SEE JANE WIN

The Inspiring Story of the Women Changing American Politics

By Caitlin Moscatello

When waves of pink-hatted women engulfed the streets the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated — having beaten the first woman to be nominated by a major party despite his viral boasts of grabbing women by their genitals — the question was, Will all this anger turn into political energy? And will that energy last until the next elections, when women might have a chance to make resistance more than a hashtag?

Last November’s midterms answered definitively: Yes. A record number of women ran for office, a record number of women won congressional seats and female candidates flipping red seats helped power Democrats to a majority in the House. But what’s more, these women changed the way women ran for office. Even after the much-heralded Year of the Woman in 1992, women were still campaigning as if they were men, wearing pantsuits, hiding their kids and reciting their résumés to try to prove they had enough experience. The impossible standards — tough enough, but not too tough! — played out in Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, as she swung from hawk to doting grandmother only to be seen as inauthentic.

Caitlin Moscatello began reporting on women running in the 2018 midterm elections soon after the women’s marches of 2017. “See Jane Win” is her celebration of their triumph. “We know now that Clinton’s loss, however devastating, signaled a beginning rather than an end,” she writes. The book mostly follows four women, all Democrats, in their successful campaigns — one for Congress, the others for state legislatures. They reflect the diversity of Democrats who won: Three are millennials, one is black, one is a Dreamer and another is a former C.I.A. agent.

Moscatello, a freelance journalist, captures the big trends of the midterms, most important among them that women won because they ran contrary to the old advice. “They could win as themselves, embracing the parts of their identities that, in previous years, they would have likely been instructed to squash,” she writes. This satisfied voters’ cravings for authenticity and for something different, because in politics, one of the most obvious ways to be different is to not be a white guy.