The dream of female solidarity is, and always has been, a myth.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign tried to tap into that dream. She dressed in white, evoking the suffragists and the hope of shattering the highest glass ceiling. She played up issues like child care and equal pay that polling showed had cross-party, cross-gender support. Her ads pounded away at Donald J. Trump’s misogyny, hoping to lure women who would be reminded of all they had suffered in their own lives.

Fifty-three percent of white women voted for Mr. Trump.

The dream that women would vote for a woman overlooked the seductive pulls and interactions among party, class and racial identity that have long divided women as much as their gender was assumed to unite them.

“From the 19th century on, women saw themselves as different, cleaning up and perfecting the public sphere,” said Theda Skocpol, a professor of sociology and government at Harvard. “The early suffragists believed as soon as the vote came in, women would show the same sense of solidarity. But that didn’t prove to be true at all.”

The first rule of political scientists who study gender is that party identification is the surest predictor of how someone will vote. And at the end of the day, Republican women voted Republican.