Hillary.

All my women friends are just as mesmerised. We are in lock-down, watching this hour of a political process which is nearly incomprehensible yet utterly transfixing. We yearned for this moment and now it is here. Hillary is speaking at the Democratic National Convention, accepting her nomination as the Democratic Party's candidate for the presidency.

For Australian women keen to strip away the horror of what happened to our own first woman prime minister, the Hillary ascendancy is glorious. Even though we know what happened to Hillary first time she ran. Even though we lived through what happened to Julia. Even though we see Hillary copping it all over again. Even though it will be neither easy nor straightforward. Even though the only person I know covering the presidential campaigns in the US sends me a message saying we live in dangerous times, that he has no good news for me.

But I put all that fear and politicking aside for one brief moment to watch Hillary's speech. It is accompanied by a flood of texts and emails and private messages from my friends which describe what we are seeing and what we are feeling yet not one of us can vote in the US elections.

Why is that? Why does an election in a country where I can't vote matter to me? Why does this candidate make me happysadhappy?

Christina Wolbrecht, an associate professor in political science and director of the Rooney Centre for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame, was at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week. For someone who has been writing about gender and politics all her adult life, she found it very moving to watch and to be present for that strange US process named the roll call, where representatives from all the states read out the number of votes for each candidate for the nomination. She says many of those reading out the numbers made specific mention of the vote for the first woman president.

Wolbrecht was listening to the stories of why gender matters.

The 102-year-old woman who was born at a time when women did not have the right to vote; the senator who said that the Founding Fathers gave America a great start but "it was the Founding Mothers who said, 'Do not forget the ladies, for we will foment our own revolution'." Iowa, whose representatives spoke proudly of a state with so many female firsts.

Wolbrecht pointed to two states in particular: Tennessee which noted its state had been the one to provide the last state ratification necessary for women's suffrage; Wyoming, the first to guarantee women the right to vote (and the first state to elect a woman governor).

Convention attendees are unusually politically active, interested and engaged, not a representative sample of how most Americans would view Clinton's speech, says Wolbrecht; but in the broader community, she can see a generational difference.

Women of my generation, for instance, had two responses. The first is pride and all that can be grouped with that, acknowledgment of how far she had come, what she represents. The second, some ambivalence about whether she has pushed too hard. (I have never had that feeling. As my old mum used to say, if you don't ask, you don't get.) Nevertheless, Wolbrecht says the polls show Clinton does well among older women.

Young women may find it harder to align themselves with the excitement my generation might feel at the whole "first woman" narrative. She says: "That may be because they have experienced more women in leadership positions, such as three women secretaries of state," she says.

I speak to men my age and I tell them how I feel about Hillary. Blank looks. Or attempts to teach me about US politics when most of them have read less about it than me. Men with expertise in media and politics who tell me Hillary is cold, dead, wooden, would make a terrible president, is not perfect. And when I ask them to name me a perfect candidate, they have no answers.

Instead, they tell me that Hillary is a bitch. Who'd vote for a bitch? I barely watch television or any of its spawn but now know I must quote Tina Fey when people use that particularly gendered insult. Bitches get stuff done.

Bitches get stuff done.

So I ask a man who was at Julia Gillard's side at the peak of all the gender hate about what he thinks of Hillary's speech. John McTernan, an advisor and strategist to both British Labour and then the Australian Labor Party as its head of communications from 2011 to 2013, says Clinton's speech did what it needed to do, which was to acknowledge some of what people feel about her.

"She will never be an Obama-style preacher. And she will always be brittle because she has had such abuse all her career and has had to defend herself against it. Her armour is herself now."

And that's how the gender hate makes itself felt, it leaves a mark on us all.

Clinton, for her part, says her biggest challenge during the acceptance speech was whether she could control her emotions.

"I was pretty concerned whether I would make it through my speech ... whether I would start crying, that was my biggest concern," she said.

Some of us were crying before she even began.

Facebook.com/jennapricejournalist

@jennaprice