"Am I right . . . .?"

"Am I right to think the "Women's vote" let us down?" a friend asked me in an email.

"Certainly white women did, although to a slightly less extent than they let down Hillary Clinton in 2016," I replied.

Am I sad about that fact, I wondered after I sent her my reply?

Yes!

Am I surprised? No!

Many years ago, I lived in Oklahoma City. I arrived with my then husband and three children, a 4-year old and 3-year-old twins, in 1973, the year after the U.S. House of Representative approved the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the state legislatures for ratification. Also the year after the anti-feminist, anti-Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) lawyer Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016), founded the Eagle Forum, a right-wing conservative organization, that is still in existence.

The ERA that simply states: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

Schlafly and her female followers mobilized to prevent the requisite number of states from ratifying the ERA. They were active in Oklahoma: I remember being at a conference that was stormed by a group of vociferous, and aggressive Eagle Forum women wearing aprons and carrying loaves of "home-made bread," their symbol of women's proper/preferred role. That was my first experience with what I dubbed—anti-women-women. (The Oklahoma legislature voted not to ratify in ERA in 1975.)

In 1911, Josephine Jewell Dodge founded the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, a well funded and effective organization.

In 1917, another Josephine—Josephine Anderson Pearson, the president of the Tennessee Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage spearheaded an aggressive anti-ratification campaign determined to block ratification by the Tennessee legislators. (They finally voted to ratify,)

That same year, suffragist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Anti-Suffragist," a poem with six stanza in which she describes six types of anti-suffragists.

The first line identifies each type:

Fashionable women in luxurious homes . . .

Successful women who won their way . . .

.Religious women of the feebler sort . . . .

Ignorant women—college-bred sometimes . . .

And selfish women—pigs in petticoats . . .

And, more’s the pity, some good women too . . .

Each stanza ends with the line:These tell us they have all the rights they want.

Gilman's types are surely over-generalizations. My point is not to defame contemporary women who voted for Trump but to put forth why I am not surprised—depending on your point of view the "women's vote" can "let us down," as it did for many of us in 2024. That said remember that it was men's vote that scored the popular vote and the electoral college for Trump.

Note: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's legacy got distilled down to just being the author of

The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), her short story of a woman suffering from post-partum depression and the "rest cure," the prescribed cure at the time.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was so much more than that—a sociologist, lecturer, writer of groundbreaking nonfiction books, including Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1896) and The Man-Made World, Our Androcentric Culture (1911).