From Me to You
Women and Power:
What Happens Next?
On the morning of November 8, I got up, jogged to the gym, and cheerfully chatted with the woman working the earlybird shift at the front desk. I asked if she got time off to vote.“ Oh, I’ m taking time off to vote today,” she said— it was that important to her. It was important to me too. An hour later I proudly posted a picture of the various women who raised me, saying that I was casting my vote on behalf of all of them. I thought especially of my mother, who died when I was 19, a pioneering woman who worked in the mostly male field of biochemistry( and still managed to be home by 6:00 most nights— wish she were around for me to ask for tips on that).
She would have loved casting her vote for a woman. Later, as I took my family— including my 14-year-old daughter— off to NYC’ s Javits Center for the evening to watch what we thought would be a historic moment for women of all political stripes, I was wearing my suffragette T-shirt and my mother’ s pearl earrings. We all know how that story ended. Now, I’ m not breaking out the Kleenex over the fact that my candidate lost. Poli tics is big-girl-pants territory: If you’ re not ready to lose, don’ t get in the game. But to many young women( who voted for Hillary Clinton 2 to 1), this was not a regular loss; it was a surreal bad joke in which a woman who has worked her whole life for one goal gets close, is knocked down, works hard again, and finally, just as the movie-peak coronation scene is about to happen— as pollsters all agree it will this time— BAM! The entire country gives her an epic head fake and goes for the other guy.
I will leave it to the thousands of history books sure to be written about this election to sort out how much of a factor gender ultimately was, or wasn’ t, in the outcome. But on the morning of November 9, it really looked like America just didn’ t want to have a female president.
Just hours into processing that, I got a query from a news outlet looking for comment:“ Was there something women didn’ t relate to about Hillary? Why did they find her less likable than Donald Trump?” The questions made me want to put my fist through the computer screen. First, for how simplistic they were; the results of this election show deep divisions in how Americans see this country— profound rifts around issues of race, immigration, income. The idea that the results could have been swayed if Clinton had only worn more pink, or smiled more, or not made some random comment 25 years ago about not staying home to bake cookies, seems like wishful thinking at best, female-blaming at worst.( It’ s insulting to female Trump supporters too— most of whom I assume had more meaningful reasons for voting for their candidate than just“ Hilz doesn’ t seem like someone I wanna get a beer with.”)
But beyond that, the questions stung
CLINTON: MELINA MARA / THE WASHINGTON POST / CONTRIBUTOR / GETTY IMAGES. WOMEN WALKING: MICHAEL WOOLLEY / THELICENSINGPROJECT. COM. LEIVE: LAURA CAVANAUGH / GETTY IMAGES
10 glamour. com