Of course, change, even political change, won’t come simply from the women who are running for office; it will also come from the women who are engaging in their campaigns, volunteering, paying attention, educating themselves, becoming activists for the first time in their lives. And in the years since Donald Trump became president, those women are legion. A 2017 Pew survey found that nearly six in ten women said they were paying increased attention to politics since the 2016 election, a greater share than men.
The self-styled “Resistance” that grew up in response to the Donald Trump administration was made of, built on, the efforts of women. Women were running the local chapters of Indivisible, one of the biggest organizations to rise in opposition to Trump and Republicans, at a rate of two to one, according to one of Indivisible’s founders; more than three quarters of Indivisible’s email subscribers were women.10 Journalist Charlotte Alter reported that Planned Parenthood said its volunteers, the majority of them women, had made more than 200,000 phone calls to members of Congress and organized more than 2,200 events across the country opposing the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, as well as having delivered more than a million petitions to members of Congress, asking them not to defund women’s reproductive health care. One 2017 survey found that 86 percent of the people using an anti-Trump text-messaging service were women. In a survey of twenty-eight thousand people who’d contacted Congress in 2017 to protest the administration, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake found the same percentage were women.
Yes, progressive politics had long relied on the labor of women, many of them women of color, the hard-working base of state and local political organizing. But what happened after Clinton’s loss, and grew through the #metoo movement, and the fury over mass shootings, was the activation of another population, long dormant: suburban white women.
I’d met and spoken to some of them, traveling to Georgia in June of 2017, in the lead-up to the special election campaign of Jon Ossoff, and landing among them was like walking onto the set of Thelma & Louise, encountering women who had just been rousted from political somnambulence and were certain that they would never be the same. “Something’s crossed over in me,” says one of the heroines in that old cinematic testament to the alchemical changes brought on by wrath, “I can’t go back.” And then, in another scene, “I feel awake. I don’t remember feeling this awake. Everything looks different.”
“If I’m not knocking on doors, I’m making calls; if I’m not making calls, I’m writing postcards; if I’m not writing postcards, I’m replacing my lawn sign,” I heard one woman saying at a suburban restaurant outside Atlanta. She and her peers were using a language of awakening and liberation that was redolent of past insurgencies.
“I am no longer in the closet,” Ann White, a sixty-four-year-old former speech pathologist told me. “I am out, I am out blue. Everybody knows now that I’m a Democrat, that I’m liberal. And they’re kind of tired of it, but that’s okay. I’m not done. I’m just getting started.” White, like so many previously complacent white women, had simply believed that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump. When she hadn’t, White said, she had felt herself transforming. “The profanity filter on my mouth totally went away,” she said, recalling cursing like a sailor on the phone with a friend, shocking her teenaged children, who’d “never heard me say the F-word before.” She attended the Women’s March in Atlanta in January, and said that “it was the very first time since the election that I felt empowered.” She’d also realized, for the first time, that “there’s a whole lot of people like me who are not going to take this lying down!”
White joined a group called Liberal Moms of Roswell and Cobb Counties. “My favorite slogan,” she told me, trying not to cry, “is ‘You Are Not Alone.’ I found my people.”
This is one of anger’s most important roles: it is a mode of connection, a way for women to find each other and realize that their struggles and their frustrations are shared, that they are not alone, not crazy. If they are quiet, they will remain isolated. But if they howl in rage, someone else who shares their fury might hear them, might start howling along. This is, of course, partly why those who oppress women work to stifle their anger.
Woman after woman spoke to me of how the loud eruption of their rage had brought them into a community they’d never known existed. “I never even put a sign in my yard because I wasn’t sure how it would be received if it wasn’t a Republican sign,” said Cherish Burnham, forty-four, of her life as a Democrat growing up in a red suburb. On the morning of November 9, consumed by hopelessness, she’d gone to volunteer at her sons’ elementary school science class and seen two other mothers who also looked stricken. After tentative inquiries, the trio realized they were all upset about the same thing; they stood outside the school in conversation for an hour.
Them too.
The expression of primal, agonizing anger that followed Trump’s election meant that for the first time, some women—even those who’d been living in proximity to one another for years—could hear one another for the first time.
“Every time I see an Ossoff sign I feel like I have an ally,” said Tamara Brooking, a fifty-one-year-old research assistant to a novelist. A lifelong Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders before she voted for Clinton, Brooking said that after the election, “I was fucking furious. I was insanely mad.” Now that she’s become active in Democratic organizing, she said, “I’m feeling like I’m working toward something. After the anger and depression faded, the motivation kicked in.”
Many women had put magnets with the logo of their activist group on their cars; if they spotted a magnet on the parked car, they turned it 180 degrees as a kind of greeting and signal of communion. “It’s to let each other know, ‘my sisters are here,’ ” said Jennifer Mosbacher, forty-four, reaching for the language of sisterhood evocative of the 1970s, or more activist spheres. “It’s this feeling of camaraderie in an area where you have often felt very isolated and disenfranchised. But now you can go to your neighborhood grocery store and get flipped, and you’re like, ‘Cool, someone else is here.’”
Women spoke with the youthful fervor of having found new friends and new love—of politics and one another. Several described how they’d not been sleeping, staying up all night scrolling through Facebook and message boards, reading political posts and messaging one another.
Their ardor echoed the recollections of the feminist writer Vivian Gornick in a 1990 essay, in which she recalled the period of second-wave feminism in which “Every week, there was a gathering of some sort at which the talk was an exhilaration. There wasn’t a woman in the room whose conversation did not engage. . . . We saw our inner lives being permanently marked by the words we spoke. We were changing before each other’s eyes, taking our own ideas seriously, becoming other than we had been.”11
The language I heard in Georgia was audible in interviews with women all over the country. The Washington Post reported on Kim Drew Wright, a forty-six-year-old writer and mother of three who, the week after the 2016 election, had invited local members of Pantsuit Nation to join her for a drink at a local bar; ninety people had come. She’d become a leader of liberal women in her conservative suburb, and helped to drive Democrats to victory in the fall 2017 elections in Virginia. “I wouldn’t have done this every day for the past year if I hadn’t gotten so angry about Trump,” Wright told the Post. “Once you wake up and see how important local elections are, it’s hard to go back to the shadows and stick your head in the sand.”12 To another outlet, Wright explained, “On election night, a switch got flipped in me. I’m starting to call it my ‘I’ll be damned’ switch. I’ll be damned if I’m going to be quiet anymore.”
The sheer amount of time these women were devoting to political organizing was staggering, especially given that most of them worked full-time and had children. “My business [and] my family have suffered from the work we’re doing,” Mosbacher told me. “Our fridge is barren; my daughter is like ‘Are we going out again?’ ”
“I tell people that I am fresh out of fucks,” Tamara Brooking told me. “I’m done. I’m done pretending that your hateful rhetoric is okay. I’m done pretending that people like us must be quiet to make you feel comfortable.”
There’s that willingness to discomfit again; it turns everything upside down, disturbs the equilibrium of households and partnerships that had been built around earlier states of complacency and quiet. And in this too, there were other kinds of reminders of the Second Wave, the kinds of intimate upheavals it had provoked.
The writer and professor Amy Butcher would describe the tolls of some of this in her essay “MIA: The Liberal Men We Love,” which she published in the weeks after the second Women’s March. “I’m frustrated and embarrassed, my boyfriend of three years said to me, with how worked up you are. He didn’t find palatable my rage, the anger I felt for Trump, for the men and women who voted for him, was . . . embarrassed that I led ninety students from my small Ohio university through the streets of Washington with half a million Americans . . . when I returned, delirious for sleep but feeling righted, in some small way satiated, he stood there in the hall and told me he was overwhelmed. All of you women with your labia hats, he said. All of you with your clitoris signs.”13 Butcher and her boyfriend broke up.
And still she wrote, she wished that the men who were put off by this surging fury could know what it was like to feel communion with the other women, the angry women on the road back with her from the Washington march. “I woke that night to a thousand taillights—many cars but far more buses, thousands of stories packed onto wheels—as we traced the edges of America, making our way home . . . as we climbed the smudged dusk of West Virginia—the heart of America, indeed, the heart of Trump Country—it seemed, if only for that evening, as if the porch lights had been left on for us . . . and how amazing it was, truly, to watch our steady stream of red lights blink and brake as we led one another home.”
The connection women were feeling in shared fury was its own home, its own reward, its own community, and for some the pushback to their activism, the losses it incurred—money, domestic comforts, relationships built in other circumstances, based on earlier expectations for comportment—were not worth retreating for.
“I know five people who are getting divorced over it,” Dawn Penich-Thacker told me in the spring of 2018. “Because it has fundamentally changed how they see themselves as women.” Penich-Thacker was a thirty-eight-year-old college professor and former Army public affairs officer in Tempe, Arizona. She became energized in the wake of the Trump election to become more civically involved, led a petition to reverse a universal voucher program in Arizona, and assisted in the teachers’ strike there in 2018.
She had been a Democratic voter, but not much of an activist, and had joined Pantsuit Nation in the run-up to the election. After Clinton’s defeat, local members of Pantsuit Nation discussed taking the group offline and turning it into a live and in-person activist organization; they formed Stronger Together Arizona. In December of 2016, “we called a statewide meeting and eight hundred people showed up, mostly women,” Penich-Thacker recalled. “It was a surprise to the organizers; the museum we’d booked couldn’t even accommodate that many people.” During the meeting, attendees divided up according to policy interests and Penich-Thacker headed over to a group discussing education. She began making trips to the capitol to protest planned changes in state funding for schools. When the state legislature passed a bill to privatize education, a mission to expand vouchers spearheaded by Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Penich-Thacker and five other women, all mothers of varying ages, who had seen one another over and over again, gathered together and asked what they could do next. They realized the state permitted a right to referendum; if they collected enough signatures they could block a law.
“We had the blessing of ignorance,” said Penich-Thacker, noting that they had no idea how unlikely it would be that they could collect more than seventy-five thousand signatures in ninety days. “We literally did not have a penny, and we were six people. But we knew all these other pissed off people, the lion’s share of them women, ninety percent through Stronger Together, Facebook, and Indivisible.” They collected more than one hundred ten thousand signatures and successfully blocked the law. Sued by organizations with ties to DeVos and the Koch brothers, the group soldiered on, winning their court cases. “We kept education in the headlines and our network kept growing and growing,” she said. “We have about five thousand volunteers now.” When teachers went on strike in West Virginia and Oklahoma, the grassroots group that moved to strike there had been involved with Penich-Thacker’s volunteers, circulating the original petitions. In May, Arizona teachers won a 19 percent pay raise.
“I would be lying if I said I see an end to this,” Penich-Thacker told me she had said to her husband the night before our conversation. “It’s not going to be over in November. It’s not going to be over next year, because you don’t change things overnight.” When she and her five original coconspirators started working together, she said, she believed that it was just to fight and roll back the one bad law. “But it’s now clear to all of us for various reasons that there’s way more work to do than stopping one law.” She paused. “But also, I think that in many ways, we actually love this. It has consumed our lives.”
The marital, romantic, domestic tolls were real, she said. But her relationships with her fellow activists, she said, “are the deepest friendships I’ve ever had. These women in this movement are my battle buddies. I can’t imagine leaving this behind, even if it ravaged my life.” Penich-Thacker said that part of the intensity of the bond is living through the aftershocks of such personal transformation. “There is the bond over the shared political vision, the bond over doing work together: we set out to do something, we accomplished it, we feel good. But also the spiritual and emotional bond of saying ‘My partner is basically done,’ or ‘I’m struggling at work.’ We have each other to talk through that.”
“That is a moment of joy,” Gornick wrote in 1990, looking back at the 1970s, “when a sufficiently large number of people are galvanized by a social explanation of how their lives have taken shape, and are gathered together in the same place at the same time, speaking the same language, making the same analysis, meeting again and again in restaurants, lecture halls and apartments. . . . It is the joy of revolutionary politics, and it was ours. To be a feminist in New York City in the early 70s—bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Not an I-love-you in the world could touch it. There was no other place to be, except with each other. We lived then, all of us, inside the loose embrace of feminism. It was as though we’d been released from a collective lifetime of silence.”14
When women awaken in their thirties, Penich-Thacker told me, “I think some men are like, ‘This isn’t who you were when I met you.’ Well, it’s who I am now and for any future I can foresee.”
“I believe this is the beginning of a new wave of feminism,” Mosbacher told me. “And I hope by the time my nine-year-old daughter is in college, she’ll be reading books about this movement and how it changed the tide in this country.”
So many of the newly hatched activists, describing their previous ennui and isolation, and their subsequent rebirth in sisterhood, could indeed sound like the quivering start of a women’s movement, and bring to mind the first paragraph of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, about the “strange stirring,” and “sense of dissatisfaction [and] yearning” that “each suburban wife struggled with . . . alone.”
Stacey Abrams, then Georgia’s House Minority Leader, who in 2018 would win a primary to become the nation’s first black female gubernatorial nominee, told me that women “understand that this has to be the beginning of something. . . . Because they’ve seen, for the first time, the real consequences of inaction. So you have women who are waking up and seeing that they don’t have the luxury of going back to sleep.”
She acknowledged that “among African-American women there’s been a long consistency of action, which has moved our communities closer and closer to political power over time. What you’re seeing in the suburbs now is a version of that.”
For some, these repetitions of history were intolerable.
Aditi Juneja said that she had been working with newly active white women throughout the summer of 2017, and “so many of them don’t realize they’re not the first people to be activists and organizers.” When she speaks to them, she said, “I try to make an effort to say, ‘Well, Black Lives Matter dealt with this; Dreamers dealt with this.’ I try to reference these other people-of-color-led organizations, to let them know that they are not the first women to do this.”
Juneja had noticed that the white activists were very focused on rules. “They ask questions I’ve not ever heard from women-of-color organizations, like ‘Do we need permits to canvas?’ They are very hierarchy-oriented, very rules-oriented in a way I have not seen when organizing with people of color.” She suggested that one of the reasons the town-hall format had caught on in 2017 was that “white people, even white women, have faith that if they voice their opinions to their representatives, that they will be heard, that they will have influence, that they have a political voice to which officials will be responsive.” Black and brown people, Juneja said, know that they have representatives, and know how government works. “But there is no faith that politicians will see that there is any cost to disappointing black and brown people. But these women believe that you work through making calls and going to town halls because you assume that they will care what you have to say.”
There were other forms of structural bias underpinning some of the activism, including the fact that the vast majority of women giving up their lives to work for campaigns and around policy issues—often offering some of the most innovative ideas and fresh thinking about how to reach members of their own communities, all while balancing kids and full-time jobs—were doing so on a volunteer basis, while so many of the highly paid party consultants were men.
Jessica Morales noticed that the resistance groups that sprang up at the end of 2016 and throughout 2017, many of them led or organized by women, were operating at strategic odds with the better-remunerated “thought-leaders,” who, she said, “somehow kept coming back to: You know what we should do? Focus on white men.” To those activists who pushed back at this, Morales said, the message was clear: “ ‘You don’t understand the math; you’re not being technical; you’re so emotional about this election.’ ” To that, Morales herself said, “Literally go fuck yourselves.”
Morales believed that political professionals were dismissing the impact of resistance groups in part because they’re so often led by and comprised of women. “They’re just not seeing, not understanding, the impact of these organizations,” she said. “But there simply have not been organizations before this that could drive millions of calls in one day, just like that. And that’s what’s been happening.”
But the repetition of unequal history, hierarchical patterns, and internal marginalization cannot be the end of the story if angry women are to move forward. And so, the task for activists and candidates and participants in the political struggles of the Trump era is to find the places where there can be long-awaited growth.
“The question we have now in this resistance movement,” said Juneja, “is: Are white women going to use their power to defend their own interests or are they going to use it to transform systems so that we all have more power? If this movement is going to be sustainable, once you stand shoulder-to-shoulder with someone who’s not quite like you, can you see how connected your fights are? Do you realize: I have to show up for them? Because our liberation is intertwined. And that’s not a meme that I retweeted. That’s actually really a thing.”
That struggles were connected was not a new idea: it’s how the suffrage and abolition movements kicked off together; how suffrage bled into labor and settlement house movements, how civil rights and the New Left informed—in part through their sexist shortcomings and in part through their approach to structural inequality and liberation—the women who would drive the Second Wave.
The idea that anger at injustice is contagious, transferable to other contexts, has long been a principle of progress. As the education reporter Dana Goldstein wrote in the New York Times, in reference to the 2018 wave of teachers’ strikes, “the politics of teacher strikes shift over time, but in every generation, their leaders have forged ties to broader social movements.” Nineteenth-century Chicago Teachers Federation leader Margaret Haley, Goldstein noted, had been “inspired by Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists,” while “many of the union leaders who led the nation’s most famous . . . teacher strike, in New York City in 1968, were first active in the civil rights movement.” The seven-day Chicago teachers’ strike, Goldstein wrote, had come in the wake of Occupy Wall Street. And in 2018, West Virginia teachers had told her that they’d “come to activism through the 2017 Women’s March, the #metoo movement or Black Lives Matter,” a sentiment echoed by one West Virginia striker who told Times journalist Michelle Goldberg that the Women’s March, “as well as the explosion of local political organizing that followed it” had been a “catalyst” for her and other strikers.
Jessica Morales hoped that connections can be forged by those who’ve never made them before. She told a story of a woman who contacted her by direct message on Twitter, as she was trying to organize protesters on social media to stand against Trump’s travel ban. “She was this nice teacher in St. Louis who wrote me and said ‘I’ve never started a protest but I am willing to go to the airport and I can leave right now. I really want to do this; I feel passionate about this, but I don’t know how to protest.’ ”
Morales sent her a list of things to do: “get in your car; get friends, fit as many as you can; if you can, make signs; when you get there sing some songs and do some chants, here are examples; don’t leave; they are going to tell you that you have to leave, but don’t; make a Facebook event and I’ll promote it and that’s a protest.” The woman made the Facebook event. And hundreds of people went to the airport in St. Louis, as they did to airports all around the country, by the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands.
“I don’t think that woman probably knew a lot of immigrants,” said Morales, months later. “But it goes to show what we are learning, which is that morally, she knew that this was the wrong thing. And that is really good. We can move forward with that.”
By 2018, the rising generation of activists seemed to be absorbing these messages faster than their foremothers and forefathers ever had.
The March for Our Lives, held in March 2018 and organized by the high school students of Parkland, Florida, in the wake of the mass shooting at their school, was a model of interconnected anger. Officially a protest against gun violence and the NRA’s grip on American politics, its speakers seemed to see it as all part of one piece: “We need to arm our teachers with . . . the money they need to support their families and to support themselves,’ ” said one speaker, while eleven-year-old Naomi Wadler named the too-often forgotten names of African-American girls, “whose stories don’t make the front page of every newspaper.”
The protest felt effortlessly integrated in its concerns. Signs about gun violence acknowledged how deeply white patriarchy was embedded in the crisis of mass shootings, and read things like “White Men Are Terrifying (Statistically)” and “Your Guns Have More Rights Than My Vagina” and “We Live in a Country Where Guns Matter More Than Black Women’s Lives.” Common rapped, “I stand for peace, love, and women’s rights.” One young woman, nervous about speaking in front of millions, simply leaned over in the middle of her speech and vomited, while speakers wept, and their noses ran; it was astounding, moving to see the viscera of women’s passions on display, without apology or shame—its own testament to urgency and fury and the will to change.
That march recalled the explosive drive behind a 1917 statement written by Lavinia Dock, a suffragist, called “The Young Are At the Gates,” a phrase that would become the National Women’s Party banner in the suffrage fight.
“What is the potent spirit of youth?” Dock asked. “Is it not the spirit of revolt, of rebellion against senseless and useless and deadening things? Most of all, against injustice, which is of all stupid things the stupidest? Such thoughts come to one in looking over the field of the Suffrage campaign and watching the pickets at the White House and at the Capitol, where sit the men who complacently enjoy the rights they deny to the women at their gates . . . A fatal error—a losing fight. The old stiff minds must give way. The old selfish minds must go. Obstructive reactionaries must move on. The young are at the gates!”
In 2018, it was both the literally and the more metaphorically young—those whose willingness to give voice to rage was nascent—who were at the gates, challenging the men who complacently enjoy the rights they deny others.
As Ann White, the suburban Georgia sixty-four-year-old woman who’d been newly woken from her carapace of political apathy, told me, she was feeling the responsibility of taking a stand, not on her own behalf, but “for people of color, for those who cannot afford health insurance, who are lesbian, gay, and transgender, for immigrants. I’m a white older woman. There’s a lot of old white people that are on [the Republican] side right now. Well I’m an old white person and I can be vocal too.”
On the day of Trump’s first State of the Union address, Jessica Morales wrote to me, excited about a response event being put on by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, at which leaders including head of the Domestic Workers Alliance Ai-Jen Poo, Black Lives Matter’s Alicia Garza, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, Congresswomen Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal, Tarana Burke, and Mónica Ramirez of the National Farmworker Women’s Alliance, who’d stood in solidarity with the #metoo actresses, were coming together to respond to the president’s speech.
“It’s so powerful and kind of reminds me that the other side of the anger is the hope,” Morales wrote to me. “We wouldn’t be angry if we didn’t still believe that it could be better.”
And if it gets better in part because of women’s ability and willingness and need to feel their anger and to let it out into the world, then what we would be living through right now would not be a trend or a fad or a witch hunt, but an insurrection—a righteous revolution, led by angry women.