“A woman is like a child”: MAGA quickly turns its sights on stripping Republican women of power
Conservative women believe complicity will save them. But an emboldened far-right is gunning for their rights
By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer

For decades, the anti-abortion movement has aggressively promoted women into visible leadership roles. It’s for cynical reasons, namely, to bat off entirely accurate accusations that the movement is misogynist. Never mind that there have always been women who are eager to police the bodies and behavior of other women. Enough people are credulous or at least disingenuous enough to think that “I’m a woman, which means I can’t hate other women” is an actual argument. For ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party’s larger hostility to women in leadership.

But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a “student” anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all.

“Removed [sic] this woman from public service,” declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the “TheoBros” movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring “We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion,” arguing that women’s suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being “busy jet-setting.”

Forty-five percent of female voters backed Trump in 2024, despite his overt misogyny. Most, no doubt, believed that complicity would protect them and that the attacks would be centered on other women. But while the GOP certainly wants to strip liberal and feminist women of their rights, male MAGA leaders are showing increasing interest in bringing Republican women to heel, both culturally and through the force of law. After all, they are more likely to live and work with Republican women. If they want to feel the full flowering of male domination, it’s Republican women they need to see submitting.

Nothing about this is shocking. Nothing about this couldn’t be seen from a mile away. The misogyny has been plain, and in our faces.

THIS IS THE SAVE ACT:

House Republicans passed a bill (now stalled in the Senate) this session to require citizens to have a passport or birth certificate matching their name to vote. This would be a back-door ban on voting for any woman who took her husband’s last name and doesn’t have a passport, an estimated 69 million women.