So, about the woman thing.
I cannot stop thinking, as Kamala Harris nears Election Day, that eight years ago I wrote an essay for a special section we had prepared for Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, celebrating the “amazing moment” when Americans elected their first female president.
Well, it lives on in the archives.
“Hillary Clinton is our next president. How do you think the founding mothers would feel if they heard the news?” I asked readers. Not surprising that I imagined she’d win — Clinton did get almost 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump, but we are not gonna whine about the Electoral College right now.
Not here, anyway. Feel free to do it with your friends on Tuesday as you wait for the returns, which, of course, may be returning for a while.
In retrospect, it seems as if Hillary was the perfect first-serious-female-presidential nominee. Big leap in a country that only had 104 women in its 535-person Congress. For quite a while in our history, the best chance for a woman to get elected to any serious office was by being married to her predecessor. Truly. The Los Angeles Times once did a study that showed that among the first-time House candidates between 1916 and 1993, 84 percent of the widows won — compared with 14 percent of the other women.
There’s very good reason for sane people to feel nervous about Tuesday. Back on the night of the Clinton-Trump contest, I left work to go for a walk while the votes were still being counted. I ran into female friends who were going off to hold a small election-watching party with their daughters. A night to remember — and it sure was. She lost, oh my Lord, to Donald Trump, the worst possible image of a male politician since — oh, I don’t know, Attila the Hun?
Not going to do any predicting today. I guess praying is OK if you want to take a minute.
One of the amazing things about this election — besides that this is only the second time a woman has ever been one of the two major nominees — is how relatively normal that part seems. “First woman” is maybe not so much the center of the story as the vast difference between the sexes when it comes to their voting plans. Women generally like Harris and men like Trump. And while there’s been an election gender gap for some time, this year it’s more like a gender chasm — the biggest division, maybe, since women first won the right to vote in 1920.