A few days ago, when the results were fresher, I saw women crying in the streets of New York. I heard a woman screaming, “He was accused of sexual assault!” This has been really hard on women…
I sat with a really smart, informed women, and we just talked it out in a quiet room. It was really kind of wonderful. We turned off all the pundits and our phones and just talked it out…
One thing I didn’t realize until we just kind of talked it out was that even though I believe women aren’t treated equally to men yet in America, and I know we have so much work to do to achieve equality… I still kind of thought the idea of a glass ceiling was sorta gone.
I felt I’d excelled at a lot of “boy” things in my life (first chair saxophone, getting accepted to the “boy-filled” engineering majors at Berklee, working in a semi-technical field – becoming an editor in television in my 20s). I never really thought of anything as off-limits to me because I’m a woman…
Even though we’d never had a woman president, I took for granted that we could. I just assumed, “Of course we can!” And now I see I may have been wrong… Because people would rather have Trump than Hillary… Not a qualified or dignified man… But, Trump.
I never thought I’d hit a glass ceiling until I saw Hillary lose the election… And now a part of me wonders, “Oh, maybe it is there hovering around everyone… I wonder when I’ll hit mine…”
Another thing this wise woman I was with pointed out to me is just how much people think of ambitious women as odd… One thing she pointed out to me was that –
In my senior year of high school, we had sketches in a special scene night where seniors kind of poked fun at themselves. And the sketch someone asked me to be in revolved around my care/desire/drive/ambition to be theater president. And I happily poked fun at myself for being super intense because I am super intense and I own that.
…But did anyone ever make fun of the guy who was class president 4 years running, captain of the cross country and track teams, I think president of the video club (or whatever we had going on there) and on and on?
No. He wanted stuff (and achieved stuff), but it wasn’t a big hilarious joke…
And I don’t want to just yell out sexism and stuff… But that really gave me something to think about… I always thought people were just making fun of me specifically for being intense… I never thought that maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with me being a woman…
So, it’s weird, you know? The world is weird and many people think Hillary’s too ambitious. But I LOVE her, and I will follow her to the end of the earth with whatever she does next!
I too thought that Hillary could win, but we all walk in different circles. There was a map of Massachusetts (where overall Hillary did about 2% better than Obama in 2012), and it showed her _heavily_ over-performing not just in my home city of Boston and neighboring communities but also in the (wealthy) western suburbs where I spent part of my childhood. But the poorer areas of the state shifted to Trump enough to cancel out most of that trend.
After the election I thought about all the female leaders around the world, and realized that the vast majority of them are prime ministers–elected to the leadership by a few hundred political professionals and not voted on directly by the full population. Basically, in a parliamentary system, the person in charge is the equivalent of the Speaker of the House in the United States, and of course we’ve had a female Speaker–Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
This past week definitely shattered some illusions about how far we’d come. 🙁
Ugh. So sad. Thanks so much for the comment, Kevin