A look at how Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and American voters invoked ideas of gender and race in the fiercely contested 2016 US presidential election

“An engaging, beautifully synthesized page-turner” (Slate). The #1 New York Times bestseller and Time #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most personal memoir yet, about the 2016 presidential election. In this “candid and blackly funny” (The New York Times) memoir, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. She takes us inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. “At her most emotionally raw” (People), Hillary describes what it was like to run against Donald Trump, the mistakes she made, how she has coped with a shocking and devastating loss, and how she found the strength to pick herself back up afterward. She tells readers what it took to get back on her feet—the rituals, relationships, and reading that got her through, and what the experience has taught her about life. In this “feminist manifesto” (The New York Times), she speaks to the challenges of being a strong woman in the public eye, the criticism over her voice, age, and appearance, and the double standard confronting women in politics. Offering a “bracing... guide to our political arena” (The Washington Post), What Happened lays out how the 2016 election was marked by an unprecedented assault on our democracy by a foreign adversary. By analyzing the evidence and connecting the dots, Hillary shows just how dangerous the forces are that shaped the outcome, and why Americans need to understand them to protect our values and our democracy in the future. The election of 2016 was unprecedented and historic. What Happened is the story of that campaign, now with a new epilogue showing how Hillary grappled with many of her worst fears coming true in the Trump Era, while finding new hope in a surge of civic activism, women running for office, and young people marching in the streets.

*A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Editor's Choice Pick* From an award-winning journalist covering gender and politics comes an inside look at the female candidates fighting back and winning elections in the crucial 2018 midterms. After November 8, 2016, first came the sadness; then came the rage, the activism, and the protests; and, finally, for thousands of women, the next step was to run for office—many of them for the first time. More women campaigned for local or national office in the 2018 election cycle than at any other time in US history, challenging accepted notions about who seeks power and who gets it. Journalist Caitlin Moscatello reported on this wave of female candidates for New York magazine’s The Cut, Glamour, and Elle. And in See Jane Win, she further documents this pivotal time in women’s history. Closely following four candidates throughout the entire process, from the decision to run through Election Day, See Jane Win takes readers inside their exciting, winning campaigns and the sometimes thrilling, sometimes brutal realities of running for office while female. MEET THE CANDIDATES: Abigail Spanberger, a mom of three young girls and a former CIA operative, running for Congress in Virginia to unseat Freedom Caucus member Dave Brat. Catalina Cruz, a Colombian-born attorney whose state assembly bid could make her the first Dreamer elected in New York and only the third in the country. Anna Eskamani, an Iranian-American woman running for state office in Florida, with a campaign motivated by her mother’s health-care struggles and the Pulse Nightclub shootings. London Lamar, a Memphis native looking to become the youngest female representative in the Tennessee state house, running in one of the only Democratic and Black-majority areas of a largely conservative state. Beyond the 2018 victories, Moscatello speaks with researchers, strategists, and the leaders of organizations that helped women win. What she discovers is that the candidates who triumphed in 2018 emphasized authenticity and passion instead of conforming to the stereotype of what a candidate should look or sound like, a formula that will be more relevant than ever as we approach the 2020 presidential election.

In order to understand the motivations for and implications of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the White House- and her subsequent defeat-the authors explore sexism and gender bias in U.S. political and social culture. While there is some indication that overt sexism toward women in politics is declining, whether this is true for women who run for the highest office in American politics remains relatively unknown. Hillary Clinton's historic run as the 2016 Democratic nominee, however, allows scholars and journalists to contextualize decades of scholarship on sex, gender, and the American presidency. In Sex and Gender in the 2016 Presidential Election, the authors, all experts on gender in politics, analyze the nature of gender in public opinion, media coverage, social media, and culture during the 2016 presidential election. They assess whether conventional expectations and theories hold up in today's sociopolitical climate. Moreover, they consider how Clinton's foray into relatively uncharted territory might redirect the political field-and its implications for women with political ambitions-going forward.

Using a discourse analysis, Dustin Harp investigates media during the 2016 US presidential election to explore how traditional (patriarchal) and feminist ideas about gender played out during the campaign. The book illustrates how these two ideologies competed for space and struggled for discursive authority. A broad range of media texts is examined, and "gender moments," where gender became a dominant part of the political conversation, are identified. These include the "nasty woman" and "grab them by the pussy" comments of Donald Trump and the "woman card" played by, and against, Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, Harp reveals how binary notions of gender and stereotypical ideas of how men and women should behave, look, and sound structured the ways Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were talked about in the media. As a counterpoint, the research also shows the ways feminist ideologies worked against the sexism and misogyny and became mainstream in media discourse during the campaign. Students and researchers of Gender Studies will find that the "gender moments" in Gender in the 2016 US Presidential Election tell a broader story about women, gender expectations, and power. They offer important and timely insights about misogyny and sexual harassment in contemporary US culture and feminist resistance in a mediated public sphere.

An insider’s look at how women defeated Donald Trump, based on interviews with Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Stacey Abrams, Nancy Pelosi, and many more. Bookended by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and his 2020 defeat, Resistance tracks a set of dynamic women voters, activists and politicians who rose up when he took the White House and fundamentally changed the political landscape. From the first Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration to the Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms to the flood of female presidential candidates in 2020 to the inauguration of Kamala Harris, women from across the ideological spectrum entered the political arena and became energized in a way America had not witnessed in decades. They marched, they organized, they donated vast sums of cash, they ran for office, they made new alliances. And they defeated Donald Trump. Democratic women candidates learned that they could win in large numbers, even in red districts. Black women voters in 2020 surged in Georgia and in suburbs in key swing states. Women across the country voted in greater numbers than in any previous election, flipped the Senate, and ensured victory for the first female Vice President in the nation’s history. While Democrats recorded impressive victories, Republican women delivered critical victories of their own. From the White House to Congress, from activists to protestors, from liberals to conservatives, Resistance delivers the first comprehensive portrait of women’s historic political surge provoked by the horror of President Trump. This is the indelible story of how American women transformed their own lives, vanquished Trump, secured unprecedented positions of power and redefined US politics for decades to come.

Scholars and political observers raise concerns that the sex of a woman candidate can complicate her chances of success. This perspective is primarily motivated by concerns about the negative impact of voter gender stereotypes. Instead, this book demonstrates that gender stereotypes have little impact on voter decisions involving women candidates.

As Washington elites drifted toward ideological poles over the past few decades, did ordinary Americans follow their lead? In The Partisan Sort, Matthew Levendusky reveals that we have responded to this trend—but not, for the most part, by becoming more extreme ourselves. While polarization has filtered down to a small minority of voters, it also has had the more significant effect of reconfiguring the way we sort ourselves into political parties. In a marked realignment since the 1970s—when partisan affiliation did not depend on ideology and both major parties had strong liberal and conservative factions—liberals today overwhelmingly identify with Democrats, as conservatives do with Republicans. This “sorting,” Levendusky contends, results directly from the increasingly polarized terms in which political leaders define their parties. Exploring its far-reaching implications for the American political landscape, he demonstrates that sorting makes voters more loyally partisan, allowing campaigns to focus more attention on mobilizing committed supporters. Ultimately, Levendusky concludes, this new link between party and ideology represents a sea change in American politics.

An invigorating and inspiring take on the new ways American women are changing and improving our culture and the way we live from Kellyanne Conway, counselor to president Donald Trump, and Celinda Lake, a leading political strategist for the Democratic party. Women are the most powerful force reshaping the future of America. There is a newly defined unified power base among women that crosses all the usual lines of division—politics, race, religion, age, and class—heralding the most significant change in American culture in the past century. Kellyanne Conway, counselor to president Donald Trump and president and CEO of The Polling Company, Inc. and Celinda Lake, a leading political strategist for the Democratic party—two of the most prominent trend-spotters and analysts in America—demonstrate how women are rejecting outdated traditions in order to get what they want and need. They are breaking the old rules about when and whether to marry and have children, living fully and equally as singles, and creating flexible, inclusive workplaces that don’t sacrifice family or sanity. They are controlling $5 trillion annually as the primary purchasers of homes, cars, appliances, and electronics. They are making their mark at ages twenty, forty, sixty, and beyond, drawing strength, inspiration, and intellectual stimulation from other women. Using the eye-opening results of interviews, focus groups, and polls (three of which were created especially for this book), Conway and Lake—who often fall on opposite sides of the country’s most polarizing debates—come together to seek out what women buy, what they believe, how they work, how they live, what they care about, what they fear, and what they really want. By delving beneath the hot-button issues, Lake and Conway discovered common causes with which women are inventing a new age of opportunity—doing it their way and, in the process, improving life for all Americans.

Women of the 2016 Election is an examination of women who played prominent roles in the 2016 US presidential election. The collection focuses on women from different parties, races, religions, and immigrant statuses who fulfill roles as candidates, staffers, first families, journalists, and grassroots organizers. The contributors to this collection give a unique view into women’s influences on an unprecedented election. They examine the roles of feminism, morality, motherhood, expectations of voters, the press, masculinity, femininity, race, class, and agency in this interdisciplinary work, which spans the fields of political science, feminist theory, communication, and women’s and gender studies. This is the election that gave rise to the Trump presidency and the #MeToo movement, and the women considered here have left trails and revealed how far there is yet to go for women achieving power in the highest echelons of American politics, media, and society.