Dismantling the Government Means More Work for Women

Tell a friend: tech bro capitalists and anti-government kleptos don't care about us

I didn’t cry much as I saw the votes coming in and realized he was going to win another term. I tried to sleep but kept waking up to check the results and respond to friends in Australia who were watching it all unfold over the course of their day. I woke up to the kids crawling into bed with me, like they do every morning, and I couldn’t tell them then, wanting just a few more minutes of predawn peace before telling them who won. When I finally told them over breakfast, Ellie’s response was “Aww, no fair. We haven’t had a girl president yet.” That’s what got me, and I cried quietly while I kept getting them ready for school.

This week I’ve been trying to recall all my coping strategies from the first term, turning off the news, drinking less, getting sleep, going for a walk, reading a book. I’ll do all the same things I’ve done since Roe fell, when I was so shocked and angry that women’s lives still don’t matter to so many Americans.

What’s hard now is that there is no relief on the horizon. Living in deep red South Carolina, I know we won’t overturn the abortion ban at the state level. Federal protections were our only hope. I knew there would be no state support for childcare, no economic relief for our generation squeezed between student loans, elder care, the costs of feeding and clothing our children. Harris was the first presidential candidate in my lifetime that clearly understood the costs of care work and wanted to do something to help.

She came up against a wall of sexism, anti-government propaganda decades old, racism, and Christian fundamentalism that doesn’t care about sacrificing the lives of women and immigrants and Ukrainians and Palestinians, if it means their grocery prices go down and they get to keep their guns and their regressive notions of sexuality and gender roles. I know these people, and I know that many of them want to do the right thing. What they think is right, though, I think is totally and completely fucked up.

It is stunning to watch the American electorate support billionaires and vote against their own self-interest on such a massive scale. A part of me thinks fine, if this is what they want, let them have it. Let them balloon the federal deficit with tax cuts for the rich and mass deportations and tariffs that tank the economy, let them see what it’s like to have even less access to education and healthcare.

But I can’t go all the way down that road, throw up my hands and just walk away, because all of these things will fall on the backs of women. We already use women’s labor as the social safety net in this country, and the men and women of the MAGA movement would gleefully shift even more of this weight to women. Setting aside the economic impossibility for women to become their wet dream of stay at home moms who toil for everyone else, they’re happy to crush girls and women under the heel of unchecked capitalism and a sadistic patriarchy that forces women to birth dying babies and just die themselves.

I live with these people, I know what they think of women. It was there before MAGA, it will be there after. They do not believe in gender equality, they would erase trans people, they see any deviation from a certain type of heterosexuality an evil perversion. And now they’re in charge, not just at the state level here, which we’ve been living with a long time, but now at the federal level, and even more so than the first term, if we take Project 2025 at its word.

I wish I could believe in young people, but they’re following in their parent’s footsteps. I have slightly more hope for them, as they chart their own path. Maybe they will come to different ideological conclusions. But Joe Rogan and his ilk are cool, and in a time of shifting gender roles, the model of masculinity that Trump and Vance are offering apparently appeals to men across racial lines, with all of its dominance over girls and women and glorification of rape culture.

Artwork by Kiersten Phillips.

I can only hope that this last Trump term motivates Americans to reject what MAGA stands for. It is possible, that if the Republicans do what they say they are going to do (policies that are deeply unpopular with the American people), we’ll shift back to a rejection of corrupt kleptocracy. In the meantime, it will still be the women doing the work.