It was 2016, and the future was female.
Hillary Clinton was the first woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, and readers browsing social media couldn’t get very far before encountering headlines like “Clinton’s Nomination: A Feminist Milestone?”, “Forget This ‘Hillary Is Unlikeable’ Stuff,” and “Day 2 of the DNC: A Reminder That Hillary Is a Woman.”
Feministing, DoubleX and Jezebel — the publishers of those stories — were part of a robust ecosystem of women-centric websites, where scores of writers reflected on the role of gender in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and what it would mean if Americans elected their first female president.
“We could pick apart every little thing,” said the author Nona Willis Aronowitz, who got her start as a feminist blogger in the 2000s. “We had this lens and a million people to talk to about it with.”
Eight years later, as another female nominee vies for the presidency, there are far fewer women’s outlets to meet the moment. Feministing, DoubleX, The Establishment, The Hairpin, Rookie and Broadly have folded. Some of the surviving women’s sites, like Bustle, don’t focus as much on politics as they once did, and others, like Jezebel, have new owners and shrunken staffs.
At the same time, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has downplayed her identity.
In the not-so-distant past, a candidate’s reluctance to talk about her gender might not have mattered to the often sardonic outlets affectionately known as “lady blogs.” If that cohort were around today, the feminist implications of Ms. Harris’s candidacy probably would have been debated in essays and comments at more than a dozen outlets, regardless of campaign messaging.
Craving That Dialogue
Some journalists and readers are bemoaning the lack of online spaces devoted to feminist discussion at a time when Ms. Harris has embraced abortion rights a marquee issue and former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate JD Vance have made young men a focus of their campaign.
“This network of women’s outlets that focused on gender and what it means to run for office as a woman would be extremely valuable today,” said Monica Klein, a partner at the political consulting firm Seneca Strategies. “For example, exploring in further depth: What would it mean to have a woman in the White House now that Roe v. Wade is overturned?”
Editors and writers who were part of women’s media in its heyday say the sites were forums where they had lively conversations on their own terms. They could draw on feminist theory as well as their own experiences and observations.
“Feminist media was taking a much more nuanced look at why perhaps women voters and particularly women voters of color weren’t that jazzed on Clinton as a candidate,” said Andi Zeisler, the founding editor of Bitch Media, which stopped publishing in 2022.
Much of the writing on Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaigns from women’s sites expressed ambivalence about her candidacy: Feministing, for instance, published stories on the “feminists not invited to the Hillary party” and the “real reason young feminists reject Hillary.”
“A robust conversation about race and gender did not mean cheerleading around the female candidate or nonwhite candidate,” said Rebecca Traister, a writer at large at New York Magazine and the Cut.
Ms. Traister said she was reluctant to romanticize those moments of discord among feminists. But in retrospect, she added, the conversations around Mrs. Clinton had raised meaningful critiques: “There were big questions about what representation actually means,” she said.
Ms. Traister, who has covered presidential campaigns going back to 2000, noted other factors that may be shaping the discussion of Ms. Harris’s candidacy. Politics writers — at legacy publications and feminist blogs — had years to anticipate Mrs. Clinton’s runs. Ms. Harris, by contrast, rose to the top of the Democratic ticket in a matter of days, in a twist few had thought feasible.
“There was no time to sit around and scratch your chin and ask, ‘Is America ready to elect a woman?’” Ms. Traister said.
‘We’re Not Going to Bang the Drum’
The surviving women’s sites have taken note as Ms. Harris has, for the most part, steered lines of questioning about her gender back to her campaign platform.
“Hillary very much was like, ‘We’re going to break the glass ceiling,’” said Lauren Tousignant, who became the editor of Jezebel after it was shuttered by G/O Media last fall and resurrected by Paste Magazine. “It’s frustrating if Harris feels like she can’t identify herself as a woman or woman of color because that will hurt her in the polls. But we’re not going to bang the drum if she’s not going to bang the drum.”
The 19th, a women’s site that started in 2020, has focused largely on Ms. Harris’s policy proposals, particularly abortion.
“I don’t think we’re shy about the history that she has made and is potentially on the precipice of making,” said Julia B. Chan, the editor in chief of The 19th. “But how we’re approaching Harris is really about helping readers understand how policy might impact their everyday lives.”
Teen Vogue, an outlet geared to young women, has taken a similar approach, with articles and columns on Ms. Harris’s climate policies, her stance on the war in Gaza and polling about young voters’ enthusiasm for her campaign.
“We’ve chosen to focus on the issues most pressing to young voters, and Kamala Harris’s gender is not one of them,” Danielle Kwateng, Teen Vogue’s executive editor, wrote in an emailed statement.
A Changing Media Landscape
It’s difficult to talk about what has changed in feminist media over the last decade or so without talking about what has changed in feminism — and in media.
When The Establishment, an outlet that started in 2015 with $1 million in venture capital, shut down after a four-year run, its editors lamented the “Sisyphean” challenge of making money with a site focused on “intersectional feminist media.”
The uphill battle had partly to do with the whims of Facebook and Google, whose algorithms have shaped the fate of many a media start-up. But some veterans of women’s media said the demand for their approach began to fade amid a wider reaction to the politics they espoused.
“Some of it was a market response,” said Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a former executive editor of Teen Vogue and of Feministing.
In the 2000s and 2010s, amid a surge of interest in gender and identity issues, articles on those topics would regularly go viral on social media, she said. But many of those platforms are no longer the hubs of discourse they once were, and, at some point, readers no longer seemed to respond the same way.
“Part of the turning point was a general feminist backlash,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said. The Trump administration, she added, “was bad for identity politics, and people on the left realized that maybe focusing on race and gender didn’t really help us move the dial.”
In the aftermath of Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 run, some journalists at women’s outlets felt burned out by the intensity of the conversations in their corner of the blogosphere.
“I very deliberately moved away from it, because it felt a bit like an echo chamber,” said Ms. Aronowitz, who moved on from feminist blogs to WNYC, Talking Points Memo and other more traditional sites.
“People knew I did stories about gender issues, but I also did things about race and the economy,” she continued. “It was refreshing to have a lens of feminism mixed with a general conversation about social justice.”
Margaret Sullivan, a columnist for The Guardian U.S. who writes about media, politics and culture, said that while women’s blogs are less abundant these days, there is no shortage of “strong and compelling women’s voices in other places.”
Still, some yearn for a dedicated place to weigh in on what this moment means to feminists.
“I feel unmoored right now, because I feel like I want to read some of these things and write some of these things being debated,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said of Ms. Harris’s campaign and the 2024 race. “That piece is really missing.”
Ms. Zeisler, formerly of Bitch Media, said that while a number of once-popular feminist sites are gone, their influence lives on.
“One of the trickle-down effects of feminist media is that more generalist, more mainstream media often has a more tacitly feminist lens than it did even eight or 10 years ago,” she said.
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