You may have heard about JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” riff. But even if you have, it’s worth revisiting the full quote — and reminding yourself of what it says about the movement that may wind up in charge of this country after this year’s election.
In 2021, while running for the Senate, Vance explained what he saw as one of the biggest problems facing America: It’s being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He name-checked, among others, Vice President Kamala Harris.
It’s a statement, as my colleague Jessica Grose writes, that shows the desperation of Republicans who are still “clinging to the tag line that the G.O.P. is the pro-family party.” But even for a red-meat, red-state Senate candidate, this was a remarkably harsh — and conspiracy-minded — insult to a large number of people: Around one in six American women 40 to 44 have never had children. It’s the kind of comment that makes you wonder if Vance thinks that he has been nominated by the Republican Party to serve as the vice president of the Republic of Gilead.
Sorry — yes — Vance knows that our nation is still called the United States of America. But there’s a real “Handmaid’s Tale” vibe to a lot of what we’re hearing from the right.
First, my main point: As Vance’s statement illustrates, many people who call themselves conservatives — and who, routinely, as Donald Trump did on Wednesday, accuse moderately center-left Democrats like Harris of being “radical” — are actually the real radicals. That is, they seemingly can’t stand America as it is and want to transform it back into a kind of society we haven’t been for generations. This is especially true when it comes to gender roles.
Modern America is by no means free of sexism. It is, however, a society that offers women far more freedom to choose their paths in life than societies of the past. And it has been that kind of society for a long time.
As Claudia Goldin, who received the 2023 Nobel in economic science, has documented, there was a “quiet revolution” in women’s roles beginning around 1970, one that greatly expanded their life choices, allowing many to pursue careers as well as or instead of traditional paths. Indeed, almost three-quarters of women ages 25 to 54 were in the paid work force by the end of the Reagan administration, close to the proportion today. Oh, and Roe v. Wade became the law of the land in 1973.
In other words, women’s expanded role was already well established by 1985, when Margaret Atwood published “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a novel about the possibility of a violent backlash undoing the gains women had achieved. That was almost 40 years ago; at this point, most Americans have never known a society in which womanhood is narrowly defined by homemaking and child rearing, in which women who haven’t had children are considered strange and inferior.
But Vance, whose political career has been shaped to a large extent by his opposition to abortion rights, is trying to turn the clock back half a century or more.
And he’s not alone. Trump continues to try to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but his efforts really only started once Democrats began making the project an issue and polls began showing growing public awareness of and disapproval of what it contains.
In reality, Trump, with his evident lack of interest in the nuts and bolts of public policy, would almost certainly be OK with outsourcing much policymaking to right-wing think tanks like Heritage. So the project’s proposals give us a good look at how a second Trump administration might govern if given a free hand. And while the overarching takeaway about the project is that it’s a blueprint for authoritarian rule, it would, in particular, represent a giant step backward for women.
True, the project’s “Mandate for Leadership” document avoids calling for a national abortion ban, but it contains a number of recommendations aimed at curtailing reproductive rights. Of these, the creepiest is its assertion that “The C.D.C.’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate,” followed by this:
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, H.H.S. should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.
Serious Gilead vibes.
As I see it, one of the great virtues of modern America is the freedom it offers its citizens to decide for themselves how to live their lives — a freedom, ironically, that Republicans used to tout all the time. And I see the increase in women’s freedom, including the protection of their right to decide whether to have children, as something that benefits all of us — men included.
But there are many people like Vance who want to limit or even take away that freedom.
“We are not going back” has already emerged as perhaps the key slogan of Harris’s presidential campaign. But depending on how this election turns out, we may indeed be going back — way, way back.
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