Telling women to vote for other women, just because they are women, is patronising in the extreme.
How we choose to engage with politics, and who we choose to vote for is about so much more than just gender.
It’s about policy and politics and passion, and trying to decide who is the best advocate for women’s rights.
Sometimes, that person is a woman, and sometimes they are not.
There are plenty of women in politics who I don’t agree with. Who support ideas and policies that I would never support, who put forward positions that I believe harm women more than they help them.
A vote for those women is not a vote I would ever cast.
So I was pretty frustrated when I saw that Madeleine Albright had used her own old line, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” stumping for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire on the weekend.
Not because I don’t support Clinton’s bid for the presidency, but because voting for a woman is not the only way that women can support each other.
Albright was talking about young women, who the polling says are breaking for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.
She thinks they don’t realise how revolutionary a female President of the United States would be.