Opinion | The Defeat of Kamala Harris Is Not the End of the Story

Just how long do you think it will be before we get a woman president?

I know, White House-wise, you’ve got a lot of more pressing things to worry about right now. But this is the holiday season — you deserve a chance to think about a happy tomorrow.

Sure, it’s going to take a little gumption. When Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, I consoled myself by pointing out, about 20 times a day, that she won the popular vote. No such luck this time around: Kamala Harris got creamed. Nearly half of the women voted for Trump. Polls showed that a number of them voted to keep abortion legal in their state but elect a president who brags about having set up the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Stop for a moment if you feel inclined to indulge in a deep moan.

Pretty much everyone agrees that the cost of living was the election’s big driving factor. And that Joe Biden’s dithering kept the Democrats from having much-needed primaries to test all the possible candidates — and give them some experience in a national campaign.

Still, it’s hard to believe the anti-woman angle wasn’t important.

I dunno, people. It’s easy to fall into a deep funk. Eight years ago, I wrote an advance piece celebrating the election of Hillary Clinton, so it’d be all ready when the big day arose. Didn’t work out. But it looked as if things were really coming around this year. Just before the election, I happily wrote a column celebrating “how relatively normal” the nomination of Kamala Harris seemed. The woman-president thing hardly came up, except in celebratory tones. The tide was turning, right?

Well, not necessarily. Here we are, still wondering if we’ll ever see a woman running the country.

“How long have we been asking this?” Gloria Steinem wondered. Like many leaders of movements for reform and major-league change, Steinem always has some examples of triumph to refer to in times of despair. When we talked after Harris lost, she recalled stories she’d heard about Native American tribes in which “the grandmothers choose the chief and can depose him.”

Grandmothers of America, see if you can get together and take that up.

Until then, this is a good time to remember that thanks to people like Steinem, first-modern-woman-to-seek the Democratic nomination Shirley Chisholm, and an endless line of heroines from our recent past, we have come a long, long way from the olden days when 19th-century ladies magazines defined the differences between the sexes like this: “Man is strong — woman is beautiful. Man is daring and confident — woman is diffident and unassuming. Man is great in action — women in suffering.”