovation. I whispered to her, "Maybe they'll elect a woman in 2020, Mom," thinking we could go home on a happy note, with all that estro-positivism in the air. She looked at me for a minute. "I'm not sure," she said. "I'm not sure they're ready."