Wearing White for the Suffragettes

The other night, when Trump gave his speech to the joint session of Congress, a number of congresswomen wore all white and refused to clap. Presumably, this was an ode to the suffragettes and possibly even to Hillary Clinton who wore white during one of the 2016 debates and for her convention acceptance speech. I couldn't bring myself to listen to Trump's whole speech because his voice makes my eye twitch and my body fill with rage after a few minutes, but seeing the congresswomen in white reminded me of my favorite article from the campaign.

This is where I have to admit that on the last night of the DNC over the summer when Hillary accepted the nomination I actually shed a few tears. Granted, I had had several glasses of wine. I teared up. It took me by surprise how meaningful it was to me to have a woman make it that far on the road to being president. Even though she is far from a perfect person or candidate, the symbolism and struggle really meant something to me. I tried to explain it to my boyfriend at the time who was watching with me and thought I was being absolutely ridiculous, but there was no way to even begin explaining to him what I felt. Sympathy and empathy are not the same thing and no white man has ever known a different world than one where every President (save one) that they've ever saw or listened to or heard about has looked like them. They have no point of reference and cannot imagine how much it could mean to see living proof on a stage that an actual person of your gender could for the first time in this country's history get to lead it.

Anyways. After the DNC speech, an op-ed writer at the Washington Post wrote a parody of Hillary's speech that at the time I thought was the greatest thing ever written. Some feminists and/or Hillary supporters didn't like the sarcasm or something about it, but I really loved it for whatever reason. I read it like 5 times and laughed until I had tears in my eyes. The women in white at Trump's speech reminded me of that article from July so I found it again and the rereading in the wake of the election results was a very different experience than reading it back in July had been. All the jokes about a woman president sting now and make me feel hopeless. I often think about how ridiculously difficult it was for Hillary to get so far, how many years, how much money and effort and coordination and gradually moving up it took. And how little time in took Donald Trump. It's entirely feasible that another woman won't get as close as she did in my lifetime. Electing a woman to the highest office in America is like a category 5 hurricane happening in a cold water climate or a tornado hitting New York - only very precise and rare conditions could create such a phenomenon and once it happens it isn't likely to come around again for another hundred years or so. I really hope I'm wrong and I certainly want to work in whatever career I end up in to speed up the process of electing more women. But rereading the parody speech this time did not make me laugh. (Here's a link to it if you want to give it a read.)