The meme was everywhere. It showed Nancy Pelosi looking like a winner, cigarette in one hand, cocktail in another, rocking a gold flecked chiffon gown and surrounded by shining gold statuettes.

Only the face was actually Pelosi’s, however. It had been photoshopped onto the body of actress and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge pictured at an Emmy’s afterparty celebrating a very good night. But the feeling of female power the Pelosi meme projected as it was forwarded again and again — that was not about the Emmys, but about politics.

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This wins

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“There’s an intense hunger for a female superhero right now, and the showdown between the most powerful woman in the country and the most powerful man is potent symbolism,” said Jo Piazza, author of Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, the bestselling book (and soon to be Amazon original starring Julia Roberts) which Piazza says she wrote in the first place to fill a post-2016 “need for portrayals of powerful women who aren’t afraid of their power.”

Women who study women agree that this week marks a moment. But because the biggest takeaway of recent years is that American women are not of one opinion, there are any number of interpretations of what that moment is about.

Some envision Pelosi all but wearing a cape and taking on a man who has shown more than a little disrespect to women in his personal life. She has been celebrated for this before –sarcastically slow-clapping Trump at his State of the Union speech or tapping her shades into place while exiting the White House after a showdown with Trump over the border wall, chastising the president for having a “temper tantrum”, one of the many times she treated him like a flailing toddler.

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