Would a national speech on gender by Sen. Hillary Clinton go over as well as Sen. Barack Obama's on race? I'm afraid not. Gender issues -- or sexual differences -- are more difficult to talk about. Why?

Like Hillary Clinton, I was student body president at a women's college and gave the graduation speech, and was sent forth to conquer the world. But I never found out about the glass ceiling. I became a wife, mother, writer and community volunteer. Like Hillary Clinton, I have 30 years of calendars in which almost every hour of every day is filled with some kind of meeting. But I never ran for office. I did not have Hillary's nerve. I played it safe.

When I hear sexist jokes about Hillary Clinton, I am as frightened as I was in high school when I heard the football team taunt me as I walked past, having stayed late to put out the school newspaper. I am as afraid as when I decided not to participate in a civil rights protest because my parents said I would be kicked out of the family.

But that was more than four decades ago. Today, I hesitate to press my views upon professional women who, having been brought this far by the women's movement, have no more need of it. I soften my support for Hillary when I go to a book club. I risk losing more than one friend who doesn't call anymore. A feminist cautioned me that no one wants to hear about women in the 1900s chaining themselves to the White House fence in support of suffrage. When I said some were jailed, and when they fasted were force-fed, a woman said, "You're making that up."

l l l

I AM AS UNNERVED TO STAND FOR HILLARY CLINTON AS I WAS TO STAND FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Sometimes I am so afraid for her that I want to say, give it up, Hillary, concede, it's his time, his campaign; go back to the Senate and do a good job. Step aside. Let a great man have it.

In one phrase or the other, this is what some Democrats are saying (perhaps not in North Carolina, where no ACC team behind in the numbers would concede victory, even with only 0.8 seconds left).

But hour by hour, I realize that asking Clinton to concede is wimpy nonsense. Rather, we are called to continue a bolder civil discourse about the historic divisions that stand in the way of unity. Let's level the playing field: All men and all women are created equal.

I believe that Clinton's gift has always been the ability to speak from a place of knowing the issues better than just about anyone else. She moves the conversation from heart to head. And the surprise is that it is the woman who is delivering the more rational, less emotional message to our nation.

Candidates can stay cool, but their supporters are free to act out their differences. Obama acknowledged that the emotions of blacks often run high in many of their churches, and women know that emotions often run high in their own homes -- and offices.

In a private letter to John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers, Abigail Adams -- at home looking after the children, the farm and the finances -- gave expression to her own strong feelings: "Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."

If it takes a rebellion to help remove gender prejudice from the politics of division, I am ready for it, and don't expect me to abide by my mother's laws of how a lady should act. While we're dismantling the language of racism, let's finish the job: No more talking about "that woman" who "should have left Bill." Let's talk about the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

In the 1900s, North Carolina's support for the l9th amendment was so timid that a national leader wondered aloud whether the state's suffragists were hoping that no one realized they favored it. (This was not true of Gertrude Weil of Goldsboro, president of the N.C. Equal Suffrage League, nor of Louise Alexander of Greensboro, who urged women to "Raise fewer dahlias and a lot more hell.")

Courage, Maya Angelou of Winston-Salem (and the world) reminds us, is the most important of all the virtues.

I am no ways tired of the struggle to try to defuse the politics of anger over a woman's right to be president. The campaign comes to North Carolina.

(Emily Herring Wilson, author of "Hope and Dignity: Older Black Women of the South" and co-author of "North Carolina Woman: Making History.")