Big Girls Don't Cry

Book excerpt: It was all as unpredictable as it was riveting: Hillary Clinton's improbable rise, her fall and her insistence on pushing forward straight through to her remarkable phoenix flight from the race; Sarah Palin's attempt not only to fill the void left by Clinton, but to alter the very definition of feminism and claim some version of it for conservatives; liberal rapture over Barack Obama and the historic election of our first African-American president; the media microscope trained on Michelle Obama, harsher even than the one Hillary had endured fifteen years earlier. Meanwhile, media women like Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow altered the course of the election, and comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler helped make feminism funny. As Traister sees it, the 2008 election was good for women. The campaign for the presidency reopened some of the most fraught American conversations about gender, race and generational difference, about sexism on the left and feminism on the right, all difficult discussions that had been left unfinished but that are crucial to further perfecting our union.