On the brink of history, American women were punched in the gut

I am living in an alternate universe. I am a New York City woman in Trump election aftershock. The streets are deathly quiet. Blank faces whisper disbelief and profanities. My eyes are on the women. After all, I've spent a career studying them, being one of them. I read their Facebook posts and inhale their texts filled with grief and outrage.

On Tuesday night we witnessed a public exposure of what we have long known in private: an experienced woman was bested by a bragging showman named Donald Trump. This travesty stings more because his campaign grabbed headlines by preening about his sexual prowess, criticising women's looks, and bragging about scoring casual assaults because of his celebrity. And without a shred of governmental, military or on-the-job experience, he now holds the most powerful office in the world.

On the brink of history, we were punched in the gut. For two hours, I waited to cast my vote for Hillary Clinton in a block-long queue at my East Village polling centre. I inched along behind a mother and her nine-year-old daughter, clutching a blonde American Girl doll dressed in a pantsuit.

“Why is this taking so long?” the little girl whined. Her mother bent down to explain, “Because it’s a big deal and the good news is that when she wins, next time, it will be no big deal.”

“No big deal,” the girl crowed.

But it was a big deal. Many of us could agree that Hillary Clinton wasn’t perfect but the misogyny surrounding her opponent’s candidacy was particularly horrifying. We may have hoped or suspended our disbelief that overt sexism had faded with the fifties or the eighties . . . but no – it has persisted.

Why were we taken by surprise? How did we forget? After casting my vote, I spent an hour counselling a woman who was struggling with her male colleagues. She told me that less experienced men were awarded promotions and bonuses: “The boss and all his men were going out to dinner with our clients and when I ask if I could join, their answer was ‘No, it’s a guy thing.’” She was cut out of a steak dinner not a strip joint. But the net message is: We don’t want girls in our clubhouse. This “girl” was 39 years old. It’s 2016.

Darkest memories

This Trump victory rips the bandages off old war wounds, ricocheting me and my generation back to the darkest memories of our own careers. How many of us worked for a boorish Trump-like boss? How many used countless days of sick leave to care for a child and soldiered through, just as Hillary powered through pneumonia? How many cringed as men rated our appearance? (It happened to me early on when male students held up placards numbered 1-10 as I walked into our college cafeteria as an undergraduate.) Still we pushed on, kept our heads down and worked. We postponed living our lives while meeting deadlines. We stayed silent as the good girl got passed over for the bad guy. Many of us succeeded despite the odds but this alternate universe has been too real for too long.

This election revived past grievances and also shone a light on the yawning gender gap. Tens of millions granted this unseasoned candidate a pass, normalised his misogyny and voted him into the Oval Office. True, Clinton won the women vote by 12 points and young women came through for her strongly but it wasn’t enough. Amazingly, college-educated women voted for her only at a margin of 51 to 45 per cent. More concerning, non-college educated women voted for Trump 62 to 34 per cent.

Voting for a woman because she was a woman may never have justified a Clinton presidency. But voting for a man who has shown contempt for more than half the population should have stopped more people in their tracks. When might we all let out a primal scream?

What are the consequences for our girls, our young women and ourselves? Will it now be okay to discriminate, to shrug off the old boy’s network or to laugh off “locker-room talk” that disparages women’s looks? Are we any farther along than 1919 when our sister suffragettes first won the right to vote?

Decades of feminism have passed and yet, as women, we still tiptoe around each other, our white gloves intact, never daring to ask, “What is your hope? Is it different than mine? Where do you see your future, your daughter’s future?” If we can use this moment to gain a deeper understanding of what feminism means to each of us now, maybe we can move forward, respecting what each of us needs for a safe and rewarding life. If we do, I believe we can birth a movement that declares the right to be true to ourselves and makes our voices heard, once and for all.

Bruised but not broken

We are bruised but we are not broken. We might whine but we don’t wallow. If there’s anything that women know how to do, it’s to roll up our sleeves, clean up a mess and move on. We’ve done it at home, we’ve done it at work and we can do it for our country and our world.

The biggest lesson of this campaign must be that we cannot take for granted that decades of progress have erased past prejudice nor unlocked rusty handcuffs. Younger women can’t be complacent, assuming that their rights are secure, or that their careers are on the same trajectory as their male counterparts or that they are judged by the same standards, which is all they ask.

No big deal? Yes, it is a big deal.

Trump started something that he will regret. His dark rhetoric has thrown a match onto the smouldering resentment and disappointments that women have tolerated and swallowed for years. And thankfully, he may have hit a nerve among younger women who demand a better future but now sit shocked with the potential outcomes. I submit that American women will put one foot in front of the other, deal with this and make their voices heard. Fired up? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Gloves off.

Mary Lou Quinlan is an author, actor and advocate for women who has just completed a nine-city tour of her play The God Box in Ireland. Her latest play Work, about women's careers, launches in 2017 justaskawoman.com