I’m the same age as Gwen Ifill – the woman who made TV history with Judy Woodruff on “The PBS NewsHour” as the first female co-anchors of a network news broadcast and who died of endometrial cancer Monday in Washington D.C. – so I’m old enough to remember earlier iterations, “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” and “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” Both were anchored by two white men. And though Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer were fine journalists in the Walter Cronkite tradition, theirs were the faces I had seen since childhood.

People will tell you that affirmative action is needless and that you should only look for role models within your immediate circle, but I have to tell you that seeing two women of my vintage, including one of color, on my TV each evening, doing excellent journalism, was a comfort and a source of pride to me, a fellow journalist. I felt I could be enlightened by them without their well-groomed presences taking pride of place. It was their well-groomed minds that inspired. ...

Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina primary Saturday 3-to-1 over her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, and all I could think about was her black-and-white Chanel-style bouclé jacket accented by a gumball pearl choker.

I thought about it so admiringly that I wore a similar jacket and pearls to church Sunday.

I could claim professional interest as a lifestyle magazine editor. I could deconstruct the message of this classic Chanel look, which is ultra feminine but says “Don’t mess with me.” But neither would come close to the truth. Even though Clinton has achieved what Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic of The New York Times, has termed a kind of neutrality of dress on the campaign trail, people like me who crave substance and understand her to be a woman of substance still notice what she wears. (You can imagine what The Donald – he of the scale of 1-to-10 for rating women – notices.) ...

In memory of… Gwen Ifill (1955-2016)

Hillary’s victory – and what she wore