In 1982, Phyllis Schlafly, perhaps the most important anti-feminist in American history, debated the radical feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon. Schlafly believed that sexism was a thing of the past; to her, if women had different roles in society than men, it was due to their distinct talents and inclinations. She herself, she said, had never experienced discrimination.
MacKinnon pointed out that Schlafly, who’d written extensively about defense policy, had wanted a position in Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon. Any man with Schlafly’s considerable accomplishments, MacKinnon argued, would have been given a job. Schlafly had to concede that her feminist foe had a point.
An ambitious woman who is willing to absolve the right of misogyny can go far, but rarely can she achieve the same status as a man. That’s especially true today, in a Republican Party that’s increasingly giving itself over to the most retrograde forms of sexism.
Recently several Republican congresswomen have been complaining, on and off the record, that their party’s leaders, especially Mike Johnson, the House speaker, don’t take them seriously. It started with Representative Majorie Taylor Greene, a onetime MAGA icon who is resigning next month. “They want women just to go along with whatever they’re doing and basically to stand there, smile and clap with approval, whereas they just have their good old boys club,” she said in September. It turns out she’s not alone in her frustration.
Last week, The Times reported on Republican women in Congress who say that Johnson “failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues,” which they seemed to attribute to his highly patriarchal evangelical Christianity. (He recently said that women, unlike men, are unable to “compartmentalize” their thoughts.)
Feeling sidelined by Johnson, some Republican women are defying him. All but one of the House Republicans who bucked leadership to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files were women. Of the eight Republicans who joined with Democrats in November to try to censure their fellow Republican Cory Mills — who has been accused of threatening his ex with revenge porn — six were women.
Recently, rumors have swirled that Nancy Mace, who is running for governor of South Carolina, could soon follow Greene in quitting the House before the end of her term. Mace has denied this, but her disgruntlement is no secret. On Monday, she wrote in The Times, “Women will never be taken seriously until leadership decides to take us seriously, and I’m no longer holding my breath.”
It’s tempting to roll one’s eyes at women who are shocked, shocked to discover sexism in a political party led by Donald Trump. But it’s a sign of progress that these women are not responding as Schlafly did, demurely accepting their subordinate position within conservatism. They may not all call themselves feminists — though at times Mace has — but they’ve internalized basic feminist assumptions about their entitlement to equal treatment. What they’ve failed to understand, however, is that those aren’t assumptions their party shares.
Much has been made about the rebirth of gutter antisemitism and racism within the conservative movement. There’s been less public alarm about the resurgence of unapologetic misogyny. Last month, there was an uproar over the support that the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, offered to Tucker Carson after his softball interview with Nick Fuentes, the influential antisemite. We’ve seen far less backlash to Heritage’s hiring of Scott Yenor, who believes that workplace discrimination against women should be legal, as head of its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Among the sort of young men who revel in transgressive antisemitism — which is to say, among much of the conservative movement’s rising generation — calls to repeal women’s right to vote have become commonplace.
Not long ago, most Republicans at least pretended to accept liberal premises about human equality, sometimes even gloating about one-upping Democrats on diversity. In 2008, Republicans tried to capitalize on the disappointment some women felt about Hillary Clinton’s primary loss by putting Sarah Palin on their ticket. There was a moment in 2011 when Michele Bachmann was a leading candidate in the Republican presidential primary race. For years it was almost a truism that the first woman president would probably be a Republican, some steely American version of Margaret Thatcher in high heels and pearls. Republicans didn’t want to raise up women as a group, but they valorized a certain kind of powerful woman, one who disdained feminism and proved through her success that the strong didn’t need it.
Today, however, Republicans are much less defensive about being the party of chest-beating patriarchy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has purged women from the highest ranks of the military. Johnson has attributed school shootings to the “amoral society” wrought by “radical feminism” and the sexual revolution and has said Americans should strive to live by “18th-century values.” Vice President JD Vance is famously contemptuous of women without children.
And the lower levels of the administration are littered with defiant chauvinists. Paul Ingrassia, who Trump recently made deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration, is probably best known for a leaked email where he referred to his “Nazi streak.” But he also reportedly intervened during a federal investigation on behalf of the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate — who is his former client and has been accused of sex trafficking — after electronic devices belonging to Tate and his brother were seized at the border, and he called opposition to women’s suffrage “very based,” a term of high praise on the right.
There are still plenty of opportunities in the MAGA movement for women who embody Trump’s preferred style of hyper-femininity, espouse traditional gender roles, or both. Indeed, the president’s obsession with aesthetics can open doors for women who might otherwise never have careers in politics. Many Republicans like having beautiful women around, and they appreciate being able to put a feminine face on their culture war crusades. But as some women in the party are realizing, there’s a big difference between being useful and being respected.
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