And yet society at large tends to make an assumption about white women voters—that because they are oppressed by white men and the patriarchy they will stand with progressive social movements and rally in solidarity with the underrepresented. This lingering expectation has roots in the suffragettes of the 1910s and ’20s, who argued, according to McRae, “that women would bring a more moral, domestic, maternal, progressive outlook to the political arena, that they would clean up politics” and be an “inherently good” influence.

This presumption continues—that because “women want better schools for their children, that means they want them for everybody’s children,” McRae offers as an example, “but that is not the case.”

Look no further than all of the ink spilled and time spent investing hope in Ivanka Trump to be some sort of progressive heroine in her father’s White House, or reporters calling on Sarah Huckabee Sanders to be any more disgusted with the Trump administration’s family separations at the border because she’s a mother—never mind that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, among many other men in their ranks, are parents themselves. As McRae points out: No one looks at a family-oriented bill and says, “Oh, my God, how could fathers vote against this?”

Emotionally, though perhaps irrationally, we want to believe in white women’s better angels. We want to believe that certain issues should be universal to all women (and, really, all humans): a right to health care, to choose what’s best for our bodies, that our children should be safe at school. But, clearly, it’s not so simple. Even as we rightfully mourn their voting habits, we may be misguided to hold white women voters to a higher standard. Time and time again some of them have proven that they identify more strongly as Southerners or Christians or GOP members than they do as women—and they vote accordingly, even if and when that vote negatively impacts not only them (voting against equal pay) and their families (paid leave, affordable child care), but women in poverty, women of color, and queer women.

Whether we like or agree with them or not, “women’s political identities are complicated,” McRae says, “and they aren’t essentially tied to a particular expression of what we imagine for females.”