The Karen meme was first served up on that smorgasbord of woman-hatred, Reddit, home to adherents of the men’s movement, egging on an angry ex-husband whining about an ex named Karen.
Reddit’s “FuckYouKaren” thread is still replenished regularly with cruelly captioned random pictures of white middle-aged women and their ugly haircuts.
The tendency to divide women into Cool Girls and uncool women has a long history in art, culture, and politics. But in the Trump era, the right has been effectively working to intensify divisions like this; the Trump campaign bought targeted dark messaging portraying Hillary as a racist aimed at suppressing the black vote in 2016 and driving a wedge between different groups critical to her election.
This is not to say white Democratic women are not as infected with racism, the all-American scourge, as their white male counterparts. And righteous anger at white women on the part of the anti-Trump resistance originates in the exit polls of November 2016, which indicated 52% of white women voted for Trump. Only much later did actual vote counts reveal white women went 47% for Trump, 45% for Clinton — still outrageous, but closer to a statistical tie, and also a better performance among white women than that achieved by Barack Obama.
No progressives — nor even standard issue conservatives — would be caught out videotaping and stereotyping any other group in the way they feel comfortable going after white middle-aged women.
The Trump election was first and foremost, a kick in the face to women. The disastrous effects of the regime on women’s rights under the law, on the job, and in American society have yet to be fully assessed. Because of what came after — governmental chaos, Nazis on the march, brown children in cages — the threat Trump poses to 51% of the population receded in relative importance.
But women did not forget. Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol’s studies into the grassroots anti-Trump resistance communities found middle-aged white females constituted a wide majority among both activists and leadership in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Building on research begun after the Trump inauguration and into the lead-up to 2018 midterms, Skocpol and a team in early 2019 surveyed resistance networks in those key swing states and found (italics mine) “most participants in resistance groups are middle-aged or older white college-educated women.” Male members of local groups were “often partners or friends of the female members,” and their leadership teams were either all-female or, in two instances, included a woman teamed up with one or two men.
“The ‘who’ of local anti-Trump organizing is very clear and may come as a surprise to some,” Skocpol with colleagues Leah Gose and Vanessa Williamson wrote in a paper published this year in Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance.
“Although national media outlets and researchers who have studied national resistance organizations often suggest anti-Trump activities are spearhead by young people and Americans from minority backgrounds,” the authors note, “the vast majority of grassroots resistance group leaders and members are actually white, middle class, college-educated women ranging in age from their thirties and forties to retirement years.”
The researchers estimated that “across all states and places we know, from two-thirds to 90 percent of volunteer resistance activists are female, white and college-educated.” Without them, Nancy Pelosi would still be the minority leader, Trump would not have been impeached by the House, and Republicans would have free rein to enact Trump’s whims without a single legislative brake.
Political reporters generally ignore this fact, except for a blip of interest just before the midterms, as in this piece from the Pacific Standard.
Misogyny has been a problem for the American progressive movement since women eschewed housekeeping and mothering to join men in the revolutionary ’60s. They signed up to fight for civil rights first. But the movement treated women so abysmally it belied the goals of social justice at which it claimed to aim.
In the anti-war movement, when women objected to being relegated to service roles like typing, a male Berkeley organizer could reply, “Let them eat cock.” And get a roomful of guffaws. Civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael famously said, “What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone.” Women who spoke up were hissed and booed at public events, like those at an anti-war protest against the second inauguration of Richard Nixon, whose speeches were drowned out by men who cat-called and yelled at them to strip.
The ideological grandmothers to the progressive women in the Democratic Party today were abused worker bees, assigned traditionally female work like typing or administrative duties, subject to sexual harassment, and ridicule if they asked for more power. The women’s liberation movement was born out of this milieu. If women were oppressed, the New Left reasoned, their problems paled against those of disempowered brown people all over the world. Women’s demands could be dealt with after the class struggle had been won. Some of the women would later say they served this sexist movement with docility as a kind of expiation for their privilege.
Over the last half century, progressives achieved some — but not enough — change. Women helped elect the first black president. An out gay man ran for president in a major party primary. But the failures of Democratic female presidential aspirations and the breadth of the me-too revelations across the political spectrum have exposed just how little has improved in half a century for women of any race.