Women across the country are mourning the passing of Elizabeth Warren’s hard-fought presidential campaign, the final blow to the potential of a woman in the White House for at least another four years. The media largely counted her out even before Super Tuesday, choosing to focus their analysis and attention on Bernie and Biden. Where had Warren gone? The press had ghosted her while she was still in the relationship. And then the voters did.
Like millions of women, I’m furious. About how she was treated. The standard to which she was held. The distance she had to travel to be recognized on par with men less qualified and smart. The damage and disappointment have led some women to compare our dashed hopes for her presidency to a death. This may not be entirely fair, but it’s very deeply and truly felt.
What has not been addressed, however, is how harmful Warren’s exit from the race is for men. In large part, it’s because men don’t realize what they’ve lost, or what they could have experienced with a Warren presidency. My late friend Elizabeth Wurtzel, another brilliant Elizabeth who shaped our consciousness on a host of issues, used to argue that our culture insists that women must understand men, but not the other way around. Men built and run the world; our institutions reflect the people and power that formed them. We can’t get by in a man’s world without navigating the patriarchal maze created to boost men’s progress and blunt ours. But men aren’t required or encouraged to know anything about women to succeed in the world. When men see us as marginal and irrelevant, their benighted perspective entails no injury to their chances at a career or a place in society.
Feminism isn’t supposed to be good for women at the expense of men. It’s not supposed to gouge out one eye to open the other. Both are required for vision panoramic and peripheral. The idea is not for women to gain power in order to subjugate those who’ve subjugated us. It’s to expand the enterprise. To make more room for engagement in and with the world for all genders. The world is not pie, and the slices are not limited; the more bakers we include, the more pie we can bake, the more people can sit at the table and eat.
The masculine crib-to-cubicle-to-coffin cycle of life that defines societal success is a narrow and often miserable existence for most. It demands conformity and creates tunnel vision to the point where we beg for blinders. And because this is the norm, other paths are either scuttled or never even considered, at least if you want to eat every day and keep a roof over your head. And every time a woman fails to get the big job in this country, male dominance is reinforced.
Imagine the ways that having a woman as president will figure into the socialization of boys in this country. It will help teach them how to regard girls and women, to see us as equals from the get-go. And if we normalize female power and female agency, boys won’t grow up afraid of these things, afraid of us. Instead, they’ll benefit enormously by getting the chance to dream unconstrained by the stunted expectations we place on them in everything from careers to parenting to humanity. More men will become stay-at-home-parents, artists, creators, visionaries. There is an irony in this: Because women have been fighting for equality for so long, we’ve had to think in new ways, invent new fronts in the fight. Men haven’t had to because paths have been laid out for them since birth. And for many boys and men, these paths are a form of diminishment, just as they are for us. When men must wield the broad brush of misogyny that current treatment of women requires, their humanity is also chipped away.
We know that men who do take the time to talk to women, to hear our perspectives, to read our books, watch our films, listen to our music, share our responsibilities, are not only more compassionate people, but more fully human. They engage more fully with their children. They find parts of themselves that society has demanded they deny. They become more creative, more sensitive, more decent. A portal in a previously inaccessible space opens for them and allows room for what they could become as well. When our beating hearts are not drowned out by the sound of us being beaten down, men start to hear their own heartbeats, too.
This is the art of re-imagination. This art is the provenance of women. Just look at Madonna. Look at RBG. Look at women who have several careers over the course of one lifetime. Elizabeth Warren has ceaselessly re-imagined herself, from public school teacher to attorney to tenured law professor at Harvard. From economics wizard to creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. From Senator from Massachusetts to presidential candidate. Men could learn that life is not just a ladder to be climbed, but a cycle of birth and rebirth; that the world is full of new opportunities, and that lockstep is a cancer.
Elizabeth Warren’s campaign embodied this message. While many women too easily wear men’s standards like oversized shirts, occasionally working to tailor them by bringing in the shoulders, the waist, or shortening the arms, Warren refused to wear men’s metaphorical clothes. She burned them instead. She reminded us that the shirts were manufactured in sweatshops for the benefit of the rich, and that we shouldn’t have wanted them in the first place. That we can no longer serve as intermediaries between the marginalized and the made. She asked us to imagine a world in which the same old problems are not solved by trying the same old, tired solutions. Her refreshing and thoughtful I-have-a-plan-for-that approach to policy, to governance, to everything, was textured, animated, necessary.
Hillary Clinton didn’t have the luxury of running to become the first female president. Instead, she ran for president and just happened to be female. She couldn’t afford to slam the door on her own foot before attempting to walk through it, so she eschewed questions on gender, wore power pants suits, stuck to policy and avoided the personal. Warren took a different approach, hoping that the country had made more room for a woman president following Clinton’s popular vote win in 2016, and three years of bumbling incompetence and raging cruelty under the Trump administration. Warren’s approach was distinctly female. After rallies, she’d stay behind for hours, hugging and listening to the concerns of her fellow citizens. She took selfies with every person who wanted one at every rally, even when it took four hours to do so. And to every little girl who approached her she’d say, “I’m running for president because that’s what girls do.” Then she’d wrap her pinky around theirs and ask them to promise to remember.
Warren’s campaign was predicated on compassion. She was rightly outraged that millions go without healthcare in the richest country in the world. That children don’t all have access to clean water. That for many, working two jobs still doesn’t make ends meet. That education is often inaccessible. When financial institutions were bailed out by the government using our tax dollars in the midst of the great recession, Warren wasn’t satisfied that our money had simply helped ultimately to stabilize the economy. Instead, like a nurturer who never forgets what we did for the country when it was down and out, she demanded financial institutions return the favor, and our money. She fought for it while being criticized as an “over-regulator,” a “schoolmarm” who couldn’t let the lecture go, a pain in the neck. When she told the story of her lower-middle class upbringing in Oklahoma, it was framed as pandering palaver from a woman who doesn’t get the complexities of power. Nonsense. She got it. She just decided to act as a salve rather than a hammer.
Following her exit from the race, a reporter asked her if sexism played a role in the downfall of her campaign, and she replied in her typically direct and succinct manner, “Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for every woman. If you say, ‘yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says ‘whiner.’ And if you say, ‘no, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, what planet do you live on?’”
To be fair, men alone did not hasten Warren’s withdrawal. They had our help. When we vote against women (as so many of us do, based on fears of electability and internalized misogyny), we don’t just harm ourselves, we also harm men. We harm everything and everyone. Votes by women against women because of anything other than policy disagreements or obvious incompetence reinforce for men the reality that female exclusion is female-sanctioned. When we decide that it’s too risky to vote for a woman because she’s a woman, we undermine our own arguments about equal access.
So yes. We are heartbroken. We are angry. But we are not mobilized. We are not helping our cause. And in turn, we are not showing men that misogyny belongs only to their gender. We share in it, we spread it, we marinate in it. And everyone suffers.