THE GENDER WAR IS HERE

What women learned in 2024

- SOPHIE GILBERT

T hroughout American political history, two capable, qualified, experienced women have run for president on a major-party ticket. Both have lost to Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous misogynist ever to reach the highest office.

But in 2024, what was even more alarming than in 2016 was how Trump's campaign seemed to be promoting a version of the country in which men dominate public life, while women are mostly confined to the home, deprived of a voice, and neutralized as a threat to men's status and ambitions.

This time around, I wasn't hopeful. I didn't let myself entertain any quixotic notions about what having a woman in the most powerful position in the world

might mean for our status and sense of self. I simply wished for voters to reject the idea, pushed so fervently by those on Trump's side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. "Your body, my choice. Forever," the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-aLago, posted on X on Election Night. "Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say," the right-wing troll Jon Miller wrote on the same site.

For Trump, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion was apparently only the beginning. Bolstered by that definitive Supreme Court win and flanked by a hateful