Hillary Clinton’s loss in the presidential election to America’s most famous sexist instantly plunged the feminist cause into crisis. In the Nation, Joan Walsh wrote, “I apologize for thinking that the country was ready to elect a woman president.” New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister stated, “The heartbreak of this election for Clinton supporters is … the loss of the idea that this country was so very close to being better, more inclusive, more just, and more representative.” Amanda Marcotte called it “the misogyny apocalypse.” The glass ceiling, many writers lamented, remained thick and unbroken.

There’s no denying that Donald Trump’s victory was a setback for women’s rights. It certainly doesn’t speak well of a country that it elected a man who has repeatedly humiliated women in public and has been accused multiple times of harassment and assault. But that doesn’t mean that the election was a referendum on whether women could be trusted to hold power, or that women as a whole were rejected. In fact, while sexism was clearly a major factor in the election, it was only a referendum on one woman, who practiced one type of feminist politics. It marked the end of Clinton’s brand of feminism—call it trickle-down feminism—and the introduction, hopefully, of a more egalitarian feminist politics to the mainstream.

Clinton has been the face of second-wave feminism for nearly her entire career. She is a Baby Boomer who came up through the American university system and fought her way—as a lawyer, senator, and secretary of state—to the top of one male-dominated career after another. Clinton has embodied, as Namara Smith put it in an essay in n+1, the ideal of “women’s liberation from traditional forms of authority through participation in the paid workforce.” She is a pathbreaker whose accomplishments and accolades were supposed to clear the way for others to follow.

The problem with this kind of feminism is that it focused too strongly on putting women in positions of power—on elevating them to the elite, which would then redound to the benefit of all women down the economic ladder. Every female law firm partner, every woman CEO, was a victory for the cause. Ironically, in these anti-elitist times, Clinton was damned for following the very steps that were deemed necessary for a woman to put herself in a position to run for president, as Traister noted in her essay. But in its gaudiest form, this animating principle only made Clinton seem out of touch on the campaign trail: a millionaire hanging out with other rich and famous women like Lena Dunham and Katy Perry. It was not entirely clear whether Clinton breaking the glass ceiling would break it for all of us. Even her campaign slogan—I’m With Her—suggested it was all about the triumph of one person.



On a macro level, the dividends of market-based, lean-in feminism have not been distributed equally. Take, for example, the narrowing of the wage gap between women and men over the last few decades. From 1980 to 2015, white women reduced the wage gap by 22 cents, earning 82 cents in 2015 for every dollar earned by a white man. However, black women only narrowed the gap by 9 cents (to 65 cents) and Hispanic women by a mere 5 cents (to 58 cents). Too often, shattering glass ceilings has only offered shards to the women down below.