The 2016 election was notable for being the first time a woman ran for the US presidency nominated by a major political party. The campaign and election of Donald Trump—an unending spectacle of misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, bullying, and the most venal nationalistic chest-thumping—upended this “first.” To show support for Hillary Clinton and to pay homage to earlier suffragists, women went to Rochester, New York, to put “I Voted” stickers on the grave of Susan B. Anthony, one of the most prominent nineteenth-century suffragists. Women of color, especially African American women, were furious at their constant erasure from the narrative of women's rights activism. Feminist writer Roxane Gay tweeted, “I’d put my voting sticker on Ida B. Wells's grave” (@rgay, November 8, 2016). Mikki Kendall, a self-described “occasional feminist” and writer, tweeted, “I owe my right to vote to Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Cary, Nannie Burroughs, Frances Harper and Daisy Langphen” (@Karynthia, November 8, 2016). And Everette Dionne pleaded with a tweet to “please put stickers on Shirley Chisholm's grave” (@freeblackgirl, November 8, 2016), which is in Buffalo, New York.

As the Democratic Party candidate trying to break “that highest glass ceiling,” Hillary Clinton was subjected to endless, horrific, and often baseless attacks on her character, honesty, and commitment to the democratic process—expectedly from the right, and surprisingly from the left. Whatever one makes of her campaign, there should be little doubt that race and misogyny—along with the Democratic Party leadership's failure to recognize the devastation resulting from thirty years of neoliberalism, Clinton's own mistakes, voter suppression, FBI director James Comey's letter to Congress regarding the reopening of the investigation of her emails shortly before the election, Russian hacking, combined with twenty-five years of systematic character assassination— played major roles in her electoral defeat.