Media playing the GENDER card for Hillary

Though the directness with which she's begun to talk about being a woman is new, there's no mystery to why Clinton would stress her gender. There are more women than men and women made up 54 percent of the voters in the 2004 presidential election. Clinton has every reason to expect that — running against at least five men for the Democratic nomination — she will be their favorite daughter.

"Her run is going to be dependent on her doing disproportionately well on women," Zambelli said. "And there's a value in engaging the proposition. There are some women in the middle who really respond when you focus them in on the issue."

And so Clinton created an atmosphere that seemed, for lack of a better phrase, intensely female. Terri Hoffman, a teacher in Des Moines, mentioned to Clinton in the question-and-answer session — and to the majority-female crowd of more than 1,000 — that she is going through menopause. And it was women's enthusiasm that seemed to define the trip, from Pat Baxter-Rebal, who told Clinton she named her Siamese cat after Clinton in 1992, to the young woman at a house party in Cedar Rapids who had one question: What she could do to help?