American Fascism: Implications for Women of a 2nd Trump Administration
The agenda of the incoming Trump administration has grave implications for women; not only for reproductive autonomy, but for our standing as citizens in a free society.
We reject the misguided direction of the democratic, liberalistic, international women's movement… A woman's entire education, development, vocational pursuit, and position within Volk and state must be directed toward the physical and spiritual task of motherhood." – Nazi Party principles for the National Socialist Women's League, 1933
As soon as it became apparent that adjudicated rapist and lifelong sexual predator Donald Trump was about to be re-elected, his sexist and racist followers let their woman-hating freak flags fly. After all, the tone had been set by the candidate’s prior misogynistic behavior and anti-woman policies, as well as his racist and sexist campaign rhetoric. The man who has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” and barging into the changing rooms of the Miss Teen USA pageant to ogle undressed women, who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by at least 26 women, creepily asserted during his campaign that he would be a “protector” of women and that once he was president, they wouldn’t be thinking about abortion anymore.
On election night, far right provocateur Nick Fuentes led the charge among MAGA men with a rapey tweet: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” His fellow misogynists picked up the battle cry, with boys deploying the slogan to taunt school girls and female teachers; others ordering women to “get back in the kitchen.”
This bareknuckle misogyny is of a piece with the brutal outcomes for women of the first Trump administration. His appointment of three far right justices to the Supreme Court overturned abortion rights at the federal level through the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decision. The ruling has resulted in injury for numerous women and the death of at least three, who were miscarrying and denied timely medical treatment. In addition, many women seeking abortions for reasons other than medical emergencies face serious hardship. In 13 states, abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances. Another 8 states ban abortion at or before 18 weeks - earlier than the Roe v. Wade decision allowed. Altogether, “41 states have abortion bans in effect with only limited exceptions.”
During his next term we can expect further assaults on women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Although Trump lied during his campaign, claiming ignorance of Project 2025, he is now hiring contributors to the project, including key architect Russell Vought, to head Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a position he held in the first Trump administration. Project 2025 is the latest in a series of “Mandates for Leadership” produced by the Heritage Foundation, with the first published in 1981. Then, as now, the Mandate called for ending programs to increase diversity and equity, (then called affirmative action), for women and racial-ethnic minorities. Paul Weyrich, the first president of Heritage, was especially focused on feminists:
Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation's 1981 master plan for the Reagan administration, warned of the "increasing political leverage of feminist interests" and the infiltration of a "feminist network" into government agencies, and called for a slew of countermeasures to minimize feminist power. Mandate for Leadership II, three years later, was equally preoccupied with conquering the women's-rights campaign; its authors asserted, "The fight against comparable worth [pay equity] must become a top priority for the next administration."1
The continued backlash against women’s rights is part of Project 2025’s overall plan for authoritarian government - to consolidate power in the hands of the executive branch, to dismantle much of the administrative state and regulatory agencies - such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education - and to impose a far-right social agenda. As Gloria Steinem stated in a 2021 discussion on NPR, “Controlling reproduction has always been the first step in any hierarchical or authoritarian government.”
Harvard professor of political science Erica Chenoweth elaborates:
In fully authoritarian states, the mechanisms of sexist repression can be uncompromising and brutal. Often, they take the form of policies that exert direct state control over women’s reproduction, including through forced pregnancies or forced abortions, misogynistic rhetoric that normalizes or even encourages violence against women, and laws and practices that reduce or eliminate women’s representation in government and discourage women from entering or advancing in the workforce.
In Mussolini’s Italy, for example, a combination of punitive policies and incentives were used to promote child-bearing.
Giving information about birth control became a criminal offense. Abortion, which had already been illegal, but largely not very closely monitored… was criminalized with women facing up to five years of penal labor for consenting to abortion.
Miscarriages had to be registered with the state and there were limitations on women’s access to employment and higher education.
At the same time, Mussolini’s government provided monetary incentives such as marriage loans that were paid off with the birth of children and job preferences for married men. Extra taxes were levied on unmarried men.
Project 2025 recommends similar, and in at least one instance, potentially more brutal, restrictions on reproductive health care than fascist Italy.
Restricting access to mifepristone by requiring in-person dispensing and, ultimately, revoking the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the abortion medication.
Going around the FDA by reviving the 1873 Comstock Act that prohibits mailing anything intended for producing abortion (and potentially birth control as well).
Prohibiting health care providers who receive Title X funding from providing abortion referrals.
Rescinding the Biden administration guidance on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) issued after the Dobbs decision overturned abortion rights. The guidance affirmed that women who needed emergency abortion care were entitled to it under federal law, even in states where abortion is banned. Project 2025 also calls for all current Department of Justice litigation against states that have violated EMTALA to be withdrawn.
Expanding religious exemptions from contraceptive coverage to make it easier for employers - including corporations - to exclude such coverage from their employees’ health insurance plans.
Replacing comprehensive sex education with abstinence-only curricula.
Project 2025 co-author and likely incoming OMB director Vought told undercover reporters during the campaign that a Trump administration would implement a national ban, if he were re-elected. This despite claims by Trump and other GOP stalwarts that Dobbs was intended merely to return abortion legislation to the states. Everywhere citizens have organized to institute abortion rights in their state, the GOP has mobilized to thwart the will of the people - demonstrating again the fascistic nature of the movement. As Chenoweth observes, “Authoritarianism and patriarchy go together; [while] women's equality and democracy go together.”
Though fascist regimes aggressively promote child-bearing, “those children are children for the state, not for the family.” Producing children is a patriotic duty for the benefit of a country or society. In a remarkable contemporary parallel, several US states have filed a lawsuit seeking to restrict access to abortion medication in their states due to population decline.
The attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri, seeking to establish the states’ standing to challenge the federal government’s liberalized rules for medication abortion, claim that expanded access to the abortion pills is “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase,” and that “decreased births” were inflicting “a sovereign injury to the state itself.”
Incoming vice president JD Vance has voiced similar “responsibility to society” arguments in support of mandatory childbearing. He has described women who are not mothers as “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable with their own lives” and all childless people as “sociopaths” who “don’t have a direct stake in this country.” Parents, Vance suggested, should have a greater say in the society by giving children votes, and allowing parents control over those votes.
When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power… than people who don’t have kids… If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.
Project 2025 calls for “restoring the family,” asserting that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” a prescription that does not bode well for lesbian-headed households.
If the second Trump administration pursues, as he has suggested he will, long-standing far-right goals of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and cutting Social Security, women will be disproportionately adversely affected. The ACA prohibits health insurance companies from their previous practice of charging women higher insurance premiums than men. Due to, on average, lower lifetime earnings than men, Social Security forms a larger proportion of women’s retirement income compared with men. For unmarried women, including widows, Social Security comprises 51% of their retirement income, compared with 39% for unmarried men and 36% for couples. For about a quarter of women, Social Security is their only source of retirement income.
Austerity policies envisioned by Elon Musk, who Trump plans to install in an undefined advisory capacity to enact drastic budget cuts in the name of “efficiency,” will adversely impact most Americans as Musk himself admits. As always, however, women will be disproportionately affected relative to men, with women of color subject to even greater hardship.
Many women who are justifiably angered and frustrated with the Democrats over gender identity policies that allow males who identify as women or girls to compete in female sport, as well as access to female spaces such as locker rooms and restrooms; and to be housed in women’s prisons, have cheered Trump’s re-election. They expect that, at last, the female category in sport will be preserved and restored. But what will women’s sport look like, once there is no Department of Education, and the Trump administration dismantles programs to promote equity?
Recall that Title IX was created to remedy sex inequality in educational institutions - not specifically for sport. At the time, women were subject to different college entrance requirements than men at many institutions; professional degree programs such as medicine and law routinely limited the number of female students they would accept; and girls were kicked out of school for becoming pregnant.
Title IX was intended to remedy these types of inequities. As it happens, sport is embedded in educational institutions in the US. An unintended consequence of the legislation was equitable funding for male and female sport.
As Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, who was a key supporter of the original legislation, said in 2002, “When it was proposed, we had no idea that its most visible impact would be in athletics. I had been paying attention to the academic issue. I had been excluded from medical school because I was female.”2
A principal role of the Department of Education, created as a stand-alone agency by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, is to prohibit “discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding.” Thus, the department oversees Title IX implementation. Although the department does not set curriculum, the far right is gunning for the department as part of its plan to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and programs. If the department is eliminated, what body will oversee Title IX implementation? And will there be any incentive to ensure equitable distribution of funding for men’s and women’s sport?
Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a Project 2025 coalition partner, which now presents itself as a champion of women’s rights, and campaigns for the female category in sport, previously argued that Title IX was unfair to men. When the legislation was implemented, one of the three prongs by which an institution could prove compliance was the proportionality rule. Male sports directors agreed to a division of funding between male and female sport based on the proportion of male and female undergraduates at an institution. At the time, women were a minority among undergraduates.3 Once barriers to higher education were removed, the numbers of women seeking college degrees increased dramatically. By 2000, they had become the majority - about 57% - of undergraduates.4
Now athletic directors lobbied Congress for a change in the proportionality rule; in particular, requesting that football be exempted. Rather than share the lavish funding football enjoys, athletic programs began cutting minor male sports, such as wrestling, and telling men it couldn’t be helped because they had to give money to women athletes. IWF took the side of men in the dispute, and issued a position paper5 arguing that, due to greater levels of testosterone, men were “naturally” more interested in sport than women.
The point here is that, yes, fascists understand “what a woman is.” But it doesn’t automatically follow that they will support sex equality. Quite the opposite. Women’s overt oppression, and restriction to childbearing and family roles, is a hallmark of fascist regimes.
The agenda of the incoming Trump administration, a nascent fascist regime, has grave implications for women. Fascism - right wing authoritarian government centered on a charismatic leader - is inherently anti-democratic. The goals are to centralize control and eliminate political competition. The latter is accomplished, in part, by targeting movements to expand civil rights to groups previously denied, and to re-affirm hierarchies. Chenoweth notes that “one of the most available of these hierarchies… in any society, is the hierarchy between men and women.”
Loyola University professor of history and Women’s Studies, Anne Wingenter, says that attacks on “reproductive rights, are an important sign for democratic backsliding.”
[T]hey are a way in which the definition of the people… gets narrowed.
There's been contestation of who gets to count as the people. And in some ways, the last century or more has really been about trying to define the people and… for various groups, to trying to be admitted into full personhood. Fascism is a rejection of… an expansive definition of the people. What we seem to be experiencing today looks a lot like an attempt to define down that notion of the people again. And some people get to be fully autonomous and some don't.
The root of patriarchy is control over women’s reproductive and sexual capacity as Gerda Lerner explains in The Creation of Patriarchy (1986). Women became a “resource” among warring tribes in the Neolithic period; bought, captured, or exchanged, both to “cement alliances” and because they could produce more people for a society.6
In every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved, whereas men were killed. It was only after men had learned how to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers, that they learned how to enslave men of those groups and, later, subordinates from within their own societies. Thus, the enslavement of women, combining both racism and sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression.7
Although US women have made great strides towards equality in the last century, we are vulnerable as a class, in part, because we have not been explicitly affirmed as citizens in the Constitution. Both political parties appear unwilling to publish the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which has been fully ratified since 2020. But we have advantages women in earlier fascist regimes did not. For example, though access to education for women was restricted under Mussolini, few women at that time pursued higher education. In the contemporary US, more women than men - 39% - have college degrees. Most women have access to paid employment. We have more resources and a base from which to launch a defense, and ultimately, full expansion, of our civil rights. This is the urgent task before us now.
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Faludi, Susan. 1991. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, (p246). Crown Publishing Group.
Ware, Susan. 2007. Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (p3). Waveland Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Ware, Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (p6).
Ware, Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (p16).
Kasic, Allison and Kimberly Schuld, 2008. Title IX and Athletics: A Primer. Position Paper No. 610, Independent Women’s Forum.
Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford University Press, New York.
Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, p212-13.
Part of me has been battling a heavy blanket of despair that has been trying to settle over me since the reelection of Trump. The certainty that a tidal wave of political and social assaults against women is coming, has been difficult to sit with. But there is part of me that feels the embers of resistance growing. There's a feeling in me that I can't explain. It's like power coming from the earth and sky. It's anger directed at those who would oppress us, but it's also the knowledge that whatever differences exist between, I am ready to fight for all women. The only way we survive this is together. Women are power, and men try to grind us down, and strip us of our individual and collective identity. They've always been afraid of us, and it's time we give them reason to be.
A tragically insightful and astute essay. Thanks for braving the darkness so we can all see war it looks like - and how to get out.