There was a lot of indignant squawking, all of it by men and most of it in private,when it became clear last spring that the Democratic candidates for all the top statewide offices would be women.  Many men thought such an “unbalanced” ticket couldn’t possibly win.

                Nobody mentioned that, speaking of imbalance, there had never been any woman nominated for any of those offices before 1978.  Prior to that, the tickets had been all male.

         When it was clear that Dana Nessel would be the Democratic candidate for attorney general, one of the most famous Democratic“old bulls” said to me “well, we threw that race away.”  Not only was Nessel actually married to another woman, she scandalized a lot of men, especially older ones, with what came to be known as her “penis video.”

      Released on YouTube a little over a year ago, when she was still largely unknown and more and more scandals about office harassment were breaking, it includes Nessel saying obviously tongue-in-cheek, Who can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting? Is it the candidate who doesn’t have a penis? I’d say so.”

                I thought it was brilliant; it was funny and got her noticed, and she went on to defeat the favored candidate for the nomination and then win the general election by more than 100,000 votes.  The women Democrats nominated for governor and secretary of state won by landslides, and Debbie Stabenow won a fourth term in the U.S. Senate.

       That wasn’t all. Four years ago, there was exactly one woman among Michigan’s 14 members of the House of Representatives. In January, there will be five –and there would have been six, had Candice Miller not chosen to retire.  In the state legislature, the number of women zoomed from 33 to 42 in the lower house, and from four to eleven in the state senate.

      Meanwhile,another woman, Megan Cavanagh, defeated an incumbent male Michigan Supreme Court justice.  It was probably the best election in history for Michigan women.

      Magazines and headline writers have already labeled this the “year of the woman,” and hinted that their success this year was somewhat of a fad, or perhaps a side effect of the Me Too movement. In fact, there are clearly multiple reasons a lot of women won.

    For one thing, most of them were Democrats, and it was a big Democratic year.  Incumbent Republican State Senator Margaret O’Brien lost her seat to a man, for example.

    In many cases, women were just stronger and more charismatic candidates; that was true in the state Supreme Court race, where Cavanagh was also a magic political name.

    Plus, some of this is just natural and overdue; it is shocking how long it has taken for women to have any more than token representation in any elected body. There were never more than two women in the hundred-member U.S. Senate before 1992. In January, there will be a record 24, still less than one-quarter of the total.  Despite their gains, women will still be less than one-third of Michigan’s state senate and have less than two-fifths of the members of the house.

   Nor can we assume that electing women will automatically give us a kinder and gentler government; think Margaret Thatcher, or what we know about Hillary Clinton.