Mad, Mad As Hell, & Madder Still: Hillary Women One Year Later Punch Our Way To The Voting Booths | Take Note, We Are Just Getting Started
/It's one year later -- one of the worst nights of my life. I drank more vodka than I want to admit. If Mika on Morning Joe opened her Bernie-loving trap on Nov. 9, I would throw a high heel at the TV and hopefully smash her away forever.
Writing for Harper's Bazaar, Jennifer Wright reflects on that awful night a year later and the day after women hit the voting booths, inflicting serious pain on the Republican party in our first reckoning after Hillary's defeat.
I watched as millions of women excitedly gathered in secret groups to support Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. There they talked about what an exciting moment in history this was. They did not venture out because their husbands might not like their vote, or Bernie voters might yell at them, or someone at their work might not like it. We saw at the time, I think, no contradiction in being posed on the edge of ultimate victory for womankind and also secreting ourselves away to make ourselves completely unobjectionable. We were always supposed to be unobjectionable.
So quietly, unobjectionably, we waited. We baked cakes, and chilled champagne, and put stickers on suffragettes graves. And so many of us thought how especially satisfying it would be to see a woman win against a man who was repeatedly accused of sexual harassment, who bragged about sexual assault, who seemed to embody the worst of what women encounter from men.
"It became clear that you can be the most qualified woman and still lose to the least qualified man."
On November 9, we woke up, and Donald Trump had been elected.
That was like a spell being broken. All across the land, women woke up and realized we were never going to get where we wanted to go by playing by the rules. Even if you walked the tightrope of acceptable feminine behavior perfectly, even if you managed to sidestep every trap laid for women, you would still never to get to the top. The bar for men was so low they could slither right over it.
And I think something inside us broke. Some dam within so many women that kept them quiet, that kept their anger tucked away, pent up all the times women smile politely when we feel like screaming. That dam burst.
And every furious moment we’d tried not to think about came flooding forth. We were awake, and we were righteously angry.