Culinary workers voted to unionize in a Las Vegas Trump hotel and his company has fought it at every step. But there are two slots open on the National Labor Relations Board that he can fill, with another appointment opening up a year from now. Hospitality-industry jobs are dominated by women — what does a Trump presidency mean for them?

Actually, there’s a little uncertainty here, right? He’s now for the white working class. Which, of course, is only part of the whole working class. Whether he has any idea how many of those people are women, we don’t know.

It seems he dog-whistled the white working class about immigrants or “those people” taking your jobs—rather than actually addressing working-class needs and support.

Of course. It’s complete opportunism. He saw that he was getting some attention and support from blue-collar white people, and he just doubled down on that. Now, whether he realizes some of them are women…?

Once Trump finalizes his cabinet picks and makes the National Labor Relations Board and other appointments, can the labor and women’s movements regroup and develop a stance, a posture?

They have a stance. There’s no need for a new stance. We’ve got it. Whether the labor movement can develop some spine and some initiative, I don’t know. The women’s movement — I don’t even know what I would refer to as the women’s movement right now. Ten, 15 years ago I would say look at what NOW [National Organization for Women] is doing, but you know, I haven’t heard a peep from NOW.

What would you imagine the next steps might be?

Obviously our first priority has to be defending those people who are most vulnerable to attack. Which are immigrants and people who look like immigrants, or who are speaking a foreign language. They’re defenseless — we’ve got to protect them.

And if I may say something from a perspective of old age, and having been in the second-wave feminist movement pretty much from the start: We started in the ‘70s in an absolutely hostile environment. It wasn’t 100 percent hostile — we had, you know, the antiwar movement and things like that. But the masculine culture was all against us. It used to be that feminism was defined by [some] as a disorder related to penis envy.

Of course!

I have never envied the penis.

We started in a very hostile atmosphere, and I think we have to get in touch with that. We have come a long way. We can do things again. I’m looking a lot to younger people—I mean really young. My 14-year-old granddaughter went to her first demonstration led by young people—there were 6,000 people there. We’re still feeling our way forward.