Republicans Aim to Return Women to 1950s Gender Roles | Vanity Fair

Never in history have we had two parties running on such radically different visions for women. On one end, leading the Democratic Party is a woman whose platform includes codifying Roe and protecting women’s fundamental rights. On the other, there’s a party headed by a thrice-married adulterer who was involved in payoffs to both a Playboy Playmate and an adult-film star—and who is running on a platform of bringing women’s rights back to a pre-1960s state.

Few people have put this contrast on fuller display than Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. For the past week, the Ohio senator has spent his days explaining away recently unearthed comments from 2021, in which he called Democrats, including Kamala Harris, a “bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” claiming that “they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Vance has been roundly—and rightfully—raked through the mud for this myopic view, even by people who have nothing to do with politics. As Jennifer Aniston, one of those beloved celebrities who’s famous for being as kind as she is famous, retorted over Instagram: “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”

Vance’s obsession with natalism springs from an authoritarian playbook. But his obsession is kind of ironic when you consider that his party refuses to codify the right to IVF—a procedure the Heritage Foundation (i.e., the architect of Project 2025) wants to regulate. (You’ll remember that an Alabama Supreme Court ruling in February restricted IVF in the state until Governor Kay Ivey indemnified IVF patients and providers in March.) Ultimately, Republicans want fetal personhood—which affords embryos the same rights as people—but that unscientific principle will make IVF unsustainable because embryos are always lost in the process.

Republicans haven’t just limited themselves to reproductive rights; they are also coming for women’s legal rights. Consider the Republican bid to end no-fault divorce—something that was signed into law by Ronald Reagan way back in 1969, when he was the governor of California. After other states enacted similar legislation, The Guardian reports, the results were both immediate and striking: “Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.” This is to say that no-fault divorce made it easier and safer for women to leave bad marriages. But extremists like Vance believe no such thing. In fact, back in 2021, the then Senate hopeful went so far as to suggest that women should stay in violent marriages for the sake of their children. “One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” he told a crowd of high schoolers at the time, is the idea that “these marriages…were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term…. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”

Another part of the GOP plan to return women to the 1960s centers on birth control. Senate Republicans voted against beginning work on the Right to Contraception Act, a bill that would enshrine the right to birth control. Meanwhile, they are also working to undermine public confidence in the birth control pill, a drug that’s been on the market since 1960. “The pill causes health problems for many women,” conservative lunatic and Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo baselessly wrote, adding that “‘recreational sex’ is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households, which drives poverty, crime, and dysfunction.”

And finally, there’s the GOP’s biggest bogeyman: abortion itself. Trump has intentionally backed away from the issue, as have many in the MAGA-verse, given how the GOP has lost so many election cycles over it. But make no mistake: Republicans are still planning on a federal abortion ban—they’re just not advertising it. Indeed, while Vance might be relatively mum on abortion now, he was hardly tight-lipped during his 2022 Senate bid—which saw him openly promote the idea of a nationall ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, and even compare the procedure to slavery. Vance has also voiced support for efforts to restrict women from traveling between states for the procedure, which could basically render the entire country an abortion desert. At a national level, this would quite literally make it dangerous to be pregnant: Friends and family would be discouraged from supporting abortion-seekers; doctors would be terrified of treating women in the first trimester of pregnancy; and women would be sent home, only to perform abortions themselves, leading to very preventable death and despair.

When it comes to Joe Biden, he did a good job trying to stand up for abortion. But the president was an imperfect messenger: an elderly white Catholic man who had never been comfortable even saying the word. Harris, on the other hand, has been wildly effective at explaining precisely what’s at stake when it comes to women’s reproductive freedoms. Women voters must now decide between a skilled sex-crimes prosecutor in her late 50s and a man in his late 70s who was found liable for sexual abuse—and whose ideas largely appeal to conservative Christian men. We saw this just a few weeks ago at the Republican National Convention, which featured the wives and fiancées of Eric, Don Jr., and Vance: They were simply brought in as character witnesses, friendly cheerleaders there to support their men—another stark reminder that this election is about two wildly different visions for women.

Back in 2016, 47% of white women voted for Trump. At the time, the former president was more of a Rorschach inkblot. He could have been anything, with no political record to speak of. But now we know his policies. We know his plans. They would be terrible for women—and likely even worse for women of color. So if white women continue to vote for Trump, they will have themselves to blame for the rights we lose.