COMMENTARY: MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS SAVOR THE MOMENT By Ellen Zionts • For the Courier-Post • July 19, 2016   The  phone dinged. My daughter Suzanne’s text read, “Are You Watching?” “Of Course, Mothers And Daughters,” I wrote back. Chelsea Clinton had just spoken about her mother, Hillary, in her introduction, teary-eyed and prideful. I was watching in real time, as Hillary Clinton accepted the nomination to be the first female presidential nominee in the history of the United States of America. Suzanne’s next text read, “No man could keep her down yay, Equal pay, yay.” “You lived to see it, and so did I.” Our relationship with our mother is the subtext of how we live our lives. My daughter and I share a bond that only women can understand, joined at the heart. For all the women of the Woodstock generation who fought to break that glass ceiling, the shattering brought an emotional response. The faces in the audience told a thousand stories. Women, who only got the right to vote in 1920, got the right to rule. And it only took from 1776 until now. Clinton’s speech held a key to the motivation that led to this moment. As she spoke of her abandoned mother, Clinton lost her usual reserve, recounting the story of her own mother as a 4-year-old left alone, walking down the street by herself to use a coupon to buy food at a cafe. Her own mother on her own, worked as a housemaid from the age of 14. She inspired Clinton to never give up, to keep on fighting, to confront the bullies and to persevere when life and love tried to knock her out. My daughter understands why this event is so important. She is 33 and has negotiated the perils of love and the working world in the time of the World Wide Web. She entered the media after graduating from NYU with a degree in journalism and a changing social media landscape. In my day, most  woman were the secretaries, the teachers, the mothers — and that was the choice. At the newspapers, they did not write the stories, they typed them. In television, they were the glamorous talking heads and not the producers. Working and rearing children did not exist. You had to be one or the other. Times have changed. Today, when most women have to work and increasingly are the breadwinners, some progress has been made but not enough. We still make 77 cents on the dollar compared to our male counterparts. We still have to train our soon-to-be bosses to do what we have been doing for the lesser salaries. We still have to suffer the indignity of having to work and then do our second job as mothers and homemakers alone. Many husbands still relax after a day's work as we assume our second job, rocking the cradle. A day late and a dollar short, we have arrived. Hillary Clinton has made it possible for us and our daughters to rock and cradle and rule the world. Hillary Clinton gets a big welcome from daughter Chelsea on Thursday when arriving on stage at the Democratic National Convention to accept her party's nomination for president. (Photo: ANDREW HARNIK/Associated Press)