The faces of Hillary Clinton’s supporters on Tuesday night said so much, but they didn’t say it all.
They stood stunned beneath an intact glass ceiling at the Javits Center in New York, weeping with fresh grief. They bowed their heads as if attending a funeral, and indeed they were. Their worst nightmare unfurled before them, and as state after state turned crimson, they swallowed the triumphant roar they had prepared to unleash.
When morning came, they turned desperately to one another: “What do we tell the children?”
Polling data, however, show us something very different than what unfolded at Democratic headquarters. While Clinton won women overall, she did not win the majority of white women. Exit polls show 53% of white women voted for Trump, pushing him to victory. They looked past his obvious misogyny, and in doing so, created a deep rift among American women. Those who supported Clinton feel profoundly betrayed.
The result is forcing us to examine more closely the ways in which sex, race, class and power intersect to steer the course of America’s democracy.
“Women are not a monolith,” said Evelyn Simien, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut and author of Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics. ”They are a demographic that needs to be broken down.”
The white female CEO may not have the same political concerns or the same identity politics as a non-college educated white woman living in rural America. Neither face the same challenges as a poor black single mother. Black women, overwhelmingly, were with her. Only 6% of them voted for Trump.
“White women historically have been protected - at least nominally. There’s been lip service about preserving the virtue of the white woman,” said Kristin Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Houston-Downtown and author of Modern Misogyny: Anti-Feminism in a Post-Feminist Era. ”But black women don’t have that luxury, so in a way, they don’t fall for that as some white women do.”
Clinton’s failure to win white women shows that gender does not have the same potency in politics as race does, Simien said. She points out that Republican women did not flock to Clinton in the same way black conservatives rallied to support Barack Obama in 2008. She said research consistently shows gender is not as politically salient for women as race is for African Americans.
Clinton won 54% of all women voters in the 2016 election. In 2008, Obama locked in 93% of the black vote. Trump’s stunning ascendancy shows how sexism in America exists in forms both violent and absurdly palatable. And it affirms that women are sometimes as culpable as men.
“Women get some benefits of associating with the patriarchy, with being OK with the sexist system,” Anderson said. “So even, for instance, that poor woman who dealt with Donald Trump and Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood video, you could tell she thought ‘these men are nincompoops, but i’ll play along, this is just what they do.’”
In the vulgar video captured on a tour bus in 2005 and leaked this October, Trump and Bush are heard making lascivious comments about women, including Days of Our Lives actress Arianne Zucker, who they meet after disembarking. They make introductions, and then Bush tells Zucker to hug Trump. She politely complies.
After the video leaked, Zucker released a statement condemning Trump and Bush’s behavior.
Many women who participate in a sexist society are unaware that they’re complicit in their own subjugation. They want to be complimented. Or seen as attractive. They want to be recognized and regarded by the dominant group, which is men. They want to be seen.
Trump’s lewd demeanor didn’t turn enough white women off. His lecherous behavior did not drive them away. The wave of sexual assault allegations against him was not a death knell. Gender studies experts say this shows how deeply women internalize messages about patriarchy. Many white women ostensibly feel safe in a system that benefits from their inferiority.
“You get attention, people like you, you’re seen not as a trouble maker,” Anderson said. “And then what happens is we can divide women between compliant women and the women who are too ambitious, too assertive. They are the Hillary Clintons. Sexism isn’t just wage inequality. It’s not just sexual assault. It works in these really insidious ways.”
One of the worst parts of sexism is how subtly and artfully it divides us. As Anderson writes in her book Modern Misogyny, it “can drive a wedge between women, preventing them from coming together as activists.”
Only by recognizing sexism in all its forms, from explicit degradation to paternalistic chivalry, can we fight it.
Many women had hoped this election would usher in a new world. They now know that they will have to endure many more humiliations under Trump before they have another chance at it.
But there is some comfort. Hillary Clinton came closer to the presidency than any woman ever has. With lumps in our throats and fires in our bellies, we listened to her powerful parting words, that “someday, someone will” shatter the glass.
Now let’s find her.
- USA TODAY