Millennial women to take the lead

The women in five generations of my family, which stretches from one coast to the other, through red states and blue, reeled this week after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election.

They range from my 87-year-old great-aunt Hazel Krutsch in the red state of South Dakota to my 3-year-old granddaughter, Evie, in Colorado, who reacted to the news Wednesday morning much as the rest of us did.

Evie insisted that Hillary Clinton had won. The kids on the playground at her day care center were mesmerized this summer by the man she calls “DAH-muld Trump.” They saw him as a larger than life cartoon character, as round and orange and wild-haired as Ronald McDonald.

Trump didn’t win, Evie proclaimed on Tuesday, because he’s a bad guy who’s mean to people.

We hear you, Evie. We hear you.

My mother, my sisters, my daughters and my nieces voted the same way, which may help explain why Clinton won the popular vote. Our heroes were my great-aunt Hazel, and her accomplice, my 83-year-old mother. Hazel has trouble walking now because the bones in her feet break easily. She has diabetes. And leukemia. Recent eye surgery has left her blind.

And yet, Hazel was determined to vote in this election. So my mother spirited into the assisted living center a voter’s guide from a progressive women’s organization, and helped my aunt, who always votes Republican, check her ballot for Clinton.

Why? “Well, he’s an idiot,” my aunt pronounced. “To make the remarks he did was not presidential at all.”

Yet it turns out, white women of a certain age, Baby Boom and Greatest Generation alike, were not the heroines of this election.

Instead those unpredictable upstarts, millennial women, upstaged us. According to a story on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Clinton carried women ages 18 to 29 years old by 63 percent to 31 percent. African-American women supported her even more.

After the election, I phoned my favorite Rust Belt millennial woman, my niece, Lily Turner, who grew up in Michigan and now attends medical school in Madison, Wisconsin. I caught her as she was walking to join a Trump protest on Thursday night.

Lily felt devastated by the outcome of the election. She and her friends believe that hard work and ambition can take a woman anywhere, even to the Oval Office.

“It’s such a slap in the face that that didn’t happen,” she said.

Lily believes she lives in a bubble, in a community and a family that mirror her votes. But she knows misogyny surrounds her. She described walking past a bar with this sign: “Show your tits and get a free shot.”

“That stuff happens all the time,” she says. “I don’t think when people say these things that they’re actually joking.”

But already, she was plotting how to direct her anger. She’ll coordinate a free medical clinic next year, focus on the 2018 Senate races and maybe even run for office one day.

In Spokane, millennial women are having similar conversations. Mariah McKay of the Spokane chapter of the National Organization for Women said her group would be gathering soon. “We’re ready,” she said of her fellow millennials. “Yes, we’re caught off guard, but we have what it takes to respond.”

McKay fears we’re at risk of rapidly sliding into fascism. “I don’t take our institutions and our protections and our civil liberties for granted,” she said.

As a Baby Boomer, I don’t discount her fear, but I also remember some other bullying, narcissistic presidents, and recall that we survived them all.

NOW isn’t the only women’s organization that can be a channel for the energy of heartbroken Hillary supporters. But it’s a place to start. The next meeting is at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the downtown Spokane Public Library.

After the Madison protest wound down, Lily sent me a text. She was encouraged to see many young white males marching with her. Her favorite chant: “Hands too small to build a wall.”

My great-aunt Hazel may not have many more chances to cast her vote for a woman president. But the millennial women I know will create a new future. They won’t ever allow my aunt’s namesake, my 7-week-old granddaughter Hazel, to forget just how precious her vote will be.

Jamie Tobias Neely is an associate professor of journalism at Eastern Washington University. Her email address is jamietobiasneely@comcast.net