What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political Racial Class and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live

Women are the most powerful force reshaping the future of America. Stronger than political parties mightier than religious differences able to leap cultural schisms in a single bound women are quietly exerting a unified power to make changes in our culture and in commerce meeting in the middle to achieve their goals. But they’re not using traditional means such as getting together and voting or banging on closed doors to demand equal access. In virtually every arena where American women are causing a sea change they are bypassing the traditional settings that ignore their needs and are creating parallel circuits which in turn then affect the old standards. Across political religious racial and class differences this new vital female center is heralding the most significant change in American culture in the past century. Two of the hottest trend-spotters in America—Celinda Lake a leading political strategist for the Democratic party and one of the nation’s foremost experts on electing women candidates and Kellyanne Conway a leading conservative pollster and president and CEO of The Polling Company INC.™—themselves cross the aisle to reveal the ways in which a newly defined united power base among women is reshaping the state of our nation much more than the two-sided politics of Left and Right. Using the eye-opening results of interviews focus groups and polls (three of which were created especially for this book) that they’ve conducted Conway and Lake demonstrate how women are getting what they want and need by rejecting outdated traditions and expectations that no longer fit their reality. They are breaking the old rules about when and whether to marry and have children living fully and equally as singles and creating flexible inclusive workplaces that don’t sacrifice family or sanity. They are taking charge of the marketplace controlling $5 trillion annually as the primary purchasers of homes cars appliances and electronics. They are making their mark at ages twenty forty sixty and beyond drawing strength inspiration and intellectual stimulation from other women. And that’s just the beginning. In this smart exhilarating book Conway and Lake—who often fall on opposite sides of the country’s most polarizing debates—come together to seek out what women buy what they believe how they work how they live what they care about what they fear and what they really want. By delving beneath the radioactive hot-button issues Lake and Conway discovered common causes with which women are inventing a new age of opportunity—doing it their way and in the process improving life for all Americans.