So much for the glass ceiling.
Hillary Clinton had planned for this moment her whole life, doing civil rights work in the South as a young lawyer, taking the role of first lady when another Yale-educated lawyer — her husband, Bill Clinton — won the White House, then running herself for the Senate. Bruised in a loss to Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2008, she accepted the job of Secretary of State and waited for her chance to work from the Oval Office herself.
Her choice of venue for her expected victory party — the Javits Center in mid-town Manhattan — had a built-in glass ceiling to underscore the win the polls had virtually assured her of securing.
That dream ended early Wednesday morning, as Clinton grappled with the news that a businessman with no political or public policy experience, who came seemingly out of nowhere, had won instead.
The day had started with an ebullient, almost giddy tone. Across the country, women — and some men — donned pantsuits in solidarity with the Democratic nominee’s de facto uniform. Others wore white, a color associated with the suffragette movement, and put “I voted” stickers on the grave of legendary feminist Susan B. Anthony. In lower Manhattan early Tuesday morning, a beaming woman posed for a photo with her young daughter as they prepared to go to the busy polls.
“I was the first woman in almost every job I ever held,” says Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat who was the first female to represent her districts in the New York City Council and in Congress, and the first woman to chair the Joint Economic Committee. And Tuesday morning, Maloney near certain she was voting for the first female president.
Women indeed backed Clinton, exit polls showed. That’s in part because females tend to vote Democratic, and partly because Trump had alienated women with the revelations about him bragging about using his fame to sexually assault women without consequence. But men strongly favored Trump, and while males make up a smaller segment of the electorate, it was enough to push Trump over the top. Early exit polls indicated that 2016 would have the biggest gender gap since the data started being collected in 1972.
Her campaign was not focused on gender, but it was a constant undercurrent. Trump brushed off reports that he had walked in on beauty contestants — including underage girls — in a state of undress, that he had called it “disgusting” when a woman wanted a break from a court proceeding to pump breast milk and had referred to a Miss Universe as “Miss Piggy” when she gained weight and held a press conference for journalists and photographers to document her working out.
READ [Election Day 2016 Results]
At the Republican National Convention, vendors sold (and attendees wore) T-shirts saying “Trump the Bitch.” The Texas Agriculture Commissioner tweeted a Pennsylvania poll result that referred to her as a c–t. And the gender-based vitriol didn’t just come from Republicans; supporters of her Democratic primary opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, weaved it into their speeches and social media postings as well. “A uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president of the United States,” rapper Killer Mike said in a speech at a Sanders campaign event.
Before the results were in on Election Day, Eleanor Smeal, one of the founding leaders of the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, mused on Clinton’s struggles and the gender-related issues and comments that characterized Clinton’s fight for the ultimate job.
“It [was] outrageous,” Smeal says. “She has been the most admired woman in the world longer than anybody. Her numbers were so high when she was Secretary of State. It was when she said she wanted to run for president that this whole negative, awful campaign was unleashed, bringing down her numbers.”
On Wednesday morning, under a still-intact glass ceiling, Clinton called President-elect Donald Trump and conceded.
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A Glass Ceiling Doesn’t Shatter After All originally appeared on usnews.com
