About a week ago, I was invited to join a “secret” Facebook group. I could tell you all about it, but then it wouldn’t be a secret, right? What I can tell you is that it is a group that exploded literally overnight into over 25,000 members, currently has more than twice that number, and would have far more than that by now if Facebook didn’t limit groups that multiply in number so rapidly. I can also tell you that we are overwhelmingly female and unabashedly supportive of Hillary Clinton and her goal of becoming our first woman president. We literally gush with pride, and sisterhood.

Now, I don’t especially have a need to be secretive about my political leanings. I live in a blue county, in a blue state, where I feel comfortable enough to have a Hillary yard sign and not one but two Hillary magnets on my car (though even I have occasionally heard someone yell “Hillary for Prison” as he drives by me). After learning why many of these women do have such a need, however, it reminded me of why I started my blog (”Musings from the FeMOMist”) in the first place. Women are the largest “minority” there is, considering we make up about half of the population. We are a minority, however, in the sense that we are treated as “different” from the norm. Women have been fighting for equal rights—human rights—for about as long as African Americans have been fighting for civil rights. We have only had the right to vote since 1920. The Equal Rights Amendment would seem to be a no-brainer to many of us and yet, we fell short of ratifying it in the 1970s and to date we still have nothing in the United States Constitution that expressly guarantees us equal rights regardless of our gender. There remains a discrepancy between men and women in terms of how much we are paid, glass ceilings in many professions, and inequities in governmental representation at the federal, state, and local levels.

I have written extensively about how during this campaign, negative views about Hillary Clinton—the most qualified person ever to run for the presidency—stem largely from a place of sexism and misogyny. I am unabashedly pro-Clinton and wanted to give voice to Clinton supporters and middle aged feminists like myself whom I found didn’t seem to have a place on the Internet. Listening to young women sing the praises of Bernie Sanders while simultaneously condemning Clinton and dismissing the need for feminism in this country did not sit well with me. My own now-deceased aunts were among the earliest women’s libbers and trailblazers for well educated, professional women like me, and I wasn’t going to sit back and watch some youngsters squander the hard work of them and so many other feminists. In those early months when I was writing my blog it was lonely and at times scary. The silence on my own Facebook news feed was deafening and punctuated sometimes with anti-Clinton commentary, invariably by men shouting over my own strongly held views.

So, I absolutely get why a “secret” pro-Clinton group on Facebook is a thing. In fact, I didn’t want to use my own name when writing about Clinton on the Internet (I either use a pseudonym or my maiden name). It’s well-known that women espousing views that don’t match with white men’s views are not treated kindly online. True to form, Donald Trump supporters, Bernie Bros, women haters, and trolls of all kinds felt welcome to post all sorts of nasty, negative comments the first time I posted a blog entry on HuffPost this past June. The topic? My 14-year-old daughter had come home from school and announced over dinner that her school friend had called Hillary Clinton a “liar.” I wrote about how this was a tired old GOP trope dating back to the Bill Clinton administration and debunked it. At that time (during the primaries), this was an unusual thing to write about and read. It attracted a lot of attention in a short period of time. What interested me the most was that while the article was quickly liked over 1,000 and shared close to 2,000 times, the actual comments were largely negative and from white men using their own names. These men were saying I was a terrible mother for telling my daughter that Clinton wasn’t in fact a lying shrew. That was when I realized I was on to something. The people who were quietly liking and sharing my writing I hypothesized were largely women; the haters who felt compelled to write and angrily tell me why I was wrong, wrong, WRONG about Clinton were mostly men who felt entitled and safe enough to exercise their First Amendment rights, openly and publicly.