THE OTHER WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
On an evening in late January, amid fallout from President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily barring entry into the United States to nationals of seven predominantly Muslim countries, a foreign-born Muslim-American journalist, Asra Nomani, sits at a cafe table in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station while opponents of the ban trickle by on their way back from a protest. They tote handwritten signs that say, “Refugees welcome” and, in English, Spanish, and Arabic, “No matter where you’re from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor.”
Nomani’s reaction is not one of solidarity.
“So ridiculous,” she mutters when someone walks by with a “Ban on Bannon” sign, a gibe at Trump advisor and reputed “Muslim ban” architect Stephen Bannon. In fact, Nomani, 51, is fresh from defending the executive order, which she views as imperfect but necessary, on a Fox News talk show—for the second time that day. It is no longer an unaccustomed role for the former Wall Street Journal reporter who came out as a Trump voter in a Washington Post piece two days after the election. She says she decided to go public after watching television commentators analyze the Trump vote as a backlash from uneducated white men. “I just thought, ‘That doesn’t describe me. That doesn’t look like me, the kind of voter you’re talking about,’” she says.
The stereotypical Trump voter does not look like Nomani. He is not a Muslim, even a liberal one; he is not an immigrant (from India, in Nomani’s case); he is white; and he is probably a he. Nomani says the backlash she has received has focused on her gender as much as on her Muslim identity. “There’s this constant theme of ‘How can you support a misogynist if you’re for women’s rights?’ and not just a misogynist but a rapist, a sexual criminal,” she says. Many find it “unfathomable,” she adds, that any woman could get beyond the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted that his star status allowed him to grab women “by the pussy.”
Even before that P-bomb tape was released in October 2016, the presidential election was supposed to be an epic Battle of the Sexes. Hillary Clinton was poised to become the first female president of the United States, facing a rival who might have been scripted by a hack writer with no subtlety—a blustery tycoon notorious for insulting women and treating them like sex objects. After the tape and subsequent accusations of sexual abuse from at least a dozen women, Trump’s defeat seemed certain—primarily at the hands of female voters, with Republican women thought to be on the verge of mass defection.
History was made, but not in the way Clinton supporters had expected. The gender gap, far from turning into a yawning chasm, barely budged from previous elections. While only 42 percent of female voters backed Trump, he got 53 percent of the white female vote. In their darkest hour, many feminists not only saw Trump’s victory as stark evidence of America’s sexism (“It’s the misogyny, stupid!”) but berated white women as “self-loathing” gender traitors who chose white privilege over womanpower and cast their lot with white men rather than join a multiracial progressive coalition.
Later, there were more thoughtful attempts to understand the women who supported Trump—and who, as a post-election survey by PerryUndem Research/Communication confirms, defy easy categorization. A sizable minority are ultraconservatives strongly skeptical of the feminist revolution that has become a part of mainstream Western culture. Thirty-one percent agree at least somewhat that women should return to traditional roles, compared with 21 percent of all women in the survey; one in four believes that men generally make better political leaders, compared with 3 percent of Clinton voters. Still
