The freelance photographer whose 'girlie question' helped Hillary Clinton win the New Hampshire presidential primary has admitted that she ended up voting for Barack Obama.

Marianne Pernold Young, 64, was one of a group of 15 undecided female voters invited to a Portsmouth coffee shop on Monday for an 'intimate' chat with Hillary Clinton - with a posse of reporters and television crews in attendance.

Ms Pernold Young said that she arrived at the Cafe Espresso at 9am and sat through a dense question and answer session that was making the Washington press pack. Then she took the microphone.

"As a woman, I know it's hard to get out of the house and get ready. My question is very personal. How do you do it? How do you, how do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?" she asked.

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After starting to reply with a touch of humour - she initially referred to her own appearance - Mrs Clinton visibly welled up and said, her voice catching: "It's not easy, and I couldn't do it if I didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities from this country just don't want to see us fall backwards.

"Some people think elections are a game and they think it's like who's up or who's down. It's about our country. It's about our kids; futures. And it's really about all of us together."

The next day, female voters - who had deserted her in the Iowa caucus - flooded back to help Mrs Clinton become the first woman to win a presidential primary. She had overturned a double-digit opinion poll lead for Mr Obama, the young black senator for Illinois, and even her own campaign credited her public show of emotion for the turnaround.

"It's amazing how one compassionate sentence could cause such a ripple. It's just mind-boggling," Ms Pernold Young told the Los Angles Times, before confiding that she had almost backed off from asking her question.

"I wasn't going to ask it, because every time I thought of it, my heart would pound," she said. "Why would she want to deal with something like this? It's too girlie."

Ms Pernold Young said that she had been as shocked by Mrs Clinton's response as everyone else in the room, including the journalists jolted awake by the show of emotion.

After verifying that the candidates eyes had indeed dampened - but that she had stopped short of actual tears - reporters in the coffee shop had approached her and asked her if she was a Clinton campaign plant. She replied that she was just an ordinary New Hampshire voter.

But while her question was credited with bringing thousands of women back into the Clinton camp, Mrs Pernold Young - who had herself been brought to tears by the oratory of Mr Obama two days earlier - was not among them.

From her front row view of Mrs Clinton's moment of emotion, she had been distinctly unimpressed by the way that the former First Lady had gone straight back into politician mode after giving her answer.

"I took a walk on the beach and all I thought was how Obama made me feel and I thought about Hillary's response to me, and I thought she was a soft feminine woman for seven seconds," she said.

"When she turned, she adapted this political posture again, the stiffness and the rhetoric, and I said I really want to vote for Obama."

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