(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ROAR LITERARY JOURNAL)
Hillary Clinton had to be preternaturally calm in the election, or else she would be labelled as an angry woman. Her two biggest competitors, Trump and Sanders, were able to leverage populist rage through their own visibly-seething and barely-contained fury at the political system. Unable to access that same level of frenzied indignation without being deemed unstable, Clinton was therefore dismissed as part of that very system they were raging against.
Her voice was never fully heard. She’s impenetrable, impossible to know, said the news media. Hillary is so hard to trust, said the voters. The two are related. There was no roadmap for how to elect a female president. She was labelled by her husband, his actions, his behavior. Trump dismissed her candidacy based on her abilities as a wife: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” She was our last victim of women self-silencing, succumbing to a culturally-imposed standard of polite, feminine behavior.
When Clinton released her memoir, her critics were outraged that she should continue to have a public voice. The public outcry was that she should stop talking already. Stop complaining. Take those long walks in the woods in silence. But, Clinton would no longer keep her opinions to herself. And in 2017, American women were no longer willing to do so, either.
The outrage was immediately apparent in the wake of the election. Immediately post-election, compilations of Trump’s sexist statements went viral. Though this was not new information—his ignorant opinions had already been available for public consumption—it was information that had not been treated seriously. Trump, in the minds of many voters (and pollsters), was not a proper threat to Clinton’s foregone presidency.
Post-election, Clinton said women frequently approached her for forgiveness—they didn’t vote, they explained, because they didn’t think she needed it. Or: they wish they’d volunteered, or campaigned harder. Enraged that the seemingly unthinkable had occurred, they now reviewed Trump’s beliefs and opinions with fresh eyes, increasingly alive to the injustice. Trump’s victory caused many women to recognize the precariousness of their individual rights and freedoms. Trump symbolized a reversal of progress for gender equality, taking the country back to a time (not so long ago) when women were accepted as inferior to men by the government, by the popular culture, and by one another.
Most alarmingly (and unsurprisingly considering his track record), our new president believed that our bodies, as women, did not belong to us. He blamed sexual assault on physical proximity (of sexual assault in the military: “what did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?), he claimed he would defund Planned Parenthood. Suddenly, our rights were in peril. Our private Facebook groups, our politeness, our manners, were putting our lives in danger. Clinton’s supporters were silenced in a similar manner to their candidate, taking refuge in private Facebook groups, constantly defending themselves against claims that they only preferred Hillary because she was a woman.
Clinton referenced “secret private Facebook sites” in her concession speech: “I want everybody coming out from behind that and make sure your voices are heard going forward.”
And in a year of political and cultural warfare, hear them they did. The triumphant Women’s March in January capitalized on the momentum, kicking off the year with a scream. Women’s rights are human rights. We shall not be marginalized. It is so ironic it is that we must fight Republicans (small-government advocates opposed to the federal government interfering with their own lives) for individual liberties. The hypocrisy is confounding.
The naysayers who believed women would become complacent were proven wrong by our continued perseverance, with historic wins for women in the November elections, which were a triumphant list of “first-ever” victories: the first openly-transgender state legislator, the first two Latinas and the first Asian-American woman elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates, the first African-American female mayor in North Carolina, and so on. EMILY’s List, a resource for Democratic pro-choice women to run for public office, is inundated with requests.
In this moment of chaos and struggle, let’s also celebrate our achievements in the past year. Our voices our heard, and wielded real power. We are the resistance we claimed we’d be when we marched on Washington at the beginning of the year. The Weinstein revelations in October birthed the #metoo movement for sexual assault, exposing predators and opening up a dialogue about the inherently imbalanced sexual power dynamics between men and women. And open up a dialogue it has. “The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido” is now being examined in The New York Times, summarized succinctly on the Sunday Review front page: “Men are awful. Let’s talk about it.”
Let’s. And let’s remember never to stop.
Writings of KPM 