Of all the explanations offered – it’s Bill; her campaign manager; the tapped-out big-donor base; her deputy campaign manager; the plodding nature of substantive oratory; the media, enthralled with charisma over competence – one has, interestingly, gone unaddressed by the unraveling Clinton campaign: young women aren’t voting for Hillary.

“I don’t vote for people just because of their gender,” says Ona Keller, 21. “My mom and her friends support Hillary Clinton. I understand it, but it’s not how I feel.”

Keller, a feminist who attends Clinton’s alma mater and is co-president of Wellesley College Democrats, supports Obama. “It’s about choosing who is best for the job, no matter their race or gender,” she says. Keller prefers Obama’s policies on health care and Iraq, and finds his rhetoric more resonant. Even more damning for Clinton: “I don’t think there’s any doubt that he’s a feminist.”

Of course, no voting bloc is homogenous. But polls consistently show that Obama wins not just among young people, but young women. On Super Tuesday, Obama won 58 percent of young voters nationally; when broken down by gender, he beat Clinton among young women, 53-45 percent. Clinton did better with older women, winning 56 percent of the vote among those 60 and above.

In this past Tuesday’s Potomac Primary, Obama eroded her support among single women, winning 66-34 percent in Virginia and 59-38 percent in Maryland; voters under 30 broke 75-25 percent for Obama in Virginia and 64-33 percent in Maryland.

“This is a glimpse into the psyche of the female voter that we haven’t seen before,” says Jennifer Donahue, senior advisor for the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. “Women who are below 40 split to Obama, and that’s in part because they don’t think women have to be rescued. They expect women to stand up for themselves.” Tellingly, after Hillary lost Iowa to Obama, it was female voters over 50 who turned out en masse for her in New Hampshire.

“If you’re over 40, it’s more likely that you want to see a woman president in your lifetime and feel a sense of accomplishment about the women’s movement,” Donahue says. The cultural shift, she adds, “is interesting, because Generation Y sees theirs as one of assimilation and inclusion of minorities.”

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Obama has shrewdly, deliberately positioned himself as America’s first post-racial candidate. He sensed, with antennae-level receptors, that the bulk of the electorate – young people especially – would like to think themselves, and the nation, above race. (Whether they are or not is another essay).

Conversely, Hillary’s most perilous mistake may be in not realizing she should be running a smarter, more sophisticated post-gender campaign – that many young people, young women especially, would like to believe that we are above gender. Instead, she seems unsure of what she is meant to represent, to signify; she toggles between pre-feminist victimization and post-feminist defiance. It’s a struggle that seems genuine and poignant to women of Hillary’s generation, but it’s a dialectic that women under 40 find wholly foreign.

“We are talking about the sexist way she’s being treated,” says Lisa Jervis, the 35-year-old founding editor and publisher of the hipster feminist magazine Bitch. That said, “We’re not going to vote for her.”

Jervis, like Keller, backs Obama: “I have always seen Hillary as a triangulating centrist. I just can’t get past her vote on the war. Obama is motivating a lot of people who have not been involved in politics before. Hillary just doesn’t do that.”

Keller was upset by Hillary’s appearance at Wellesley last year: “Everyone knows that this is her alma mater and it’s all female,” Keller says. “But they invited boys from surrounding schools to sit on stage with us for photo ops. I thought it was very strange. If there’s one time to celebrate Wellesley turning out incredibly strong women, this would be it. I found it disturbing. I think she uses her gender as an argument when it’s convenient.”

That may be – but the difference is that older women get it, that idea of compromise in attempting to negotiate a male-dominated field, while younger women have no frame of reference for the inequalities between men and women just 30 years ago. Younger women live in a still unequal, yet vastly better, society than their mothers or grandmothers ever did.

“I’d say that the Boomers who started the [women’s] movement feel that the generations that came after them did not continue it,” says Donahue. “Women in their 30s have had greater opportunities. It’s a huge divide, so there is that tension.”

“A lot of young women don’t realize that they’re too young to have experienced any discrimination or sexism,” says The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison, editor of the new anthology “Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers.” “There is something great about these young women just assuming we’ll have another woman running soon enough – but if you look around, who are the viable female candidates who are going to run in the next ten years?”

Morrison thinks that “if there is a generational divide, it has less to do with Hillary Clinton than it does the cult of Obama.”

Unlike Obama – whose mainstream media coverage has been, on average, fawning – Clinton’s words, demeanor, and appearance are discussed and debated in ways that bolster feminist charges of veiled misogyny. Has America ever before been asked to consider whether they’d like to watch this nominee age in office, as they’ve been asked of Clinton? Then there was the “reportage” over what voters thought of her “cackle” – annoying? Genuine? Too frequent? And those tears – or was it just welling up? And if they were tears, were they genuine? The endless replays in search of the answer rivaled the Zapruder film.

“We don’t really have a template for what we want a woman [president] to look like and sound like,” Morrison says. “There have been a few things that have made me think that as much as we’d like to be gender blind, we’re not.”

*

Part of the gap, perhaps, is not just in the perception – a 22-year-old will certainly read treatment and coverage of Hillary differently than a 52-year-old – but in the approach. The old language of the feminist movement seems hyperbolic in 2008. Really, how many women under 35 are likely to agree with Marcia Pappas, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, that Barack Obama took part in a “psychological gang bang” of Hillary Clinton during the debates? Or that Ted Kennedy is “a traitor” for endorsing Obama? (Is that really worse than leaving Mary Jo Kopechne for dead, or actively defending his nephew against a credible rape charge?) Similarly, Gloria Steinem’s assertion in a recent New York Times op-ed that gender always trumps race is not only calcified but elitist: Using Steinem’s logic, what’s a black woman to do?

Then, last week, the stealth battle between old-school feminists and post-(post?)-feminists erupted on Jezebel.com, after one of the site’s editors posted excerpts from Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye to All That #2.” A pro-Hillary tract and sequel to her radical 38-year-old essay (in short: it’s all the fault of the white man!), it was reportedly forwarded to potential supporters by Chelsea Clinton.

If true, Chelsea may be as tone deaf as her mother when it comes to reaching young voters; over on Jezebel, one poster wrote that Morgan “totally hated on all young women, which I’m f – – – ing tired of.” Another: “Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem are two of the most irritating voices to come out of second-wave feminism. . . . Can’t the Clintons find a feminist under 60 to shill for them?”

“Younger people don’t have a political history,” Morgan says. “The women of my generation brought us the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and got us out of a war.”

Like Steinem, Morgan thinks the media and the electorate think that the first black president would just be cooler. “The media has placed a huge emphasis on how historic it would be for him to win as a person of color,” she says. “That has not been the case with her. If he were a young white male, he simply would never have gotten that far.”

Maybe, maybe not. But arguments like this not only illustrate the generation gap, they widen it. Older women can understand why Hillary may have stayed in an imperfect marriage; women 35 and under – who came of age during the divorce boom – cannot. (There is also her part in helping to smear the reputations of the women her husband was accused of harassing – a profound compromise of feminist principles and one that many younger voters may be unaware of.) Older women see hatred of Hillary as subterranean misogyny; Gen X picks up on that too, but they are also aware that Hillary possesses problematic character traits, and has made problematic decisions, that her gender does not excuse. “If Hillary was a man, I think the same things would apply in terms of older women supporting her,” Keller says. “I like Hillary and admire everything she’s done, and her candidacy has shown that America has a lot to deal with in terms of gender issues.”

There is, surprisingly, one thing that everyone interviewed for this piece agreed upon: that younger women don’t feel compelled to vote for the female candidate out of solidarity is, in fact, a good thing. As Bitch magazine’s Jervis puts it, “It’s a testament to the work these women have done that we have a male candidate who is as much of a feminist as the female candidate. That’s a huge victory.”