Was the Trump election a setback for women? Even women do not agree

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The crowd watching Vice President Kamala Harris deliver her concession speech in Washington last week. Photo / Erin Schaff, The New York Times
Kamala Harris would have been the first female president in the nation’s nearly 250-year history. But many women chose Donald Trump, despite his history of sexism and his support for the end of Roe v. Wade.

To many left-leaning Americans, it is resoundingly clear that women who backed Donald
Trump in the presidential election voted against their own self-interest.

Liberal women, in particular, have spent recent days practically stunned, stewing over how other women could have rejected Kamala Harris, who would have been the first woman to lead the nation in its nearly 250-year history. Instead, they chose a candidate who spews misogyny seemingly with glee. For the second time.
One voter from Maine, interviewed after Trump declared victory, offered a takeaway shared by many. As she put it, “The sisterhood did not stand up”.
In many ways the election results seemed to contradict generations of progress made towards women’s equality and for feminism generally. Women have made strides in nearly every facet of American life in recent decades, generally making up a greater proportion of the US workforce than in the past, taking on high-paying jobs and outpacing men in higher education – though they remain under-represented at the top levels of business and Government.
They now find themselves in a country where Trump won decisively with a campaign that pitted men against women, sitting down with podcasters who trade in sexism and choosing a running mate who had criticised single women as “childless cat ladies”. Trump took credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned the constitutional right to abortion but appeared to pay little price at the polls. Immediately after the election, social media posts were circulating by men that read, “your body, my choice”.
But women themselves clearly were divided in the election. Exit polls show that 45% of female voters cast ballots for Trump, and far more white women voted for Trump than Black women. The compounding rejection of first Hillary Clinton then Harris has exposed an uncomfortable but steady undercurrent of American society: women do not necessarily agree on what counts as progress or a setback.
For Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative organisation, the election of Trump is “the liberation of women out of the dark days of so-called feminism”.
“This,” she said, “is real American feminism”.
Justice sees Trump’s elevation of Susie Wiles as the first female chief of staff as the first of many moves by the next President that will be good for women.
“Every woman who feels like Donald Trump is going to be bad for their lives may want to just wait a minute and stop listening to the mainstream media and listen to what President Trump does,” she said.
In the days since the election, it seems as though womanhood itself has fractured. Plans have yet to emerge for a large show of togetherness like the pussy hat rally in Washington after Trump’s first election in 2016. Liberal women have blamed conservatives for siding with Trump, a known philanderer who was found liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll, the former magazine writer. Some Black women have blamed white women for betraying them by voting for a candidate who says not only sexist but racist things.
Jamila K. Taylor, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank that aims to close inequality gaps for women, has tried to parse the fact that women in some states voted to protect abortion rights but also voted for Trump. To her, that indicates that some voters were uncomfortable voting for Harris because she is Black.
“We have to call it out – the misogyny and racism and sexism,” Taylor said.
To academics who study women’s movements and activists who have led them, the idea of a sisterhood where women stick together because of their gender is a myth with deep roots in American society. In examples that start from the nation’s earliest days – through suffragist movements, racial integration and the legalisation of abortion – some of the biggest opponents of women’s rights have been women.
“Women don’t speak with one voice,” said Lisa Levenstein, director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Programme at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “They never have, they never will.”
Some of the biggest opponents of the fight to allow women to vote in the early 1900s were groups led by women. White mothers were among the loudest opponents of school desegregation and busing. In the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly ridiculed feminists and glorified traditional roles for women as she fought to block the Equal Rights Amendment, saying it would lead to the complete unravelling of traditional American society.
Still, the election results last week came as a shock to many in a country where popular culture celebrates an awareness of women’s struggles and achievements.
America today is awash in examples of feminism’s popularity. Beyoncé on her summer tour sang to enormous crowds, “Who run the world? Girls.” Taylor Swift sold out arenas across the country calling out sexism she has faced (“If I was out flashing my dollars/I’d be a bitch, not a baller”). The “Barbie” movie drew hordes of people to theatres in red and blue states alike to see a doll with impossible curves turned into a feminist icon.
But pop culture did not translate to political culture, and signs of fractures among women were obvious during the campaign.
In Nebraska, female university athletes filmed a TV ad supportive of an ultimately successful ballot measure restricting abortion rights. Well-coiffed women from a North Carolina evangelical charismatic Christian church followed Trump to rally after rally.
Recently, the “tradwives” movement on social media picked up traction, celebrating the return of women to traditional roles as submissive wives. Mainstream media has treated the trend largely as a curiosity.
But for women who stay at home in lieu of low-paying jobs, including taking care of other people’s children, or are faced with workplaces where gender pay gaps are still prevalent, focusing on supporting their working husbands to better help their families is its own act of empowerment.
“There is still so much discrimination and pay inequity, you can see why some women would like to boost their husband’s status,” said Katherine Turk, a historian of second-wave feminism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Women who are not feminist have different ideas about what it means to have a self-actualised life and meaningful choices.”
The idea of harnessing a voting bloc of women was shattered in this election, despite appeals from Michelle Obama, the former first lady who, voice nearly trembling at an October rally for Harris, called Trump an existential threat to women’s rights and told men that a vote for him “is a vote against us”. Actor Julia Roberts in an ad for Harris appealed to female solidarity, reminding wives that their husbands would not know whom they voted for in the privacy of the voting booth.
“Did those ads work? They clearly didn’t,” said Elizabeth McRae, a history professor at Western Carolina University. “There is a long history of conservative white women moving politics to the right, and it’s not because their husbands told them to.”
In 1984, presidential candidate Walter Mondale picked a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, as his running mate, thinking he would win women’s votes. It didn’t work. Many white women who voted for Ronald Reagan said they liked his version of a strong man and a strong America.
Some women this year said they themselves were uncomfortable with a woman being president.
“I’m a woman and it probably goes against the grain, but I think we need a man to deal with foreign countries,” said Lynn Lewis of Old Fort, North Carolina, who voted for Trump.
In the days before the election, Trump vowed to be a protector of women, “whether the women like it or not”. Some women were offended, but for others that message appealed. Lewis, 60, said she fears foreign leaders might think they could push around a female president.
“There are certain things that men need to lead,” she said.
Many historians of women’s equality movements through the decades say the gains won by women often didn’t benefit all women; rather, they helped privileged women secure more opportunities in society. The fight for legal equality allowed women with the necessary means to pay for college and find jobs with good salaries, for instance. That’s part of the reason women have not been unified in what they want from politicians.
In last week’s election, some women said they specifically appreciated Trump’s support for their role as mothers.
Conservative women argued that the national movement for transgender rights took power away from mothers to make decisions for their children. Some believe Trump will support their position that parents, not the Government, should decide whether children are vaccinated. They think his crackdown on the border will stop their children from accessing fentanyl, even though the largest group of known fentanyl smugglers are Americans, not immigrants, crossing through legal points of entry. And they said they saw the rising cost of groceries as an affront to women trying to feed their families, and something they think Trump can stem.
In her campaign, Harris tried to appeal to mothers and others by advancing “the care economy,” a set of policies aimed at helping parents and other caregivers.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, who gained renown after her article for The Atlantic about the difficulty of career advancement for professional women with children, said she once focused her fight for gender equity on the workplace and now sees it as just as important for women who care for others.
“Feminism should be framed in terms of care and career, but within that there are going to be lots of debates about what care reasonably encompasses,” she said. “I would not include it to mean control over all my children’s choices, but that is complicated ground.”
What’s clear in looking back at feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s is that women in the past were far more organised, historians said. But that’s largely because they were united in fighting for a set of fundamental rights.
Back then few women were decision-makers in Government, boardrooms or in families. Women had trouble getting a driver’s licence or passport or registering to vote unless they took their husband’s last name. Marital rape was legal. Most could not open credit cards in their own name until the mid-1970s.
Gloria Steinem, perhaps the country’s best-known feminist activist, said she wasn’t certain Harris lost because of her gender – “We don’t know what’s in the heart of each woman” who voted for Trump, she said – but said women had made huge gains that shouldn’t be forgotten because of this election’s outcome.
“It is within my memory that it was not possible in many states to get a prescription for birth control unless you were married and had the written permission of your husband and not possible to have an abortion without some access to an illegal network. Those are huge,” said Steinem, who is 90.
Steinem has been thinking of another setback for a woman who wanted to be President: the 1972 bid by Shirley Chisholm, who was the first Black woman to serve in Congress and the first woman to seek the Democratic nomination for presidency. Steinem was a delegate for the unsuccessful campaign where Chisholm had tried to consolidate Black, female and working-class voters but faced institutional sexism and racism.
Steinem offered practical advice for women distraught by what they see as a reversal for women’s rights with the election of Trump: focus on equality in the workplace, she said, and treat daughters the same as sons.
“The lesson is less in the national and world atmosphere and more in the home and employment atmosphere in which we have some control,” she said. “We shouldn’t give up the power we have.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Dionne Searcey
Photographs by: Erin Schaff, Kristian Thacker and Jordan Gale
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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