Seeing Beyond Gender, Despite Shared Struggles

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New Hampshire Resident Speaks Her Mind

Laurie Tostenson of Lebanon, N.H. speaks about who she'll be voting for in the upcoming primary and why that person isn't Hillary.

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And though they've shared struggles, Tostenson does not think Clinton knows what it means to stretch $63 at the grocery store and leave with only three bags of food. She doesn't think Clinton can relate to someone who has to spend virtually her whole check on heating oil.

So Tostenson is backing Obama, a black man with whom she's shared few common experiences, but with whom she feels a connection. Her eyes filled with tears as she watched Obama deliver his victory speech to a mostly white crowd of Iowans Thursday night. It wasn't until that moment that she realized that she believed voting for him was a way of righting historic wrongs. A vote to unify white-and-black America was more powerful than one to elevate a woman to the presidency, she thought.

"Good for us," she said while watching Obama. "It's been too long."

Obama worked as a community organizer in housing projects, and his wife has talked about the difficulty of paying back college loans. Tostenson said their lives feel authentic to her in a way that the Clintons, who have long been public figures, do not. When Obama said putting the country on the right track would take a lot of hard work, Tostenson thought, "Well, he's not sugarcoating it."

But when Clinton said President Bush has marred America's reputation and made wrong-headed foreign policy decisions, Tostenson thought Clinton was doing too much blaming.

"If someone tracks all over your floor, I don't care who did it, I just want someone to clean it up," she said.

Tostenson married at 18 and four years later gave birth to a son. She stayed home to care for him for five years, and when she went back to work because she needed the money, it was as a part-time janitor in a nursing home.

For eight years, she cleaned rooms and washed soiled sheets, before becoming head of a housekeeping crew at a retirement community. Her boss there was unfair, she thought. He would see a freshly mopped floor and never acknowledge Tostenson and her crew. But when something was out of place, he would tell her, "I don't want to hear any excuses," she recalled.

Tostenson went over his head and told upper management that they should name another director to oversee housekeeping. She said she "had to scream louder and longer to be heard," and assumed her suggestions were being ignored.

Apparently not. In 2000, Tostenson was promoted to housekeeping director -- even though she hadn't applied for the position. She has since become T training and quality assurance manager for the housekeeping staff at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. It took longer than she wanted, but she had made it.

"They felt I had demonstrated all the necessary skills and education that I need to do that job knowing that I didn't have a college degree," Tostenson said. "It really was a leap of faith."

Likewise, Clinton has been successful in politics, and part of her pitch to women is that she can help them get what they have earned. Clinton tells the story of Lilly Ledbetter, an Alabama woman who for 20 years was paid less than her male counterparts at the Goodyear factory where she worked. Ledbetter won a pay disparity suit against her employer only to have her award overturned by the Supreme Court.