On paper, at least, 2016 looked to be a banner year for feminism. As the GOP primary field succumbed to Donald Trump’s insurgency, Hillary Clinton’s march to the White House seemed all but inevitable. Discussions about rape on college campuses, workplace harassment, pay disparity, and other feminist issues finally broke through to the mainstream. A-list celebrities began embracing the word feminism—a significant shift after decades when feminists were little more than pop-culture punch lines, derided for their humorlessness, earnestness, and ideological single-mindedness. Seemingly overnight, feminism had become fashionable. Pop stars used the word to sell records, guys used it to get laid, models used it to push product, writers used it to advance their brand.

Like all fashions, it passed. And like all fashions, it turned out to be a frivolous, cosmetic change, completely divorced from the actual lived experience of most women. Instead of the first female president, we now have an accused sexual predator in the highest office in the land and a proud misogynist homophobe as his deputy and de facto head of domestic policy. Even more startling, in a way, are the exit polls showing that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump—and that many of those same women consider themselves feminists.

How did we get to this point? How could a majority of white women choose Trump over the first woman to serve as the presidential standard-bearer for a major political party—and call themselves feminists while doing so?

Now that we appear poised to lose much of the ground women have gained over the last 40 years, many feminists have taken a cue from Trump and gone on an aggrieved blaming binge of their own, chalking up the colossal political failures before us to the entrenched misogyny of America’s voters. But that, too, is a fashionable distraction. The fault here lies with mainstream feminism itself.

Over the past several decades, the gap between mainstream feminists and the daily realities of most American women has grown wider and deeper. Feminism, as our most prominent, mediagenic feminists practice it, does little to address the struggles of poor women, rural women, working women—women, in short, who live outside the sophisticated urban bubbles that mainstream feminists inhabit.