Tuesday night proved a long slog as the mood of the Clinton loyalists who gathered at the Javits Center to celebrate this historic election slowly transformed from jubilant to concerned to hushed to, finally, despondent when Donald Trump took the podium at the comparatively cozy Hilton ballroom as our next president. As stunned as Clinton’s supporters were, no one looked more surprised than Trump himself, whose seemingly improvised speech lacked the eloquence and gravitas any experienced politician would have brought to the occasion. Similarly, the fact that Mrs. Clinton failed to address her supporters on election night suggested her utter unpreparedness for anything other than what nearly everyone on the planet had assumed would be her inevitable victory. It was, after all, her turn, and had been since she conceded to Barack Obama in 2008. More than once during the interminable election season, I was reminded of little Rhoda in the campy horror film The Bad Seed. “The medal was mine!”

From the time of Bernie Sanders’ MODA Center rally in Portland, Oregon, in August of 2015 (the first of many such events attended by tens of thousands of energized, impassioned Americans of all ages and races), I’d been saying that Mrs. Clinton was unelectable. All of my female (along with many of my male) friends scorned me for insisting that she was the worst possible candidate to go up against any serious Republican. But then, Donald Trump had never struck me as a serious candidate; his outrageous declarations and lack of substantive policies made me wonder whether he was actually a creation of the Clinton machine—a candidate that even she, one of the most widely disliked political figures in the world, could vanquish. As we have learned, the “pied piper” strategy backfired badly.

Since Wednesday morning, social media has been ablaze with the questions of heartbroken women. What will we tell our daughters? How will gender equality ever be achieved? Women’s progress toward shattering the glass ceiling has taken a giant step backward. Interesting, this hyperbolic backlash, after months of “I’m With Her” and “In My Lifetime” and #WearWhiteToVote. Where was the measured pragmatism that the Clinton diehards advocated when Bernie’s supporters dared to suggest that he might be the stronger candidate for this election?

Instead, tears, protests, and even riots broke out as our citizens engaged in a mass tantrum, never stopping to blame themselves or the candidate the DNC had crammed down our throats in their arrogance. And arrogance had indeed played a substantial role, as we have since learned from none other than marginalized DNC staffers.

But despite being a woman—one who came of age during the Women’s Liberation movement, who experienced sexual harassment in the workplace before one could turn such things into a financial windfall, and who made the decision not to become a mother—I’m not so certain that we’re reaching the correct conclusion.

For starters, Bernie’s policies were more pro-woman than Hillary’s. He staunchly supported a woman’s right to choose, adequate paid parental leave, and single-payer healthcare. Perhaps most significantly, his insistence on a $15/hour minimum wage across the board (versus Hillary’s $12/hour compromise) would have mattered most to the women who require the most assistance—including those victims of Bill Clinton’s infamous welfare reform of the 90s.

And I think that’s what rankles for me. Hillary characterized herself as a mother, a grandmother (or an abuelita, depending on the audience), and a champion of women everywhere. But the women I know who supported her most avidly were those who had the kinds of glass ceiling-shattering aspirations common to a particular class—those who came from a foundation of available education and advantage. In other words, relatively affluent white women. These women cared more about the length of Hillary’s resume than about the details of her record. To even attempt that discussion was treasonous.

I worked in a male-dominated industry for two decades, which taught me that while some men might treat me with less respect initially, the most effective strategy was to perform my job to the best of my abilities. And after awhile, it worked. True, I may have endured the occasional unwanted shoulder rub, but I achieved my goals through simple hard work.

So what I want to say to those heartbroken women who fear for the futures of their daughters is this: there are numerous women who have broken glass ceilings and been elected to run countries all over the world, including the recently elected Theresa May and Angela Merkel, Time Magazine’s 2015 Person of the Year. And just because Hillary isn’t our first Madam President doesn’t mean that we will never elect a woman—it only means that she wasn’t the right woman. Her agenda of “incremental change” was code for “more of the same.” As we learned on Tuesday night, her tone deafness to a country demanding revolution combined with a we-got-this arrogance proved a fatal equation.

It’s my hope that the next woman who runs for POTUS will do so on a platform of ideas and policies rather than on entitlement or fear. Her I’m-not-Trump message failed to resonate with, especially, young voters who wanted more from a president than to simply be the lesser of two evils, particularly after they’d had a legitimate chance to elect the populist Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, the saddest fallout from her defeat is not that we don’t have the first US woman president, but that for at least the next four years we will have an administration that will do everything in its considerable power to regulate reproductive rights, restrict parental leave, and keep wages low.

Ladies, it’s time now to dry your tears and prepare for the 2018 midterm elections before Hillary’s loss results in more damage for your daughters. Let’s get truly pragmatic and support candidates who represent us, the people. Because irrespective of our gender, we are all in this together.