The Plot Against American Women
The Heritage Foundation plan to keep women uneducated, pregnant, and subservient.
Since Trump’s re-ascendance to the White House, the reactionary conservative movement has become the most aggressive and unfettered it has been in my lifetime. And they are getting very, very clear on what they think an acceptable life looks like for women: Settle for any man who decides he wants you; don’t go to college; marry early; have as many babies as possible; quit your job (or don’t pursue one in the first place) to stay home full time and depend financially on your husband; shoulder the blame if you wind up married to a jerk; wind up impoverished if you divorce; and face social condemnation if you fail to follow the Trad Wife script. Contraception should be illegal or at least hard to get; same for IVF and other fertility treatments. The reactionary conservatives of the New Right are not simply pro-natalists who want lots of babies; they are people who want to impose a strictly patriarchal model of the family on all of us, which has certain kinds of women having babies, and other women punished for deviating. And that requires giving men greater rights and freedoms, while allowing women fewer.
This isn’t hyperbole. It’s a plan they wrote down and published.
Last month, the Heritage Foundation published Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. Think of it as Project 2275, a detailed plan that is mostly about how America can spend the next two and a half centuries undoing the feminist progress we’ve made. And it’s not just Heritage: Some of the most prominent thinkers (“thinkers”) of the New Right are obsessed with increasing (white) birthrates, and the curtailments of women’s freedoms that would be required to get reproduction to where they want it (infinite). Many of these “thinkers” are terminally online brain-rotted misogynists, but they have heavy sway over the terminally online brain-rotted men currently running the US government (if they’re asking Claude how to invade Venezuela and capture Maduro, they’re definitely turning to Bronze Age Pervert for his thoughts about women’s rights).
The tech bro-natalist right may be in favor of things like IVF and commercial surrogacy, but the broader right is not; they believe — not wrongly — that the only way to get women having an average of three-plus babies apiece or more is to subjugate them. Or, perhaps, this is backwards: They’ve long wanted to subjugate women for the sake of it, and this new birthrate discourse has given them a new argument in favor of an old cause.
The rhetoric on the right has gotten so extreme that even Meghan McCain has spoken out about it:
…to which the conservative response was, “actually, it’s better to shame women.” Here’s Katie Miller, wife to Stephen Miller (who by the way got married at 28, when her husband was 34; not exactly a “young” marriage):
Katie Miller is right that if you focus on settling, you can probably find someone to marry at any age. Maybe that’s how she wound up married to Stephen Miller.
The fundamental problem with the conservative life script for women is that when women have choices, we don’t tend to the follow the conservative life script. For any of you reading who are under the age of, say, 45: How old were you when you met your partner, if you have a partner? (I was 30). If you’re over 45, think of the younger people you know: how old were they when they met their partner? Overwhelmingly, the Americans who marry are meeting their spouses in their late 20s and into their 30s (and beyond). The average age of first marriage for an American woman is a touch older than 28, and for men it’s 30. These couples have largely not been together since they were 16 and simply chose to wait a decade-plus to wed. It took them a while to find the right person — and to become a person who felt mature enough and themselves enough to tie themselves to another for life.
This is a good thing, if what you care about is happiness and human flourishing. It is a bad thing if all you care about is women doing their maximal reproductive and wifely duties. And the only real way to force women to do their maximal reproductive and wifely duties is to, well, force them.
I am not exaggerating when I say that the forces of the New Right want to use the full force of the state to impose a national patriarchy. I read through the Heritage Foundation’s plan to save America by saving marriage. Here is the plan, in Heritage’s own words, with a little translation from me. They are explicit: Have fewer women go to college; push women to marry and start having babies when they’re very young; ban same-sex marriage; ban IVF; limit contraception access; strip basic rights even to physical safety from children; penalize single mothers; and impose conservative Christianity as a national religion.
On Curtailing Women’s Rights:
“the state and federal governments should recognize the natural differences between men and women. They should also preserve this distinction between the sexes in law against attempts to replace it with tendentious and subjective concepts, such as ‘gender identity.’”
What that means: The law should discriminate against women. Heritage leaders have said this repeatedly. They recently hired Scott Yenor, who says professional women are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome,” and that “the heroic feminine prioritizes motherhood and wifeliness and celebrates the men who make it possible.” He advocates for the end of anti-discrimination laws and says it should be possible for companies to legally “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage.” And “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”
“Instead of celebrating the nuanced expressions of femininity, the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s commanded a crusade that promoted sexual, financial, and familial ‘freedom’ for women. Women were encouraged to “liberate” themselves from a patriarchal culture that insisted they stay at home and raise a family.”
What that means: Sexual, financial, and familial “freedom” for women is bad. Liberation from a patriarchal culture is bad.
“Fertility rates tend to be higher in less-developed countries, but as nations industrialize, several factors conspire to reduce birth rates. These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home, the delayed financial independence of young adults, and the government’s role in old-age Social Security.”
What that means: The Heritage Foundation is looking to limit birth control, higher education for women, work for women, and Social Security.
“Today’s adults may favor autonomy and personal development over raising children more than earlier generations did. Thus, greater opportunity cost rather than greater actual cost may be a better explanation.”
What that means: I actually think they’re right on this, but what they aren’t explicitly saying is that there are greater opportunity costs for women today than there were in past years. Men have always been able to have children, rely on women to raise them, and still pursue fulfilling work, hobbies, friendship, and travel. Women, on the other hand, once gained significant social status by having children, and now see the other things they love — work, hobbies, friendship, travel, autonomy, and so on — threatened if they reproduce. The Heritage plan is not to make it easier for women to be fully-formed human beings and mothers. The plan is to make it harder for women to be fully-formed human beings so that motherhood will be their own path to personal fulfillment.
“Often, dating app users who are marriage minded suffer from what sociologist Brad Wilcox describes as the ‘soulmate myth,’ which he defines as ‘the idea that marriage is primarily about feeling an intensely emotional connection with the one that makes you happy and fulfilled.’ This contrasts with the historic understanding of marriage as being centered on a shared life of duty and virtue. The same idea can be captured in three words that are emblematic of the dating scene today—fear of ‘settling.’”
What that means: It is frivolous to try to find someone with whom you feel you have a unique and profound connection. Instead, you should marry out of a sense of duty. You should settle. Or at least women should.
