At the event Melania Trump hosted for Women’s History Month, the ladies in the audience had perfect blowouts and wore pastel dresses. But the speakers who took the stage were tough. They included an Olympic athlete, a single mother who worked as a waitress and Melania herself. Most of the women honored were notorious for being abrasive: among them Pam Bondi and Karoline Leavitt. The women in the crowd didn’t clap politely but cheered and hollered, as if the East Room chairs were bleachers at a football game. Rumor on the street is Leavitt, who is pregnant, will only receive three weeks of maternity leave from her role as White House press secretary.
“Women are either mothers, whores, or nuns”
The event offered an interesting view into the young women of the right – and what role they had to play in the MAGA movement. A recent article by Sam Adler-Bell published in New York magazine started out by describing why a woman called Anna joined the New Right, only to leave years later. She wanted to exist free from “woke pieties.” She wanted to go to the party, to be a woman welcome in this world of men. She valued family, seeing the longer delays before marriage and children as the main reason modern women were miserable. It was initially an “aesthetic choice” and she “found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.” She left the movement when “the theme of the party,” the extremism and misogyny, became too real to tolerate.
But there was never a stable alliance between the men and women of the New Right. Throughout the 2020s, the women who were drawn to this conservative movement were either enamored by traditional womanhood, intellectually transgressive, or both. What may have once seemed like an escape from the left’s denial of difference became another version of the same. MAGA politics has a masculinizing effect on women, who must cultivate traits like stoicism and the ability to stomach cruelty towards vulnerable people.
Women who are motivated to become wives and nurture children, who hold the sanctity of human life as a core value, are less prone to support far-right policies based on contempt for the weak. They might laugh off the occasional joke about putting children in cages, but tend to object when faced with the reality. The kind of woman who is spirited enough to join a reactionary movement might flirt with the idea of being less rational than men, but in practice resist it. The women who turned to the right for free speech do not take well to having their opinions dismissed on the basis of their sex.
Yet there is a kind of public-facing conservative woman who seems to have forgotten she is a woman at all. The reaction to Adler-Bell’s article devolved into abstract scolding. Helen Andrews wrote on X that, in choosing to remain anonymous, Anna had broken an “honor-based” rule that “feminized societies just don’t get.” Andrews’s rhetoric demonstrates why women in these circles have been doomed from the start: in order to last, they must act like the typical online right-wing man, aggressive toward outsiders but loyal to the group, vengeful, anti-social, coarse.
Women have always made tradeoffs; they exchange freedom for love, or love for safety, or love and safety for freedom. However, most women aren’t motivated to act against their own interest. A lot of women on the New Right would have been aligned with Vivian Gornick’s description of her ideal world back in 1969 as the Women’s Movement was rising: “Not only do I believe there is a genuine male or female nature in each of us, but I believe that what is most exciting about the new world that may be coming… is the complementary elements in those natures meeting without anxiety, of our different biological tasks being performed without profit for one at the expense of the other.” What women moving rightward may have wanted for themselves was to be connected to their female nature, to their biological role and to men, while maintaining most of the freedoms and dignities won for them in the 20th century. This was not the left’s vision for women – nor was it the right’s, so it turns out.
Gornick describes a “college-educated housewife, fat and neurotic,” announcing, “with arch sweetness, ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t feel oppressed.” A similar false comfort allowed some women to feel cozy on the right even as male counterparts joked about raping them.
At first, the appeal of the New Right seemed like a wry gesture at the absurdity of the liberal order, and a return to something harder, more durable and mysterious. From the comfort of our phones, deep within liberal society, it can be easy to lose our appreciation for what protects us. If the lie of wokeness was that words mattered more than reality, the lie of anti-wokeness was that words bore almost no relation to reality.
Part of the problem is that the ideas these men are floating sound ridiculous. They call to repeal the 19th Amendment, which ensures women have to same voting rates as men, as a rallying cry. What congresswoman is going to vote to repeal the 19th Amendment? Do they know how many members of Congress have to vote to repeal an amendment? It is all so impractical.
Adler-Bell quotes Nick Fuentes from one of his rants: “Women are either mothers, whores, or nuns… There are no female philosophers. There are no female inventors. There are no female generals or billionaires. They are mothers, whores, nuns. End of list. That’s what you can be.” Well, no.
It’s a lot easier to tolerate alliances with people who hate you when they sound this naive. But unrealistic propositions can act as a decoy that distracts while more plausible threats get in. Women who want to draw moral lines based on the feminine perspective leave themselves or get cast out. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s decision to leave MAGA, and Congress, over Trump’s initial refusal to release the Epstein files, was significant in this regard. “Standing up for women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor,” read her resignation.
The women of the New Right may have wanted to go back to the “Italy of their dreams,” as Elizabeth Hardwick called it, “a country of madonnas and widows and no divorce.” They were bound to find out it had been lost forever. For a while now, the question has been: where will they go next?
Comments