Suburban Women to Trump: No Votes to Grab Here!
Women have led the movement against Trump and are voting against him in record numbers. Here’s why.
This week, in the battleground state of Michigan, President Trump once again demonstrated his utter disconnect with suburban women, a group that has been rejecting him in unprecedented numbers. Ignoring the data that nearly a million women left the workforce last month, causing our nation’s first “female recession,” Trump made a shallow appeal to women voters that they should like him because he was “getting [their] husbands back to work.” This is two weeks after his thinly-veiled racist plea, “Suburban women, would you please like me? Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”
Even in formerly red Orange County, Trump’s rhetoric fails to resonate with suburban women. As a suburban woman working with thousands of other suburban women against Trump and his Administration’s devastating policies for the past four years, I feel compelled to issue an emphatic “no” to his sophomoric question.
Nearly four years ago, on December 7th, 2016, 21 women sat in my living room in south Orange County, drinking wine and discussing various stages of depression caused by the then-recent presidential election results. One woman couldn’t get her children ready for school, so the kids missed a couple of days of school. On that rare rainy southern California evening, we decided to continue meeting monthly as a form of therapy and support to deal with our collective grief. Comprised of women from all political persuasions, we also decided to form a nonpartisan political action committee, and we eventually settled upon the name Women for American Values and Ethics — WAVE.
While WAVE’s origins may have felt uniquely inspired, we now know that suburban women across the country experienced a similar call to action in the wake of the election. Not surprisingly, women are also the backbone of volunteers in political campaigns, as well as grassroots activists. For example, women make approximately 85% of the calls to congressional offices. (“The Trump resistance can be best described in one adjective: female,” The Guardian.)
Women do not have anywhere near equal representation at most levels of government. Without representation, suburban women have found alternative ways, through protests, marches, phone calls to members of Congress, and creative hashtags, to raise our voices. Given the surge of female activism, it is unsurprising that Merriam-Webster’s 2017 word of the year was feminism. Over the past four years, women have mobilized to protect the Affordable Care Act, defend DACA, support gun safety legislation, and protest the confirmation of two Supreme Court nominees who presumably will vote to dismantle Roe v. Wade. In Orange County, WAVE conducted dozens of pro bono immigration legal clinics to assist undocumented families prepare in case of deportation, and we volunteered more than 20,000 hours to the congressional campaigns that eventually turned Orange County blue, including the extraordinary Rep. Katie Porter. Women like Rep. Porter also have run for office in record numbers, largely in reaction to Trump’s election in 2016.
Why are women at the center of this wave of political activism? The answer may lie in psychologist Shelley E. Taylor’s theory of “tend and befriend.” According to Taylor, men and women have developed different responses to stress. While the “flight or fight” model may explain the typical male response to environmental stressors, women tend to use relationships to combat stress.
Under the Taylor model of women building relationships to deal with stress, we can understand how we came together with Trump’s election — millions of women were engulfed in emotions ranging from fear and concern, to despair and hopelessness. Our natural reaction was to reach out to one another to build bonds to combat this emotional strain. From the smallest townships to female members of Congress, women reaching out to each other quickly became female-centered political mobilization. For WAVE, that meant that our group grew to more than 2,400 activists in less than four years. And for millions of other suburban women across the country, they have also firmly made their stand against Trump, much to his apparent dismay.
The feminine voice has become our national conscience, advocating for the underserved, the underrepresented, and the marginalized. American women, including thousands of Orange County suburban women, have mobilized into a potent force aimed at reminding the country of what its values should be. I am proud to stand with millions of my sisters, and am inspired that our Nation as a whole is deeply affected by this new female activism that rejects Trumpism. So, no, Mr. President, suburban women don’t like you, and we won’t be voting for you.
