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Jennifer Egan

Recently I met a man whose wife is a pilot for American Airlines. Occasionally, he told me, she flies with a female co-pilot. At those times, in certain parts of America, a male passenger will board the plane, see that the cockpit contains two women, and turn around and get off. He would rather not fly than travel in a plane in female hands.

Hillary had liabilities, of course – chief among them the fact that she seemed to be a known quantity. But it is hard to believe that a man with her track record and resources would have fallen to an opponent of such staggering inexperience and personal deficiency.

We’ve watched Hillary bear, with dignity, her husband’s public sexual infidelities, her bitter loss to President Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, and now her shocking defeat by Donald Trump. She is a consummate leader: wry, forbearing, mature. But I rage at the unfairness of what has happened, and dread the wreck that may follow.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.



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Siri Hustvedt

There is an old phrase often credited to the American demagogue Huey Long, but which was actually written by an obscure American professor: “When fascism comes to America, they will call it Americanism.” It has come, and it has come by public vote. I am convinced that we are witnessing the politics of humiliation. People who grew up with a powerful sense of white, masculine privilege (as well as others who sympathise with that image of power), people for whom that sense of superiority was always precarious and always needed protection, found in Donald Trump a figure for their own fantasy of the restoration of an era now gone.

The demographics in the US have changed. Growing numbers of Hispanic and Asian people, as well as a larger black middle class and more women in positions of influence, serve as an affront to the fantasy. “Those people” are held responsible for the white man’s fall from grace, just as the Jews were blamed in Germany. Obama, a highly educated, elegant, moderate and well spoken black man who was president for eight years, fed the racist fear of the Other. His very presence was an offence. From this point of view, electing a woman would add insult to injury.

The role misogyny played in this election should not be underestimated. Hillary Clinton lived squarely in the world of realpolitik. Those who voted for Trump are living in a state of vicarious narcissism. The man’s grandiosity, his sense of entitlement with impunity, his open cruelty toward women, minorities and disabled people were adopted by identification. Policy did not matter. Reality did not matter. He made humiliated, emasculated white men (and the women who identify with them) feel better about themselves. Now all of us will pay for a collective fantasy that belonged to only half of us.

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind is published by Sceptre in December.



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Joyce Carol Oates

It does not emerge that Hillary Clinton’s gender was a primary factor in her (narrow) defeat. It is not even clear that Clinton really “lost” this election on her policies or her personality; rather, the electorate was told repeatedly a systematic sequence of lies – that Clinton would “take away your guns” and allow in “terrorists”. So, it is not clear that any opponent, certainly including Bernie Sanders, would have done better pitted against a demagogue rival for whom truth is not an issue.

Yes, it is likely that misogyny played a negative role, to a degree – but if Clinton had been strongly in favour of guns and closed borders, these voters would have voted for her regardless of gender, as many of them would probably have voted for Sarah Palin, a rightwing favourite whose gender has never disadvantaged her.

Possibly, an authoritarian rightwing woman politician could win the presidency of the US, perhaps more readily than a leftwing, liberal Democrat.

The Man Without a Shadow is published by 4th Estate.



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Cynthia Bond

My daughter’s grandmother lives in Yorkshire. Her grandfather in France. I remember thinking as this nightmare of a candidacy began to take shape – as it grew arms and legs and started veering about the country drunkenly, smashing through fences of reason, crushing illusions of equality and basic human behaviour – that in the unlikely event that Clinton didn’t win, that we would move, either to London or Paris, or Canada or … I’d made calls for Clinton’s campaign, and taken my daughter to the voting booth as I punched the circle for Clinton. Then I watched the greatest election tragedy I have seen in my life: numb, in shock, weeping, feeling hopeless.

When I woke up on Wednesday morning and told my daughter what had happened, she began crying. She asked me if we were going to move. In that moment, I knew. I said, “We’re not going anywhere. This is our home.” When Obama won I felt a new pride in being an American, but now I feel like a patriot, because I know that I will not let anyone push me from my land. I won’t allow bigotry to send me running. I will stay and fight. I will stay and vote in four years. I will exercise my right of free speech. I thought of all of the men and women who had died for my right to vote. My grandfather was born in 1866, three years after the Emancipation Proclamation. I lived through the civil rights movement, was just a kid when the voting rights act was signed. Obama’s victories made me feel an electric, buoyant pride.

The musician Sara Bareilles wrote a song entitled “Seriously”, sung by Leslie Odom Jr, about what Obama’s inner thoughts must have been during the election. I’ve been repeating these lyrics to my daughter: “In a history plagued with incredible mistakes, still I pledge my allegiance to these United divided States.”

Ruby by Cynthia Bond was shortlisted for this year’s Baileys women’s prize for fiction.

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Katie Roiphe

The story of this sad and disturbing election is not just white men turning out for Trump, but women not turning out for Clinton. A certain failure of women to support the more obvious supporter of their rights, an ambivalence, even rage against her. Trump beat Clinton among white women; only 51% of white women with a college degree voted for Clinton.

The idea of Clinton being “unlikable” has always been a code, a way of papering over and personalising a deep distrust of ambitious, powerful women that extends much further than uneducated, disenfranchised men, which we expect, to women, which we don’t. I’ve often been surprised by the vitriol against Clinton I have heard in ultraliberal living rooms in Brooklyn, the irrational fury at her for some impossible to pin down crime. This feeling, even among educated liberal women, goes way beyond dislike into hate. Even those who are not chanting “Hillary for Prison” and “lock her up” are displaying just how deep our antipathy and suspicion toward ambitious women is. To view this election as, among other things, a sign of white male distrust for female power is to overlook the more disturbing and less understood story of female distrust for female power.

The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End is published by Virago.



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Curtis Sittenfeld

For many reasons, I am heartbroken about Hillary Clinton’s loss. I was at high school when I first heard about her, as the lawyer wife of presidential candidate Bill Clinton. I still remember reading about her in Time magazine and finding her impressive. But over the years, so much “scandal” seemed to attach itself to both Clintons that I didn’t actively admire them any more.

Then in 2006, I began writing a novel loosely based on the life of Laura Bush, and for research I read Hillary’s memoir Living History. Without a doubt, this book is in part propaganda – she was a senator when it was published in 2003. So I took it with a grain of salt, but it made me reflect for the first time on her as a person, on the chronology of her life, her public record, and her treatment by the media. The media is not monolithic, but there have been so many articles, even in publications I deeply respect, that ask some variation of “Why Does the Public Dislike Hillary?” Reading Living History made me reflect on the self-perpetuating aspect of these articles and on their sexism. Many times, I’ve heard people say there’s “just something” they don’t like about Clinton, but in my opinion, that something is her gender.

The criticism of Clinton that I’d find most amusing, if it weren’t so annoying, is when people say she’s “Machiavellian”. As far as I can tell, she’s spent her career trying to help kids, especially poor kids; trying to advance the cause of women’s equality; trying to improve America’s diplomatic relationship with other countries. Imagine how ruthless and power-hungry she must be, say, to want to make sure all children have health insurance.

I didn’t use much of what I read in Living History in my novel, although I couldn’t resist “borrowing” one detail. In 1997, Clinton visited Eritrea, where, as she described it, “As I stepped off the plane … women in brilliantly coloured dresses greeted me by throwing popcorn at me, a welcoming practice meant to protect visitors from evil and to assure good fortune.”

Hillary Clinton, thank you for being a pioneer and a role model. Thank you for persevering all these years even when you had to eat what I will euphemistically refer to as dirt. Thank you for your intelligence, dignity, tireless work ethic and toughness.

Today, I’m throwing popcorn at you and at all Americans.

Eligible is published by Borough.



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Maya Jasanoff

Americans’ reverence for “the founding fathers” points to the challenge history hands to a female presidential candidate. “I just don’t think she has a presidential look,” said Donald Trump of Hillary Clinton, because a president, presumably, has to look like a man. While the US has never had a female president, the UK has had queens for hundreds of years – a tradition of female rule that has perhaps made it easier for the UK to also have had two female prime ministers. It’s no accident that both those have been Conservative, more easily associated with “tradition” in all its forms. Though I do believe there will be a female president in my lifetime, I think she’s far more likely to be a Republican than a Democrat.

The “founding fathers” were also white and mostly rich, and the country they imagined marginalised more than just women. During and after the American revolution about one in 40 Americans fled the US for various British colonies, because they thought the king would protect them better than the new republic. The refugees were black, Indian and they included elite whites and poor immigrants too; pollsters might peg them today as likely Democratic voters. What the refugees saw in the founding fathers’ vision is a version of what I woke up to on Wednesday. I urge those Americans who imagine “a more perfect union” to stay put and help to build it.

• Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World is published by Vintage.