In fact, as per a poll commissioned by progressive advocacy site Daily Action, middle-aged women are doing nearly all the activism these days. The company, which texts daily alerts reminding users to contact Congressional representatives, says that the members who responded to the poll were 86% female — and, significantly, over 60% were older than age 46. Most had attended a Women’s March, and the vast majority (77%) described themselves as “very likely” to publicly protest Donald Trump’s administration and policies in the near future.

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Much of the discussion around this report, particularly from male commentators, was politely baffled. Jeff Stein of Vox called the data “fascinating,” and marveled that “angry young white men may be blowing up your social media, but middle-aged women/moms [are] doing the real grunt work.” Shane Savitsky of Axios informed his followers that “your mom might be playing a huge part in the anti-Trump movement.” (I don’t know about you, Shane, but my mom also knows how to use Twitter. Might want to re-think those pronouns.) This reaction, though it was well intentioned, was grating. This data simply should not shock us. The dynamic Stein describes—men writing Twitter essays and women making phone calls, men as the faces of the movement and women as its faceless foot soldiers—is exactly how things have worked for a very long time.

Of course, this is self-reported data from one platform, and doesn’t necessarily represent the totality of progressive activism.  But it’s worth noting, especially since women are sometimes dinged for their unwillingness to participate in “politics”—usually construed to mean running for office. That accusation rests on a very specific idea of political engagement. Rejigger your definitions, and the picture changes considerably.

By a variety of political metrics, women are doing more of the work. Women register to vote more often than men, and are more likely to vote once they’ve registered. Women are more likely to do volunteer work. Women make the vast majority of charitable donations; in fact, as per Debra Mesch of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, “women give more than their male peers at virtually all income levels, even though women in general earn less.” At the local level, women are far more likely than men to attend religious services and to join religious groups—which Pew Research tells us is an indicator of civic engagement—and slightly more likely to be involved in neighborhood associations. Finally, and most predictably: As of 2009, 90% of all PTA members were female.

This is not glamorous stuff. It is, in fact, mom stuff; making sure that children are schooled and people are fed, that the church fundraiser goes off well and the new mayor is more competent, that the park gets a new fence, that the Goodwill gets the old clothes, and that the daily wheel of life more or less rolls on, in all its boring glory. Which is to say, we assign women the work of community; all the daily, unremarkable social and political engagement that keeps groups of people bound together as a coherent whole, and thereby makes civic life possible. Women are expected to do all this for the same reason that they’re still expected to do the lion’s share of parenting, or to take care of aging relatives, or to do most of the chores; because they’re “just better at it,” because no-one else wants to do it, because the willingness to provide this labor, for free, is some essential part of how we construe being feminine.

And, because it is feminine, it is dismissed. None of this work is what we see as “leadership,” and none of these women, especially as they age, fit our images of “leaders.” Barricade-mounting and enraged-speech-giving and Nazi-punching and office-holding — all the positions we actually associate with “politics”—are assumed to be beyond them. Instead, middle-aged women are stereotyped as terminally bland soccer moms, oversharing mommybloggers and prudish neighborhood busybodies, harried non-entities who “try too hard to be cool” and whose idea of fun is “always having snacks on the counter.” Throughout the 2016 election, the media made a constant fuss about their irrelevance and their political ineptitude when compared to their supposedly more progressive millennial daughters.

This is where the benign, patronizing shock around the poll numbers comes in. How could meek little Barb or Pam, or anyone else afflicted by God with such terminal lack of flavor, turn out to be the face of anti-fascist resistance in America?

Again: She always has been.

It would be more shocking if the majority of women involved in the anti-Trump protests actually fit the “white soccer mom” stereotype. That is, at least in part, because it would be shocking if most of them were white; though the Daily Action survey doesn’t segment its data by race, we know that only 4% of black women voted for Donald Trump, whereas 52% of white women did. Plus, older women vote more than younger women, and they are more likely to have money to donate or children to tie them to a community.

But, most importantly, time is not static. “Old lady” stereotypes aside, today’s moms are likely to have more direct experience of radical activism than their daughters. A 64-year-old woman, in 2017, has a birth date of 1953. She has directly witnessed—or actively participated in—both the mid-century civil rights movement and feminism’s second wave. She is more likely to identify as feminist than any other age group, and she is more likely to vote for political candidates based on their gender politics. She is also the most likely to advocate for women’s rights by taking measures such as—surprise!—calling or writing her representatives.

This isn’t to slight younger women; they come in a very close second in the Most Feminist Generation sweepstakes. It’s simply to demonstrate how easily women’s political work can be ignored or obscured, hidden away by our presumptions about what—and who—qualifies as an “activist.” Indeed, even as the media whipped up the catfight of the century between millennial feminists and their second-wave mothers, the same pattern of gendered labor was repeating itself: In one 2013 survey, women under 30 were already volunteering more, donating more, voting more, and joining community groups more than their male peers. In fact, young women were outstripping men on every measure of “civic participation” but one: “Talking about politics with friends and family frequently.” That one, the boys had covered.

Unfortunately, we happen to live in a society that perceives “leadership” qualities in the guy doing all the talking, not the girl doing all the work. We applaud the man giving the speech, not the woman making sure there are enough chairs for everyone in the audience; the dude who pens a single scathing Medium essay, not the woman showing up every night to phone bank; the charismatic male candidate, not his female campaign manager.

Making a daily phone call to one’s representative—taking ten minutes out of a lunch break to be one of twelve people on hold, staying appropriately polite for a 30-second conversation about voting against Betsy DeVos or Syrian intervention or whatever is on the menu today—is exactly the sort of granular, incremental, everyday work that women are socialized to take on themselves. It’s also one of the more immediately effective forms of protest out there. In the midst of the crisis that is the Trump administration, it should not be surprising that women would, once again, step in and do the pragmatic, everyday work of keeping their communities safe. What is surprising is that we still don’t expect them to do it — or that we simply didn’t notice them doing it in the background all this time.

If we knew how to value those women, to notice and spotlight all the unheeded background work that keeps resistance running, we might have a very different idea of “leadership” — and a very different picture of who actually runs (and saves) the world.

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The pattern laid down by history is clear. The first major book of feminist theory in the West, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was shockingly popular when it was published in 1792. Key figures in American politics — John and Abigail Adams, Aaron Burr — studied it with care and reverence. If things had gone only a little differently, the United States might have been founded as an explicitly feminist nation. But Wollstonecraft died, and the posthumously revealed details of her sexual life and mental illness were used to conduct a campaign of character assassination until feminism itself became tainted by association. That led to the 19th century and the Victorian era, whose institutionalized misogyny and sexual conservatism still comprise the backbone of most anti-feminist thinking today.

The cycle repeats. The 19th century did, eventually, give us the suffrage movement — but white women gaining the vote did not prevent the harshly enforced racist patriarchy of the early 20th century. By the 1960s, the Father Knows Best era had gotten unbearable enough to give us the second wave — which, after making rapid cultural and legislative progress throughout the ‘70s, met the freeze-out of the 1980s through the 2000s. Throughout the 2000s, an independent women’s media movement, facilitated by the rise of blogging, broke the taboo on talking about gender politics. It so effectively mainstreamed the feminist movement that, by the early 2010s, mainstream journalism and pop culture alike rode its coattails. Now, right on schedule, we have New York Times op-eds on why liberals should stop talking about “identity politics.”

Oh yeah, and Trump.

Granted, Trump’s more-than-flirtation with fascism will make this particular cycle worse. Some, like journalist and scholar of authoritarian regimes Sarah Kendzior, see no hope at all for feminist progress: “We need to prevent the Trump regime. There will be no organizing under it,” Kendzior told me. “If we go forward under his regime, it will be authoritarianism and there is a decent chance we will be jailed or killed.”

Yet “preventing” the Trump administration is likely impossible: There is no evidence that the electoral college will swing to Clinton, or that evidence of Russian influence on the election will be investigated deeply enough or quickly enough to call his victory into question. If we believe that Trump will happen, the question then becomes how to slow him down, and how to keep organized and committed to that task.

I asked Andi Zeisler, co-founder of Bitch Magazine — which arguably laid the groundwork for much of the 2000s women’s-media renaissance — how her readers’ needs had shifted in times of more intense backlash, like the Bush administration.

“For every reader who had lived through the supposedly post-feminist ’80s and the feminist ’90s, there were more who were just coming of age and coming to feminism in this conservative time and realizing that they needed feminism much more than they had expected to,” Zeisler says. “So to me it felt less like a shift than a continuum. The one thing we did experience was that people were not coming to us just for pop-culture and media analysis. They wanted concrete, actionable information: Who to write to, where to protest, etc. And they wanted to hear more directly from activists.”

Of course, there’s the issue of what that activism will look like and what our goals can reasonably be. In recent years, feminists have had the luxury of playing offense. We could afford the time bitching about millennials’ “entitlement” and focus on micro-aggressions. Now, the issue is not just abortion stigma, but whether we will retain the right to abortion; not only how the media represents or employs marginalized people, but whether the media itself will be free to produce anything but Trump propaganda.

This is painful, not just because of the losses themselves, but because we seemed to be so close to making tangible gains. Policies for paid family leave, more affordable college, and a strikingly ambitious plan to cap child care cost at 10% of a family’s income were all on the table in Hillary Clinton’s administration. She had also vowed to fight restrictions on abortion, defended late-term abortion, and had committed to overturning the Hyde Amendment, which prevents poor women from accessing federal funds for abortion and thus puts it out of reach for many poor women.

Trump’s gender policy is still taking shape, but the early signs — he’s affirmed a commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, and made moves to forbid single parents from filing as “head of household” — are that we will not just stall out on advancing these agendas, but rapidly move backward. That means that defensive activism is the only activism left.

Most feminist activism has taken place not in the bright sunlight, but in the shadow of overwhelming and oppressive conditions. Cindy Cooper, of the reproductive justice organization Words of Choice, points me to the way much pro-choice activism arose specifically in response to the backlash of the Reagan ‘80s. She cites an essay by longtime activist Barbara Santee: “Young people must prepare themselves for a lifelong engagement in this crucial war to protect women’s reproductive autonomy,” Santee wrote. “If side A is prepared at any cost to take away side B’s freedom, and side B is saying, ‘It can never happen,’ it will happen.”

In other words: By underestimating the damage that Trump’s extremist right-wing movement is prepared to do to women’s rights, we all but ensure that damage will occur. We can’t relax, and we can’t assume that everything (or anything) will work out.

“I don’t think any backlash ever ended,” Cooper added. “A lot of horrible things have happened in the Obama years, from murders at Planned Parenthood to the vast expansion of state anti-abortion regulations. In fact, historically, it’s been true, I believe, that more bad things happen in the abortion area when there are pro-choice people in office because the antis go wild. Of course, now we may be facing the worst of the worst… reproductive rights is an ongoing lifelong battle, and so are all of the fights for civil rights, freedom and human rights.”

If the Trump administration does nothing else for feminism — and, trust me, a Trump administration will do absolutely nothing else for feminism — it can, at the least, galvanize us into an awareness of how fragile our progress always has been, and remind us to keep committed to that lifelong, never-ending march.

Domestic violence is a classic “women’s issue.” Although both women and men can be victims (and although both men and women can be violent) studies estimate that up to 97% of abusers are men with female partners; between 1994 and 2010, the Bureau of Justice says, 4 in 5 victims of intimate partner violence were women.

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It’s easy to look at these numbers and frame domestic violence purely around sexism: If patriarchy says a man is king in his home, and if women’s lives and needs are deemed less worthy than men’s, then it follows that many heterosexual relationships descend into a nightmare of control and violence as the abuser asserts his supremacy in the most literal way possible.

But if you shift your focus just a little bit to the side, to the realm of money and work, another pattern emerges — and it may prove to be far more useful in terms of crafting policy that saves victims’ lives.

In one study, 60% of domestic violence survivors reported losing their jobs as a direct consequence of the abuse. 98% said that abuse made them worse at their jobs — they couldn’t concentrate because they’d been attacked, or were anticipating an attack when they got home. Generally, abuse victims miss work more often, come in late more often, are hospitalized for injuries more often, suffer more long-term and chronic health conditions (depression, PTSD, substance abuse), and thereby accrue more medical debt. When you add in the economic abuse present in 98% of abusive relationships—anything from sabotaging job interviews to holding a monopoly over family bank accounts to simply making sure that things like cell phone contracts are in the abuser’s name—it’s no surprise that a woman who does try to leave her abuser frequently finds that her entire financial support structure disintegrates when the relationship does. It’s for precisely this reason that the majority of homeless women are domestic violence survivors.

The point of this catalogue of horrors isn’t to tell you domestic violence is bad, which (I hope to God) we can all take as a given. It’s to demonstrate that the division between “economic issues” and “women’s issues” is artificial. Money is our society’s most concrete form of power. And when we look at domestic violence through money, what we see is a power play: women are kept captive to male violence because they can’t afford to live without the men who hurt them.

That’s why it’s essential to treat domestic violence as an economic issue. It allows us to craft responses that go beyond the moral (“don’t be violent”) or even the purely gender-based (“don’t be sexist”—always good advice!) and actually alleviate specific burdens.

In Pennsylvania, for example, there are two measures on the table: One, a move to remove all cancellation fees for abuse victims who have to abruptly leave their cell-phone contracts, and give them a new phone number if requested. Two, a move to allow women who are being abused to terminate their leases without penalty. Those seem like small things, maybe even trivial—but if your abuser still has access to your phone, he may be able to see who you’re calling, or even use your GPS to find you, making stalking more possible. And you can’t “just leave” if breaking your lease will damage your credit and make it impossible for you to rent your next home and begin to rebuild your life.

These specific, practical policies are not only effective, they require policymakers to take a feminist, victim-centered approach: Talk to victims, listen for common stories, and figure out what common tactics abusers are using and precisely where debt-relief or financial aid should be applied to benefit victims best. The cell phone bill, for example, stems in part from a specific situation in which a woman’s abuser smashed her cell phone because he knew she couldn’t afford a new one, thus draining her bank account (she couldn’t stop paying the bill) and limiting her ability to reach out for help.

Annamarya Scaccia, who has reported on the Pennsylvania bills, says these smaller interventions can precede and prevent the necessity for larger ones.

“The most direct connections aren’t always the most obvious or violent,” Scaccia told me. “When an abuser wipes out your account to embarrass you at the store or when they smash your cell phone knowing you can’t afford another one, these can easily be framed by the abuser as accidents or lies, and the victim ends up looking ‘crazy’ or ‘overreacting’ (which of course has a gendered element). These smaller (so-to-speak) moments of abuse often proceed [more severe abuse].”

To be clear, cultural work is also deeply necessary. As long as women are fundamentally seen as less worthy than men, the violence they experience directly in abusive relationships will simply be repeated in other, subtler ways throughout their lives, as they move from the men who attack them to the bosses who pay them less or the male co-workers who denigrate their contributions. Needless to say, if more employers benefited from real education about how domestic violence works, and more workplaces had plans for dealing with it, fewer victims would lose their jobs.

But when we allow ourselves to move toward an understanding of domestic violence and sexism as economic issues—with all the seriousness and “real” political heft that implies—then we have both more urgency and more acuity in dealing with them. And when we include gender in our economic understanding, our policy stops being a sort of generalized “uplift” and starts providing specific and targeted aid. We can stop sifting our thinking into “real” issues and “women’s” issues, and start thinking about the ways both feminism and economic justice cohere to make real, immediate changes—which we have to do, in the end, if we want to impact sexism at all.