As the going is getting tough, Hillary Clinton is playing the woman card. Again.

During an interview with New York magazine, Clinton said she has people come to her events early enough to be in the front row and along the rope line, and then tell her they don’t know if they can support a woman for president.

She told a story about the time she and a friend from Wellesley sat for the LSAT at Harvard. “We were in this huge, cavernous room,” she said. “And hundreds of people were taking this test, and there weren’t many women there. This friend and I were waiting for the test to begin, and the young men around us were like, ‘What do you think [you’re] doing? How dare you take a spot from one of us?’ It was just a relentless harangue.” Clinton and her friend were stunned. They’d spent four safe years at a women’s college, where these kinds of gender dynamics didn’t apply.

“I remember one young man said, ‘If you get into law school and I don’t, and I have to go to Vietnam and get killed, it’s your fault.’ ”

“So yeah,” Clinton continued. “That level of visceral … fear, anxiety, insecurity plays a role” in how America regards ambitious women. 

The sexism is less virulent now than it was in 2008, she said, but still she encounters people on rope lines who tell her, “ ‘I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.’ I mean, they come to my events and then they say that to me.”

“Unpacking this, understanding it, is for writers like you. I’m just trying to cope with it. Deal with it. Live through it,” she told magazine writer Rebecca Traister.

Earlier in the article, Traister wrote:

When I asked her why she thinks women’s ambition is regarded as dangerous, she posited that it was about “a fear that ambition will crowd out everything else — relationships, marriage, children, family, homemaking, all the other parts [of life] that are important to me and important to most women I know.” She also mentioned the unappealing stereotyping: “We’re so accustomed to think of women’s ambition being made manifest in ways that we don’t approve of, or that we find off-putting.”

“I think it’s the competition,” Clinton told Traister. “Like, if you do this, there won’t be room for some of us, and that’s not fair.”

Then:

I pushed her: Did she mean men’s fears that ambitious women would take up space that used to belong exclusively to them? “One hundred percent,” she said, nodding forcefully.

It’s certainly not the first time Clinton has played the “woman card” to gain sympathy and an advantage.

Check out this compilation of just 21 times she’s invoked her gender as a reason to support her candidacy: