The black mood of women feeling battered and bereft after Hillary Clinton’s loss was suddenly pierced on Thursday by an image that brought the tears all over again.

'We are witnessing the politics of humiliation' – Siri Hustvedt, Joyce Carol Oates and more on the US election Read more

It was a snap on Facebook taken on the hiking trails surrounding Chappaqua by Margot Gerster, a grieving Hillary supporter who was out walking with her little girls. Suddenly, she wrote, there was the sound of rustling. Then, appearing like a mirage in the clearing, was Hillary herself with Bill and their dogs, doing “exactly the same thing” as Gerster. The former president obliged Gerster by taking the photograph after she and Hillary had exchanged “a few sweet pleasantries” and hugged.

Nothing I have seen in the last 15 months of the campaign has resonated with me as much as the image that Gerster posted. It shows Hillary wearing what looks like no make-up, her hair uncoiffed, dressed in a baggy black parka, brown leggings and boots, and holding the dog leash twisted in her hand as her poodle mix snuffles among the carpet of leaves at her feet.

Only 24 hours after delivering the poised, dignified concession speech that masked her own heartbreak and tried to mend ours, it’s as if she had finally been returned to the world as she really is: an approachable woman in late middle age, hiking the trails with her dogs and her husband in the solitude of a beautiful fall morning, trying to cope with her pain. The sight of it, so comforting in the warmth of its ordinariness, was a visual rebuke to the distortion and the cruelty of the attacks she has endured.

“She was my champion. I miss her,” my 26-year-old daughter grieved last night. Every disappointed Democratic supporter has her own target for anger, it seems. My daughter’s is her fellow millennials, who didn’t come out in enough numbers to take Clinton to the White House. Clinton won this group by 54%, six points down from Obama in 2012. Always in a storm of umbrage about micro-aggressions, those crucial solipsistic stay-at-home millennials wound up enabling the macro-aggression of Donald Trump.

By contrast, Hillary has been the living embodiment of resistance to a torrent of intimidation that was not a construct, but horribly real. She faced an alt-right and Fox News smear campaign, followed by the coup de grace from the self-righteous FBI director who hasn’t yet had the decency to resign. She was called a crook, a felon, a liar who was too old, too past it, not cool enough, not authentic enough, not not not.

‘Hillary Clinton didn’t fail us. We failed her’ Read more

But there are iconic images of her courage we should never forget: her cool precision through 11 hours of congressional assault in the Benghazi hearings, her triumph in each presidential debate with crackling, well-prepared arguments, even though in one she was watched by a peanut gallery of her husband’s accusers disgracefully assembled by Trump to put her off her stride. The aim was to portray her as Bill’s enabler, which is the cruelest slander of all.

Here’s my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played in Hillary’s demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by-the-pussygate, when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump’s gross comments with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.

These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump’s unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he’d be the greatest job producer who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill’s.

Missing this pragmatic response by so many women was another mistake of Robbie Mook’s campaign data nerds. They computed that America’s women would all be as outraged as the ones they came home to at night. But pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum. They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, who participate in their remaindered pain. It is everywhere in the interviews. “My dad lost his business”, “My husband hasn’t been the same since his job at the factory went away”.

Even though, in the digital age, there was no bigger Trump lie than pretending manufacturing jobs will ever return, rust belt women and plenty of others saw him as the rough, tough boss who would bring the business back, and with it the manhood of the sad guy they love.

Trump’s reality show crassness was another blind spot with elite liberals covering the election and running Hillary’s campaign. At every moment when the Trump tribe streamed behind him on to the convention stage or the tarmac, America saw images of a Kardashian Camelot: a phalanx of GQ men and leggy, gorgeous women following the heavyset guy who had a private 757 plane and a gold tower with his name on it.

After the election of Donald Trump, we will not mourn. We will organize | Gloria Steinem Read more

While commentators sniggered, millions saw the all-American success they dreamed of. They rooted for the guy who had it but was despised by the elites for having it. There are more tired wives who want to be Melania sitting by the pool in designer sunglasses than there are women who want to pursue a PhD in earnest self-improvement. And there are more young women who see the smartness and modernity of Ivanka as the ultimate polished specimen of blonde branded content they want to buy.

In the entertainment era, even political candidates must be able to entertain. Which show would you rather watch? The Clintons round a table debating the right approach to solar energy, or the show about the rivalries between the Trump women who vie for the attention of a capricious patriarch? Four years is a long time.

Even though she won the popular vote by what is expected to be more than two million ballots, Hillary was not destined to shatter what she has called, with agonizing ruefulness, “that highest and hardest glass ceiling”. So what do we want, and what do we expect from a woman leader who can win?

The killer rap on Hillary was that she was never authentic. I would argue that, born into a generation that had to break down so many cultural walls, and wounded by a marriage that always required her to cover up pain, she had PTSD on behalf of us all by the time she ran for president. Yes, even the complacent young people, who believed until now that they were living in a post-gender world.

If you want to see “authentic” women leaders who can really entertain, you have to go now to the generation in their 40s who do not have the battle scars of the women who were “firsts”. It’s no good bringing up Angela Merkel. Germany is not the US. After the trauma of Hitler, theirs is an anti-charisma culture that actively distrusts pizzazz.

Some fabulous women won senatorial elections. They are the post-Hillary icons. Kamala Harris in California is a political knockout, as is Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who defeated an incumbent Republican senator. She’s a war veteran who lost both legs in Iraq. Watch for the rise of Ilhan Omar, the vibrant 34-year-old former refugee and practicing Muslim who became America’s first Somali-American female lawmaker. She beat out her Republican opponent to gain a seat in Minnesota’s House of Representatives.

If you want to go global, cross the channel and look at the two wildly popular women at the top of politics in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of the Scottish National Party, is as direct as she is fearless. After the US election result, she doubled down on her distaste for Trump and condemned “diplomatic silence in the face of attitudes of racism, sexism misogyny or intolerance of any kind”.

In opposition to her is another winner: Ruth Davidson, the kickboxing, working-class former territorial army member and open lesbian who, with her salty wit and irreverent debate style, has single-handedly made the once irrelevant Scottish Tory party a rising force. Maybe being around men in the army made her impervious to misogynist trolls. “Nice. Classy. Do you kiss your mother with that mouth? Bet she’s really proud of you,” she tweeted to one who told her that what she needed was a “good fuck”.

Hillary Clinton once believed anything possible. Now her tragedy is ours | Jill Abramson Read more

The new media narrative is that the Clinton era is now over and done. But perhaps this last chapter of Hillary’s life can be the most rewarding. On the job, she was always the first up and the last to go to bed. Heaven for her is poring over a briefing book with her hair tied back in a scrunchy, cracking down on the work. Imagine the agony she must have endured while being deprived of the thing she loves doing most for 15 long months. Instead, she was forced to take up the grandstanding and gladhanding that she’s never been good at.

She still has an important role to play, and she began it in her concession speech by telling the young girls who, like my daughter, adore her, never to give up.

Hillary, now you can be the woman you really are, the woman in the woods. More important to the rest of us, you can be the Queen Maker. A friend told me how, very late on election night, she crept into her 10-year-old daughter’s room as she always does, to tuck her in and remove her open laptop from the bed. She saw on the screen that her daughter had been in the middle of writing a letter before she fell asleep.

“Dear Madame President,” it began, “I want to tell you the things that are important to girls like me …”

The letter was unfinished.