Feminism and the 2010 Midterm Elections

What do yesterday’s election results mean for women? This is the question I asked Rebecca Traister, a senior writer at Salon, whose book on the 2008 election, “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” is reviewed this week in The New Yorker. In her book, Traister focuses on the anti-Hillary Clinton sentiment that polarized the Democratic party, as well as the role of Michelle Obama in the White House and Sarah Palin’s representation of “a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.” Traister chatted with me over e-mail yesterday; read our exchange at newyorker.com.

Published by Sally

I’m the deputy managing editor at strategy + business, a freelance editor at Belt, and the former web manager at The New Yorker. My writing and editing also has appeared in The New York Times, The Independent, the Observer, the Rumpus, the Cleveland Clinic Press, and Northern Ohio Live. Additionally, I was a founding team member of Maven, a healthcare app for women. I live in Brooklyn with my husband, the musician and writer Mike Errico, and our daughter. Follow me @sally_errico.