Jayne Dowle: Waking up to a nightmare for women of the US

Donald Trump, on course to become President of the United States of America? Against almost all of the poll predictions and every ounce of reason and common sense? Yes. And now, with all the votes in, it has happened.

What’s more, both the Senate and the House of Representatives are Republican too. It is bad enough being a woman in the UK and watching through our collective fingers. Imagine what it’s like being female in America right now. Trapped, cornered and scared.

Indeed, the first reaction I saw was from an old university friend on Facebook. Until yesterday, she was a marine biologist at Princeton. Now she is fleeing to Canada. This educated mother to two teenage daughters, peacenik and believer in a fair world, was holding off applying for her American citizenship until the outcome of the election.

Her mind is made up. She says she can’t live in a country with Trump in the White House. And in her view, neither can her daughters.

My friend is lucky. She has the wherewithal to get out. What of the millions of women in low-paid, low-status jobs (if they have work at all) who will now be prey to Trump’s reactionary neo-Republicanism? Where will they fit into his grand plan? The callous truth is that he probably just doesn’t care. And the huge percentage of women who have voted for him won’t even accept this yet.

The fact that a defining proportion of women simply didn’t opt for the female candidate is just one of the issues which has characterised this world-changing election. That Hillary Clinton represented all that was elite, distant and privileged about the political establishment was her own downfall. That she was an insider challenged by an outsider could never have been spun, however snappy her slogans or dedicated her supporters.

This leads us to the bigger question: can any of us live in a world with Trump in charge? Don’t tell me that it won’t affect us, living here. His election to power happens in a year in which extremist political views have come spewing out into our own public life with all the fervour of a series of angry volcanoes.

It is a terrible thing when the individuals this carries aloft hold views about women which should be buried far beneath the ground. The shocks prove seismic; just witness the bitter approbation in certain quarters towards our Prime Minister, Theresa May, and equally, to women in the moderate centre of the Labour Party.

Talk about the “glass ceiling”. This is what happens when the established political systems shatter and crack. It is the outcome of a disaffected and distrustful electorate. And it’s the terrible legacy of politicians so removed from the concerns of ordinary people that the influence they hold becomes used entirely for their own ends.

That’s why the world is full of shell-shocked liberals today. If you’re one, ask yourself what you really understand politics to be? As this election teaches us, it is not something which happens in a vacuum; it’s in front of us on the streets, in the police custody cells, at the food banks opening in every British town and city.

If you really want to turn the tide, you have to make your voice heard. If some injustice happens, complain to your MP. Hold them to account. In fact, stand for office, even at local level, yourself. Without decent, honourable people in politics, we end up with those who use power to attack, not defend.

Meanwhile, as I scrolled around social media desperately looking for some kind of context, what disturbed me most was the bile I witnessed coming from men triumphant on the back of Trump’s victory. Women were being dismissed as “pathetic”, “whiney”, “sad old feminists” and much, much worse.

Trump’s success has legitimised the sheer nastiness of the many who feel powerless in a post-industrial world. And guess who will be the punch-bags?

I’m not a marine biologist at Princeton. I never will be. However, I am a woman and the mother of a daughter. What kind of world will my 11-year-old, Lizzie, grow up into? Could 
it be one in which America, a country she loves, will become off-limits to all but those prepared to sanction sexual harassment and degradation of women? I worry what it will look like when Trump has been in power for a year, when the values of liberty, equality and democracy have been thoroughly trashed.

Interestingly, his first speech as President-elect struck a conciliatory tone. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer”, he announced, as he paraded on stage with his children. Time will tell whether all – or only half – of this promise comes to pass.