The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

Rebecca Traister discusses *Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women*, which offers a startling appraisal of what the campaign meant for all of us. Though the 2008 election did not give us our first woman president or vice president, the astonishing, exhilarating campaign was nonetheless transformative for American women and for the nation. A senior writer for Salon, she covered the 2008 campaign from a feminist (and personal) perspective, receiving a huge response to her pieces on Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, the media’s coverage of the candidates, and the role of women within the media. In *Big Girls Don’t Cry*, Traister makes sense of a moment in American history that changed the country’s narrative forever. Special thanks to [Northeastern University Libraries](http://www.lib.neu.edu/) for contributing this recording. Photo: Hillary Clinton at the 2008 DNC [wikipedia](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 "")

Rebecca Traister

**Rebecca Traister** is writer at large for New York magazine and a contributing editor at Elle. A National Magazine Award finalist, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for \_The New Republic\_ and \_Salon\_ and has also contributed to \_The Nation\_, \_The New York Observer\_, \_The New York Times\_ and \_The Washington Post\_. Traister’s first book, \_Big Girls Don’t Cry\_, about women and the 2008 election, was a \_New York Times\_ Notable Book of 2010 and the winner of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book prize. Photo: [www.rebeccatraister.com](http://www.rebeccatraister.com/ "http://www.rebeccatraister.com/")

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The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

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