The Cut has a fantastic excerpt from Rebecca Traister’s forthcoming book “Good and Mad” – the except is titled And You Thought Trump Voters Were Mad: American women are furious — and our politics and culture will never be the same.
The idealized vision of what this country might be was born of the virtuous, and sometimes chaotic, fury of the unrepresented. We are taught it as patriotic catechism — give me liberty or give me death; live free or die; don’t tread on me. We carve our Founders’ anger into buildings, visit their broken bells, name contemporary political factions after the temper tantrums they threw, dressed in native garb, dumping tea in a harbor. We call these events a revolution.
This is the anger of white men, of course. Their anger is revered, respected as the stimulus for necessary political change. Because they’ve always been the rational norm, the intellectual ideal, their dissatisfactions are assumed to be grounded in reason — not the emotional muck of femininity. (This isn’t just in the past. Think about how the anger of white men in the Rust Belt is often treated as politically diagnostic, as a guide to their understandable frustrations: the loss of jobs and stature, the shortage of affordable health care, the scourge of drugs. Meanwhile, the Movement for Black Lives, a response to police killings of African Americans initiated by women activists, is considered by the FBI to pose a threat of “retaliatory violence” and discussed as a “hate group” by Meghan McCain.)
The whole thing is beautifully written, and it’s striking and more than a little depressing that after two hundred years of this, women are still fighting the same fights. This time might really be the start of something new: polls have suggested for months that women are abandoning the Republican Party in record numbers. November sure is going to be interesting.