Peg Tyre is a journalist and author of The Trouble With Boys and The Good School. You can follow her @pegtyre.

So little of it seemed to matter to so many women in the voting booth: the vulgar language about sexual assault, the serial groping, the fat shaming, all the sharp, crystalline shards of misogyny that were spiked through Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign. On Nov. 8, Trump won over working-class white women handily but also scored big with white college-educated women. And if there was a Latino surge, it was for Trump. Twenty-eight percent of college-educated Latinas cast their vote for the GOP candidate.

Women didn’t just vote for Trump. They voted against Hillary Clinton. And for many, they weren’t voting against her as a woman. They were voting against her as an establishment figure, and her sex didn’t matter all that much. Try as she might to distance herself—and, in truth, she didn’t try all that hard—HRC could never be anything but a consummate Washington insider at a time when many, many voters, women as well as men, wanted change.


Still, there’s a lot of public breast-beating among women now. (For example: “Dear Fellow White Women: We F**ked This Up.”) It’s rather jarring to be part of a generation of female Americans who fought for women’s rights, and then to watch as your fellow female Americans vote the ultimate male chauvinist into the White House. And there have been some derogatory pieces by women on women.

But ignore the true lessons of the election 2016 at your peril.

Lesson One: There is No Women’s Vote

Yes, women make up half this country. Yes, we share certain life experiences unique to our gender. And yes, we spend a lot of time talking and writing about those experiences. But we don’t vote as a bloc. Never have. Doubt we ever will. If you learn your history from Facebook posts during Women’s History Month, you might not know that. Think on this: Even something as seemingly bedrock as universal suffrage was divisive among women. In 1911, the National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage had 350,000 female members in 25 states and defeated close to 40 local and state referendums aimed at getting women the vote (and that was back when the population of the U.S. was about a third of what it is now.) We all know sisterhood is personal. We’ve all experienced the powerful empathic connection that can exist between women. But it’s not political. Eve Ensler had it wrong when she called her play “The Vagina Monologues.” There is no monologue. We’re all singing a different song. The point of democracy is to reflect that.

Lesson Two: Power and Strength Look Different to Different People

Hillary’s indefatigable performance during the Benghazi hearings looked like power and strength to some. Trump’s outsize silhouette as he was introduced as the presidential nominee at the GOP convention looked like strength to others. People are susceptible to the aura that emanates from wealthy men—and that’s particularly true of women. That Trump, with his gilded this and gold-plated that, had extramarital entanglements surprised exactly no woman. (Perhaps we’ve only grown inured to this since the days when Donna Rice ruined Gary Hart’s presidential chances aboard the “Monkey Business.”)

And while it looked like pro-HRC fodder to some, for others, the outrage, coming from the presidential campaign for the wife of Bill Clinton, seemed manufactured. The groping and the overt sexism seemed to confirm that Trump was what he said he was—too wealthy to care what other people thought—and he didn’t even have to release his tax returns.

Lesson Three: There Are No Concerns That Affect All Women

This is a corollary of Lesson One. The Pantsuit Nation is not a movement but an archipelago of women in or on the fringes of wealthy communities up and down the East and West coasts. It doesn’t represent all women. Not even close.

In fact, the giddy notion that the concerns of coastal elites were a distillation of women’s concerns all over the country offended many of those women. Universal child care seems like a government intrusion to some. Readily available contraception may be a fact of life, but women, both churched and unchurched, remain deeply divided about abortion. Every time Chelsea took the stage with her mother or Lena Dunham issued an artless missive claiming that HRC was speaking for all women, the “Never Hillary” crowd seethed. Hillary may have “found her voice,” but she didn’t know how to speak in a way that could be heard outside of her own echo chamber. She needed to be a candidate for many different kinds of people and acknowledge that there were many different kinds of women with many points of view.

Lesson Four: The Federal Government Should Have Stayed Out of the Bathroom

Women tend to be big preservers and enforcers of the cultural status quo. When feminism entered into an accord with social justice warriors who complain about “cis-women” (in other words, women whose gender identity matches the sex on their birth certificate—the opposite of transgender women), remade sisterhood into siblinghood and campaigned for transgender bathrooms, it activated a not-too-far-below-the-surface longing for authoritarianism in many middle-of-the-road women. Gay marriage was a big leap forward. Feminism and the lesbian and gay rights movement have long found common ground—it's one of the many ways that women can be in this world. But in the past five years, the folks in the trans-movement insisted that being a woman was no longer a matter of biology and a lifetime of accrued experience but one of preference. Some feminists, well-represented by Elinor Burkett, balked. They were shouted down. And instead, younger feminists dropped the gendered pronouns and started calling each other “they.” But when women’s rights and trans rights become allied, a lot of people, many of whom were women, started to feel like cultural mores were changing too fast.

Lesson Five: Please Stop Talking and Listen, Lefty Feminists

When Trump talked about his rejection of political correctness, it may have been a coded call for racism for some. But for a lot of the former Barack Obama, now Trump, supporters, it was a reaction against what they see as the tyranny of the left. It was a rejection of the kind of discourse, first found on campuses and enforced by the Title IX compliance squads and increasingly accepted into progressive society at large, where political engagement takes the form of policing the language and expressions of others. This is a tricky point to raise right now, when social media is filled with the worst kind of hate, but in spaces that purport to have room for civil discourse—starting with college classrooms—one side cannot express its point of view and then claim that the other side is victimizing it by merely expressing its side.

The left muzzled the middle of the road and the right and mistook their silence for tacit agreement. Now the left is shocked to see that those women who said nothing not only disagreed, but wanted to exercise their right of free expression all along. Now they are.

Hear them roar.