Then, for vice president, you would find someone who has implied women should stay in abusive relationships (he denies that’s what he meant but listen for yourself), wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, favors a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling to states where abortion is legal, accuses single women (“childless cat ladies”) of lacking a stake in America’s future, votes against protection for in vitro fertilization and wants higher taxes for childless people. (He later said he had not meant to offend cats.)
Well, that’s the MAGA Republican Party ticket of convicted felon and former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Trump, having normalized overtly racist speech and demonization of immigrants during his campaigns and presidency, now seems bent on making misogyny acceptable, as well.
Indeed, the MAGA movement’s anti-woman outlook relies on a whole pseudo-academic underpinning to justify relegating women to the home as baby-making machines. “Vance, along with his New Right fellow-travelers, is about to introduce voters to a more conceptual take on sexism — one which many women, and indeed many men, might find even more alarming,” Laura K. Field wrote last week for Politico. Field detailed the right-wing groups that have concocted a philosophical framework to propound “a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality”; its aim is “to roll back much of feminism’s gains.”
Their declaration for a “revival of faith, family, and fertility” comes straight from the fascism playbook, which historically has sought to domesticate women and put them under the thumb of their fathers and husbands. “Control over female bodies in the name of population growth is a throughline of authoritarianism, as are persecutions of LGBTQ+ individuals,” writes historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “In Europe and America, the century-long focus of the far right on demographic emergencies supposedly created by declines of White births and upticks in non-White immigration have created support for controls on female bodies.” She continues: “These controls are predicated on negating the personhood of women and consigning them to roles as vessels of population growth.”
From the “great replacement theory” to abortion bans, the Make America Great Again movement echoes past demographic freakouts and accompanying efforts to dominate women. As Ben-Ghiat puts it, the MAGA crew, like its intellectual ancestors, insists that for “White Christian civilization to continue, women must be deprived of reproductive rights and demeaned, disciplined, and criminalized if they resist.”
But you don’t have to rely on historians. Project 2025, which Vance has championed and many close Trump advisers put together, explicitly commits to restore the centrality of a male-headed, heterosexual family with children. (“Families composed of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”) Running through every policy recommendation, the plan gives preference to the “traditional family,” (often called “healthy family”), deeming all other family units as “unnatural.”
The 900-page manifesto declares: “It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family,” reads the manifesto. It says the secretary of Health and Human Services “should proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” No wonder Vance disparages blended families.
At times, the 2025 Project sounds downright Orwellian:
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
If they delete the words, do they imagine abortion and gender issues will vanish?
Needless to say, the reaction to these backward ideas and the effort to denigrate Vice President Harris as a “DEI candidate” have not gone over well with women (or many men). A week ago, “more than 44,000 Black women joined a call to galvanize supporters for the vice president’s historic run for president, drawing celebrity names — including Yvette Nicole Brown and Jenifer Lewis — and raising an estimated $1.5 million,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. “At the white women call Thursday night, there were more than 100,000 participants, a number so staggering it caused significant technical glitches that sent many to watch the live stream on YouTube, where more than 25,000 also joined the call.” (Reports indicated that by Friday they had raised more than $8.5 million.)
Certainly, Harris personally has generated much of the excitement. The prospect of a woman of color beating Trump to win the presidency has supercharged women voters. But this ticket’s odious rhetoric certainly has contributed to the rising tide of fury, defiance and resentment among women. When Harris declares “We’re not going back,” the message has particular resonance among women.
The backlash against Trump is nothing new. In my book “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump,” I documented the organic organizing among women that surged in the wake of Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. The networks of women, the organizations they created, the entry into politics of a new generation of women politicians and the muscle memory for grass-roots activity remain, now invigorated by the Harris campaign. A GOP ticket even more misogynistic, repressive and hateful than its 2016 version has lit a fire under these women.
If women prevail in handing MAGA forces a defeat (as they did overwhelmingly in the 2018 midterms and in 2020), they might have Trump and Vance to thank. They have roused the sleeping (mama) bear, now more determined than ever to preserve democracy and keep misogynists out of the White House.
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