The Worst of Times for Women

On MAGA’s cultural, economic, and policy war against women

The election of Trump in 2016 was many things, but first and foremost, it was a slap in the face to American women. It signaled the end of an era when women and girls could believe, based on statistics about women in the workforce and girls in college, that we were living in an era of progress. 

The election of Trump and the rise of MAGA elevated a particular female style of which the Trump women are avatars. The ones who hang at Mar a Lago, or strut the CPAC stages are caricatures of femininity. They often yield to the showgirl costume and plastic-fantastic self-mutilation because they must be ever attentive to the sensitive feelings and perverse desires of the oafs and ogres they serve, in exchange for access to power and money. 

But their prefab looks and standard of female attractiveness are only the most visible evidence of the gargantuan step backward that women have taken since 2016. At the women’s march on the day after the p*ssy-grabber’s inauguration, we were really only beginning to understand just how much a corner of the man-osphere hates what our mothers and grandmothers accomplished by second-wave feminism. 

We live with those gains today: the share of women in opposite-sex marriages who earn as much as or more than their husband has roughly tripled over the past 50 years, about a third of workers in the country’s ten highest-paying occupations are women – up from 13% in 1980. And women outnumber men in the U.S. college-educated workforce, now making up 51 percent of those ages 25 and older. And for the first time in human history, thanks to the birth control pill, women could decide when or whether to have children.

This shift on the power dynamic did not sit well with some - perhaps many - men. The long backlash gained force through the 1980s. In that decade, besides the rise of Rush Limbaugh calling women “feminazis” and the “Reagan revolution,” economic gains by women started to stagnate. In 2022, U.S. women earned 82 cents for every dollar men earned - about the same as in 2002, when women earned 80 cents to the dollar. And of course there has been no increase in child care for working women, which was met with its own backlash of a sort with the fake Satanic Panic day care scandals also in the 1980s.

Now the 1980s look like a halcyon time. Forcing women to become breeders is no pipe dream with the clinic bombing set today. It is actual state policy. Ruth Ben Ghiat, a historian of autocracy, last week called the MAGA obsession with controlling women’s bodies “biopolitics.” Last week she quoted the odious CPAC director and accused male groper Matt Schlapp wailing about the decline of the White race as a primary justification for a federal abortion ban. ‘If you’re worried about this quote-unquote ‘replacement,’ why don’t we start…with allowing our own people to live?“ he said in 2022. “This position, Ben-Ghiat writes, “makes women race killers as well as baby killers, which is why Schlapp considers the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade as “a good start” to a larger civilizational battle.”

During the Roe half-century, American women grew accustomed to access to safe and legal abortion. But we were always on the back foot politically. Women and their allies were constantly forced to raise money and fight what would be, as we now see, a losing battle with the fanatical and well-organized forces of the zygote-worshippers. On the 40th anniversary of Roe I wrote that for two generations, women’s politics in America was defined and limited by a single, highly personal issue that should have no place in the political discourse of a modern, post-industrial, civilized nation. The constant threat of outlawing abortion (and restricting access to and means of birth control) eclipsed every other issue of great importance to women—equal pay, gender parity in politics and boardrooms, issues of workplace fairness, employee flextime, and affordable child care. 

Today, all those important policy issues are truly abandoned, replaced by the urgent threat of nationwide forced birth.

For a half-century, Democrats could have fought back harder, tried to ensconce abortion as a national right, and/or poured resources into shutting down the lunatic fringes seizing power in the States. They did not, in part I believe because the war on abortion benefited Democrats politically. American women had no one else to turn to. The male left is hardly blameless: Bernie bros’ misogyny was well documented. It’s in cool culture too. Most women under the age of 45 grew up listening to music with catchy beats set to lyrics and videos that reduced women to bitches, whores and T and A. Anyone who critiqued this style was either a Karen or a racist - or probably both.

The furious backlash against women’s gains - the long-simmering rage, really - went unaddressed in political debate for years. Our American Taliban, besides the occasional clinic bomber, was mostly quiet or when vocal, relegated to - lighten up ladies - political insult comedy. The political media’s habitual downplaying of female voters’ potential power and influence on American politics is just a subtler version of the same creepy misogyny that propels Trump.

Trump looming menacingly over Hillary in the nationally televised second debate in 2016 effectively taught the decision-makers in the Democratic Party that a woman cannot run for president - anyway, not just yet, little lady. And the #MeToo movement has had the unfortunate side effect of cementing an assumption on the progressive side that women are victims who either don’t have agency, or who by their mere presence represent potential HR threats to men in workplaces. 

The abysmal status of women in America was nowhere more on display than last week in Arizona, where a rightist Supreme Court court dusted off a 160-year-old statute written before the state was a state and applied it to Arizona women and girls and their doctors - today. The law, written during the days of gamblers and gunfighters, Wyatt Earp, Apache raids, states: “A person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years.”

Until the mid 19th Century, abortion was largely legal across America before “quickening” - the second trimester when a woman can first feel movement. It was mainly practiced by midwives, women who also attended births. The earliest forced-birth laws - like the one that Arizona now must respect - were proposed by the American Medical Association. As medicine professionalized, male doctors took over from the midwives and acted in their own interests. They wanted, like so many today, women breeding and in the kitchen. 

By 1880, 40 states had outlawed the procedure.

The Arizona law was written during an era of extremely high maternal mortality in America. Doctors knew little about fetal development and even less about how to keep birthing women alive through the process. No ultrasound. No antibiotics. Pregnancy and childbirth were perilous - even more so on the frontier. By some estimates, American women in the 19th Century had a one in eight chance of dying in childbirth. Choice mattered: women died. Today, everywhere in America where states are getting between doctors and women, miscarrying women and women with complicated pregnancies, are being denied basic care - just like our female ancestors, except that modern medicine exists to help them.

The sole light in this dark tunnel is that outraged Arizona women and their male allies will very likely pay attention and turn that state blue in November. And that state’s clownish Republican Senate nominee, Kari Lake, will be reduced to a stage act at Mar a Lago.