Yet women were not united in grief far from it. Melinda Iyer joined their ranks not long after the election, one of countless women across the country spurred to political activity by their rage and despair at Trump’s election. Facebook, later to be exposed as an unwitting tool of Russian bots bent on defeating Hillary Clinton, was flooded with anguished posts and meetups to mourn: the first glimmerings of what has come to be known as the resistance. And if liberal, White, relatively privileged women were shell-shocked, women of color of all classes now faced the president-elect’s race-baiting, scaremongering about immigrants, and appeals to White supremacists. In a suburb of Phoenix, Melinda Merkel Iyer recalled trying to soothe two sobbing, scared daughters she could not sleep herself that night. The night after Clinton’s loss, women in a New York restaurant were weeping openly, their arms wrapped around their weeping daughters. The movement has combined two potent forces: the passion of the newly awakened, primarily grassroots participants and the organizing experience of professionals and institutions determined to channel that passion into sustainable electoral and policy gains. Even as Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and regulatory changes erode protections on fronts from abortion restrictions to campus sexual assault, women have mustered a formidable counterattack. The shock and anger galvanized women into political action and prompted a resurgence of feminist energy not seen in decades. Yet the leap from 2016 to 2018 also reveals something unexpected: Donald Trump’s election turned out to be a boon as well as a curse for the feminist movement. The #MeToo movement has toppled once-immune men and replaced many of them with women, but new cases of sexual harassment seem to pop up daily, revealing its deep and stubborn roots from Hollywood to the factory floor. Divorce or single parenthood still leave them more vulnerable than men. They continue to shoulder more childcare and household work, holding them back from advancement in their jobs or persuading some of the most privileged to leave the workforce altogether. More than fifty years after equal employment laws opened new professions to women, the number of women running corporations is vanishingly low, and even dropped in 2018. While women won a record number of seats in Congress, they still have not hit the 25 percent mark. These bookends capture a familiar dynamic for women in their long struggle for rights and representation: opportunity followed by regression, progress in fits and starts. By early 2019, six women had announced they would run for president in 2020, one century after American women first won the right to vote. Nancy Pelosi was once again speaker of the House, outwitting the president in their showdown over a shutdown. Nevada became the first state in the country with a majority of women in the legislature. Suburban women deserted Republicans to flip many key seats women of color mobilized voter turnout seldom seen in a midterm election. Health care, gun control, and education, issues women have long rated as urgent, helped drive many votes to Democratic candidates. Women were the force that wrested control of the House of Representatives from Republicans. For two years, Democratic women had been on the march, running for office in unheard-of numbers and gathering in churches, sororities, brew pubs, and suburban dens to address postcards, plan protests, and storm constituent meetings. On November 6, 2018, women shattered records in a display of raw political power at every level of government: as candidates, voters, volunteers, and donors. Women who backed Clinton thought they would be celebrating a historic first instead they were lamenting a staggering reversal. More concretely, his conversion from supporter to opponent of abortion, his pledge to appoint stalwart conservatives to the Supreme Court, and his determination to repeal Obamacare promised policies that would roll back women’s rights once seen as settled law. His sexual swagger, stream of insults about women’s looks, and infamous taped boast of forcing himself on women shattered every political taboo that decades of feminism had labored to put in place. On November 8, 2016, many American women confronted a crushing reality: their fellow Americans (including a plurality of White women) had elected a brazen misogynist as president, rejecting the first woman to run as a major party nominee.
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