In the weeks leading up to the election, a media and pollster chorus went something like this: Women will save us from Donald Trump.

The Access Hollywood tape of Trump telling Billy Bush he grabs women "by the pussy"; the 15 women who came forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault; Trump calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during the third debate. All this, after 18 months of demeaning remarks about women and a host of minority groups along with an apparent lifetime of misogynistic behavior, led to an assumption that women would go to the polls in droves to squash the man who belittles them.

Feminists felt further buttressed by the fact that defeating Trump would also mean shattering the ultimate glass ceiling. Women who had read Lean In and converge on Facebook in groups like Pantsuit Nation, now 3.6 million members strong, were confident that determined American women would triumph over angry white men, upon whom Trump’s candidacy seemed to hinge.

Then came D-day, and the crumbling of these, and many other, pre-election falsehoods. According to initial exit polls, Trump got 53 percent of white women’s votes; Clinton got 45 percent. Women of color’s strong support of Clinton — 94 percent of black women voted for her along with 68 percent of Latina women — tipped the women's vote in her favor, with a 12-point advantage among all female voters, but it wasn't enough to win her the election. It may be that by the time all votes are counted, fewer women voted for Clinton than Obama four years ago.

It was not illogical to believe that, in 2016, the vast majority of female voters would choose a woman over a misogynist. Feminism has had a seismic comeback in recent years. Thanks to people like Beyoncé, who stumped for Clinton alongside her husband Jay Z, it’s cool to be a feminist. Issues that directly affect women, such as paid family leave and equal pay for equal work, were election cycle talking points for both parties. And Clinton’s place on that DNC stage in July as history's first female presidential nominee from a major party — and the fact that she won the popular vote — was a direct result of generations of successful feminist organizing.

But believing that this would translate into victory for Hillary Clinton was where we went wrong. Believing that feminism’s rise was being felt with equal passion across all earning brackets was partially responsible for the myth of the inevitable Clinton victory. The reality is that for legions of women, other parts of their identity rank higher than their gender. The election underscored that our “fourth wave” feminist movement remains, to many women, a privileged space. The current wave, which grapples with the intersection of gender and race, equal pay for equal work, a sexual harassment-free workplace, and sexual assault-free college campuses, is an improvement on earlier waves, which centered on securing rights for white women. But the Clinton brand of feminism — the pantsuit-wearer who leans in for a raise or for whom boardroom gender parity is of paramount importance — is alienating to large swaths of the population for whom those issues aren’t even on the table. Many of these women, for example, earn just as much as the men around them, because their jobs pay the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

The women of color in this group voted for Clinton anyway. But turnout among Democrats was lower in 2016 than it was in 2012. Given that the Democrats are responsible for mass incarceration, welfare reform that hurt many low-income women, and watered-down immigration rights, lack of enthusiasm for the party and its presidential candidate is understandable. Feminists were not significant allies in these battles, and so Clinton’s feminist cred seemed to have done little to heighten engagement from this community.

It was white women, especially the working class, who turned away from Clinton, even though Clinton’s policies arguably would have been more beneficial to the working class than Trump's. Some of it was probably straightforward: It was the woman who worked at the coal plants shut down by the EPA, who would rather take her chance on the guy who says he’ll punish the regulators and bring back her job. Or the woman whose husband was laid off from factory jobs. (Sixty-two percent of women without a college degree voted for Trump.)

But as Joan C, Williams, a law professor at University of California, Hastings, writes in her insightful analysis of the election, “one little-known element of [the class culture] gap is that the white working class resents professionals but admires the rich.” Hillary Clinton, she says, “epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite.” Support for Trump, she argues, wasn’t based on a rational calculation — it was rooted in a culture in which a straight-talking successful businessman is more appealing than someone like Clinton.

Many of us in blue counties, who could hardly fathom that feminism would not carry Clinton to victory, are still scratching our heads, blind to the movement's most severe failings. That may be because we have only a surface understanding the lives of red state voters who pushed Trump over the finish line. The media is partly to blame for this. Coverage focused on Trump’s most vocal and volatile supporters who spew hate-filled remarks on a dime, instead of the tens of millions who were not propelled by Trump’s bigotry and sexism, but were not willing to reject it either. While interviews with the people wearing “Trump that B*tch” T-shirts make for entertaining Daily Show skits, they cease to be instructive. Rare reporting — such as BuzzFeed’s look at the mild-mannered Ivanka voter or the work of Pro Publica’s Alec MacGillis, who routinely talked to Trump supporters calmly, in their homes — went beyond the monotonous, sensationalist write-ups of Trump rallies. Some major publications, including the New York Times, have since admitted they failed to get at the roots of the anti-establishment sentiment churning in our nation’s rural areas — evidenced not only in Trump’s victory but also in Bernie Sanders's unexpected popularity.

While we in the media self-reflect, feminists should take stock too. My suggestion: humility and solidarity. Check out what history teaches us about life under an autocrat and then roll up your sleeves. Now is the time to be an ally to anyone more vulnerable than you, by supporting — not leading — resistance movements. We who are white, cis-gender, U.S. citizens, or straight are in a position to help those in danger under a Trump administration. We should not lose sight of traditional feminist issues such as access to abortion, but it’s not the moment to be myopic. If Republicans ramp up deportations or further curtail voting rights, protest. If Trump establishes a Muslim immigrant registry, denounce it. When his supporters intimidate or attack people based on their race or dress or gender identity, do something. Then donate to organizations that are doing more than you can.

White feminists have an extra job. We should be the ones to reach out to other white women. We ought to learn what’s going on in the life of a woman that leads her to vote for a man who brags about sexual assault and figure out how to organize on the issues that matter to her. We must also confront our white sisters on their racism. Every vote for Trump was an acceptance of bigotry. As Samantha Bee said in her post-election rage, directed at white folks: “If Muslims have to take responsibility for every member of their community, so do we.” It’s not the responsibility of people of color to help white people unlearn racism — it’s ours. Feminists should be leaders in this effort.

Perhaps, over time, more women of all classes and backgrounds will feel like mainstream feminism is theirs, and not just the domain of those in pantsuits. At the very least, by engaging, we won’t be as shocked by the limitations of our movement as we were last Tuesday.

That night, my brother, who’s also a journalist, was in Cuba. While I bit my nails in my living room, he was on the streets of Havana, asking for predictions. Cubans have very little access to internet or American TV, and no one he spoke with was watching the real numbers roll in, sealing Democrats' fate. Yet most people he interviewed called it. “Trump will win,” he was told again and again, “because he reaches the common man. He sounds more like the average American.”

Everyone here — the data whiz kids, the pollsters, the media, and feminists — banked on women making a different calculation when they stepped into the ballot box. We were wrong.

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