My niece’s cross country track team used to fire each other up before a race by saying intently, “Let’s go pass some bitches.” When my brother first told me that story a few years back I cracked up but then ended up adopting it as a personal mantra. It’s fierce. It’s relentless. Ironically, it’s kind of empowering all the way around — young women sizing up sometimes formidable competition and vowing to work harder. Game recognize game.
Also it’s a little profane and fuck if I don’t love a well-deployed expletive.
Anyway, I’ve invoked their call to arms a lot in the past year. And I’m pretty sure if she knew about the line, Hillary Clinton would say it to herself every morning.
It’s been a year of grinding work for so many. A year marked by frustration and disbelief, as the woman who is easily one of the most qualified candidates to ever seek the office endured ridiculous and noxious attacks at times solely because she is not a man. Because she is not what her most vocal detractors are used to or the way they think things ought to be. A “nasty woman” because she had the audacity to clap back at a man.
Hearing that man, her opponent, brag about sexual assault and not immediately get ushered off the national stage was enough to break us if we had let it. Women speaking out in droves about their sexual assault survival was enough to bind us. Their courage was enough to send us out at the end of already long days to knock one more voter’s door, to make one more phone call.
Let’s go pass some bitches.
This marks the final hours of a campaign that, for me, began in the January cold of Iowa for the caucus. And good Lord it is cold there. But now it’s 11 months later and I’m watching Bruce Springsteen sing a contemplative “Thunder Road” to a huge, beautiful crowd in Philadelphia that looks like Real America™ because it is in fact representative of what America really is in 2016. Next to me in a bouncy chair, the eight-week-old baby girl who was secretly along for the ride on those snowy Iowa days is burbling.
In the corner of the same TV screen where Bruce is singing about riding out to the promised land, a small man speaks at another rally a few states away. A scared, bitter man who believes in conversion therapy for gay Americans and who wants to theatrically punish women for getting a legal medical procedure. And he’s just on the undercard of the ticket. The headliner is terrifying. The headliner is pathetic. I don’t care that his hands are small. I care that his character is.
Tuesday is not a day that will reward small men. It’s a day that will elevate strong women.
I came back to work from maternity leave a month early today to help out with our union’s election communications work. A few people asked me what I was thinking, teasing me for heading in so soon, even if just for a few days. While I played along, it also spoke to how hard it is for some to fully feel the weight of what’s going to happen tomorrow. To understand that there is simply no alternative to being a woman completely in the fight until the very end to elect the first female president. To being mothers finishing what our great-grandmothers started.
In a recent enough time that there are folks alive who remember it, women endured torture for suffrage. In my grandmother’s lifetime, women had scant career options. In my mother’s lifetime, women couldn’t get bank loans without their husband’s signature. In my lifetime, I’ve been paid less than male colleagues hired to do the exact same job. In my oldest daughter’s lifetime, my encouragement early on that she could grow up to be anything she wanted was pretty much some Grade-A, magical thinking bullshit.
So you’re damn right I’ll be joining tens of thousands of other people tomorrow on the job and on the campaign trail to make sure that changes. As a result, my youngest daughter will know an entirely different world than her big sister, in just seven years’ time.
Let’s go pass some bitches.
I spent Monday evening talking and texting with strong women I admire and love across the country who are driving Hillary’s campaign forward. From Miami to Chicago, from Cleveland to Las Vegas, there were some universal truths. One in particular was that more than a couple of us had cried at least once today. They were tears of excitement and nerves and expectation. Hope and anxiety.
It’s Election Day. Let’s go pass some bitches.
