So when I phoned her on the morning of the election, I expected joy and anticipation. Instead, I heard trepidation. “How do you think it’s going to go?” she asked.
“I think she’s going to win.”
“Mmmm,” said my mother, in the same tone she used to judge a dubious dress colour. I felt the first hint of anxiety. Mildred had also seen the world turn away from progress; a history of adversity was buried in her bones.
But the signs, that day, were good. Social media filled with pictures of women in their pantsuits, with babies in pantsuits, drag queens in pantsuits. A live camera showed the steady stream of voters making a pilgrimage to Susan B. Anthony’s grave in Rochester, placing their “I Voted” stickers on the headstone. In 1872 Anthony was fined $100 for trying to vote in the presidential election to protest the fact that “the blessings of liberty are forever kept from women and their female posterity.” She never paid the fine.
My finger grew weary from refreshing my Twitter feed: I couldn’t get enough of its photos of women voting, elated and beaming. My feed was a stream of affirmation of what I already believed, which was of course a problem. I swam in a filter bubble of my own making — a dangerous thing for a person, more dangerous for a journalist. I’d been listening to voices that chimed in glorious harmony with mine, and forgotten about the child in Tampa in her prisoner’s costume.
I had also put out of my mind an article I’d read in the Washington Post a couple of weeks earlier, which carried the headline “How sexism drives support for Donald Trump.” In it, three political scientists from the University of Michigan wrote that their research into voters’ attitudes showed that “sexism was strongly and significantly correlated with support for Trump.” At that point, Trump voters were thought to be driven by fear — of poverty, of job loss, of a changing America — but the political scientists’ analysis showed that fury was a much more potent fuel: “Our research suggests that the role of racial prejudice or sexism may be catalyzed more by anger.” There was a rage monster lying dormant in America. I had witnessed it, but I was too blind to see.
That evening, I sent my daughter and son off to see Matilda, the musical based on Roald Dahl’s vision of a world ruined by adults’ cruelty. My son, a political obsessive like his grandmother and an American by birth, kept his eye on the exit polls. My daughter just wanted to know if she’d wake up to a historic dawn: “When will we know?” she asked at the door. “When will we know if she’s won?”
I finished writing the piece my editors had asked for, about the historic significance of the first female presidency. I honed it, and edited it, and hit send. Here’s how it began, the piece that would never see the light of day:
“In the end, she was the right woman after all. Despite the endless criticism aimed her way, Hillary Clinton did not smile too much or too little, she was neither too tough nor too frail, and it didn’t matter if anyone wanted to have a beer with her. What mattered is that millions of Americans judged her singularly fit to run their country.”
I wasn’t the only one who had to throw my words in the garbage. Later, much later, Clinton would reveal the contents of the acceptance speech she would have given if she’d become president, standing in her white suffragette’s pantsuit with all the shattered glass at her feet.
She would have thanked her mother, Dorothy, who died in 2011 at the age of ninety-two. Clinton often cited her mother, survivor of a dreadful childhood, as a source of strength and inspiration. In her speech, she would have addressed her mother, who’d been abandoned at the age of eight and sent to live with uncaring grandparents. She would have told Dorothy that her misery would give way to happiness eventually: “And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become president of the United States.”
The prospect of a Clinton presidency grew dimmer by the moment. I channelled my bewilderment into a tweet: “What are we going to tell our daughters?” No one had an answer, least of all me: When my daughter came home, I couldn’t bear to tell her the truth, so I lied and said that we didn’t know.
I woke my mother when I called. She had gone to bed, disconsolate, and here I was disrupting her ancient, patchwork sleep.
“Do we know yet?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“It doesn’t look good,” I said.
She sighed, and click, she was gone.
I wanted to punch the world, for her sake. Hadn’t she earned some good news? Was the universe destined to be ruled by assholes forever? I couldn’t bear to stay up and watch Trump’s acceptance speech. I went back to my bottle of whisky; I was halfway through. And then I dragged myself off to bed and had bad dreams; whisky or life gave me nightmares or perhaps a bit of both.
Clinton never got to make her acceptance speech, of course; she never got to thank Dorothy. Instead, the next morning, she appeared before the cameras in New York to address her supporters. She was wearing a purple blouse, a conciliatory gesture — the red states and the blue as one — but I couldn’t imagine conciliation was much on her mind. She looked exhausted. Everyone in my world was heavy with grief. How was Clinton holding it together?
I managed to hold it together, watching the speech on TV, until she said: “And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.”
I phoned my mother again. As soon as she picked up, I burst into tears. She listened to my blubbering for a moment, and then she said, “I’ve got to go. The View’s coming on and I want to hear what Whoopi has to say.” Later that evening, when I phoned her again, she said drily: “Have you stopped crying yet?” It was her greatest gift to me, this flintiness at her core, the rock-hard centre that survived every natural disaster life threw at her.
After Clinton had finished speaking, I sat down to write a new column, seeking answers to the question that I’d asked the previous night: What would we tell our daughters? The words gushed forth, an unstoppable fountain of rage. “For the daughters out there, the time for fighting is at hand. It is now perhaps apparent that our mothers and grandmothers did not win every battle, and the ground they did win is slipping away under our feet. Instead of being discouraged, go and put on your Nasty Woman T-shirt and engage in the battle, in defiance of the sexism that lies like a freshly woken monster in your path. In the words of the old protest song: ‘Take it easy, but take it.’”
It felt cathartic, and I hit send. My tiny bit of light in the world. In truth, though, those brave words felt as flimsy as the newsprint they were printed on. The monster was alive in the world; it would never rest; it would never give up its power.
When I picked up my daughter at her after-school club, she told me that she and her friends had spent the day talking about Trump’s victory. They were blessedly ignorant of electoral college votes and swing states and email servers and a far-off place called Benghazi, but, in the manner of eleven-year-olds everywhere, they understood bullies and were deeply concerned with fairness.
She put on her seatbelt, and I put on my game face. I told her that history was on our side, even though I didn’t much believe it myself. I told her that America would have a woman president in her lifetime, that Canada would elect another female prime minister.
“Sure,” she said, turning to look out the car window. “In 55,000 years.”
IT TOOK LESS than 55,000 years for a sliver of light to pierce the hate-dark clouds. Two and a half months after the election I emerged from L’Enfant Plaza subway station onto the wide boulevards of Washington, D.C. Outside the subway I was swept along like a cork in a current, part of a vast, happy-angry crowd, a crowd of hundreds of thousands that jammed the streets of America’s capital. It was the day after Trump’s lacklustre inauguration, but no one was talking about that because all eyes had turned to this momentous gathering, the Women’s March on Washington.
I was pressed on all sides by old women carrying signs that said “I Can’t Believe I Still Have to Protest This Shit” and young women chanting “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” The crowd was rosy with pink knitted pussy hats, the Phrygian caps of the new revolution.
A toddler sat on her dad’s shoulders, wearing a tiny white shirt that said “This is what a feminist looks like.” He must have bought it for her, ordering it off a website, perhaps, with deliberation and bottled rage, in the same way that Inmate Hillary’s parents had prepared her costume in Tampa. Was that just a couple of months before? It seemed like years.
Ahead of me, a young woman carried a sign that she had painted herself: “I stopped counting at 44,” it said on one side, and on the other, “Black lives still matter.” Erin was thirty, marching with her mother, who had never been to a protest before. (This was a common theme; many of the people I talked to over the course of the day were demonstrating for the first time, and many of them were with mothers, sisters, aunts.)
“As a Black woman I don’t feel safe at the moment,” Erin said. “It’s important that we show up, and tell the world that it’s not okay for our president to be racist, sexist, and xenophobic.”
Erin, it occurred to me, was the future; her mother was the future. They knew, as Americans, what protest can do to improve their lives. The crowd filled all the wide spaces between the museums of the Smithsonian complex. Those museums — temples of knowledge, free to the public, endowed for eternity — are the highest ideals of America made manifest. Inside, they provide testament to the place of protest at the heart of that country’s democracy: At the Museum of American History, the Woolworths lunch counter, site of the Greensboro protest sit-in, stands across the hall from the wagon that delivered the suffragette newspaper The Woman’s Daily. Every victory for social justice had been hard-won in a relentless ground war. This was one more skirmish, not the end.
On that grey day in January, the Women’s March on Washington earned a place in the Hall of Fame of protests. It began on Facebook, in the despairing, weepy hours after the election. It was born there, a seed, but it grew into something surpassing everyone’s wildest expectations. Organizers had hoped that 200,000 might show up; instead, more than 500,000 brought the capital to a standstill. They arrived from all over the country, some from across the world, in fury and determination. Over the course of the day, social media overflowed with pictures of sister protests around the world, from tiny ones in Jos, Nigeria, and Sandy Cove, Nova Scotia, to a wintry slog in Haines, Alaska, where marchers were bent double against the wind and snow.
Yet, despite the fury that propelled us, there was a particular spirit I could only think of as female, for better or worse. No one misbehaved. Everyone brought lots of water. Energy bars were unpeeled, shared, the wrappers placed carefully in pockets for disposal later.
Under a concrete overhang, I found another mother and daughter, Fawzia and Shaza, who were also marching for the first time. Shaza was a high-school senior in neighbouring Alexandria, Virginia. They had come to express their solidarity with other women. Shaza said that they were anxious about the possibility of a Muslim registry — a policy reportedly considered by the Trump team during the election. They didn’t think it would come to pass.
In fact, she said, people at the march had come up to her to say “As-salāmu alaykum” and compliment her on her pale blue hijab. The teenager had a message for the new president, which pretty much summed up the mood of the day: “I’m a citizen. I was born here. It’s as much my country as it is his.”
I slipped further into the crowd, threading my way between bodies, trying to get closer to the stage where feminist heroes of the past and future echoed Shaza’s message: This is our country, our day, our time. We will not watch the clock roll back. As I listened, I felt lightness in my frozen feet, my frozen heart.
Sound bounced off the walls and the bodies: Gloria Steinem was on stage, though I couldn’t get near enough to see her. I could hear her, though, and later I would watch her on YouTube, a lioness in a red scarf and tinted glasses: “Because this, this, is the upside of the downside. This is an outpouring of energy and true democracy like I have never seen in my very long life. It is wide in age. It is deep in diversity.”
The lineup of speakers was deep in diversity. The march’s organizers had listened to criticism, early on, that the day could not be constrained by white feminists. To do so would not just be short-sighted and unjust, it would mean failure. The women traditionally pushed to the margins by the historical forces of oppression could not be pushed there by the sisterhood as well. They needed to be at the centre, working the gears and levers, holding the microphones, making the speeches.
Never mind that women of colour had earned their place at the head of the resistance: 94 percent of Black women and 68 percent of Latinas voted for Clinton. On the other hand, astoundingly, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump, choosing tribalism and self-interest over the common good. As Michelle Obama would later say, “Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice.”
The author and transgender activist Janet Mock took the stage to talk about the challenging work ahead: “Our movements require us to do more than just show up and say the right words,” she said. “It requires us to break out of our comfort zones and be confrontational. It requires us to defend one another when it is difficult and dangerous.” She was at the march, she said, to be “my sister’s keeper.” The young women around me put their pussy-hatted heads back and howled in agreement. Adrian, a college freshman standing by my side, waved the sign she carried; it was a middle finger raised to the world, except the finger was the symbol for the female gender turned upside down.
“Nice sign,” I said.
“My girlfriend made it,” Adrian replied. She was at the march with five college friends. They’d started crying on election night. It took a while to pick themselves up. She looked numb and exhausted.
As I stood and listened for four hours, a feeling of strangeness descended on me, a discombobulation. By the time a preternaturally poised six-year-old named Sophie Cruz, the daughter of undocumented immigrants, took the stage to talk about human rights in Spanish and English, I had located my sense of disconnect. We’d been listening to girls and women all day. For hours on end. From the Mothers of the Movement, speaking about their sons killed by police, to Angela Davis and her unashamed takedown of the “heteropatriarchy,” they’d all been women’s voices.
It set me rocking on my heels. When was the last time I listened to women speak, uninterrupted, for hours on end — about labour rights and social justice and race relations? When was the last time I listened to women speaking uninterrupted about anything? I thought of my daughter, at home, and how often I had to tell her father and brother to be quiet and let her finish a thought.
It felt radically female, as if hundreds of thousands of menstrual cycles might spontaneously synchronize right there outside the National Air and Space Museum. In spite of the chaos of the day — no one seemed to know where anything was, or in which direction we should move — a spirit of co-operation ruled. In the weeks before the march, I’d rolled my eyes at some of the rules imposed on participants. There could be no pickets with wooden handles. No purses larger than a few inches square. No bicycles. No backpacks, unless they were transparent. Who owns a transparent backpack?
Apparently, a lot of women. Or at least they managed to find some. Thousands of transparent backpacks, as far as the eye could see: All day long, I peered into the secret lives of strangers, at their water bottles and snack bars, their extra sweaters and books. It was a revolution organized by the PTA.
I turned and join the stream of people marching toward the White House, along the broad boulevards where in 1913 suffragettes marched and were beaten for their temerity, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. That was a turning point in the history of wo
men’s rights; perhaps this would be, too.
For a while I walked alongside Casey, a transgender army veteran, and her wife, Karen, who were seriously considering a move to Canada. Casey’s sign showed an American flag upside-down, a military signal of distress. I could see a pack of Kools in her transparent backpack: I was tempted to ask her for one. As we walked and talked, a man came alongside, pointing to Casey’s sign identifying her as a veteran. “Thank you for your service,” he said.
“Does that happen all the time?” I asked.
She nodded. “There’s a lot of good people in this country. You just have to look for them.”
I left Casey and Karen and found myself under a giant cardboard cut-out of Hillary Clinton carried by a group of young men and women, who giggled as they shifted the candidate from hand to hand. Clinton herself did not attend the protest. Later, she would say that she didn’t want to distract from the march’s message.
That, instead, was left to Madonna, who yelled from the stage that the new president could “suck a dick.” Madonna at full Madonnosity made me laugh, as did the woman holding aloft a picture of Vladimir Putin wearing a tiny “I Voted” sticker in his lapel. It was a hell of a lot better to laugh than to cry. It was better to march than to lie in a soggy heap wondering why the lights had gone out.
At the end of the day, my feet exhausted, I paused to marvel at how quickly the women of America went from crying to organizing, from fretting to fighting. Historically, organizing has been our role: We make phone calls and arrange billets and photocopy the flyers and take our places next to the men who raise their fists on the podiums. Not on this day, though. This day belonged to us.
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