When historians look back on 2017 and try to describe the profound cultural upheaval that brought down Hollywood titans and powerful politicians, they'll no doubt struggle to capture the ache and fury of women who spent their lives silenced by abusive men and finally decided they'd had enough.
There's no tidy or sober way to describe the rot that women knew festered in our social, professional, and political institutions — a decay that once couldn't be named or fully exposed, until it was.
When the accounts are written by those with more hindsight than we currently have, one man should play the starring role, and it's not movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. It's another master showman, the one we call president of the United States.
The election of Donald Trump, who admitted to grabbing women's genitals against their will, to the nation's highest office confirmed what many women knew, and it triggered a visceral awakening for others. Despite being well into the 21st century, America still clings to the notion that women are vessels whose bodies can be owned by men for pleasure.
These bellwether moments are evidence of how women are increasingly embracing a pose of cultural and political defiance.
As it turns out, though, confronting that ugly reality helped produce a dramatic shift in attitudes about gender. This might seem obvious based on the blockbuster success of the film Wonder Woman, or the unapologetic reckoning of the #MeToo movement, whose "silence breakers" were named "Person of the Year" by Time. It was clear in the defeat of accused pedophile and Trump-backed Senate candidate Roy Moore, whose retrograde policy views and racially divisive beliefs led to critical voter turnout among black women in Alabama.
These bellwether moments are evidence of how women are increasingly embracing a pose of cultural and political defiance. They also collectively suggest women show no signs of tempering their outrage in 2018, a year that will bring Congressional midterm elections, the possible end to Robert Mueller's investigation of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, and new clashes over issues like immigration, health care, and race. That's not to mention any unforeseeable conflict sparked by Donald Trump's penchant for publicly demeaning women who oppose him.
If the newfound enlightenment when it comes to gender equality and politics seems like a passing fad or a liberal fever dream, that shift is showing up in a way we can quantify: public opinion.
Tresa Undem, partner in the polling firm PerryUndem, has spent the past 17 years asking people about their views, and she's used to tracking the slow pendulum of change swing toward a new consensus. But in the past year, Undem has witnessed an intriguing phenomenon.
Tweet may have been deleted
When she polled 1,058 voters from across the nation and political spectrum in late November, she discovered a surprising percentage of people altered their views in the past year. A new majority of voters thinks the country would be better off with more women in office, a figure that jumped from 52 percent to 69 percent between 2016 and 2017. Those who said sexism is a "big" problem in American society increased from 30 percent to 44 percent during the same time period.
People aren't keeping these feelings private, either. Seven in 10 respondents in Undem's poll said they've talked to a friend or family member about issues related to gender equality. That marks a major increase from last year, when just 49 percent said they'd had similar conversations.
"I don’t know that I’ve seen these kinds of differences in my career in polling."
We can arguably trace this transformation partly back to Donald Trump, says Undem. When she analyzed the results of her nationally representative December 2016 poll of 1,302 adults, she found that the number one predictor of engaging in activism after the presidential election was feeling upset by Trump's behavior on the Access Hollywood tape.
Undem believes that Hillary Clinton's loss, despite the tape's existence, played a significant role in the increased percentage of people who believe the country would be better off with more women in office.
While these are just two polls, Undem is struck by the swift evolution in participants' opinions.
"I don’t know that I’ve seen these kinds of differences in my career in polling," she says. "In my view, what’s happening right now is a result of a lot of things, but one of the biggest things was the Access Hollywood tape."
Neera Tanden, an informal adviser to Clinton's presidential campaign and president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, knows what Undem means.
In April, Tanden tweeted, "I don't think the country has understood how psychologically wounding it was to so many women that Trump won after the Access Hollywood tape." The observation has remained her pinned tweet for months. It's received 33,000 likes and 16,000 retweets.
Tweet may have been deleted
"If you look at this year, the beginning, middle, and end of the year, it's fueled by what I hear as a primal scream for women’s equality," Tanden says.
Indeed, people demonstrated by the millions in January's Women's March. Women were prominent voices in protests against Trump's travel ban, the decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and Congress' attempt to repeal Obamacare, among other political battles. They dressed up as characters from The Handmaid's Tale to protest restrictions on reproductive rights, and they confronted racism on the left in tense exchanges on the private Facebook group Pantsuit Nation.
"If you look at this year, it's fueled by what I hear as a primal scream for women’s equality."
Women ran for office in unprecedented numbers and notched historic victories. Charlotte, North Carolina, elected its first black female mayor in the city's history. A transgender woman unseated a conservative Virginia lawmaker who authored a "bathroom bill" that would've required people to use the restroom that matched the gender listed on their birth certificates.
And when the media's attention wasn't trained on the liberal women who form the backbone of the resistance movement, Trump's own tweets reminded the public why they oppose him in the first place. Whether he was harassing and insulting women like Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fl.), or Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Trump frequently found ways to illustrate his taste for uniquely berating women who defy his authority.
It's a wonder, then, that national news organizations barely revisited the dozens of accusations of sexual harassment and assault against Trump for the first half of the year, even as they helped drive women's opposition to Trump's agenda. (The White House maintains all of the women are lying.)
"This man did this terrible thing, he wins, and the media treated it like everything got wiped out by the election," Tanden says. "But women said: 'I didn't forget what he did.'"
Tanden believes that Democratic elected officials, including a star like Sen. Al Franken, should also be held accountable for sexual misconduct.
When people warn Tanden about the possibility of a backlash against the #MeToo movement, she offers a different take: "#MeToo, in my view, is a backlash to Donald Trump. I don’t think it’s an accident that we had a gigantic discussion of sexual harassment and assault and what it means for women reaching their potential. It's a cultural response to misogyny taking over the White House."
"It's a cultural response to misogyny taking over the White House."
The fact that Republican leaders haven't taken women's opposition to Trump seriously worries Evan Siegfried, a Republican strategist and author of GOP GPS: How to Find the Millennials and Urban Voters the Republican Party Needs to Survive.
In January, Siegfried wrote a New York Times op-ed imploring his party's leadership to learn from participants in the Women's March. That advice, he says, has gone unheeded and may help spell the party's doom in the 2018 midterm elections.
Siegfried finds that particularly troubling since the GOP has long faced criticism that it wages a "war on women," and Trump isn't helping the party's case. Instead, Siegfried describes Trump as "steroids" that are making the symptoms of that problem far worse.
"Women are disgusted with the Republican party for a myriad of reasons," he says, noting the impact of the Access Hollywood tape and the #MeToo movement. "At the same time, among Democrats and progressives, organizations are taking anger, the most abundant renewable energy source invented in the world, and harnessing it and making it productive."
Tweet may have been deleted
That poses a real threat to the GOP's grip on Congressional power. If women who oppose Trump help drive Republicans from office in the midterm elections, it could put the House of Representatives in the control of Democrats, who'd be willing to investigate the assault allegations against the president and have indicated they're considering the possibility of impeaching him.
Neither Undem nor Tanden see an imminent end to the current cultural and political moment. Undem continues to be surprised by sentiments shared in focus groups, including the feeling that people are still energized to fight Trump's agenda. Tanden believes that women, including those who are entering politics and activism for the first time, are only just getting started.
"There are backlashes and forward movements, but my basic view is Donald Trump is giving rise to a new wave of feminism that will transform the country," Tanden says. "It will be women that defeat that him."
