Still, rage bait can occasionally be useful when it stumbles into a question I have been meaning to discuss anyway. A bad argument, stated with enough confidence, can clarify all the assumptions sitting underneath it.

This one certainly did.

“Michael Jackson was never in my history classes.”

That was apparently offered as evidence that Michael Jackson is not historically significant, rather than as a devastating review of those history classes.

The video distinguishes sales records from “historical records,” allows that the Beatles might matter because they “did a first thing,” and insists that Taylor Swift will not be remembered in 500 years the way we remember Pompeii or Alexander the Great. “In the larger scheme of things,” the creator concludes, “Taylor Swift does not matter.”

At that point, we are no longer talking only about Taylor Swift. We are talking about who gets to decide what counts as history, why wars, rulers and catastrophes are treated as inherently significant, and why music, magazines, fashion, fandom, domestic life and mass culture must drag themselves before the tribunal and prove that they belong.

We are talking about the difference between the past and the carefully selected portion of it that most of us encountered in school.

Because “I didn’t learn about it in history class” is not evidence that something was historically unimportant. It is evidence that somebody decided not to teach it.

The syllabus did not descend from heaven

This is not really an article about whether Taylor Swift will be remembered in the year 2526. I have no idea. Neither does anyone else. Historians are not bookmakers placing odds on the future survival of celebrity reputations.

Nor am I arguing that Taylor Swift is the greatest artist who has ever lived, that every pop single deserves a dedicated museum wing, or that students should be required to master the complete history of the Eras Tour before anyone lets them near the Roman Empire.

You are entirely free to dislike her music, her business decisions, her politics, her fans, her private jets, or the way she has become a permanent weather system hovering above the internet. None of that answers the question of whether something not being in a historical textbook means it doesn’t deserve to be there.

A school curriculum is not a neutral inventory of everything that mattered. It is a selection shaped by limited teaching time, examination requirements, political pressures, national priorities and inherited assumptions about what students are supposed to know. Choices have to be made, but those choices do not emerge naturally from the past.

For generations, women appeared in history lessons when they married, advised, inspired, distracted or were murdered by important men. Black history appeared around slavery and civil rights, frequently arranged around the actions of white presidents. Indigenous people encountered European settlers and then mysteriously evaporated. Queer people apparently sprang fully formed from the pavement outside Stonewall in 1969.

Workers arrived when they went on strike. Disabled people appeared when a famous person heroically “overcame” something. Ordinary families briefly materialised during discussions of census records before returning to the historical mist.

We do not conclude that all these people were insignificant because somebody’s secondary-school course failed to mention them. We recognise that the course was missing a considerable amount of history.

I have spent entire lectures encouraging students to question the reliability of their textbooks, especially when a dubious throwaway line turns out to be an old political insult repeated so often that it has hardened into fact. A textbook is a secondary source produced by people, institutions and editorial decisions. It should be read critically, not carried down a mountain on stone tablets.

The same is true of the curriculum built around it.

History did not arrive with a table of contents attached.

Who made “serious history” serious?

The professional historical discipline developed its own hierarchy of respectable subjects. Governments, diplomacy, military campaigns, legislation, empires and prominent political actors occupied the upper floors, while most of the things human beings spent their actual lives doing were placed somewhere below stairs.

People worked, cooked, cared for children, shopped, worshipped, read, listened to music, dressed themselves, flirted, formed families and developed furious opinions about people they would never meet. The past did not consist entirely of presidents signing documents while generals waited nearby for their chapter, although many textbooks have worked heroically to create that impression.

Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History examines the construction of professional history in the nineteenth century and the way supposedly scientific historical practice became associated with masculine authority. Historical writing by women, particularly work concerned with manners, social life, customs and personal experience, could be dismissed as amateur or sentimental while political history acquired the armour of objectivity. The division between “serious history” and the decorative bits already had a gender.

This was more than a disagreement over research interests. It established a hierarchy of human experience in which the state was consequential and the home incidental, war was serious and leisure was fluff, while elite men exercised power and ordinary people merely lived somewhere in its vicinity.

Women’s history, Black history, labour history, queer history and cultural history did not simply add a more diverse cast to an otherwise complete story. They challenged the structure of the story itself.

Joan Scott’s argument for gender as a category of historical analysis was not a request to insert several notable women between the important men. Gender could explain the construction of citizenship, labour, family, authority and political power. It altered the questions historians asked and the answers they could see.

History from below similarly asked how political and economic changes were experienced by workers and ordinary communities. Cultural historians turned toward language, ritual, memory, representation and media, not because politics had ceased to matter, but because people encounter politics through culture. Ideas about nation, race, gender and authority do not remain politely confined to parliaments and courtrooms. They circulate through stories, performances, advertisements, songs and the assumptions of everyday life.

The point was never to decorate political history with a few songs and aprons. It was to recognise that political history cannot explain a society by itself.

Somebody also built the archive

The historical canon was reinforced by the archive. Governments generated enormous paper trails, including laws, tax records, military reports, diplomatic correspondence and official memoranda. Prominent men donated their letters, and institutions preserved those materials because the people who created them were already considered important.

Domestic labour rarely produced a neatly labelled archival box. Neither did neighbourhood gossip, oral culture, working-class leisure, girls’ bedrooms, informal economies or the emotional lives of ordinary people. Marginalised communities were less likely to have their records preserved by institutions that did not consider them proper historical actors in the first place.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past remains indispensable because it shows how historical silence is produced at several stages. It occurs when sources are created, when archives are assembled, when narratives are written and when later generations decide which stories deserve commemoration. Power does not enter history only when someone burns the evidence. It is already present in the decision about what counts as evidence at all.

What institutions recorded became what archives preserved. What archives preserved became what historians could most easily study, and what historians repeatedly studied became what schools taught. By the time that chain reached the classroom, generations of human choices had hardened into something that looked like objective importance.

The American Library here in Norwich has a valuable collection in their archive. An accessible back catalogue of American magazines, material that might otherwise be scattered across institutions, locked behind databases or simply gone.

Magazines are glorious historical gossips. They tell us what companies wanted people to buy, what editors imagined readers wanted, which bodies were displayed, which fears could be stated openly and which desires had to be smuggled between the lines. They preserve advertising, fashion, political language, celebrity culture, domestic advice and endless instructions for women on how to rearrange themselves for everybody else’s convenience.

They are also the sort of material that was designed to be temporary. Yesterday’s magazine becomes wrapping paper, rubbish, a drawer lining or a casualty of someone deciding that nobody needs fourteen years of Ladies’ Home Journal taking up space in the loft.1

We can study twentieth-century popular culture partly because someone kept it.

The nineteenth century offers plenty of popular culture too, but the further back we go, the harder everyday cultural material often becomes to recover. That does not mean earlier people lacked songs, fashions, performers, stories, games, jokes or collective obsessions. It means their culture was more likely to be oral, ephemeral or considered too trivial to preserve.

An absence in the archive may tell us less about what ordinary people valued than about what archivists were taught to value. The archive is not a divine warehouse containing everything that mattered. It is a collection of human decisions, limited budgets, institutional priorities, cataloguing systems, dust and at least one box nobody has opened since 1974.

Popular culture is partial, just like every other historical source

When I sent the video to friends, one of them raised a fair qualification. Popular culture is one aspect of history. It can reveal the attitudes, fashions and concerns of particular generations or audiences, but it cannot stand in for the whole of society.

Absolutely. Neither can anything else.

A Cabinet memorandum does not represent an entire society. It tells us what certain officials discussed, what they were prepared to commit to paper and what they wanted preserved in the official record. A newspaper reflects its owners, editors, advertisers, writers and intended readers. A census takes millions of complicated human beings and presses them into categories devised by the state. A court judgment tells us what judges ruled, not automatically how ordinary people experienced the law, interpreted it or cheerfully found ways around it.

Historians do not discard these sources because they are partial. We ask who produced them, for whom, under what conditions and for what purpose.

Popular culture deserves the same basic competence.

A pop song may illuminate a particular market, generation, subculture or audience. It may exclude people, distort reality or emerge from a corporation whose devotion to artistic truth lasted exactly as long as the quarterly earnings call. None of that makes it useless. It makes it evidence.

Stuart Hall resisted treating popular culture as either the uncorrupted voice of “the people” or meaningless material poured into passive consumers by capitalism. The popular is contested territory where commercial power, tradition, pleasure, interpretation, incorporation and resistance collide.

Sometimes a pop song challenges the dominant culture. Sometimes it reinforces it. Sometimes it manages both before the second chorus.

Culture and policy are not positioned on a tidy conveyor belt either, with culture occurring first and “real history” arriving ten years later as legislation. Cultural narratives help determine which policies seem acceptable, dangerous, moral or necessary, while policy shapes who can produce culture, where it circulates and what can safely be said.

I have used music in my own women’s-history teaching for precisely this reason. In one course, I gave students a playlist and asked them to choose a song, research it and connect it to the wider themes of the class. This was not a temporary abandonment of scholarship in favour of karaoke. A song can carry arguments about gender, sexuality, work, race, citizenship and power.

Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill,” for example, belongs in the history of contraception whether or not anyone’s textbook gave it a paragraph. The song opens questions about marriage, reproductive autonomy, country music, censorship, class and the different standards imposed on male and female performers. Its reception also shows how reliable contraception was understood, celebrated and feared.

The law tells us that contraception became available. The song tells us what it sounded like when a working-class woman celebrated having some control over her reproductive life, and why a substantial portion of the country reacted as though she had driven a contraceptive-filled bulldozer through the American family.

Both are history.

“Sales records. Not historical records.”

This may be my favourite part of the argument because historians have occasionally been known to study commerce.

Rather a lot, in fact.

Prices, wages, shipping manifests, household inventories, advertisements, trade figures, company accounts, tax records and consumer surveys are all historical evidence. Nobody examines the East India Company and announces that it only sold things, so unfortunately there is nothing historical to discuss.

Commerce does not cease to be history when the product has a chorus.

Sales records can reveal who possessed disposable income, which markets companies pursued, how technology altered distribution, which cultural forms moved across borders and which audiences had enough collective economic power to reshape an industry. “People bought it” is not the conclusion of a historical investigation. It is where the questions begin.

Who produced it? Who owned it? Who profited? What labour disappeared behind the finished product? How was demand created? Which consumers were imagined in the marketing, and which were excluded? What technology allowed millions of people to hear the same recording? What did audiences do with it after they bought it?

The history of popular music runs through radio, records, cassettes, television, music video, portable players, digital downloads, streaming platforms, algorithms, copyright, touring infrastructure and ticketing monopolies. These are transformations in capitalism, labour, technology and communications. Calling them “just sales” does not make them disappear.

Michael Jackson is an obvious example, especially since this video chose to invoke him. His career raises historical questions about racial barriers in broadcasting, the global recording industry, childhood labour, music video, dance, masculinity, celebrity and media surveillance. None of this requires historians to declare him a good person, because historical significance is not sainthood. Historians study emperors, corporations and governments without issuing certificates confirming that they were delightful company.

Jackson’s Thriller was added to the National Recording Registry in 2007. The Library of Congress preserves recordings judged culturally, historically or aesthetically significant, and its essay on Thriller discusses the album’s enormous effect on the sound, image and consumption of popular music.

The Billboard list, the sales, the music videos and the audience all belong to that history. The fact that Michael Jackson did not appear in one person’s school course proves only that the course did not cover twentieth-century media history.

History is not an awards ceremony for being first

The video allows that the Beatles might be historically significant because they “did a first thing,” while Taylor Swift apparently “will never be a first.”

This is Great Man history wearing a novelty hat.

Firsts can matter, but they are also an unreliable way to organise the past. “The first” depends on how an achievement is defined, which sources survive and who possesses the authority to recognise it. The person celebrated as the first may really be the first to receive a patent, attract commercial investment, reach a white market or have their name preserved by a powerful institution.

A first is often simply the first person the archive noticed.

The plaque on the wall then obscures the predecessors, collaborators, communities and traditions that made the achievement possible. One heroic individual marches into history while everyone who taught them, influenced them, assisted them or accomplished something similar without recognition is pushed behind a curtain.

Historical change also occurs through adaptation, scale, synthesis, circulation and reception. A person can transform a cultural form without inventing it. Audiences can alter the meaning of a work, while a new distribution system or business decision can restructure an entire industry.

No musician creates themselves in a sealed laboratory. Popular music develops through migration, community, technology, imitation, collaboration, borrowing and appropriation. History becomes remarkably thin when we study only whoever received the ceremonial badge marked FIRST and ignore everybody who built the road leading to it.

Pop music is also Black history

Any argument that pop music is historically unimportant collapses particularly quickly once race enters the room.

Blues, jazz, rock and roll, soul, disco, R&B and hip-hop cannot be separated from Black history. Black communities created musical forms that were repeatedly dismissed as dangerous, vulgar or unserious before industries repackaged them as national culture.

The music mattered enormously, even when its creators were denied equal ownership, profit, protection or credit.

Tricia Rose’s Black Noise situated hip-hop within the economic conditions, racial politics, technology and urban life of the 1970s and 1980s Bronx. Rap was not decorative noise playing behind urban history. It was created within that history by Black young people living amid systemic neglect and disenfranchisement.

Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution examines Black women musicians, listeners and critics as intellectual and historical actors while asking who has been authorised to write, collect and canonise the history of music. Black women can be central to the culture industry and still be marginalised within the stories told about that industry.

This is one of the uglier habits of the traditional canon. It extracts enormous cultural value from marginalised communities while refusing to treat those communities as serious producers of knowledge. Black music becomes part of national identity while Black musicians are flattened into entertainment. Women’s creativity becomes profitable while women’s audiences are treated as irrational. Working-class culture becomes heritage after the working-class people who made it have been politely removed from the gift shop.

Music also has an obvious political history. Songs have circulated through labour organising, war, migration, election campaigns, civil-rights activism and social protest. The Library of Congress’s Songs of America collection uses music to explore work, immigration, political campaigns, reform, conflict and leisure for exactly this reason.

A history that records the law but not the songs people sang while demanding that the law change has left out rather a lot.

Apparently, the things women like do not count

The dismissal of Taylor Swift depends partly on the claim that people buy her music because they are “attached to her personality.” This is supposed to prove that nothing historically meaningful is happening.

To a cultural historian, it sounds like a research proposal.

Why do audiences develop emotional relationships with public figures? How is that sense of intimacy constructed through recordings, interviews, concerts and social media? How is it monetised? How do fans use celebrity narratives to interpret their own lives? Why are some forms of intense cultural knowledge treated as expertise while others become evidence of collective derangement?

Popular culture associated with women and girls has always been forced to prove its value independently of the people who value it. Young women’s enthusiasm becomes evidence that the object itself must be shallow, manufactured or embarrassing, even as their economic power is courted, exploited and cited as proof that they have terrible taste.

Male-dominated fandoms are more readily translated into expertise, collecting, connoisseurship or serious subculture. A man who remembers decades of football statistics is knowledgeable, while a young woman who can trace lyrical themes, production changes and visual references across an artist’s career has apparently been manipulated by a sinister marketing operation.

Interesting how that keeps happening.

Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber challenged a similar problem in early research on youth subcultures. Scholars searched for meaningful cultural activity in male-dominated public spaces, found boys there and concluded that boys were the principal creators of subculture. Girls’ cultural lives, often located in bedrooms, dance halls, magazines, friendships and domestic settings, remained harder to see because researchers had already decided where significant culture happened.

The same blindness appears whenever soap operas, romance novels, fashion, boy bands, celebrity magazines or female-dominated online fandoms are dismissed as fluff.

The subject does not have to be admirable, the fans do not have to behave rationally and the industry does not have to be benevolent. Historians have never imposed those requirements on war and yet every bookstore has approximately 70 tonnes of 500 page books detailing various wars in increasingly granular detail.

When millions of people build rituals, communities, identities, interpretations and economies around a cultural form, something historically meaningful is happening. Dismissing it as stupid does not make it insignificant. It simply exposes the elitism beneath the dismissal.

To say that popular culture does not matter is to say that the interests, pleasures and creative expressions of most human beings are historical clutter. People may sing, dance, collect, imitate, desire, argue and construct whole communities through culture, but apparently none of this becomes history until a government regulates it or an important man walks into the room.

Taylor Swift does not have to defeat Alexander the Great

Again, none of this proves that Taylor Swift will remain famous for 500 years. She does not have to.

Historians study failed campaigns, forgotten products, obscure organisations, short-lived fashions, local customs and ordinary people who never became famous at all. Sometimes brevity is exactly what makes a subject revealing. A moral panic that lasted two years can expose what a society feared, while a magazine published for six months can show what its readers desired. A song that vanished from public memory can illuminate a migration, a protest movement or a changing idea of respectability.

History is not a prize awarded to whatever remains famous longest.

Long-term fame is not neutral anyway. Historical memory is cultivated through education, museums, monuments, archives, books, films and political institutions. Alexander the Great did not receive a permanent place in the curriculum directly from the universe. His prominence has been reproduced across centuries by institutions that continued to tell his story, then pointed to his familiarity as evidence that he naturally deserved the attention.

He matters because I learned about him in history class. I learned about him because he matters. Nobody stops to ask who wrote the class.

A historian could study Taylor Swift through genre, gendered authorship, celebrity branding, intellectual property, rerecording, streaming, touring, ticketing, parasocial relationships or the cultural treatment of female audiences. She does not need to have invented popular music, remain universally admired or outlive Pompeii.

The comparison with Pompeii is where the argument becomes particularly strange. Why would pop music have to appear in history “over” Vesuvius? Who proposed this exchange?

One commenter beneath the video gave the obvious answer:

“Who said over? There’s room in the history books for all history.”

Exactly.

There is not room for everything in every textbook, course or museum, and practical choices are unavoidable. But practical limits do not establish a natural hierarchy in which volcanoes are serious and music is frivolous.

History is not a cage match between Taylor Swift and Vesuvius. We do not have to drag Alexander the Great out of the archive and leave him on the pavement because someone wrote a dissertation about Beyoncé, nor will Pompeii vanish from the curriculum because a historian wants to know what Michael Jackson’s career reveals about race, television and global celebrity.

The scarcity is invented. It comes from an old model in which a limited number of worthy subjects are allowed through the gates, and popular culture must first defeat war, politics and catastrophe in single combat.2

The canon is not the past

“Michael Jackson was never in my history classes” does tell us something useful, although not what the speaker intended.

It tells us that many people received a narrow definition of history. Political and military narratives continue to dominate public ideas about historical seriousness, while commercial culture remains intellectually suspect despite commerce being central to virtually every major historical development. Women’s enthusiasm, meanwhile, still functions as evidence against whatever women happen to be enthusiastic about.

The old canon is still doing its work.

What the statement does not tell us is that Michael Jackson was historically insignificant, or that popular music somehow exists outside history.

Popular culture cannot explain every part of a society. Neither can a law, a census, a battle or a king. History requires all of them, read critically and placed in conversation with one another.

Popular music tells us who held power and who wanted it, who was heard and who was silenced, who performed the labour and who collected the profit. It shows us which bodies could appear onstage, which desires could be spoken aloud and which communities built worlds around a shared sound.

That is history.

Your history class was never the whole past. It was a guided tour written by people who kept us in the throne room and hurried us past the kitchen, the shop floor, the dance hall, the newsstand and the bedroom.

Those rooms were never empty.

We were simply taught not to look inside.

More specifically, he dropped a link to his own essay titled Women: A Grand Mystery, a piece so spectacularly aligned with the point I had just made that I initially had to ask whether it was satire.

It was not.

Daniel’s Substack

Women - A Grand Mystery

Warning: Even casual viewing of the following article could be upsetting and trigger acute mental and/or emotional distress within the mind, especially of women, and could lead to irreparable and permanent schisms within relationships, especially with women, as they are prone to become quite sensitive and unpredictable after reading essays about their g…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Daniel (Murphy) Kennedy

The article begins by warning readers, “especially women,” that they may become emotionally distressed by what follows because women are supposedly “prone to become quite sensitive and unpredictable after reading essays about their gender, especially when written by men.”

The trap is obvious from the opening paragraph. Before a woman has even responded, her response has already been classified as irrational. If she dislikes what he writes, that does not mean the writing was insulting. It means she is sensitive. If she objects to being stereotyped, she proves the stereotype. If she becomes angry after being called unpredictable, hormonally governed, intellectually mysterious, and in need of male restraint, then clearly the author has correctly identified a problem with women.

It is the rhetorical equivalent of poking someone repeatedly and then announcing, with great satisfaction, that they appear irritable.

From there, the essay moves through a familiar parade of clichés. Women are unknowable, emotional, temporarily irrational during menstruation, prone to poor planning, strangely powerful over men, and in need of male restraint when their emotions threaten to overwhelm them. Men, by contrast, are apparently less likely to “lose their head” when the family is threatened, which is an interesting claim to make after several thousand years of men responding to wounded pride by duelling, invading neighbouring territories, starting wars, smashing furniture, and punching holes in drywall.

The menstruation material is especially revealing because it treats women’s anger during PMS as evidence that their emotions are fundamentally unserious. My personal theory is that the things that enrage women when they are PMSing are usually the same things that irritate them the rest of the month.1 The difference is not that hormones have invented a new grievance out of thin air. It is that the threshold for tolerating bullshit has dropped.

Perhaps she is not suddenly irrational. Perhaps she is simply less willing to absorb the same dismissiveness, mess, condescension, incompetence, or casual cruelty she usually works harder to smooth over.

The standard male response to this has often been avoidance: stay out of the way, say as little as possible, wait for the weather system to pass. But that assumes the problem is her reaction rather than the behaviour provoking it. A better solution might be to notice what keeps coming up and change it. If the same grievance appears every month, perhaps the useful question is not, “How do I survive her period?” but, “Why am I giving her the same reason to be angry over and over again, and is this perhaps something that annoys her the rest of the month too?”

That would require treating women’s anger as information rather than hormonal noise that disrupts your good time. It would also require men to do something much more difficult than hiding in another room: take responsibility for improving their behavior in a relationship.

The author repeatedly insists that he is being affectionate, but he is not. Calling your sisters “creatures,” describing their menstrual cycles as recurring periods of insanity, and suggesting that you and your father needed to calculate when it was “emotionally safe” to emerge from your rooms is not fond teasing. It is contempt wearing a sitcom joke as cover.

He describes women as blessings, angels, divine inventions, and delightful mysteries, but he also describes them as irrational, badly prepared, unstable, dangerous, naturally subordinate, and perhaps incapable of understanding even themselves. This is a familiar form of sexism because it does not always arrive snarling. Sometimes it arrives smiling broadly while explaining that women are magical, inscrutable beings whose peculiarities men must patiently endure.

The compliment and the insult are not opposites. They are dance partners.

Women are not a species

At one point, the author explains that his mother was different from his four sisters and that his sisters were different from one another. Each woman he encountered was an individual with her own personality, moods, needs, and habits.

A reasonable person might conclude from this that women are individual human beings. Instead, he concludes that women are a “mysterious species.”

This is gender essentialism at work. Gender essentialism takes patterns associated with men and women and treats them as deep, fixed, natural truths. It does not merely suggest that people may be shaped by sex, gender, socialisation, culture, or experience. It turns categories into destinies, with men becoming one kind of creature and women another.

The author’s favourite guide to this arrangement is John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which he believes should be assigned to schoolchildren before Shakespeare. Personally, I think children have suffered enough.

The recommendation is revealing because Gray’s book does not merely suggest that partners sometimes communicate differently. Its entire framework rests on the idea that men and women are effectively members of separate civilisations, complete with distinct languages, instincts, values, emotional needs, and methods of thought.

Gray writes:

“Men mistakenly expect women to think, communicate, and react the way men do; women mistakenly expect men to feel, communicate, and respond the way women do.”

He then makes the premise even clearer:

“Without the awareness that we are supposed to be different, men and women are at odds with each other.”

Not may be different. Not are often socialised differently. Not sometimes develop different communication habits. We are “supposed to be different.” The distinction has already been transformed from observation into destiny.

The genius of Mars and Venus

The genius of the Mars-and-Venus framework is not that it helps people communicate. It is that it makes failed communication feel inevitable.

If your wife says she feels unheard, perhaps she is simply speaking Venusian. If your husband withdraws instead of talking, perhaps he has returned to his Martian cave. If a woman explains what she needs and the man ignores her, perhaps the translation was simply too difficult.

Once men and women are treated as visitors from different planets, misunderstanding stops being a failure of curiosity, attention, or care. It becomes the natural consequence of interplanetary diplomacy, which is an extraordinarily useful arrangement for anyone who does not want to do the work.

Gray tells us:

“When you remember that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, everything can be explained.”

Everything.

That is an ominously efficient theory. A framework capable of explaining everything usually has another useful quality: it can rarely be disproved. Any behaviour can be folded back into the system. A man who behaves “femininely” has suppressed his masculine traits. A woman who identifies with Mars has more testosterone. A person who does not recognise themselves in the descriptions can simply “look deeper.”

The categories always survive. The person must be incorrectly interpreting themselves.

Separate planets, separate purposes

The book’s most revealing passages are not really about communication. They are about what men and women are supposedly for.

Gray writes:

“A man’s sense of self is defined through his ability to achieve results.”

A woman, meanwhile, receives a different emotional assignment:

“A woman’s sense of self is defined through her feelings and the quality of her relationships.”

Elsewhere, he offers an even cleaner division:

“Men are motivated and empowered when they feel needed. Women are motivated and empowered when they feel cherished.”

Men achieve, while women relate. Men act, while women feel. Men need purpose, while women need affection.

Gray presents this as a discovery about timeless male and female nature. A historian sees something much more familiar: separate-spheres ideology with a space programme.

For centuries, patriarchal cultures have claimed that men belong to the world of achievement, production, authority, rationality, and public action, while women belong to the world of emotion, intimacy, nurture, beauty, and relationships. Gray simply rebuilds that arrangement on two planets.

Mars has highways, tall buildings, uniforms, technology, and accomplishment. Venus has harmony, feelings, clothing, shopping centres, gardens, and counselling. Apparently the universe itself contains a gendered division of labour.

The metaphor makes an old hierarchy feel whimsical. It adds telescopes and removes the politics.

The world’s most convenient mystery

The cultural insistence that women are unknowable gives men a remarkably effective escape hatch. A man can fail to listen to women for decades and conclude, not that he has failed to listen, but that women cannot be understood.

He can misinterpret a partner, overlook her unhappiness, dismiss her anger, ignore her stated needs, and then shrug: “You know women.” Or “Women are complicated.” Or “Women say one thing and mean another.” Or “It must be that time of the month.”

The explanation transforms his lack of curiosity into a universal law.

What is striking in Women: A Grand Mystery is that the author never seems especially interested in what the women around him thought. His sisters appear primarily as hormonal weather systems. His mother is an ideal of maternal love. His former partners become a “mixed bag of joy and grief.” The woman currently closest to him is an “angel from God.”

Women appear as categories in relation to him: mother, sister, girlfriend, wife, teacher, temptation, mystery, help meet. They are rarely permitted the ordinary dignity of being people whose behaviour might have reasons unrelated to their function in a man’s life.2

He repeatedly tells us he has known many women, but proximity is not the same as attention. Living near women does not automatically produce knowledge of them, particularly when every piece of evidence is fed into a theory that women are irrational by nature.

You can spend a lifetime looking at something without ever learning to see it. Once you have already decided that women speak another language, why bother asking what your sister meant? She was never speaking your language anyway.

Meanwhile, women are expected to understand men

The burden of incomprehension is not distributed equally. Women are told that men are simple, but they are still expected to study them constantly.

Women are expected to know when a man is upset even when he says he is fine. They must distinguish anger from fear, silence from sadness, withdrawal from exhaustion, and irritability from shame. They are expected to know when to encourage him, when to leave him alone, when to soften criticism, when to offer praise, when to protect his pride, and when to translate his emotional state into words he has never learned to use.

Gray’s book makes this asymmetry unusually visible.

He tells men to listen more, which is reasonable enough. But he devotes enormous energy to teaching women how to manage the conditions under which a man might successfully perform that listening. Women must not criticise too directly, offer unsolicited advice, follow a man into his “cave,” demand intimacy at the wrong moment, sound accusatory, imply blame, or make him feel inadequate. They must reassure men that their unhappiness is not necessarily his fault and show appreciation for his listening so that he understands listening has value.

They must ask in precisely the right way.

In one especially revealing passage, Gray writes:

“Women have a lot to learn about men before their relationships can be really fulfilling.”

He then explains that women must learn not to interrupt men’s withdrawal, not to panic, not to demand intimacy, not to offer help, and not to interpret silence as neglect.

The man retreats, while the woman studies the retreat. The man goes silent, while the woman learns how not to disturb the silence. The man struggles to listen, while the woman learns how to make listening feel safe, rewarding, and nonthreatening.

Mars receives an operating manual. Venus is assigned technical support.

Emotional labour with a planetary theme

This is the unequal economy of understanding.

Girls are taught early to notice other people’s feelings. Women are expected to remember birthdays, anticipate needs, choose gifts, maintain family relationships, organise social lives, recognise tensions, prevent conflict, and make gatherings emotionally pleasant.

This is not because women emerge from the womb clutching a colour-coded family calendar and asking everyone how that made them feel. It is learned labour.

Someone remembers that your mother is still angry about Christmas. Someone notices that the teenager has gone quiet. Someone realises your friend felt excluded. Someone phrases the complaint carefully because otherwise he will become defensive and the discussion will shift from what he did to how bad he now feels about being told.

Someone keeps the emotional machinery humming. Usually, we call her overreactive right up until she stops doing it.

Gray inadvertently describes this imbalance repeatedly. Women, he tells us, are naturally intuitive because they have spent centuries anticipating the needs of others. They are relationship-oriented. They care, nurture, communicate, and improve.

But rather than asking why women have spent centuries anticipating everyone else’s needs, he treats the resulting skill as evidence of female nature. The labour disappears into biology.

Women become good at emotional interpretation because they practise it. Men become bad at it because they are excused from practising. Then we call the outcome natural.

The cave has excellent labour protections

Gray’s cave metaphor is probably the clearest example of how essentialism turns a behaviour into an exemption.

According to Gray, stressed men withdraw, become quiet, lose awareness of others, and focus on their own problems. At times, he writes, a man may have only “5 percent of his mind” available for his relationship. He can become “distant, forgetful, unresponsive, and preoccupied.”

The woman’s task is to understand.

She must not follow him, pressure him, or interpret his behaviour personally. She should find other people to meet her emotional needs, go shopping, take a bath, call a friend, see a therapist, or occupy herself until he returns.

The cave is treated as male nature. Her reaction to being ignored is treated as a communication problem she must learn to manage.

He withdraws because that is what men do. She feels neglected because she does not yet understand men correctly. The result is an apparently neutral theory in which one person’s emotional absence becomes a natural cycle and the other person’s pain becomes a misunderstanding.

This does not mean nobody ever needs solitude. Of course people need time alone. The problem is the transformation of one historically gendered pattern into a universal biological law, followed by a set of instructions teaching women how to accommodate it.

The cave comes with excellent labour protections.

Women must speak fluent Martian

Gray also insists that men and women use the same words with different meanings. Women, he says, use “poetic licence,” superlatives, metaphors, and generalisations to express emotion. Men take their words literally because men use language to convey facts and information.

This produces an entire “phrase dictionary” translating women’s speech into something men can understand.

When a woman says, “We never go out,” Gray explains that she does not really mean that. She means she wants intimacy, reassurance, romance, appreciation, and perhaps dinner. When she says, “No one listens to me,” she is supposedly making a complex emotional request hidden beneath dramatic language.

The man is advised not to take her words literally.3 The woman, meanwhile, must learn to formulate her needs in ways that do not threaten his competence, trigger his defensiveness, suggest criticism, imply blame, or make him feel inadequate.

She must understand what he means when he says nothing. He must learn what she means when she says something.

Again, the work is not evenly distributed. The man’s silence is meaningful and deserves respect. The woman’s speech requires translation and correction.

One is an instinct. The other is a dialect problem.

Pop culture’s lovable idiot

Popular culture has spent decades turning male incompetence into an endearing personality trait.

The sitcom husband forgets the anniversary, buys the wrong gift, cannot tell that his wife is angry, does not know where anything in his own house is kept, and remains baffled by his daughter. He makes a catastrophic parenting decision because his wife left him alone with the children for four hours.

The studio audience laughs because he is not cruel. He is just a man.

His wife rolls her eyes, repairs the damage, explains the children to him, reminds him of the appointment, and performs the final scene in which everyone learns that he meant well. The joke depends on her competence. Without the wife quietly understanding everyone, the lovable idiot would simply be an exhausting adult leaving a crater in the living room.

Romantic comedies often perform a similar trick. The man does not need to understand women generally. He merely needs one grand revelation near the end, usually followed by a public declaration, a sprint through an airport, or the interruption of an event other people worked very hard to organise.

The woman, meanwhile, has spent the entire story analysing his emotional unavailability, interpreting his behaviour, recognising his hidden goodness, and waiting for him to achieve the basic insight that she is a person.4

This imbalance is packaged as romance.

Even seemingly harmless phrases reveal the arrangement. “Happy wife, happy life” often does not suggest that a husband should care about his wife’s happiness as an equal partner. It means that the mysterious female creature must be pacified so the man may enjoy peace.

“Women are complicated” means their dissatisfaction need not be taken at face value. “Men are simple” means their behaviour should be accommodated rather than examined. “Boys will be boys” means women and girls will handle the consequences.

These sayings do not describe men and women. They assign labour and excuse failure.

The flattering cage

Essentialist arguments often survive because they include compliments.

Women are more intuitive, nurturing, spiritual, morally superior, precious, and naturally suited to becoming the heart of the home. They are angels.

The author of Women: A Grand Mystery claims God has always honoured women. He points to Jesus speaking with women and entrusting them with important messages. Then he explains that men must nevertheless remain heads of households because someone needs final authority and because husbands are supposedly better equipped to stop wives from going feral on the neighbours.

This is not honour. It is paternalism.

Benevolent sexism idealises women in ways that justify limiting them. Women are placed on a pedestal, where they can be admired, protected, spoken for, and prevented from wandering dangerously near power.

Hostile sexism punishes women who reject the arrangement, and the two work together. The “good” woman is loving, soothing, forgiving, maternal, emotionally available, and grateful for male leadership. The difficult woman is angry, political, sexually autonomous, demanding, ungrateful, or unwilling to provide free counselling to the men around her.

One is an angel. The other is crazy. Neither is simply human.

Gray’s version is more secular and therapeutic, but the structure remains familiar. Men are competent, autonomous, achievement-oriented providers, while women are intuitive, relational, nurturing receivers. Each sex is supposedly honoured in its own sphere.

The old hierarchy has traded the pulpit for the relationship seminar.

At a certain point, an explanation becomes an alibi

Gender essentialism is not flattering to men either. The belief that men cannot understand women assumes men are incapable of empathy, intellectual curiosity, emotional growth, or sustained attention to another person.

It sets the bar for male relationships somewhere beneath the basement.

He forgot. He did not notice. He cannot express himself. He does not know how to comfort people. He does not understand why she is upset. He was never taught.

At a certain point, an explanation becomes an alibi.

Men are not born unable to listen. They are not biologically incapable of remembering birthdays, recognising distress, reading books by women, learning about menstruation, or asking a follow-up question.

Treating these skills as naturally feminine lets men avoid developing them, then presents the resulting incompetence as proof that the stereotype was true.

One of the strangest moments in Gray’s book comes in its opening story. His wife has recently given birth. She has been physically injured during labour, can barely walk, has run out of pain medication, and has spent the day caring for a newborn without adequate help.

When Gray returns home and finds her distressed, he becomes defensive and prepares to leave. She has to stop him and explain, very clearly, that she is in pain and needs him to hold her.

Gray interprets his failure to recognise this as evidence that men and women are different:

“Another woman would have instinctively known what Bonnie needed. But as a man, I didn’t know that touching, holding, and listening were so important to her.”

Perhaps another woman would have understood because women are trained to notice pain, anticipate care needs, and remain attentive to people recovering from childbirth.

Perhaps the issue was not that he was from Mars.

Perhaps the issue was that his wife had to explain why abandoning her while she was injured, exhausted, and caring for his newborn child would be unkind.

The planetary metaphor does not make that interpretation kinder. It makes accountability disappear into orbit.

She probably told you

The most revealing thing about “women are mysterious” is how often it is said after women have explained themselves repeatedly.

The author ends his essay with this line:

“A woman’s mind is a mystery, maybe even to them.”

That is not just glib. It is deeply dismissive.

First, men are excused from understanding women because women are supposedly too strange, contradictory, hormonal, and alien to be understood in the first place. Then, when women do explain themselves, men are given a second escape hatch: perhaps she does not really know what she thinks either.

It is a perfect little system. A man does not have to listen because women are mysterious, and a woman’s own account of her feelings can be discounted because she is apparently mysterious even to herself.

That means there is no answer she can give that must be taken seriously. If she is calm, perhaps she is hiding what she really feels. If she is angry, perhaps she is hormonal. If she changes her mind, she proves women are inconsistent. If she holds her position, she is unreasonable. If she says exactly what she wants, perhaps she does not truly understand her own mind.

The mystery is doing political work. It strips women of authority over their own experiences.

Women say they are tired. They say the division of labour is unfair. They say a joke is demeaning. They say they do not like being spoken to that way. They say they need help, that they are unhappy, that they are afraid, that they do not want sex, that they do not want children, that they want careers, that they want independence, and that they are angry because something unjust has happened.

Then someone rubs his chin thoughtfully and announces that women are impossible to understand. Or worse, that perhaps women do not even understand themselves.

This is how female testimony gets dissolved into nothingness. Her words become evidence of a mood rather than information about her life. Her anger becomes hormones. Her refusal becomes confusion. Her dissatisfaction becomes instability. Her stated desire becomes something a man feels entitled to reinterpret for her.

Perhaps she was not speaking in riddles. Perhaps she was not speaking Venusian. Perhaps she understood her own mind perfectly well.

Perhaps you simply preferred the version in which she did not.

Because if women really are another species, another planet, another unknowable civilisation, then you never have to confront the possibility that she explained herself clearly and you chose not to believe her.

Mystery asks nothing of you. Understanding requires curiosity, humility, memory, and the willingness to accept that a woman may be the leading authority on what she thinks.

That is much harder than blaming Venus.

Women are not escape rooms

I do not think women are uniquely mysterious. I think human beings are complicated, inconsistent, historically situated, emotionally layered creatures who cannot be reduced to a few rules in a relationship manual.

Men are not simple, women are not incomprehensible, and neither group possesses a single shared mind.

What gender essentialism does is take the ordinary difficulty of understanding another human being and distribute responsibility for overcoming it unequally. Women are expected to learn, while men are permitted to shrug.5 Women are expected to soothe, while men are permitted to withdraw. Women are expected to explain men to themselves, while men are permitted to classify women as irrational when the explanation becomes inconvenient.

The greatest trick of “women are a mystery” is that it sounds like admiration while functioning as an excuse.

It allows a man to insist that he loves women without taking their thoughts seriously. It allows him to describe them as angels while mocking their bodies, dismissing their emotions, and endorsing their subordination. It allows him to transform contempt into affectionate humour and then blame women for lacking grace when they fail to laugh.

Women are not mysterious because men and women belong to separate species. Women appear mysterious to men who have been taught that observing women is the same thing as listening to them.

It is not.

Perhaps the real mystery is why so many men would rather build a bridge across the Atlantic, consult an interplanetary phrase book, and invent an entire Venusian civilisation than ask a woman what she thinks and believe her answer.

I should begin with an apology, or at least the closest thing to an apology I am emotionally equipped to offer: I am not, by training, a historian of ancient civilizations.1 My work tends to live closer to modern gender, media, politics, and the long miserable afterlife of patriarchal bullshit in contemporary culture. So, if you came here expecting a specialist in ancient Greek law to gently walk you through the oikos with the soothing voice of a museum audio guide, I regret to inform you that this is not that tour.2

What I do have is access to academic search engines, a copy of Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, a copy of Victoria Bateman’s Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth, and Power, and enough historical training to know when someone is abusing Aristotle in public.3

Add in the motivating power of being pissed off, and suddenly I am knee-deep in ancient household structures, textile production, women’s labor, matrilineal kinship systems, fertility panic, and the long-standing human habit of pretending women’s work is not work until society collapses without it.

This began, as too many regrettable things do, with a man on the internet.

He had been reading Aristotle and wanted to argue, more or less, that the ancient household worked because the wife was ruled by the husband “for her benefit.” The man, in this formulation, served as the public-facing representative of the household, while the woman’s subordination was not quite equality, no, but perhaps something more practical. More ordered. More stable. More “defendable.”

When I pointed out that what he was describing was a household organized around dependency and male gatekeeping, he responded by asking how a lack of “dependency” would have benefited the Greek world. Were these “strong independent women,” he asked, going to get a college education and work in downtown Athens?

Later, when I pointed out that women’s legal subordination was not the same thing as “households exist,” he escalated into the usual patriarchal escape room: farming, war, physical strength, fertility rates, “pairbonding,” and the allegedly practical question of how society could function without male household rule. At one point, he asked how women would contribute economically in a world based on farming and war, graciously granting me “textiles and perhaps a few other crafts.”

Textiles and perhaps a few other crafts.

I nearly had an aneurysm, because what do you mean ‘textiles and perhaps a few other crafts?’

The work of women is the work of civilization and always has been.

The mistake here is assuming that because patriarchy organized many civilizations, patriarchy therefore created civilization. It did not. Civilization required women’s work. Patriarchy just put men in charge of it.

The first lie is that stable means good.

The household, in his telling, was “stronger” because it was organized through male authority. The husband represented the household in the public realm. The wife’s subordination was framed as responsibility, protection, order, and social function. This is a very old trick: hierarchy puts on a little moral play in which it is the benevolent one just providing ‘care’ to the poor weak womanfolk.

But the household was “stronger” because women had fewer legal and economic ways to leave it. Prisons are also very strong. We do not usually cite that as evidence that everyone inside is thriving.

A household can be stable, affectionate, productive, and unjust at the same time. People loved one another inside patriarchal systems. They built homes, raised children, sacrificed, grieved, survived, and made meaning inside structures that denied women equal legal, economic, sexual, and civic personhood. That is part of what makes patriarchy durable. It doesn’t always operate through overt cruelty. It embeds power inside intimacy. It wraps hierarchy in affection, calls dependence “protection,” calls domination “responsibility,” and then looks wounded when women notice the door has a lock on it.

Cooperation and hierarchy are not opposites. A husband could love his wife and still possess legal power over her. A household could function and still be unjust. A society can run smoothly while resting on coercion. Slavery functioned. Empire functioned. Child labor functioned. “It produced an outcome” is not the same as “it was necessary, natural, or good.”

Function is not justice.

This is especially important because patriarchal arguments almost never present themselves as “we would like to control women because it benefits us.” Too vulgar. Too honest. Instead, the argument is usually that women are sacred, valuable, delicate, morally superior, naturally nurturing, biologically destined, spiritually elevated, or socially indispensable.

Lovely.

When I taught women’s history, I used the framework of women being both “revered and demeaned” in society. That is exactly what happens here: women are praised for the value they bring, especially reproductively and socially, while still being treated as less than in daily life. Benevolent sexism does this with a smile. It values feminine-coded traits like nurturance and care, but uses that “valuation” to limit women’s roles through paternalism, protection, and the idea that traditional gender roles are naturally complementary.

“Ruled for her benefit” is benevolent sexism with a ‘I took one Philosophy 101 class in undergrad and it’s now my entire personality’ sticker slapped on it.

Women are the heart of the home, so naturally they cannot control the home. Women are the moral guardians of society, so naturally they cannot govern society. Women are too precious for politics, too pure for public life, too nurturing for property rights, too delicate for autonomy, and somehow simultaneously responsible for everything that goes wrong with men, children, sex, family, morality, and civilization itself.

Funny how women are always most sacred exactly where they are least free.

This is the basic con behind the “men provide for women” argument. First, you build a world where women are barred from owning property independently, excluded from political life, denied education, kept out of most professions, restricted in contract law, and made legally dependent on male guardians or husbands. Then, once you have structurally routed money, citizenship, protection, status, and survival through men, you point at women and say: look how dependent they are.

Nature has spoken.

Only nature did not speak. The law did. Custom did. Property structures did. Male violence did. Religious authority did. The household economy did. Men with a vested interest in controlling women’s labor and reproduction did.

Tiny difference.

And this is where “textiles and perhaps a few other crafts” becomes useful, because it is not just stupid. It is revealing.

Textile production was not macaroni art. Barber’s Women’s Work is built around the fact that, for thousands of years, fiber arts were an enormous economic force and were primarily associated with women. The jacket copy itself makes the central point beautifully in case you are too busy for the full book: for more than 20,000 years, until the Industrial Revolution, fiber arts belonged primarily to women and functioned as a major arena where women were mothers, providers, workers, entrepreneurs, and artists. It also points out why this labor disappears so easily from historical memory: women produced perishable necessities, especially food and clothing, while archaeology more easily preserves houses, tombs, temples, stone sculpture, and other durable artifacts. Economic histories that omit cloth and clothing are not neutral. They are leaving out a vast female-produced portion of the economy.

The archive has a “men did everything” filter because stone survives better than pajamas.

Cloth is not decorative fluff on the edge of civilization. Cloth is clothing, warmth, bedding, sacks, sails, tents, storage, bandages, shrouds, ritual objects, dowry goods, trade goods, military supply, household wealth, and status display. A civilization without textiles is not a civilization. It is a crowd of cold, naked people trying to carry grain in their hands.

The importance of fiber technology goes even deeper. The Invisible Sex discusses what Barber called the “String Revolution,” arguing that fiber technologies such as cordage, nets, and woven materials had profound effects on human survival. String made snares, fishlines, tethers, leashes, carrying nets, handles, packages, and more complex tools possible. The authors argue that these humble-looking fiber artifacts were far more important than their appearance suggests, but also note that fiber items are highly perishable and often neglected by archaeologists trained to see stone, bone, shell, and other durable materials.

So when someone says, “I’ll grant you textiles,” what they are actually saying is, “I will grant you one of the foundational technologies of human society, but I will say it in a tone that makes it sound like women were making potholders and lace doilies while men invented history.”

No.

Women were not economically irrelevant. Their work was simply made economically illegible.

And textiles were only one piece of it. Women processed food, ground grain, brewed beer, preserved food, hauled water, tended children, cared for the sick, managed households, performed ritual labor, participated in markets, gathered plants, worked fields, supervised servants, made clothing, washed bodies, delivered babies, nursed infants, mourned the dead, transmitted culture, and maintained kinship networks. In Vivante’s Women’s Roles in Ancient Civilizations, the index alone is a quiet little detonation under the myth that women only did “a few crafts”: women’s economic activities across ancient societies included agriculture, animal husbandry, brewing, business and commerce, childcare, cloth production, cooking, domestic service, estate management, food distribution, gathering, household management, hunting and trapping in some societies, market work, medicine, and more.

This is not side-quest labor. This is the game.

Men could go farm, fight, trade, govern, philosophize, and compose tedious arguments about women’s natural inferiority because someone else was producing the material conditions that allowed them to do so. Armies do not march unless someone grows, grinds, cooks, packs, washes, mends, births, raises, and buries the society behind them.

Civilization was not built by men with spears alone. Someone had to make the clothes they were wearing while they congratulated themselves for killing the other guys more violently.

This also matters because the “household” is doing a lot of sneaky work in these arguments. Modern people tend to imagine the household as a private family unit: two adults, children, maybe a mortgage, maybe a dog with anxiety.4 But the household was not a snow globe. It was not a little sealed domestic ornament, shaken gently by Father’s loving hand.

The ancient Greek oikos was an economic, legal, reproductive, and religious institution. It organized property, production, inheritance, legitimacy, enslaved labor, citizenship, ritual, and gender authority. Women’s work within the oikos was not irrelevant to the wider world. It was the foundation that made men’s participation in the polis possible. Vivante’s reference guide notes that in fifth-century BCE Athens, women were confined to the oikos, where they had some authority in the home while being excluded from public life. Women maintained household rituals, wove, directed household servants, and performed the labor that made men’s public role in the polis possible.

So when a man says the husband was the “external-facing diplomat” of the household, that is not a neutral administrative detail. That is deliberate, structural political exclusion.

The household decided who worked, who owned, who obeyed, who inherited, who reproduced, who got leisure, who got legitimacy, and who got called dependent after doing all the work. This is why the feminist slogan “the personal is political” still matters. Radical feminism’s key insight was that power does not only exist between citizens and the state. It exists in marriage, sex, childrearing, domestic labor, reproduction, and family structure. Personal experiences in marriage, sex, and childrearing have political consequences because power relations between men and women shape women’s larger position in society.

The home was never outside politics. It was politics with laundry.

Calling patriarchal marriage “men providing for women” is generous. Men were often providing women access to resources women were legally prevented from accessing directly. That is not provision. That is a hostage situation.

The point is not that men did nothing. I cannot emphasize this enough because the “but men are useful too” chorus always comes skittering out of the walls like a haunted Roomba. Yes, men contributed to society. Men farmed, built, hunted, traded, governed, fought, repaired, herded, fished, traveled, invented, carried, risked, and labored. Wonderful. Have a biscuit.

But men do not need to own the household in order to contribute to it.

This is where my interlocutor asked, “In what matrilineal or non-patriarchal society is male labor mobilized to sustain advanced economies?” Which is a fascinating question, mostly because of what it smuggles in under the floorboards.

First, do you think men simply stay home eating bonbons all day if they are not legally in charge?

Second, what exactly do you mean by “advanced”?

If your definition of a successful society is maximum resource extraction, capital accumulation, manufacturing capacity, mechanized infrastructure, expansion, and military force, then fine, yes, patriarchal states are very good at producing that sort of thing. They are good at hierarchy, ownership, coercion, surplus extraction, labor control, militarization, and domination. That is not a neutral definition of success. That is a very specific value system.

It is also a value system patriarchy happens to flatter.

A society is not automatically “better” because it extracts more, accumulates more, centralizes more, conquers more, or builds larger monuments to the men at the top. Those are forms of power, not universal measurements of human flourishing. His argument treats patriarchal, state-based, militarized, surplus-producing societies as the obvious endpoint of human development, then asks whether non-patriarchal systems can reproduce those exact outcomes. That is not analysis. That is rigging the test and then acting impressed when you are the only one that gets an A.

Has it possibly occurred to him that non-patriarchal societies look different because they do not organize themselves around the same priorities?

A society that values cooperation, sustainability, kinship, subsistence, relational obligation, and ecological balance over conquest, surplus, domination, and imperial administration is not automatically “less advanced.” It is just not built to satisfy his personal Civilization VI victory conditions.

This is where comparative examples matter, but carefully. I am not interested in inventing a matriarchal fairyland where women ruled benevolently while men peacefully braided flax and no one was annoying. That is not history. That is possibly a cult.

But matrilineal, matrilocal, avuncular, and non-nuclear household systems do show that patriarchal wife-subordination is not biology. It is one historical arrangement among many. Vivante’s introduction makes this point in a useful way: patriarchy refers not just to individual men being bossy, but to an entire social framework of laws, customs, and thinking that supports male rule and prevents women’s full participation in public and domestic arenas. The same introduction also notes that many societies described as matriarchal do not simply mirror patriarchy by putting women at the top of the same hierarchy. Their structures often differ considerably from patriarchal ones.

That distinction matters. If you define civilization as “who conquered the most territory and built the biggest state apparatus,” then yes, you will privilege the societies best at conquest and state apparatus. Shocking. But if you ask how humans organize survival, kinship, care, descent, labor, land, sexuality, inheritance, and obligation, the answers are much wider than “husband owns wife, otherwise everyone dies.”

Men do not need patriarchy to contribute to society. They need patriarchy to confuse contribution with command.

The most revealing thing about patriarchal labor arguments is how flexible women’s supposed natural limitations become whenever the state needs them. If women are naturally unsuited to hard labor, it is remarkable how often societies discover their strength during wars, revolutions, industrialization campaigns, labor shortages, and national emergencies.

The Chinese Iron Girls are a useful, complicated example. During the Cultural Revolution, “Iron Girls” referred to women who performed demanding hard labor previously coded as male: repairing high-voltage wires, working farmland, welding, and other heavy physical labor.

This was not a pure feminist liberation project. The Chinese state did not wake up one morning and say, “Perhaps women are fully human, let’s explore.” Feminism was treated as bourgeois and Western, while industrialization and state development were the real motivating forces behind bringing women into more “masculine” forms of labor.

Still, motives are not the same as lived consequences. Women can experience real openings inside exploitative systems. Guo Fenglian, known as the “Mother of the Iron Girls,” later described the previous generation of women in her village as having bound feet, no freedom to choose marriage partners, and no status at home. For Guo’s generation, work became a way to imagine liberation from being “men’s appendages.” Even though they performed intense physical labor, she remembered their spirit as free.

That is the complication. The Iron Girls were not simple liberation. They were not simple exploitation. They show how quickly “natural” gender limits can shift when a society needs labor, and how women can take state projects and make different meanings out of them.

The “natural” limits of women’s labor have a suspicious habit of vanishing when the state needs crops harvested, factories staffed, uniforms sewn, ammunition made, revolutions performed, or economies rebuilt.

Then, when the crisis passes, everyone gets very concerned about femininity again. Women were strong enough for the fields, factories, workshops, and war effort when needed. Then suddenly, when male status feels threatened, the delicate flower discourse returns from its smoke break holding a clipboard.

This is not ancient history only. It is a recurring pattern. Women’s labor is needed, mobilized, exploited, praised, disciplined, and then shoved back into “nature” once men want the status hierarchy restored.

The fertility panic works the same way.

After being unable to prove that women’s subordination was morally or historically necessary, my interlocutor dragged in modern fertility rates, because apparently no patriarchal argument is complete until someone starts muttering about “pairbonding” like a divorced podcast host given unrestricted access to a microphone.

He claimed the fertility crisis proves the current system is not working.

The actual evidence is much less flattering to the “women stopped being governable” theory of civilization. Pew Research Center’s 2024 study of U.S. adults without children found that adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children cite multiple reasons: 57 percent say they simply do not want children, 44 percent want to focus on other things, 38 percent cite concerns about the state of the world, and 36 percent say they cannot afford to raise a child. Women under 50 in that group are more likely than men to say they just do not want children, 64 percent compared with 50 percent.

The OECD’s 2024 Society at a Glance report similarly does not say, “Have we tried putting husbands back in charge?” It notes that the average total fertility rate across OECD countries fell from 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to 1.5 in 2022, and points to later childbearing, economic and financial security, the cost of children, labor market conditions, housing costs, global crises, and the ability to combine work and family life as relevant factors. It also states that fertility rises when women can combine work and family life on an equal footing with men, supported by paid parental leave, affordable childcare, financial supports, and a fairer sharing of work and childrearing.

So no, the solution to fertility decline is probably not rebuilding the household monarchy and hoping women are too legally cornered to object. People need housing, healthcare, childcare, income security, bodily autonomy, time, social trust, and partners who do not treat women’s equality as civilization’s tragic software update.

Children are not raised by two abstract “pairbonded” mammals floating in a vacuum. They are raised through cooperation, kinship, labor-sharing, law, resources, care networks, social norms, and material support. The modern nuclear family is not the default human structure across history. It is modern, specific, and politically useful to people who want the family to absorb the costs that society refuses to carry collectively.

A workable household model does not require male domination. It requires reciprocal obligation, shared resources, legal personhood for adults, enforceable responsibilities to children, and a social structure that values care instead of pretending it appears magically from the Wife Goblin under the floorboards.

Patriarchal systems often denied women control over the products of that labor. That does not prove women were naturally dependent. It proves their labor was valuable enough to control.

Patriarchy is not men contributing to society. Men can contribute to society perfectly well without being handed a wife as a domestic appliance without legal personhood. Patriarchy is the system that turns contribution into entitlement. It says: because men plow, they rule. Because men fight, they own. Because men provide access to resources, women owe obedience.

But that only works after women have already been pushed away from land, law, wages, education, and public authority.

It is not provision. It is enclosure.

A man read Aristotle and thought he had found a natural law. What he found was a historical arrangement that treated women’s labor as necessary and women’s autonomy as negotiable. There is a difference.

Civilization does not collapse when women are not subordinate to men. What collapses is a very specific fantasy of civilization: the one where men imagine themselves as builders, defenders, thinkers, and rulers while women appear in the background as wives, mothers, servants, wombs, and suspiciously self-cleaning support infrastructure.

The work of women is not peripheral to civilization.

It is civilization.

Patriarchy did not create that work. It organized itself to own it, devalue it, naturalize it, and pretend it had been male genius all along. And if your model of social order only functions when half the species is legally managed by the other half, the problem is not feminism.

The problem is that your civilization is a hostage situation with Corinthian columns.

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Recommended Reading and Resources

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth, and Power by Victoria Bateman

The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory by J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page

Women’s Roles in Ancient Civilizations: A Reference Guide by Bella Vivante

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner

Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity by Sarah B. Pomeroy

2

To this day the absolute best museum audio tour guide I ever experienced was the one for the Gravensteen castle in Ghent, Brussels. More audio guides need to be recorded by comedians.

4

Maybe that’s just my dog…

Yes, the discount is historically themed. I have never encountered a political crisis I could not make slightly more manageable with a deeply specific joke.

Unfortunately, the sale’s name is becoming less hyperbolic by the day.

The 19th Amendment was ratified after Tennessee became the necessary thirty-sixth state to approve it on August 18, 1920. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby formally certified it eight days later. The amendment declared that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of sex.” (National Archives)

It was the culmination of generations of organising, petitioning, marching, lobbying and civil disobedience. Suffragists were mocked, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and force-fed. They were told women did not want the vote, did not understand politics and would destroy the family if permitted opinions outside the approved household supply.

Political discourse was very sophisticated in 1920.

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A Constitutional Victory, With Several Enormous Asterisks

The 19th Amendment mattered enormously. It also did not instantly enfranchise every woman in America.

It prohibited governments from explicitly denying the vote because of sex. It did not eliminate Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, citizenship restrictions, intimidation or violence. Black women across the South remained subject to racial voter suppression. Many Native American women were not recognised as citizens until 1924, and Asian immigrant women continued to face naturalisation restrictions. (Brennan Center)

The suffrage movement itself was also deeply compromised by racism. Black women including Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper challenged white suffragists who were willing to appeal to white supremacy in exchange for political support.

That does not make the amendment meaningless. It makes the lesson more important.

A constitutional right can be transformative without being complete. It can exist clearly on paper while hostile governments build a bureaucratic obstacle course around it.

The right is not the same thing as access to the right.

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The Anti-Suffrage Argument Has Put On a New Bonnet

The deeper objection of the anti-suffrage movement was not simply that women were too emotional or uninformed to vote. It was that women were not independent political citizens.

Anti-suffragists defended the male-headed household as the proper unit of political representation. A husband voted for the family. His wife could influence him privately, presumably while handing him dinner and avoiding opinions forceful enough to disturb his digestion.

Giving her a separate ballot meant recognising that she possessed political interests and legal personhood independent of him.

That was the dangerous proposition.

This is why modern proposals for “household voting” are not innovative conservative thought experiments. They are nineteenth-century anti-suffrage politics with a podcast microphone.

Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson has described the 19th Amendment as a mistake and advocated a system in which the male head of a household normally casts the family’s vote. In 2025, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a video featuring pastors from Wilson’s church network arguing that women should not vote. The Pentagon later said Hegseth supports women’s right to vote, but it remains significant that a Cabinet secretary amplified a movement openly hostile to women’s independent political citizenship. (PBS)

At a Turning Point USA women’s conference, some attendees also said they would surrender their own votes in favour of one household ballot controlled by a husband. Many conservative women reject that position, but the idea is no longer confined to anonymous men with Roman statue avatars. (Democracy Docket)

Calls to repeal the 19th Amendment remain fringe. There is no serious congressional repeal effort approaching passage.

But political ideas often spend years being described as jokes or provocations before anyone tries to make them policy. The purpose of repeating them is to make them familiar. Calling disenfranchisement “family voting” makes the removal of women’s citizenship sound cosy.

It is coverture with a campaign logo.

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You Do Not Have to Repeal a Right to Restrict It

The more immediate threat is not a constitutional amendment announcing that women have had enough democracy.

It is legislation that makes voting harder while remaining formally neutral about sex.

The SAVE America Act would impose national documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration and create new identification restrictions. Supporters describe these measures as election security. Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, and documented cases are rare. (White House)

The proposal does not say women may not vote. Modern voter suppression tends to have better lawyers.

Instead, registration would depend on obtaining and presenting specific documents. The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million American citizens lack ready access to qualifying proof-of-citizenship documents. Married women who changed their surnames could face additional burdens when the name on a birth certificate does not match their current identification. Young, rural, disabled and low-income voters could also be disproportionately affected. (Brennan Center)

Not every married woman would automatically be barred from voting. Supporting documents and alternative procedures may exist. The problem is that a right previously exercised through ordinary registration becomes dependent on paperwork, money, transport, time and the judgement of local officials.

Every additional hurdle creates another opportunity for an eligible citizen to be turned away.

You still possess the right. You simply need the correct certificate, accepted identification, proof of every name you have used and enough free time to navigate a system designed by a malevolent filing cabinet.

Congratulations on your equality.

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Rights Are Not Heirlooms

There is a comforting version of American history in which rights are won in a neat sequence and then placed safely behind glass.

Women marched. Tennessee ratified. The secretary of state signed the paperwork. Everyone applauded. The end.

But rights are not heirlooms. They are political arrangements maintained through law, institutions, participation and collective insistence. They can be expanded. They can be restricted. They can be made inaccessible while remaining technically intact.

The women who fought for suffrage were not asking for another declaration that women were important. Society had spent centuries praising women’s sacred importance immediately before denying them property, education, wages, bodily autonomy and legal personhood.

They were demanding power.

The vote meant women could act upon their beliefs rather than whispering them into the ear of a husband who retained the final decision. It recognised women as members of the political community, not decorative dependants represented through someone else.

That is why anti-suffragists opposed it then.

It is why some people oppose it now.

So throughout August, Bitchy History annual subscriptions are 26% off in honour of the amendment certified on August 26, 1920.

Subscribe for feminist history, political analysis, cursed primary sources and regular reminders that no right was secured because the people holding power suddenly developed excellent manners.

The sale ends August 31.

The 19th Amendment is not a limited-time offer.

I love a cursed primary source. Not necessarily an evil one. Not always a dramatic one. Sometimes the best historical artifacts are not the official speeches, the manifestos, or the laws written by men who sound like they were upholstered in mahogany. Sometimes the really revealing sources are the little throwaway pieces. The mildly amused newspaper columns. The fashion commentary. The cultural observations written in the tone of someone peering over a teacup and saying, “Isn’t it funny how girls are these days?”

That is where history gets wonderfully nosy.

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Because a cursed primary source is often not cursed because it is unusually hateful. It is cursed because it is ordinary. It says the quiet part politely. It reveals the assumptions everyone was already breathing in. It does not announce itself as ideology. It arrives wearing a hat, makes a few jokes, compliments a girl’s figure, and quietly drags the furniture of patriarchy back into place.

Which brings us to Patricia Blake’s 1946 New York Times article, “Why College Girls Dress That Way.” The piece was published on April 7, 1946, less than a year after the end of World War II, and it asks one of the great urgent questions of the postwar age: why are college girls wearing sweaters, slacks, men’s shirts, old coats, jeans, moccasins, military castoffs, and generally dressing like they have a body they intend to use rather than display? The article’s subtitle offers several explanations, including the apparently comforting idea that it is “fun to be a bohemian before settling down.”

There it is. The whole cultural situation, folded into a single sentence like a cursed napkin swan.

The article presents itself as a light little study of campus fashion. It is not screaming that women belong in the home. It is not a fire-and-brimstone sermon about the collapse of womanhood. It is not one of those anti-feminist texts that bangs pots and pans while warning that if women get too much education, civilization will immediately slide into a ditch. It is softer than that. Smilier. More amused. It looks at young women on college campuses and treats their clothes as a charming anthropological puzzle.

But that is exactly what makes it useful. This is not just an article about clothes. It is an article about containment.

The opening image of the article is doing a lot of work. Blake describes spring arriving on ivy-covered campuses, but instead of finding young women eagerly assembling Easter outfits, she finds them shedding winter layers into a new costume: old jeans, men’s shirts, broken-down moccasins, and various garments that suggest utility, comfort, and indifference to polish. It is a very funny visual, but the comedy depends on treating these women as a spectacle. Their clothes become evidence of a campus civilization operating by its own rules, one that apparently requires translation for the ordinary newspaper reader.

That translation matters. The women in this piece are not treated as women. They are treated as girls. Calling them girls makes their independence feel temporary. It makes their choices seem playful rather than deliberate. A woman in slacks might be making a choice about comfort, mobility, practicality, money, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, or indifference to male approval. A girl in slacks is just going through a phase. Nothing to see here. She’ll grow out of it. Probably when someone puts a ring on her finger and gets her pregnant.

This is the article’s central trick. It notices women’s autonomy and immediately turns it into youthful experimentation. College becomes a kind of supervised rebellion zone, a place where young women can try on strange clothes and stranger selves before they return to the real business of life: marriage, domesticity, respectability, and being pretty in the approved direction.

Blake’s campus is full of transformations. Professors, she suggests, might feel as if they have wandered onto a movie set, because the women’s clothing changes so dramatically depending on season, weather, day of the week, and social occasion. Rain turns students into seafaring figures. Winter turns them into bundled arctic creatures. May apparently produces farm-girl overalls. Sunday dinner produces a ballet influence. The point is not merely that their clothes are varied. The point is that their dress is theatrical, excessive, and unstable. These women are not presented as choosing outfits so much as performing identities.

That is important because performance is safer than politics. If women’s clothing is a costume, then their eccentricity can be dismissed as play. If their clothes are practical or expressive, however, then we have to start asking what needs those clothes are meeting. Are they dressing this way because they are moving around campus? Because they are living among other women? Because they are tired? Because they are cold? Because they are students rather than ornaments? Because they like not being pinched, polished, powdered, arranged, and displayed every second of the day?

The article comes close to some of these answers, but it keeps steering the reader back toward psychology and spectacle.

Blake is particularly fascinated by the weekend metamorphosis. The women who appear casual, sloppy, strange, or deliberately unpolished during the week reappear on Saturdays as elegant, groomed, date-ready beings. Parents visiting on weekends supposedly wonder where all these lovely students have been hiding, not realizing they are the same women they passed earlier in the week in campus garb. A historian, Hans Kohn, is even invoked as someone who can understand European historical movements but not recognize his students off campus.

This is funny, but it is also doing ideological labor. The article reassures readers that conventional femininity remains available. The same women who wear jeans and men’s shirts to class can become fashionable when the occasion demands it. They have not abandoned beauty. They have only put it on a schedule.

And notice what causes that schedule to change: weekends, parties, football games, dates, men. During the week, at women’s colleges, they dress for campus life. On weekends, when male attention becomes more central, they transform. Blake makes this dynamic especially explicit when she discusses coeducational colleges, where women are said to dress carefully because of:

“the omnipresent male.”

That phrase is both a fashion theory and a threat assessment.

The underlying assumption is obvious: women’s dress is supposed to be tethered to male approval. When that tether slackens, things get suspiciously comfortable. The article wants to treat women’s clothes as bizarre, but what seems to bother it is not actually bizarreness. It is self-direction. The young women are not always dressing to be looked at by men. They are dressing for breakfast, bicycles, dorm life, weather, classrooms, friends, floors, deadlines, and themselves. They are dressing like people who have places to go and things to do. Apparently this required national explanation.

That matters because 1946 is not just any year. World War II had just ended. During the war, women had been recruited into factories, offices, farms, military auxiliaries, volunteer services, and technical work. They had been told, with patriotic urgency, that the nation needed their hands, brains, stamina, and labor. Then the war ended, and suddenly the culture discovered that this had all been a temporary emergency arrangement.

After the war, many women were let go because their jobs were again understood as belonging to men.

That is the larger world sitting behind this little fashion article. Women had been mobilized, then demobilized. They had been invited into public life, then nudged back toward private life. They had worn uniforms, work clothes, trousers, coveralls, practical shoes, and whatever else made sense when the task was welding, typing, driving, nursing, transporting, organizing, producing, or simply getting through the day. Then peacetime arrived and American culture began the delicate work of pretending that none of this had changed anything fundamental.

So when Blake describes college women adopting military garments, pilots’ helmets, pea jackets, insignia, and borrowed uniforms, she is not just describing a campus fad. She is describing the afterlife of wartime gender disruption. These young women were wearing the symbols of mobility, authority, service, and public seriousness.

The article tries to make that funny. It presents the military influence as an odd reverberation of the war, something that looked especially careless next to properly uniformed WAVES on campus.

A military jacket on a college woman in 1946 is not just a quirky garment. It is a reminder that women had participated in the war effort, that women had taken up space in institutions previously defined as male, and that women’s proximity to uniforms was no longer entirely ornamental. Even if the jacket was borrowed from a returning man, the effect was still gender trouble in wool.

The article also treats casual dress as a class performance, a way for privileged women to play at artistic poverty without experiencing actual precarity. Blake suggests that students enjoy looking like intellectuals, artists, or poor people precisely because they are not actually any of those things in any material sense. College becomes a theater where elite young women can borrow the aesthetics of bohemian life while remaining protected from its discomforts.

This is one of the sharpest moments in the article, even if Blake does not draw out all its implications. The “college girl” here is not an everywoman. She is elite-coded, northeastern, white by implication, and cushioned by respectability. The world of the piece includes Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, Yale fathers, Dartmouth weekends, ski clothes, house parties, and the assumption that these students will eventually settle into socially approved lives. Their rebellion is permitted because it is class-buffered. A wealthy college girl in slacks is eccentric. A working-class woman in practical clothes is often just judged.

That distinction matters. The article is amused by these women because it assumes their deviance is temporary and manageable. Their families can afford the experiment. Their institutions can absorb the eccentricity. Their future respectability is presumed. The slacks are not allowed to mean too much because the marriage plot is waiting in the wings with a wedding dress and an apron.

There is a real critique there, but the article bends it back toward the marriage plot. These women can play at being unconventional because they will eventually return to convention. Their flirtation with bohemianism is framed not as the beginning of an adult intellectual life, but as a story they can tell themselves before marriage and children. They can imagine they have experienced life fully, then settle down with the satisfaction of having briefly worn the costume of rebellion.

That is the emergency exit. Whenever college women’s choices start to look too autonomous, the piece reassures the reader that this will all end. The bohemianism is temporary. The sloppiness is temporary. The unfeminine comfort is temporary. The campus is a little holding pen for experimentation before young women are returned to the softer cage of domestic normalcy.

This is why the subtitle matters so much. It tells readers how to interpret women’s experimentation without fearing it. Yes, students may dress strangely. Yes, they may look intellectual, artistic, careless, masculine, military, or defiantly comfortable. Yes, they may live among other women and develop styles that are not organized around male approval. But do not panic. It is only temporary. It is only college. It is only youth. It is only a costume.

Marriage will fix it.

Blake also frames campus clothing as group identity. The women, she argues, want to be recognized as college women, almost as if their clothing works like a label attached to luggage. Their sweaters, skirts, moccasins, jeans, and eccentric combinations become a visual declaration of institutional belonging. This is where the article moves from fashion commentary into amateur psychology, describing campus style as:

“academic exhibitionism”

It is such a useful phrase because it reveals how quickly women’s group identity becomes suspicious. Men’s collegiate clothing traditions can be interpreted as school spirit, institutional culture, or youthful masculinity. Women’s collegiate clothing traditions become exhibitionism, insecurity, instability, competition, and conformity. The article is not entirely wrong that clothing can be about belonging. Of course it can. Fashion is social. But the interpretive generosity is not equally distributed.

This is one of patriarchy’s most reliable party tricks: when men develop a group aesthetic, it is culture. When women do it, it is neurosis.

That neurosis framing becomes even clearer when Blake discusses what happens to individuality. She argues that mass dress gives the college woman confidence on campus, but that once she returns home to the admiration of family and friends, she can abandon:

“herd psychology”

Again, the point is not that Blake has invented the idea that young people dress like their peers. Of course they do. College students still do this. Humans are social animals with laundry. The issue is that the article interprets women’s collective style as a failure of selfhood, while also insisting that the proper restoration of individuality happens at home, under the admiring gaze of parents and friends. In other words, the campus community of women is treated as destabilizing, while the family home is treated as secure and individuating.

That is not subtle. That is domestic ideology.

Deirdre Clemente’s Dress Casual helps flip the article’s premise on its head. Clemente argues that the modern casual American wardrobe emerged from college spaces: classrooms, dormitories, gyms, fraternities, and sororities. In other words, the students being treated as odd little fashion goblins were not failing to dress properly. They were helping invent American casual style.

That makes Blake’s article even better as a primary source. It captures a cultural shift while pretending it is only observing a campus nuisance. Casual clothing was not simply laziness. It was practical. It was comfortable. It suited bodies in motion. The scandal, then, was not that college women dressed badly. The scandal was that they dressed usefully and for themselves.

The article even admits this, though it tries not to linger on the implications. Campus life required clothes that worked: for bicycling, for sitting in unladylike positions, for rushing into dining halls, for studying, for moving through the day without dedicating every available minute to decorative maintenance. At one point, Blake gives the stock student defense of campus clothing:

“free and comfortable.”

A horrifying confession. Comfort. In public. During daylight hours. Civilization wobbles.

This is the danger of casual clothing in this source. Not that it makes women unattractive, though the article certainly circles that possibility with the nervous energy of a 1950s housewife separated from her tranquilizers. The danger is that casual clothing lets women prioritize something other than being seen correctly. It gives them speed, ease, warmth, looseness, and the ability to sit on the floor without turning into a morality play.

Blake tries to undercut the freedom argument by saying the students have merely exchanged one stereotype for another. Many came from strict boarding schools where uniforms had been compulsory, she explains, and now they have simply embraced a new campus uniform of casual disorder. There is truth there. Campus casual clothing had its own expectations, rules, and hierarchies. The article notes that the person who truly wants to be different from the group is not necessarily celebrated.

But this is where the source becomes especially revealing. Blake is right that campus style could be conformist. She is right that “freedom” does not magically appear because a woman changes from serge to denim. But the article uses that observation to dismiss the whole possibility that comfort could still matter. Clothing can be both conformist and liberating. A uniform can be freely chosen and socially enforced. A pair of slacks can be a trend and still be more useful than the alternatives. Women do not need to achieve perfect philosophical autonomy before they are allowed to enjoy freedom of movement.

The timing also puts this article right before the postwar fashion world swings hard toward a renewed ideal of emphasized femininity. During World War II, fashion was shaped by rationing, uniforms, and practical design. Dior’s 1947 “New Look” helped define a postwar turn toward fuller skirts, rounded shoulders, and a more elaborate feminine silhouette.

Blake’s article sits in that fascinating in-between moment. The war has ended, but the full domestic fantasy machine has not yet finished reassembling itself. The women in the article are still wearing the residue of wartime practicality: slacks, jackets, layers, uniforms, sturdy shoes, and clothes that prioritize movement over display. They are not yet fully folded into the later 1940s and 1950s ideal of the polished domestic woman, but the article is already doing some of that folding rhetorically. It is smoothing the wrinkles of autonomy out of the garment before the decade hangs it back in the closet.

Linda Eisenmann’s work on women’s higher education after World War II helps clarify the stakes. Her study of postwar advocacy for women’s higher education emphasizes that this advocacy had a distinct relationship to the expectations of the era, and she links women’s wartime activism to the later women’s movement. That is exactly the tension Blake’s article accidentally reveals. Women’s colleges could be places of real intellectual and social development, but the culture around them often tried to interpret that development as preparation for better wifehood or as a temporary detour before domesticity.

That tension would become central to Betty Friedan’s critique in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan later argued that postwar American culture insisted women should find fulfillment in housework, marriage, sex, and children. This was part of a wider Cold War culture of anxiety and security, in which Americans tried to create an idealized home life with father as breadwinner and mother as housewife. The “feminine mystique” rested on the assumption that women should not want work, education, or political opinions if they were truly feminine.

The 1946 article is not making Friedan’s argument, obviously. It is doing the thing Friedan would later help name.

It treats college women as if their education, friendships, self-expression, and bodily comfort are all slightly unserious because their real adult lives are presumed to begin after they leave campus and become wives. It is not hostile in the obvious sense. It is not ranting. It is not angry. It is worse in some ways because it is affectionate. It likes these girls. It finds them charming. It enjoys their oddity. It just cannot imagine that their oddity might be meaningful beyond the courtship-and-marriage timeline.

That is the curse of this primary source. It is not trying to be villainous. It is trying to be cute.

And yet it reveals a culture trying to laugh women back into place.

The article’s final reassurance is that college women can still be pretty:

“when they want to be.”

That ending is doing the work of a tiny ideological border guard. After all the slacks, sweaters, military jackets, moccasins, jeans, and campus eccentricity, the reader is comforted with the knowledge that conventional femininity has not been destroyed. The girls are still pretty. They still know how to perform attractiveness. They have not become permanently unfeminine. Nobody needs to alert the authorities.

It is a strange little compliment with a leash attached.

Because the question was never really whether these women could be pretty. The question was whether prettiness would remain compulsory. Whether women’s bodies would remain public property for judgment. Whether education could become a route to adult selfhood rather than a scenic road to marriage. Whether clothes could serve women’s lives rather than organize women’s lives around being seen.

That is why this article matters. Not because slacks liberated anyone by themselves. Not because a borrowed pea coat was a revolution. Not because every college woman in 1946 was consciously engaged in some grand feminist project through the medium of denim and slacks. History rarely works that neatly, and clothing is never just one thing.

But clothes are also never just clothes.

They are rules, aspirations, anxieties, permissions, refusals, class signals, gender scripts, and little wearable arguments with the world. In 1946, college women’s casual dress carried the memory of wartime practicality, the culture of women’s campuses, the emergence of modern American casual style, and the unsettling possibility that young women might enjoy moving through life without constantly arranging themselves for male approval.

The article looks at all of that and says, essentially: how funny. How charming. How temporary.

And that is the point. Postwar America did not only send women back home through laws and employment policies. It did it through newspaper features, fashion commentary, advertising, psychology, sitcoms, marriage advice, campus rules, beauty standards, and an endless supply of cultural throat-clearing about what women were really supposed to become.

The slacks were not the scandal.

The scandal was that, for a few years on campus, young women looked almost comfortable in their own lives.

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A 1941 advertisement for Sanforized fabric in which a husband demonstrates how uncomfortable a shrunken shirt feels by wrapping it around his wife’s neck and choking her.

No, really.

Before anyone asks, yes, I checked. Yes, it is real. No, it is not satire. No, Mad Men did not invent it for a joke. Multiple copies of the original advertisement survive, and the copy is exactly as unhinged as it appears. The wife literally says, “Gk-gk-stop choking me, you brute!” while her husband explains that she should have bought him a shirt with a Sanforized label. The product being advertised was a real pre-shrinking process developed to keep clothing from shrinking in the wash. The chokehold was apparently considered a helpful visual aid.

Now, I know what some people will say.

“It’s just a joke.”

Yes.

That is the point.

The thing cultural historians care about is not whether a culture contains violence. Every culture contains violence. What interests us is what a culture finds funny.

Because humor is never random. Humor relies on shared assumptions. If nobody shares the assumptions, the joke falls apart.

We’ve all seen it. An employee makes a joke in the breakroom that’s in horribly poor taste and no one laughs. That employee may grumble about how ‘people can’t take a joke these days’ and how ‘sensitive’ everyone is, but their not likely to make that joke again for a the CEO. Because the joke doesn’t promise camaraderie or understanding anymore.

And this advertisement has a very specific set of assumptions built into it.

George suffers because his shirt shrank.

Julia made the mistake.

Julia is responsible for solving the problem.

George gets to be angry.

The audience is expected to sympathize with George.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, George is physically choking his wife.

What fascinates me is that the ad does not treat the chokehold as the problem. The shirt is the problem. The violence is just punctuation.

That tells us an enormous amount about the world that produced it.

The historian and sociologist Erving Goffman argued that advertisements do not merely reflect social norms. They teach them. Advertisements function as little cultural scripts, showing audiences how men and women are expected to behave and how relationships are supposed to work. In his analysis of advertising, Goffman noted that ads repeatedly positioned women in subordinate roles while men occupied positions of authority, competence, and control. Advertisements weren’t snapshots of reality. They were lessons in how gender should be performed.

And this ad is one hell of a lesson.

Look closely at the story being told.

Julia’s job is household management. She buys the clothing. She manages the laundry. She is responsible for anticipating her husband’s needs. George’s role is to experience the consequences when she fails.

The product itself is almost secondary.

Sanforized fabric is not being sold as a technological innovation. It is being sold as protection against blame.

Buy the right shirt.

Avoid disappointing your husband.

Avoid conflict.

Avoid getting garotted by your angry husband, apparently?

That structure was incredibly common in mid-century advertising. Products were marketed as solutions to domestic failure. Buy the right detergent and your husband will be impressed. Buy the right coffee and your marriage will survive breakfast. Buy the right fabric and apparently your windpipe remains intact.

Now, to be clear, I am not arguing that every man in 1941 was walking around strangling his wife over laundry mistakes.

I am arguing something more nuanced.

The ad assumes readers will not be particularly disturbed by the image. That the American public would see domestic abuse and say ‘yeah, that’s a normal way to handle household conflict.’

That is the real story here.

The joke only works if the audience already accepts a hierarchy in which the husband’s frustration matters more than the wife’s discomfort.

The violence is funny because it is framed as understandable.

That framing is doing all the work.

Modern audiences tend to focus immediately on the chokehold because today we recognize strangulation as one of the most serious warning signs of domestic abuse. We see danger. The copywriters saw comedy. The distance between those two interpretations tells us how dramatically cultural assumptions can change.

And yet, before we congratulate ourselves too much, it is worth asking what has actually changed.

You are unlikely to see a modern advertisement featuring a husband choking his wife over laundry.

Thank God.

But the underlying logic has proven remarkably durable.

Women are still frequently positioned as managers of emotional well-being, household harmony, family schedules, meal planning, child development, social relationships, and domestic organization.

The products are different. The pressure is softer. The accountability remains.

The genius of this ad, if we can call it that, is that it reveals the machinery so openly.

Many modern advertisements disguise their assumptions.

This one practically puts them in neon lights.

The most revealing thing about this artifact is not that George is choking Julia.

It is that nobody involved in making the advertisement seemed to think that was the weird part.

The shirt was the crisis.

The chokehold was the joke.

And sometimes the fastest way to understand a culture is to look at what it laughs at…or what it assumes everyone already finds funny.

Representative Lauren Boebert asked Dr. Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, whether any part of the American founding could be looked at in an uncomplicated way.

Hartig was very polite in her response. She had to be. She was under oath, sitting before Congress, and apparently possesses both professional discipline and an intact survival instinct.

I am not in front of a Congressional committee, thank God. Had I been invited to testify at this hearing, I probably would have ended the day being held in contempt of Congress.

So here is the uncomplicated answer Boebert wanted:

No.

There is no part of the American founding, or any history for that matter, that can honestly be called uncomplicated. Humans are the raw material of history, and humans are complicated little disasters. They proclaim liberty while denying it to other people. They write magnificent words and behave abominably. They compromise, contradict themselves, change their minds, and leave later generations to argue over what they meant. Sometimes they are brave. Sometimes they are selfish. Usually they are several things at once.

The men who declared that all men were created equal lived in a society built on racial slavery. The Constitution created a durable republic and protected slavery through compromise. The nation expanded democratic participation while taking Indigenous land, excluding women from formal political power, and fighting over who counted as “the people.” None of those facts cancels the others. They are the history.

If you need the founding to be uncomplicated, you do not want history. You want a commemorative plate.

That distinction caused repeated trouble during the July 21 hearing titled Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past. Members of the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency claimed to be investigating whether the museum had distorted American history. Much of the questioning was devoted to something else: making Hartig display the proper amount of patriotism, endorse some genuinely dreadful history, and explain why the museum had failed to arrange the national past according to each member’s personal preferences.

The museum’s accuracy barely mattered. Hartig was being asked whether professional historians would trade complexity for patriotic reassurance. By the end of the hearing, the majority’s witness had supplied the consequence for refusing: “clean house” and replace the Smithsonian’s leadership.

The committee majority then published its official wrap-up. Its headline announced the conclusion: the museum had a “radical agenda to reshape the past.” The release said members had exposed a “hateful agenda” and “extensive left-wing biases.” It featured Chairman Tim Burchett and Representatives Brandon Gill and Brian Jack, quoted the majority’s invited witnesses at generous length, and omitted every Democratic member’s questioning.

It also omitted several Republican exchanges that made the hearing look less like oversight and more like an ideological obedience test. Hartig’s description of the museum’s scholarly review process vanished. So did the call to replace its leadership.

A committee spent hours accusing historians of selective presentation and then issued a selective official history of the event. The release distilled the hearing’s method: keep whatever flatters the conclusion and lose whatever complicates it. The omitted exchanges show exactly what had to disappear.

The approved emotional setting

Representative Eric Burlison began sensibly enough by asking about the museum’s purpose. Hartig said its mission was to tell the richest story of America’s past it could and to preserve and explore the past in all its complexity. Burlison quickly abandoned museum practice for a patriotism examination.

“Are you America First?”

“Do you love America?”

“Are you proud of America’s history?”

Hartig said she was a proud American, loved the country unconditionally, and was proud of its history “warts and all.” This was apparently still insufficient. Burlison wanted to know who had spread the “falsehoods” that World Cup visitors supposedly believed about the United States. The director of the National Museum of American History was now responsible for the entire planet’s vibes.

Representative Pat Fallon administered another exam. First he asked Hartig’s salary, emphasized that the Smithsonian receives taxpayer money, and reminded her that she worked for all Americans, including those with whom she disagreed.1 Then came the questions that apparently determine whether a historian may be trusted near the nation’s objects.

Did she love America? Yes.

Had the United States been a force for good? Yes.

Was it still a force for good? Yes.

Was it “the greatest nation history has ever known”?

Hartig declined to rank every society in human history during a rapid-fire congressional loyalty test. Fallon announced the score: “So we got three out of four. That’s not bad.”2

Apparently the director of the National Museum of American History was auditioning for Miss America, and professional caution cost her the evening-gown category.

The official wrap-up included none of this. A reader relying on the committee’s account would not know that Hartig had been asked to declare herself “America First,” that multiple members demanded professions of national love, or that Fallon literally scored her patriotism aloud.

Those omissions are useful. They preserve the committee’s preferred version of the hearing, in which sober legislators evaluated museum scholarship. The actual questions revealed a different standard. Accuracy was not enough; the historian had to display the approved emotional posture toward the nation.

Abolition needs a calendar

Burlison’s history became worse when he stopped asking Hartig how she felt and began telling her what she should teach. He described the United States as the country that “led the world and inspired them to eliminate slavery” and, somehow, end “all of the genocides that happened.” He did not offer evidence. He offered the conclusion and waited for Hartig to salute it.

Representative Michael Cloud made a similar claim. He acknowledged that slavery belonged in the museum because it had existed in many societies. What made the United States exceptional, he said, was that “we worked to overcome it” and were “leading on the world stage in getting rid of it.”

The history of abolition is complicated. Sorry to spring that on everyone again.

Abolishing the transatlantic trade was not the same as abolishing slavery. National decrees did not always reach every territory, and enforcement was another matter. A law could declare emancipation while leaving coercive labor systems in place. Enslaved people forced the issue through resistance and revolution; free Black activists, religious dissenters, politicians, soldiers, writers, and organizers pursued different routes for different reasons. Imperial self-interest lived quite comfortably beside genuine moral conviction.

Even with all those qualifications, the United States did not lead the world in abolishing slavery. Haiti declared independence in 1804 after a successful revolution by enslaved people and became the first country in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery. Mexico formally abolished slavery under President Vicente Guerrero in 1829. Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Emancipation took effect in most British colonies in 1834, accompanied by an exploitative “apprenticeship” system and an enormous payment to enslavers because even moral progress can arrive carrying a bill for the wrong people.

The United States abolished slavery nationally through the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, after a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The National Archives gives the dates plainly: Congress passed the amendment on January 31, 1865, and the states ratified it on December 6. The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 had not ended slavery throughout the country; it applied to areas in rebellion and excluded the loyal slave states.

That timeline does not make the United States uniquely evil, a tedious straw man dragged out whenever anyone points at a calendar. However, it makes Burlison’s and Cloud’s claim false. The American abolitionist struggle was enormously important. So were the actions of enslaved people, Black soldiers, abolitionists, lawmakers, and the millions who pushed the founding’s promise beyond what many founders were prepared to grant. Their achievement does not need a fabricated gold medal in the Global Abolition Olympics.

The genocide claim was even stranger. No country inspired the world to end “all of the genocides,” a phrase with the intellectual precision of something found scribbled on a bar napkin. Representative Don Beyer later named some of the history flattened by Burlison’s sentence: the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, the Sand Creek Massacre, the California genocide, and forced Indigenous boarding schools. He asked why acknowledging the people who lived on the land before European settlement should be objectionable. Hartig answered that recognizing the country’s first peoples was part of acknowledging the “layered complexity” of the place where the museum stands.

The majority wrap-up omitted Burlison’s claims about both slavery and genocide. They were too useful during the hearing to challenge Hartig and too historically illiterate to preserve afterward.

When evidence appears, move the standard

Cloud argued that the museum had buried the Declaration of Independence and the founders beneath displays about slavery, social reform, abortion, and drag. Hartig explained that the Declaration appeared across a full wall in The Price of Freedom. Cloud’s response deserves preservation: “It’s in the back. You have to walk through a bunch of junk to get there.”3

The Declaration had not disappeared.4 He disliked where it was placed, what visitors encountered before it, and the fact that the museum expected them to walk through American history to reach more American history. Objects and exhibits about Americans he found objectionable became “a bunch of junk.” Jefferson’s desk and Lincoln’s hat did not count because they had not been encountered with sufficient ceremonial fanfare.

Fallon used the same method while asking about the 250th anniversary. He wanted new exhibits on Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and American inventors. Whenever Hartig said those people appeared prominently in the museum’s new exhibition, Fallon changed the requirement. Washington being featured did not count unless there was an exhibition solely about Washington.5 An exhibition including Jefferson did not count as an exhibition “on” Jefferson. The same happened with Franklin and the inventors. The standard moved so often it should have worn running shoes.

The museum’s actual anniversary project is not mysterious. In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness opened in May. It contains 250 objects spread across 250,000 square feet and all three public floors. It is explicitly organized around the ideals of the Declaration. Highlighted objects include Washington’s uniform and sword, Jefferson’s writing desk, the Revolutionary War gunboat Philadelphia, and the Star-Spangled Banner.

Representative Melanie Stansbury gave the committee a brisk virtual tour: the flag, Lincoln’s hat, Jefferson’s desk, R2-D2, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, the Wright Flyer, and the Apollo 11 command module. All of that, she observed, is American history. She also noted that many of the Republican members who considered this hearing so urgent had left before its conclusion.

Maxwell Frost had already suggested that the committee should perhaps consider actually visiting the museums it was condemning. The National Museum of American History is about two miles from the hearing room.

One hates to recommend primary-source research to a congressional oversight committee, but desperate times.

Cloud did conduct some fieldwork in the gift shop. He said he could not find Thomas Paine’s Common Sense on the day he visited, but he found George Takei’s It Rhymes with Takei, which he described as a book about “one young man lusting after another” in the children’s section.

We cannot reconstruct the physical shop’s inventory or shelving that day, perhaps Cloud did find the book in the children’s section. Or, hear me out here, is it possible that he assumed that because it is a graphic novel memoir he assumed it must be for children despite being 328 pages long. If I am being particularly generous, which Cloud has not exactly given me cause to be, I might think that somehow It Rhymes With Takei was accidentally shelved in the children’s section alongside Takei’s actual children’s book They Called Us Enemy.6

Cloud may indeed have found it in a children’s section. He may indeed have been unable to find Common Sense. Neither fact establishes institutional erasure. A retail shelf is not an exhibition, the physical museum shop is not the curatorial department.

The current Smithsonian Books history catalogue includes editions of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation; books on the American Revolution, American democracy, Benjamin Franklin, presidents, first ladies, military service, slavery, and the nation’s 250th anniversary. The Smithsonian Store’s history section online lists 141 items. I did not find Common Sense on either webpage. I also did not mistake one absent eighteenth-century pamphlet for proof that the Smithsonian had abolished the founding.

The republic will survive a gift shop being out of Thomas Paine.

The wrap-up omitted Cloud’s “bunch of junk,” Fallon’s shifting definition of a founding-era exhibition, Frost’s proposed field trip, and Stansbury’s inventory of the objects allegedly missing. Those details would have made it harder to maintain that the museum had erased traditional American history. Easier to erase the details instead.

Context was treated as an admission of guilt

The hearing’s moral-panic portion began with Chairman Burchett and reached its purest form with Representative Nancy Mace. Mace asked Hartig how many children visited the museum, then jumped immediately to sexual fetishes, pedophilia, grooming, rape, drag queens, and whether the museum was making children vulnerable to abuse. She repeatedly demanded yes-or-no answers while denying Hartig enough time to identify the objects, exhibitions, intended audiences, or context.

Mace said the museum had displayed the diary of a six-year-old who wondered about growing a penis. Hartig corrected her: the writer was 13, and Girlhood: It’s Complicated was a temporary exhibition not designed for children. It examined changing definitions of girlhood, girls’ bodies, education, labor, fashion, and political action. The team had convened scholars and educators and consulted visitors during its development.

That information does not force anyone to like every curatorial decision. It explains what the diary was doing there. This was precisely why Mace could not allow an explanation.

She moved on to “What is a woman?”, how many genders exist, when Hartig’s gender had been “revealed” to her, and whether men could become women. Five minutes allocated for Smithsonian oversight had become a cable-news audition with visual aids.

The official wrap-up did highlight Burchett using the same technique. It quoted his claim that the diary belonged to a six-year-old, immediately followed by Hartig correcting the age to 13, yet still presented the exchange as a simple question Hartig refused to answer. The trick was consistent: remove an object from its setting, attach the most inflammatory label available, prevent an explanation, and present the resulting mess as proof of evasion.

Representative Brandon Gill performed a related trick with scholarship on the early Mickey Mouse’s connections to blackface minstrelsy. “Is Mickey Mouse racist?” he asked, turning a historical question about artistic genealogy into a personality test for a cartoon. When Hartig tried to distinguish the character from the history of minstrelsy, Gill collapsed the distinction again. Accuracy was inconvenient. “Mickey Mouse is racist” was usable.

Gill also questioned Hartig about the MASS Action toolkit, an external museum-equity project that discusses what its authors call characteristics of white-supremacy culture. The Smithsonian did have contact with it. An NMAH staff reading group met to discuss the toolkit, and the Smithsonian’s fiscal-year 2023 report describes that group as an activity of the museum’s IDEA Council. That contact is legitimate evidence for oversight. It does not turn an outside document into “your toolkit,” as Gill repeatedly called it, or make every line the museum’s governing policy.

A staff reading group is not the Nicene Creed.7

Gill ended by asking whether Hartig was a white supremacist because she had agreed that politeness was important and the toolkit criticized “politeness” in a particular institutional context. The wrap-up considered this a member highlight. I suppose “Congressman asks museum director whether she is a white supremacist because she is polite” was too dignified a sentence to waste.

Mace’s “What is a woman?” detour did not make the official account, neither did Boebert’s long rant about abortion numbers in the United States.8 Burchett’s and Gill’s exchanges did. The selections were not random. The wrap-up kept the moral panic when it could be edited into a triumphant gotcha and discarded it when it made the hearing look unhinged.

Franklin and the supposedly “bizarre” question

Gonzalez offered a slightly more scholarly-looking version of the same maneuver during Jack’s questioning. He complained that a Smithsonian exhibit had “pondered” whether Benjamin Franklin performed experiments involving “electroshock” on indentured servants or enslaved people without producing evidence that he had. “Why smear a Founding Father such as Ben Franklin,” Gonzalez asked, “by pondering such a really bizarre thing?”

I initially did not know which exhibit he meant. It was not difficult to find once I stopped relying on Gonzalez’s description. The Electric Dr. Franklin opened in 2021, closed in November 2025, and remains available online. The White House report that preceded the hearing devoted several paragraphs to complaining that 20 percent of the exhibit concerned enslaved people and that it asked a “baseless” question about their possible participation in Franklin’s experiments.

The actual Smithsonian text is considerably more careful than either account. It does not claim that Franklin experimented on enslaved people. It says the surviving records are “few and unclear,” distinguishes what is known from what remains possible, and repeatedly acknowledges that we may never know who assisted him. It explains that Franklin held people enslaved during his electrical research; that their household labor helped create the wealth and leisure that made his scientific work possible; that his experiments often required assistants to turn a human-powered generator, observe sparks, or act as test subjects; and that he frequently failed to name the people who helped him.

That is the basis of the question. Franklin used friends, relatives, visitors, and other human subjects in electrical experiments. Researchers gave and received shocks because they lacked precise instruments for measuring a charge. Franklin also pursued medical uses for electricity. A 2006 paper on Franklin, electricity, and the treatment of palsy documents his treatment of named colonists, while another examines his role in the eighteenth-century history of medical electricity and mental illness. The American Philosophical Society describes his electrical treatment of James Logan after a stroke, his treatment of a young woman identified as C.B., and his correspondence about using electricity to treat melancholy.

Franklin also owned multiple human beings during the years of his electrical research. This is not conjecture. The Smithsonian identifies several of them by name where the surviving record permits. His evolution into an abolitionist belongs in the story, too, but it does not travel backward through time and un-own the people whose labor supported his household.

Nor was the use of enslaved people as experimental subjects some alien possibility that a deranged curator imported into the eighteenth century. The documentary record is especially extensive for the nineteenth-century use of enslaved people as being experimented on by scientists and doctors; such as Martia Graham Goodson’s Enslaved Africans and doctors in South Carolina. That later history does not prove anything about Franklin. It establishes that the underlying question is historically plausible rather than “bizarre.”

This distinction matters. Franklin’s medical experiments, his slaveholding, the presence of unnamed assistants, and the broader exploitation of enslaved bodies create a legitimate research question. They do not create an answer. If the museum had stated as fact that Franklin shocked enslaved subjects without evidence, that would be rotten history. It did not. It stated what was documented, marked the limits of the evidence, and asked what the silences in that evidence might conceal. That is what historians do when the people least likely to appear by name in an archive are the people denied control over their own lives.

Gonzalez’s word “electroshock” also did useful rhetorical work. Modern readers are likely to hear medical or psychiatric electroconvulsive treatment. The exhibit discussed eighteenth-century static-electricity experiments and demonstrations in which participants felt shocks. Gonzalez converted a carefully qualified question into the image of Franklin secretly administering “electroshock” to enslaved victims, then accused the museum of inventing the image.

I cannot tell whether Gonzalez was lying through his teeth, had not read the exhibit carefully, or simply preferred the White House report’s caricature. Given the factual batting average in that room, none of those possibilities would shock me. The six-year-old diary writer was actually 13. Cloud’s supposedly missing Declaration occupied a full wall. Burlison’s claim that America led the world in abolishing slavery fell apart upon contact with a calendar.

What I can say is that Gonzalez’s version was materially less accurate than the exhibit itself. Curiously, that failure of accuracy was presented as evidence that the museum could not be trusted with history, when it appears the real people who could not be trusted were those with the most power at the hearing.

The non-curator recommends a purge

Frost spent part of his time establishing who at the witness table had actually done museum work. Hartig described her training as a public historian and her work with archives, material culture, preservation, scholarship, and interpre

tation. Mike Gonzalez said he was a professional historian because publishers had paid him to write history.9 Frost asked how many exhibitions he had curated.

None.

This did not prevent Gonzalez from prescribing how the Smithsonian should operate or who should remain employed there.

Hartig described an exhibition process involving scholarly development, extensive internal review, peer review, risk assessment, undersecretaries, and, for major projects, the Smithsonian secretary. Smithsonian Directive 603 is real. The Board of Regents describes its purpose as identifying potentially sensitive or controversial exhibitions early enough for thoughtful planning and discussion. One may criticize that process, examine its records, and argue that a particular exhibition failed. Pretending no process exists is easier, but it is not oversight.

Representative Ayanna Pressley asked David Blight, a Yale historian and the minority’s witness, why fascist and authoritarian governments attack museums and cultural institutions. Blight answered that controlling those institutions offers a route to controlling education, art, writing, creativity, and public thought. Frost later asked how Congress or the White House deciding historical interpretation differed from political censorship. “It is political censorship,” Blight said.

Representative Brian Jack then invited Gonzalez to diagnose the alleged ideological takeover and prescribe a cure. Gonzalez agreed with Blight that fascists seize the past to control the future, blamed Marxists for doing the same, dismissed Directive 603, and said the Smithsonian needed to “clean house.” Its leadership had to be replaced.

The sequence could have been written as satire.

A witness agrees that authoritarians seize cultural institutions, then recommends that political officials remove the leadership of a cultural institution because he dislikes its interpretation of history.

The official wrap-up quoted Gonzalez at length on Marxism, institutional capture, and the museum’s alleged wickedness. It reproduced the accusation. It stopped before the remedy.

“Clean house” clarifies the purpose of the entire performance. The desired result was not a better label, a corrected date, fuller sourcing, or a revised review standard. The people entrusted with the national collection had produced the wrong interpretation, so political officials should install people who would produce the right one.

There is a name for government officials deciding which interpretation of history is politically acceptable.

What the uncomplicated record had to lose

The demand for a happier museum depends on treating injustice as safely remote, a regrettable prologue before the real national story began.

Representative Jasmine Crockett supplied a useful chronology. The four girls murdered in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church would have been 74 and 77 at the time of the hearing. More than 40 current members of Congress were older. Ruby Bridges, who integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans, was 71, more than 100 serving members were older than she was.

The people who lived this history are not sepia photographs from an inaccessible age. Some are alive, the ones who survived the era. They vote. Some are younger than the officials implying that museums spend too much time on racial violence.

Crockett also challenged the image of a Smithsonian captured by non-white radicals, citing a workforce that remained majority male and more than half white, with senior-level pay overwhelmingly going to white employees. Those figures disappeared from the wrap-up along with the chronology.

Representative Kweisi Mfume’s words remain some of the most powerful of the entire hearing: if anyone attempted to erase this history, “we will continue to replace it over and over and over again.”

Pressley made the same point when speaking about visiting the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. The history she encountered there was devastating and instructive. That combination is exactly what serious public history can do. It can inspire and disturb a visitor before lunch.

Beyer asked Blight what the museum would become if everything uncomfortable were suppressed. “A nice, pleasing stroll,” Blight replied, “and not much to talk about afterwards at lunch.” Exhibits should provoke curiosity, questions, and encounters with unfamiliar evidence. “If all they learn is a patriotic story, then frankly, professionally, curators and historians have not done their jobs.”

The wrap-up left out that answer. It left out Boebert’s search for an uncomplicated founding; Burlison’s claims about slavery and genocide; Fallon’s scored patriotism test; Mace’s “What is a woman?” detour; Frost establishing that Gonzalez had never curated an exhibition; Hartig’s account of scholarly review; Crockett’s living-memory chronology; Beyer’s history of Indigenous dispossession; Stansbury’s tour of the objects supposedly missing from the museum; and Gonzalez’s call to replace its leadership.

It also left out every Democratic member’s questions.

What remained was a tidy morality play. Conservative members uncovered a “radical agenda,” friendly witnesses confirmed it, and Hartig dodged the obvious. The committee curated the hearing for ideological effect while accusing curators of ideological selection.

Selection is unavoidable. A museum with two million objects cannot display all of them. A writer cannot include every exchange in one article. The ethical question is what the selection does. Does it help an audience understand the evidence, or does it hide evidence that would ruin a conclusion chosen in advance?

The committee’s wrap-up answers that one without difficulty.

Hartig told Beyer that loving America could be complicated for her as a historian and unconditional for her as an individual. Members demanding a simpler answer wanted professional history to perform unconditional love on behalf of the state. A museum may inspire love of country. It may also produce wonder, gratitude, grief, anger, embarrassment, and responsibility. The government does not get to decide which reactions visitors are permitted to have.

Blight gave the clearest statement of the day: “We do not serve the state. We serve the practice of the creation and dissemination of knowledge.”

So, back to Boebert’s question. No, there is no uncomplicated part of the American founding. There is no uncomplicated American history. The country is full of astonishing achievements, brutal exclusions, soaring principles, evasions, courage, hypocrisy, reinvention, and people who demanded that its promises apply to them too.

Anyone who hears that as an insult has confused love with flattery. This complicated, unfinished mess is the American story.

Thank God, because a commemorative plate would make a terrible museum.

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This piece is an extension of my prose slam, Working in the Myth Factory. That version was written to be performed aloud, which meant it had to move quickly. It turned years of political belief, professional ambition, denial, evidence, tequila, and ideological collapse into something I could read onstage in a few minutes.

It told the story of how I left conservative media, but it compressed that story down to four and a half minutes and left out a lot of the details and I firmly believe the details matter.

I sometimes describe myself as a former Republican because that is the easiest way to explain the broad shape of the story. It is also true. I changed my party registration. I changed my positions on numerous policies. I became a very loud feminist, which would have startled the younger version of me so badly that she might have required smelling salts and a reassuring pamphlet from Hillsdale College.1

But I do not think the most important change was that I acquired an entirely new collection of convictions.

I think I discovered that the convictions I already had were not represented by the party in the way I had been told they were.

By 2016, I was already persona non grata with the Tea Party.

I had failed their purity tests. I had publicly disagreed with the wrong people, including more than one person with political connections and a highly developed sense of personal grievance.2 I had demonstrated the dangerous tendency to treat policy questions as questions rather than opportunities to recite the approved answer.

My position inside the Republican ecosystem was already fragile. I knew that. I had accepted that I was unlikely to be welcomed into the more ideologically rigid corners of the movement unless I became much more obedient, and obedience has never been one of my most marketable qualities.3

Still, I held on.

I believed the Tea Party and related groups within the GOP represented a loud but containable faction. I believed the more theatrical elements of conservative media were embarrassing cousins rather than the people quietly rewriting the family will. I believed that responsible Republican leaders would eventually regain control because, surely, the adults understood that governing required more than outrage, slogans, and threats to set the federal government on fire unless everyone agreed to repeal legislation they disliked.4

Poor sweet summer child.

I was twenty-five, which is old enough to believe you are no longer naïve and young enough to assume the political facti

on you prefer must secretly be the authentic one.

I was also good at what I did.

That is important, because political transformation stories are often made tidier by converting the former self into an obvious failure. The person was unhappy, unsuccessful, confused, and secretly waiting for enlightenment to arrive carrying a tote bag full of progressive literature.

That was not my situation.

I had a following. People respected me. I knew how to communicate political ideas clearly and persuasively. I understood the rhythm of online political media before many traditional institutions had worked out what a retweet was. I could make arguments, build an audience, and speak with confidence.

I enjoyed being known as someone who had convictions, who could argue them articulately and with enough humor to get a few thousand people to repost my thoughts on Twitter or Tumblr or whatever wordpress site I was blogging for at the time.

I was not pushed out because I lacked talent. I was not fleeing a career that had collapsed.5 Leaving meant walking away from something I knew how to do, at precisely the point when becoming more compliant might have made it easier to keep doing it.

The system was not rejecting my abilities.

It was asking what I was willing to do with them.

The Purity-Test Economy

The Tea Party’s purity tests were not really about whether someone was conservative. They were about whether someone would demonstrate loyalty in precisely the approved form.

You could agree on taxes, regulation, national defence, spending, and healthcare, but disagreement on one culturally charged issue could contaminate your entire political file. A failure to express sufficient hostility toward the correct enemy was treated as evidence of concealed liberalism. Asking whether a tactic would work was interpreted as cowardice. Compromise was not judged by its results, but by whether compromise itself revealed spiritual weakness.

The point was not merely to persuade Republicans to move rightward.

It was to make departure from the movement’s line personally and professionally expensive.

Conservative organizations developed scorecards that translated complicated legislative records into numerical measures of ideological reliability. Heritage Action explicitly used votes and legislative sponsorships to measure how conservative members of Congress were, while alerting lawmakers and activists about designated votes. By 2013 and 2014, its efforts to pressure Republicans over healthcare, spending, and other legislation had become part of the internal struggle over who possessed the authority to define conservatism.

I experienced a smaller-scale version of the same political culture.

A person did not need to defeat you intellectually if they could classify you as insufficiently loyal. Once that classification took hold, your arguments no longer required answers. You had failed the test. The file was closed.

By 2016, I knew my own file was not clean.

What I failed to understand was that these mechanisms were not marginal irritations. They were helping reorganize the Republican Party around permanent ideological escalation.

The Republicanism I Thought I Believed In

The Republican Party sold itself to people like me through a vocabulary of freedom, restraint, responsibility, constitutionalism, and evidence.

The official 2012 Republican platform instructed the party to: “Trust the people. Limit government. Respect federalism. Guarantee opportunity, not outcomes.”

That language appealed to me. It sounded coherent. Government should be accountable. Power should be limited. People should be free to make decisions about their own lives. Policy should create the conditions for opportunity rather than dictate a single acceptable way to live.

The problem was that the same platform also supported a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman. It endorsed a constitutional amendment extending legal protection to fetuses, opposed public funding for organizations that provided or advocated abortion, objected to medication abortion, and defended state voter-identification laws against federal intervention. The promised government restraint became considerably less restrained once the subject was sex, reproduction, marriage, or access to the ballot.

The contradiction was already sitting there in the party’s own document.

I just didn’t understand it as a contradiction…yet.

I believed these policies could somehow be fitted into a larger philosophy of freedom. I believed there must be a serious constitutional explanation that would reconcile the promise of individual liberty with the desire to control which relationships counted, which medical decisions women could make, and which citizens should face additional barriers when voting.6

I thought the framework was sound and that any inconsistency could be repaired through better reasoning.

What I eventually learned was that the inconsistency was doing political work.

Republican government was not actually meant to be universally limited. It was meant to be selectively absent and selectively omnipresent.

It was supposed to remain deferential toward employers, corporations, private wealth, and existing hierarchies. It was expected to become highly energetic when regulating pregnancy, sexuality, public education, voting, poverty, and the boundaries of respectable family life.

Liberty for the boardroom. Supervision for the body.

I did not abandon a coherent philosophy of limited government. I realized the philosophy had never been applied coherently in the first place.

The Autopsy That Diagnosed a Messaging Problem

After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee commissioned its Growth and Opportunity Project, generally known as the Republican “autopsy.”

The report acknowledged that the party’s message was weak, that its campaign infrastructure was inadequate, and that it had failed to be inclusive. It recommended sustained outreach to women, Black voters, Latino voters, Asian voters, and gay voters. It also supported comprehensive immigration reform. RNC chairman Reince Priebus insisted that Republican principles remained sound, but that the party was communicating them badly.

At the time, this felt reassuring.7

The party appeared capable of introspection. It had lost an election, studied the evidence, and admitted that something needed to change. The existence of the autopsy allowed people like me to believe there was still an institutional Republican Party distinct from its most reactionary elements.

The adults had seen the electoral map.

They would surely correct course.

But the report’s central diagnosis was not that Republican policies were alienating people. It was that the party had failed to present those policies attractively enough. The proposed solution was broader outreach, a kinder tone, stronger technology, and better organization.

It was the same product with improved customer service.

The party wanted to reach women without fundamentally reconsidering its politics of reproductive control. It wanted gay voters while retaining opposition to their marriages. It wanted Latino voters while remaining unwilling to confront the nativism spreading through its base.

The autopsy assumed the Republican coalition could be expanded without changing what that coalition was being asked to support.

I wanted to believe it.

Believing it allowed me to classify every ugly development as a temporary deviation from the party’s real principles. The Tea Party was not the Republican Party. The conspiracy theorists were not the Republican Party. The people who treated compromise as betrayal were not the Republican Party.

They were simply loud.

Surely volume was not the same thing as power.

The Fringe Begins Governing the Party

In 2013, Tea Party-aligned Republicans helped force a federal government shutdown in an attempt to defund or delay the Affordable Care Act. The strategy did not repeal the law, but it did demonstrate how willing the movement had become to use basic government operations as leverage against policies it lacked the votes to overturn through ordinary legislation.

During the standoff, Pew found that 52 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agreed with the Tea Party believed the debt limit did not need to be raised at all. Only 30 percent of Tea Party Republicans said they were very concerned about the shutdown’s economic effects.

This should have been clarifying.

The faction was no longer merely demanding conservative policy. It was treating refusal to acknowledge foreseeable consequences as proof of commitment.

If economists, civil servants, business leaders, or other Republicans warned that a tactic could cause serious harm, that warning became further evidence that the tactic was threatening the correct institutions.

Evidence could not defeat the argument because ignoring evidence was becoming part of the argument.

Then, in 2014, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his Republican primary to Dave Brat, an obscure Tea Party-backed challenger who portrayed him as insufficiently conservative and too embedded in Washington. Cantor had a firmly conservative record and had been widely viewed as a future Speaker of the House. None of that protected him from an electorate trained to see established Republican leadership as suspect.

The message to other Republicans was obvious: there was no safe amount of conservatism.

You could move right and still be accused of betrayal by someone willing to move farther. You could help build the machine and still be fed into it.

By 2015, many veterans of the Tea Party movement had formed the House Freedom Caucus.8 It represented fewer than one-sixth of House Republicans, but its members acted as a disciplined bloc, giving them enough leverage to obstruct Republican leaders. The caucus helped push Speaker John Boehner toward resignation, refused to support Kevin McCarthy as his replacement, and used threats over government funding and Planned Parenthood to pressure the rest of the party.

At that point, calling these people “the fringe” required a creative definition of the word.

They did not need to represent most Republicans. They needed enough members, enough media attention, and enough willingness to sabotage routine governance that everyone else had to negotiate around them.

They had learned that a smaller faction could control a larger coalition if it was more comfortable with destruction.

I saw all of this.

I understood that the party was changing. I understood that the political environment around me had become hostile to anyone who resisted its purity rituals. I understood that my own place in it was precarious.

Yet I continued to believe the insurgents would eventually overplay their hand.

Responsible “adult” Republicans would reassert themselves. Voters would tire of chaos. The party’s donors, strategists, and elected leadership would decide that perpetual radicalization was electorally unsustainable.

The guardrails had been rattled, certainly, but they remained attached to the road.

That is what I told myself.

What Evidence Did to My Politics

While the party moved farther right, my own beliefs were being tested against the world they were supposed to explain.

I had called myself socially liberal and economically conservative. It sounded balanced, thoughtful, and independent. It also allowed me to divide social freedom from the economic conditions necessary to exercise it.

That separation did not survive scrutiny.

A person may formally possess the right to leave an abusive relationship, but the right is hollow without housing, income, legal assistance, childcare, and healthcare. A student may technically be free to pursue an education, but freedom means little when education is financially inaccessible. A worker may have the legal right to refuse dangerous conditions, but that right becomes theoretical when refusal means losing food, shelter, or medicine.

Rights are not made real by announcing that everyone possesses them.

They are made real through institutions, resources, protections, and enforcement.

Reproductive autonomy requires medical access. Disability rights require infrastructure. Workplace equality requires regulation. Voting rights require more than the absence of an explicit prohibition. Queer equality requires the state to recognize that private prejudice becomes public power when it governs employment, housing, education, healthcare, and family law.

Economic policy was not a separate, morally neutral category beneath social policy.

It determined who could use the freedoms society claimed to guarantee.

My views changed because the evidence changed my understanding of what freedom required.

The same thing happened with feminism.

I had been taught that feminism transformed individual unfairness into an exaggerated theory of systemic oppression. I believed sexism existed but was becoming increasingly marginal, and that feminists remained angry because recognizing progress would deprive them of a political identity.

Then I began studying history, law, labour, medicine, political representation, media, and family policy more seriously.

The same patterns kept appearing.

They appeared across institutions and across time. They determined whose work was valued, whose testimony was believed, whose bodies were regulated, whose ambitions were treated as selfish, and whose dependence was manufactured and then presented as natural.

Eventually, dismissing every pattern as coincidence required more ideological work than acknowledging the structure producing it.

I changed my conclusions because the evidence no longer supported the conclusions I had inherited.

That is not the abandonment of conviction.

It is what conviction looks like when it is accountable to reality.

We praise people for standing by their beliefs, as though consistency is automatically evidence of character. But consistency can also mean protecting yourself from information. A belief does not become principled simply because you preserve it after its explanatory value has collapsed.

Sometimes the most honest use of a conviction is to let it destroy the political identity built around it.

Trump Was Not an Invasion

Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in June 2015 with a speech that characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. In December, his campaign called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States. These were not obscure remarks uncovered after the election. They were central features of his public campaign.

And he kept winning.

For months, I held on to the comforting theory that Trump was an external contaminant.

He was a celebrity opportunist exploiting Republican voters. He was not a genuine representative of the movement. Once the field narrowed, voters would become serious. They would choose someone who could discuss policy without turning the entire campaign into a travelling resentment carnival.

That belief allowed me to avoid the harder question.

What if he was not changing the party?

What if he was revealing what the party had spent years cultivating?

Republican media had trained its audience to distrust expertise, resent compromise, treat demographic change as dispossession, and experience politics as an endless battle between virtuous insiders and threatening outsiders. Tea Party organizations had taught voters that established Republican leaders were traitors. The party had spent years rewarding figures who could convert anxiety into anger quickly enough to keep audiences watching.

Trump did not need to build a new emotional infrastructure.

He inherited one with excellent broadcast capabilities.

The Florida Republican primary took place on March 15, 2016. Trump received roughly 45.7 percent of the vote. Marco Rubio, a sitting senator from Florida and the candidate I had supported, received about 27 percent. Trump carried all but one Florida county and won every one of the state’s ninety-nine Republican delegates.

That was my breaking point.

Not because Marco Rubio’s defeat was a uniquely profound political tragedy. Time has been extremely busy sanding any remaining nobility off that particular memory of Rubio.

It mattered because Rubio represented the last version of the Republican Party I was still trying to believe existed.

He was conservative, but he presented himself as policy-minded and institutionally serious.9 He spoke in the language of optimism rather than permanent vengeance. I thought he demonstrated that the Republican coalition could still choose someone who belonged to its conservative tradition without surrendering completely to its appetite for spectacle and cruelty.

Florida Republican voters did not merely reject him.

They crushed him in his own state.

The result made it impossible for me to continue pretending that Trump had seized control of the party through some clever procedural accident. Voters had heard him. They knew what he was offering. They selected him precisely because the performance I found disqualifying was the product they wanted.

The fringe had not stormed the gates.

The gates had opened from the inside.

Leaving Something I Was Good At

The next morning, I changed my party affiliation.

The paperwork was simple. The meaning was not.

I was not leaving because I had lost every argument or because nobody wanted to hear from me. I still knew how to communicate. I still had people who respected my voice. I still enjoyed public political engagement.10

I was leaving because success within the Republican media ecosystem increasingly required me to defend claims I no longer believed, excuse tactics I considered dangerous, and treat people I knew were acting in bad faith as guardians of principle.

My political identity had become a negotiation between what I actually thought and what I was permitted to say without making my position even more fragile.

I could have adapted.

People do it all the time. They learn which objections to swallow. They allow strategic silence to become habitual silence. They tell themselves they are preserving influence for the moment when speaking out will matter more.

The moment never comes because influence obtained through silence can only be retained through more silence.

I had already irritated connected people and failed the Tea Party’s tests. I knew I was unlikely to rise very far without proving that I could be trusted to stop asking inconvenient questions.

Leaving was not an escape from failure.

It was a refusal to make ideological obedience the price of future success.

That distinction matters because propaganda does not recruit only the unintelligent, the hateful, or the obviously broken.

It recruits people by giving them roles they enjoy.

It offers status, community, professional opportunity, and a flattering account of their own intelligence. It tells them they are brave for repeating the consensus of the room. It transforms belonging into evidence that the worldview must be correct.

I was deceived, but I was also rewarded.

The system did not need me to be foolish. It needed me to be articulate and useful to the lie.

That is harder to admit because it leaves less room for innocence.

What Did Not Change

I did change my politics.

I became more supportive of public institutions, regulation, social welfare, reproductive rights, labour protections, and civil-rights enforcement. I changed how I understood feminism, capitalism, structural inequality, and the relationship between government and freedom.

But I did not change because I ceased to care about personal liberty, intellectual seriousness, responsibility, or evidence.

I changed because I began applying those standards to the Republican Party rather than accepting its claim to represent them.

I still believe people should be treated as moral agents capable of directing their own lives.

That is why I support reproductive autonomy.

I still believe government power should be constrained and accountable.

That is why I oppose using it to police sexuality, gender, speech, education, and private medical decisions.

I still believe people should take responsibility for their actions.

That is why I believe political movements must be judged by the consequences of the policies they produce, not merely the virtue of the intentions they claim they have.

I still believe evidence matters.

That is why I changed my mind.

The skills I developed did not vanish when I left conservative media. I still speak forcefully about my convictions. I still build arguments, tell stories, study political language, and examine how history is used to make power appear natural.

The difference is that I no longer confuse loyalty with integrity.

I no longer assume that a party owns a principle because it has printed the word on enough signs. I no longer think consistency is admirable when it can only be maintained by refusing to look at consequences. I no longer believe the most radical members of a movement are harmless simply because more respectable people continue insisting they are not in charge.

Republican Meredith was not a fictional character and she was not an idiot.

She was ambitious, capable, politically engaged, professionally growing, and deeply invested in an explanation of the world that made her feel principled.

She was also watching the evidence accumulate.

Eventually, she stopped asking how the Republican Party could be returned to the values she thought it represented and began asking whether it had ever represented them consistently at all.

I did not stop being someone who spoke publicly about what she believed.

I stopped allowing a political movement to decide what those beliefs were permitted to mean.

I did not abandon my convictions.

I followed them until they led me out.

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Empires have always exported more than soldiers.

They export laws. They export religions. They export economic systems and political hierarchies. They export entire theories of human civilization, including remarkably specific instructions about what a family should look like, how a woman should behave, which forms of sex should be criminal, and who gets to control reproduction.

Then, after imposing those ideas through churches, schools, courts, colonial governments, and occasionally the barrel of a gun, they begin describing them as local tradition.

It is one of imperialism’s more successful magic tricks. First, a foreign power reorganizes a society around its own moral assumptions. Then everyone is encouraged to forget where those assumptions came from.

European colonialism did not invent patriarchy in Africa. Precolonial African societies were not a single feminist paradise temporarily ruined by white men, because Africa is a continent containing thousands of cultures rather than a convenient blank canvas for someone else’s political allegory. Gender inequality, restrictions on sexuality, and reproductive control existed in many forms before colonization.

But colonialism changed those systems. It codified some practices, suppressed others, elevated particular men as intermediaries, and used European Christianity and law to impose new definitions of marriage, sexuality, domesticity, and legitimate authority.

Missionaries taught religion, but they also taught gender. Mission schools frequently trained African girls for Christian marriage, motherhood, domestic labor, and submission to male authority. A Friends Africa Mission school in colonial Kenya, for example, explicitly sought to transform African girls into “better wives and mothers,” although the students did not always use their education in the ways missionaries intended.

Christian marriage was defined through European expectations of monogamy, sexual discipline, and male-headed domestic order, even where local systems of marriage, inheritance, kinship, and gendered authority operated differently. Missionary and colonial institutions introduced new marital expectations into places such as Lagos, linking church marriage to European education, legal status, economic opportunity, and membership in a new colonial elite.

Colonial governments supplied the legal enforcement.

The British Empire exported criminal codes prohibiting same-sex activity across Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code became a model for laws reproduced throughout British territory, transforming Victorian sexual anxieties into criminal statutes imposed upon populations that had not been consulted. Many of those laws survived independence, remaining available to later governments as supposedly traditional protections against supposedly foreign sexual identities.

This is how imperial ideas disappear into the wallpaper.

Britain exported the criminal code. Christian missionaries exported European sexual morality. Colonial governments gave both the force of law. Generations later, politicians could point to that legal inheritance and announce that they were defending authentic African values from Western decadence.

The foreign import had completed its transformation into indigenous tradition.

That history matters because the United States is currently performing a modern variation of the same trick.

The Trump administration and its allies in the American Christian Right are pouring money, political support, lobbying expertise, and foreign-aid pressure into campaigns against abortion and LGBTQ rights across Africa. They are doing so while describing reproductive and queer rights as foreign ideological colonization.

Apparently, foreign influence only counts when the foreigners disagree with them.

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Colonialism With a Grant Agreement

In January 2026, the Trump administration introduced a group of foreign-aid restrictions under the title “Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance.”

Human flourishing, in this case, means accepting the Republican Party’s positions on abortion, gender identity, and diversity initiatives as conditions of receiving American assistance.

The policy consists of three linked rules: “Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance,” “Combating Gender Ideology in Foreign Assistance,” and “Combating Discriminatory Equity Ideology in Foreign Assistance.” Together, they restrict funding connected with abortion, gender-affirming care, legal protections based on gender identity, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Organizations receiving affected funding may be required to certify that they will not provide, promote, or support services and ideas prohibited by the administration. Depending on the recipient and the particular rule, those restrictions can reach activities supported with non-American funds.

This is much broader than the older version of the Mexico City Policy, commonly called the global gag rule.

KFF estimates that approximately $39.8 billion in American foreign assistance obligated during the 2024 fiscal year would fall within the expanded policy’s potential reach. That funding was distributed across 160 countries and included health, humanitarian assistance, economic development, education, human rights, and governance programs. The policy also reaches multilateral organizations, American organizations, foreign governments, and thousands of primary aid recipients, not merely foreign reproductive-health NGOs.

This is not a politically neutral adjustment to foreign-aid administration.

The Mexico City Policy was created under Ronald Reagan in 1984. Since then, Republican presidents have repeatedly reinstated it and Democratic presidents have repeatedly revoked it. Trump restored it after returning to office in January 2025 and then expanded the underlying principle into a much broader campaign against abortion, gender-affirming care, LGBTQ protections, and diversity programs.

Vice President JD Vance announced the expanded restrictions at the March for Life, just in case anyone remained confused about which domestic political movement was writing American global-health policy.

This is not merely “the United States” exporting American beliefs. That language is too vague and too polite. It dissolves responsibility into a national mist.

This is the American Christian Right using the machinery of the Trump administration to export a specifically Republican political program.

The administration is taking the culture-war coalition that overturned Roe v. Wade, attacked transgender healthcare, dismantled diversity programs, and turned “gender ideology” into a catchall term for anything more complicated than a church pamphlet from 1954, and converting its priorities into foreign policy.

It is Project 2025 with a passport.

The New Missionary Network

The government is not acting alone. American conservative organizations have spent years constructing the political infrastructure needed to carry these ideas overseas.

An Associated Press investigation found that publicly disclosed spending in Africa by 17 American anti-abortion organizations increased by 50 percent between 2019 and 2022, reaching more than $16 million. Those organizations spent another $9.4 million across Africa during 2023 and 2024. Because churches and some religious organizations do not have to provide comparable public financial disclosures, the documented total almost certainly captures only part of the network.

The organizations involved include Focus on the Family and Family Watch International, along with other groups that connect opposition to abortion with campaigns against LGBTQ rights, comprehensive sexuality education, gender equality, and international human-rights frameworks.

This is not simply a collection of charities offering pastoral guidance. It is a transnational political operation.

The network organizes conferences, cultivates relationships with lawmakers, distributes lobbying materials, trains activists, supports legal campaigns, and helps construct a shared vocabulary in which abortion, feminism, queer rights, sex education, and gender equality become different tentacles of the same foreign monster.

At a 2026 conference in Ghana, lawmakers from 18 African countries backed an African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values. The proposed charter urges governments to reject international agreements associated with abortion, LGBTQ rights, and comprehensive sexuality education. Participants included politicians and conservative activists from Africa, Europe, and the United States.

The language of sovereignty is doing an almost heroic amount of work.

Conference organizers and allied politicians describe LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, and comprehensive sexuality education as Western interference. Yet the political movement supporting that claim is connected to American elections, American conservative organizations, European legal groups, international conferences, and foreign funding.

Reuters reported that participants explicitly credited Trump’s return to power with strengthening their movement. A former Ugandan lawmaker thanked American voters for electing him.

There is something wonderfully brazen about a movement gathering international activists and foreign-funded organizations to complain about international activists and foreign-funded organizations.

But the contradiction is more than amusing. It is strategically useful.

Calling reproductive and LGBTQ rights “Western” allows conservative campaigners to position themselves as defenders of African self-determination. Their own American and European connections can then be recast as mere solidarity, while African feminists, queer activists, doctors, lawyers, and human-rights organizations are portrayed as agents of foreign corruption.

American conservatism becomes invisible. African resistance becomes foreign.

The empire vanishes, but somehow its funding remains in the room.

Africa Already Has a Reproductive-Rights Framework

The claim that reproductive rights are simply being imposed on Africa from abroad also requires erasing one rather inconvenient document: the Maputo Protocol.

Adopted by the African Union in 2003, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa is one of the world’s most significant regional women’s-rights agreements. It addresses political participation, violence against women, harmful practices, marriage, inheritance, reproductive health, and economic rights.

Article 14 requires participating states to respect women’s sexual and reproductive health rights, including the right to control fertility and choose contraceptive methods. It also requires states to authorize medical abortion in cases involving sexual assault, rape, incest, threats to a pregnant woman’s mental or physical health, and threats to her life or the life of the fetus.

The Maputo Protocol was not drafted by Planned Parenthood in a basement under George Soros’s house.

It is an African human-rights instrument developed through African institutions and adopted by African governments.

That does not mean it is universally accepted or fully implemented. Some governments have entered reservations to its reproductive-rights provisions, while others have failed to translate their treaty obligations into accessible healthcare. But the African Commission continues to recognize access to safe abortion under the conditions specified in Article 14 as a women’s and girls’ right.

There are African anti-abortion activists and African reproductive-rights activists. There are conservative religious leaders and feminist legal scholars. There are governments moving toward greater access and governments imposing harsher restrictions. There are urban and rural differences, regional differences, generational differences, and political struggles within individual countries.

There is no single African voice, because there is no single Africa.

Presenting opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights as indigenous while dismissing African supporters of those rights as foreign puppets is not respect for African sovereignty. It is a decision about which Africans are allowed to count.

Conveniently, the Africans who count are the ones agreeing with Republicans in Washington.

The Colonial Law Beneath the Culture War

Kenya demonstrates how neatly historical and contemporary systems can interlock.

Kenya’s 2010 constitution permits abortion when emergency treatment is necessary or when the life or health of the pregnant woman is endangered. Court decisions have also shaped access in cases involving rape, incest, and serious threats to mental health.

Yet Kenya’s penal code, inherited from British colonial rule, continues to criminalize abortion providers and patients, creating a legal gray area in which healthcare workers can face investigation, harassment, or prosecution. The conflict between the constitution and the older penal code leaves many public hospitals unwilling to provide care that may be constitutionally permissible.

Modern American anti-abortion organizations did not create that contradiction. British imperialism helped create it.

But contemporary activists can exploit it.

Colonial law provides the weapon. Foreign-funded conservative networks help determine where it is aimed.

That is why the historical framework matters. Without it, the current fight can be presented as a simple conflict between traditional African values and modern Western liberalism. Once the colonial history becomes visible, that tidy story collapses.

The “traditional” criminal code may be British.

The Christian model of family may have been reshaped by European missions.

The language of the modern campaign may come from American culture-war organizations.

The political momentum may depend on Donald Trump.

And the people accused of importing foreign ideas may be African women demanding that their governments implement an African treaty protecting their rights.

Tradition, in this context, is less an ancient inheritance than a warehouse full of imported goods with the labels carefully removed.

The Policy Does Not Even Accomplish What It Claims

The Trump administration describes these restrictions as protections for life. The available evidence suggests that gag-rule policies can produce the opposite result.

A 2019 study examining 26 sub-Saharan African countries found that periods of high exposure to the Mexico City Policy were associated with a 40 percent increase in abortion rates, a 14 percent decline in modern contraceptive use, and a 12 percent increase in pregnancies. The researchers concluded that reductions in contraceptive services offered a likely explanation for the increase in abortions.

Later research into the policy’s implementation found that affected healthcare facilities provided fewer family-planning services, including emergency contraception. Women living in highly exposed areas were less likely to use contraception and more likely to have recently given birth.

A wider KFF review of 71 studies and reports identified recurring consequences including reduced contraceptive use, increased abortion and pregnancy rates, disrupted health services, lost partnerships, administrative confusion, and a broader chilling effect among healthcare organizations.

In other words, a policy advertised as preventing abortion can remove contraception, weaken clinics, increase unintended pregnancy, and create the conditions for more abortions, including unsafe ones.

Sub-Saharan Africa already experiences more than six million unsafe abortions annually. Africa accounts for approximately 70 percent of maternal deaths worldwide, and the Associated Press documented the consequences of unsafe procedures, delayed treatment, inadequate services, and legal intimidation in countries where reproductive healthcare is already difficult to access. In Kenya, researchers estimate that an average of seven women die each day from complications connected with unsafe abortion.

These women are not rhetorical devices in an American election.

They are not background characters in JD Vance’s performance of Catholic masculinity.

They are people attempting to survive pregnancies, miscarriages, sexual violence, medical emergencies, and healthcare systems that may depend upon funding controlled by politicians thousands of miles away.

When that funding is conditioned upon obedience to American conservative ideology, the United States is not withdrawing from interference in other countries.

It is interfering through the threat of withdrawal.

Sovereignty for People Who Agree With Us

The Trump administration says its policies protect national sovereignty from ideological coercion.

What it actually offers is a choice: adopt our approved definitions of sex, gender, family, equality, and reproduction, or risk losing access to the resources that keep clinics, educational programs, and humanitarian organizations operating.

That is not sovereignty.

It is coercion with grant paperwork.

Imperial power has always been adept at disguising itself as benevolence. Colonial governments called conquest “civilization.” Missionaries called cultural erasure “salvation.” Development projects called economic control “modernization.”

The Trump administration calls ideological compliance “human flourishing,” while it actually contributes to human death and suffering.

The vocabulary changes because the old words eventually become embarrassing. The underlying entitlement survives: powerful countries still imagine that their money gives them the right to organize other people’s families, bodies, healthcare systems, and laws.

The United States is not formally colonizing African territory. American conservative activists are not simply Victorian missionaries reborn with podcasts and nonprofit tax status. History does not repeat itself so tidily.

But the resemblance lies in the machinery.

A wealthy foreign power defines its morality as universal. It uses financial dependence to reward compliance. It works through sympathetic religious and political elites. It exploits legal systems shaped by earlier imperial rule. It dismisses local opposition as corrupted by foreign influence. Then it calls the entire process a defense of indigenous values.

This is not an incidental consequence of Trump’s foreign policy.

It is the policy.

The American Christian Right won a transformative victory when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. But Dobbs was never going to remain inside the borders of the United States, because the movement that produced it has never understood abortion as merely a domestic issue. It understands gender, sexuality, and reproduction as a global struggle over who has the authority to define human life.

Now that movement controls the foreign-policy machinery of the world’s most powerful country.

The missionaries are back.

This time, they are carrying grant agreements.

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I responded that I was less a person and more a stack of delusions in a trench coat.

Republican Meredith does sound fake now.

Like a cryptid. Grainy footage filed somewhere between Bigfoot and a flying saucer in the X-Files.

Unfortunately, she was real.

The machine that produced her was real, too.

I worked in conservative media. I was part of the “new media” wing of the GOP, back when we still pretended “new media” meant we were “democratizing” political conversation and not manufacturing outrage faster with ring lights.

Conservatism didn’t sell itself to me as cruelty. That would have been easier to spot.

It sold itself as reason.

Common sense.

Freedom.

Limited government.

All those polished little phrases that sound sturdy until you press on them and realize they are mostly stage scenery.

That’s how the myth factory works.

It doesn’t begin by asking you to hate people.

It begins by handing you a very flattering story about yourself.

You aren’t selfish or hostile to equality. You’re sensible, you understand economics, you believe in small government and personal responsibility.

Except I started noticing that the people who talked most about small government didn’t actually want small government.

They wanted selective government.

Government small enough to stay out of corporate boardrooms and large enough to crawl into classrooms, doctors’ offices, and bedrooms.

And history was one of the main tools used to make that contradiction feel natural.

I watched the machinery at work from the inside. Culture war narratives pushed to distract while someone else was dismantling social safety nets and consolidating power.

I watched history get cherry-picked to justify policies that harmed the most vulnerable.

I watched talking heads confidently repeat historical nonsense they either knew was false or didn’t care enough to fact-check.

The point was never accuracy, it was repetition.

Say it often enough, loud enough, and with enough patriotic wallpaper and eventually the lie sticks.

The right doesn’t fight over history because it’s sentimental. They do it because the past is politically useful. The myths we tell about what happened then become the policies we accept now.

If you can convince people that feminism destroyed the family or racism ended with a few speeches and a federal holiday, you can make attacks on women’s rights sound like restoration and civil rights enforcement sound like special treatment.

Historical erasure isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.

That is what I eventually had to face. I hadn’t just been lied to. The lie had been useful to me.

It let me feel reasonable. Moderate. Sophisticated. It let me imagine I was standing above the mess, when really I was standing on top of people the system had already pushed down.

The myth factory doesn’t ask you to become a monster.

It asks you to become comfortable.

My breaking point came in 2016, when I watched Trump win the Florida Republican primary and realized this was not an intellectual movement that had been hijacked. It was not a good-faith policy debate that had temporarily gone off the rails.

This was the product.

The fear. The cruelty. The historical illiteracy. That had been the point the entire time.

My mother, sensing either political disaster or impending personal growth, handed me tequila.

The next morning, hungover, I changed my party affiliation and took a sledgehammer to load-bearing walls of my career.

But leaving wasn’t enough.

I had helped carry the myth, so I had to help dismantle it. You don’t get to walk out of the factory covered in soot and pretend you were only sightseeing.

I study history because history isn’t safely behind us. It’s alive, badly behaved, and currently being used in campaign emails.

I teach it, write about it, and yell about it online because people who understand the past are much harder to control in the present.

So when my friend says she forgets Republican Meredith was a person, I get it.

Sometimes I forget too.

But she was real.

She was a person standing in the myth factory, pulling the levers and pretending she wasn’t setting fires.

And now I spend my life loudly pulling the fire alarm.

They say this as if feminists believe there is a literal Patriarchy Headquarters, perhaps in a windowless conference room beneath a steakhouse, where men gather each Thursday to decide whether women should be allowed pockets and because they, personally, have not been invited to monthly meetings, it must be fake.

That is not what patriarchy means.

Patriarchy is not a group chat. It is not every man personally oppressing every woman. It is not a claim that all men have wonderful lives, that all women are powerless, or that every bad thing that has ever happened can be solved by saying “because men” and throwing a match into the discourse.

Patriarchy is a social system in which male authority is treated as normal, natural, and legitimate, while institutions distribute power, resources, credibility, safety, domestic labor, sexual freedom, and bodily autonomy along gendered lines.

That is the basic definition. Everything else is fieldwork.

The historian Gerda Lerner defined patriarchy broadly as the institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family, and the extension of that dominance over women in society more generally. Crucially, she also stressed that this does not mean women are totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence, or resources. That distinction matters because one of the laziest anti-feminist arguments is “but some women have power,” as though one female CEO causes the whole system to burst into feminist glitter and vanish.

Patriarchy has never required women to have no power at all. It only requires that women’s power be conditional, exceptional, constrained, or made dependent on fitting into rules built by and for male authority.

This is why patriarchy is annoying to explain. It does not always show up wearing a name tag. Sometimes it is a law. Sometimes it is a paycheck. Sometimes it is a marriage contract. Sometimes it is a judge. Sometimes it is a joke. Sometimes it is a mother telling her daughter not to make men uncomfortable. Sometimes it is a man insisting he is “protecting” women while voting to make sure women cannot protect themselves.

The patriarchy is not one thing. It is a habitat.

Identifying marks

The patriarchy is easiest to spot when it is honest about itself.

For much of recorded history, male authority was not hidden behind softer language about “family values” or “natural differences.” It was just the law. Fathers ruled households. Husbands ruled wives. Women’s labor, sexuality, property, children, and public status were controlled through family structures, religious teaching, custom, and legal systems.

The older, narrower meaning of patriarchy referred quite literally to rule by the father: the male head of household as legal and economic authority over dependents. But feminist scholars expanded the term because male dominance did not stay politely inside the house. It moved through inheritance, citizenship, religion, education, work, medicine, politics, and culture.

This is where the field guide gets useful. A patriarchal society will usually leave tracks in several places at once.

Look for who is presumed to lead.

Look for who is expected to obey.

Look for who owns property.

Look for who inherits.

Look for who gets education.

Look for who is believed.

Look for who is protected by law, and who is controlled by it.

Look for who does unpaid care work.

Look for whose sexuality is treated as dangerous.

Look for whose body becomes a public policy project.

That last one is usually not subtle. Patriarchy has never been especially chill about women’s bodies. It does not merely care who women are. It cares who women sleep with, whether they marry, whether they reproduce, how they reproduce, whether they can avoid reproduction, whether they can end a pregnancy, whether they can leave a man, whether they can live without a man, and whether they can do all that without being punished socially, economically, legally, or physically.

A system that has this many opinions about uteruses is not a neutral bystander.

Common habitats

Patriarchy likes the family because the family is where hierarchy can be made to look intimate.

That is one of its neatest tricks. If power can be framed as love, protection, tradition, duty, or romance, people are less likely to call it power. The father is not ruling; he is leading. The husband is not controlling; he is protecting. The woman is not subordinated; she is cherished. The cage has curtains, how lovely.

This is what makes paternalism one of patriarchy’s favorite costumes. Paternalism says, “I will protect you, but in exchange you must obey me.” It turns inequality into a bargain, then calls the bargain natural.

You can see this in the old language of separate spheres, especially in the nineteenth century. Men were imagined as belonging to the public world of politics, commerce, competition, and authority. Women were imagined as belonging to the private world of home, morality, care, and emotional refinement. Victorian gender ideology framed men as public actors and women as domestic guardians, with power and privilege reserved for men even as women challenged their exclusion.

This is important because separate spheres were never just “different but equal” roles. The public sphere controlled money, law, citizenship, education, and policy. The private sphere made dinner.

Funny how “equal but different” so often means “you do the unpaid work and I will handle the voting.”

The same pattern appears in work. Patriarchy does not need to ban women from all jobs forever. It can simply sort women into lower-paid work, punish motherhood, reward uninterrupted career paths, treat caregiving as a personal inconvenience rather than social infrastructure, and then announce that the market has spoken.

Claudia Goldin’s Nobel-winning research on women and the labor market showed how the gender earnings gap changed over time and how, in the modern era, much of the remaining gap is connected to career interruptions and unequal responsibilities after the birth of a first child. In other words, the problem is not just whether women are “allowed” to work. It is whether work itself was designed around someone who has another person at home handling the human maintenance department.

This is why “choice” is such a slippery word. Yes, women make choices. But choices are made inside systems. A woman “choosing” flexible work because childcare is unaffordable, her partner’s job pays more, and employers penalize caregiving is not making that choice in a sunlit meadow of perfect freedom. She is making it inside an obstacle course and being told to call the bruises empowerment.

Sounds

Patriarchy has a recognizable soundtrack.

It says women are naturally better with children.

It says men are natural leaders.

It says boys will be boys.

It says girls mature faster.

It says mothers are selfish for working and unambitious for staying home.

It says women are too emotional for power but naturally suited to absorbing everyone else’s emotions.

It says men need sex and women must manage the consequences.

It says men are protectors, but somehow the thing women most need protection from is also men.

It says women are safest under male authority, then gets very cross when women ask why male authority has historically been such a dangerous neighborhood to live in.

These are not random opinions floating in the air. They are gender norms, and gender norms do institutional work. The UNDP’s 2023 Gender Social Norms Index found that close to nine out of ten men and women held at least one bias against women, with nearly half of people believing men make better political leaders and two in five believing men make better business executives.

That matters because laws and policies do not emerge from a magical unbiased cloud. People carry assumptions about gender into voting booths, workplaces, classrooms, courtrooms, hospitals, marriages, newsrooms, churches, and family group chats from hell.

Patriarchy survives because it becomes ‘common sense.’

Defensive behavior

When threatened, patriarchy usually insists it is not patriarchy.

It becomes “tradition.”

It becomes “biology.”

It becomes “family.”

It becomes “protecting women.”

It becomes “what about men?”

This last one is especially common, so let’s be clear: patriarchy can harm men. Feminists have been saying this for a very long time, despite certain men discovering the point every six months and presenting it as if they found a new planet.

A system that says men must be dominant, stoic, sexually aggressive, financially successful, emotionally controlled, and permanently invulnerable is also bad for men. It narrows men’s lives. It punishes tenderness. It turns care into humiliation. It makes violence a language. It teaches men that needing help is failure and that being loved is somehow less masculine than being obeyed.

But “patriarchy hurts men too” does not mean “therefore patriarchy is not male dominance.” It means systems of dominance often damage the people trained to perform them. A king can be lonely. He is still the king.

The point is not that every individual man is living in luxury. The point is that masculinity has historically been associated with authority, citizenship, rationality, leadership, ownership, and public power, while femininity has been associated with dependence, emotion, care, sexuality, and domestic duty.

That hierarchy can crush men who do not or cannot live up to it. But it does not stop being a hierarchy.

Mimicry

One of the most confusing things for beginners is that women can enforce patriarchy.

This should not be confusing. People participate in systems that shape their survival.

Women have taught daughters to be obedient, shamed other women for sexual independence, defended abusive men, opposed women’s rights, romanticized submission, and worked very hard to become the sort of woman patriarchy rewards. That does not disprove patriarchy. It shows how systems reproduce themselves.

Lerner argued that patriarchy could only function with women’s cooperation, and that this cooperation was secured through many means: gender indoctrination, educational deprivation, denial of women’s history, division between “respectable” and “deviant” women, coercion, restricted access to resources and political power, and privileges awarded to women who conformed.

That is the ugly genius of the system. It does not need every woman to be powerless. It needs enough women to believe that safety, status, money, respectability, or moral superiority can be obtained by aligning themselves with male authority.

This is why the “but women uphold it too” argument is not the intellectual cannonball people seem to think it is. Yes. They do. That is how social systems work.

Congratulations, you have noticed society.

Modern sightings

One reason people deny patriarchy is that they expect it to look like the past.

They expect patriarchy to announce itself with a powdered wig and a law saying married women cannot own property. And yes, historically, it often did. But systems adapt. When one form becomes embarrassing, another form puts on nicer shoes.

Modern patriarchy often appears as contradiction.

Women can work, but are still expected to handle most care.

Women can lead, but are punished for seeming ambitious.

Women can have sex, but are judged for wanting it.

Women can avoid pregnancy, unless lawmakers decide contraception is suspicious.

Women can become mothers, but must do so under economic conditions that make motherhood punishing.

Women can report violence, but must be perfect victims.

Women can have rights, but those rights are treated as temporary permissions.

The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2026 report measures legal and policy barriers to women’s economic participation across 190 economies. Its 2026 findings show that no economy grants women fully equal economic opportunities, and that the gap between laws on paper and enforcement in practice remains substantial.

The World Health Organization’s 2026 fact sheet on violence against women states that about one in three women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. WHO identifies gender inequality, harmful norms, and beliefs upholding male privilege and women’s subordination as root causes.

These are not vibes. They are not feminist astrology. They are measurable patterns across law, money, safety, health, work, family, and belief.

That is what people are naming when they say patriarchy.

Frequent misidentifications

A powerful woman does not disprove patriarchy.

A suffering man does not disprove patriarchy.

A woman making a choice does not disprove patriarchy.

A woman defending the system does not disprove patriarchy.

A law changing does not automatically end patriarchy.

A man being nice does not cancel patriarchy, though obviously it is preferable to the alternative.

Patriarchy is not a claim that nothing has changed. A field guide should not pretend the animal has stayed exactly the same since Mesopotamia, because that would be bad history and frankly lazy. Women have fought, organized, written, sued, voted, worked, taught, struck, loved, refused, survived, and changed the world. Legal systems have changed. Family structures have changed. Economic opportunities have changed. Sexual norms have changed.

But change is not the same thing as disappearance.

The question is not “Are women allowed to do things now?” The question is “What happens when women do those things, and what structures still shape the cost?”

That is where patriarchy lives now. Not always in formal exclusion, though that still exists in many places, but in penalties, expectations, backlash, unequal burdens, credibility gaps, safety risks, and laws that suddenly remember women’s bodies exist when there is controlling to be done.

Final field note

The patriarchy is not an invisible monster feminists invented to explain every inconvenience. It is the name we give to a long historical pattern: male authority normalized in the family, extended into law and politics, reinforced through culture and religion, adapted through work and economics, and defended through gender norms that teach everyone what men and women are supposedly “for.”

You can debate how patriarchy works. You can argue over where it is strongest. You can insist that class, race, sexuality, disability, religion, empire, and capitalism must be part of the analysis, and you would be right. Feminists argue about this constantly. Put three feminists in a room and you will get seven frameworks, two reading lists, and one person quietly muttering about methodology.

But pretending the patterns are imaginary because the word makes you uncomfortable is not skepticism.

It is standing in a forest, pointing at every tree, and insisting there is no woodland here.

Further Reading

bell hooks, “Understanding Patriarchy”
A short, accessible essay that is perfect for beginners. hooks explains patriarchy as a political-social system that teaches male dominance and female submission, while also showing how people of all genders are trained into it.

Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy
The big historical foundation. Lerner argues that patriarchy was not natural, eternal, or inevitable, but historically constructed over time.

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism
Excellent for the historian’s version of this conversation. Bennett is especially useful on continuity and change: patriarchy does not stay exactly the same, but it also does not disappear just because its outfit changes.

Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy
The “patriarchy has multiple moving parts” book. Walby breaks patriarchy down into structures like paid work, household labor, culture, sexuality, violence, and the state. More academic, but very useful for explaining why patriarchy is not just “men being sexist.”

Last year, the Trump administration terminated more than 1,400 grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.1

These were not hypothetical projects awaiting approval. They were active grants supporting museums, archives, historical organizations, documentary projects, preservation work, university research, educational programs, and public scholarship across the United States. Together, they represented more than $100 million in humanities funding.

The administration claimed the awards no longer aligned with its priorities. But in May, a federal judge found that the mass terminations were not simply an ordinary change in spending policy. They were unlawful and unconstitutional. The court described them as a “textbook example” of viewpoint discrimination and found that projects had been targeted because they involved subjects connected to race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, immigration status, and other identities disfavored by the administration. DOGE, the court ruled, had no legal authority to select or direct the termination of the grants in the first place.

In other words, humanities grants were not merely caught in a broad budget cut. They were ideologically screened.

Now the National Endowment for the Humanities is contacting recipients and asking whether they want their funding restored. That sounds, at first, like justice working its way through the system. The grants were illegally terminated, a court intervened, and the money is coming back.

Except restoration is not repair.

NEH is asking recipients whether they still intend to continue their projects, whether they still have the staff and institutional capacity to complete them, whether their budgets or timelines must be revised, and whether key personnel remain available. Recipients are warned not to resume work until reinstatement is formally approved. NEH will not provide additional money to cover costs created by the termination, and any new expenses incurred before final reinstatement are taken at the recipient’s own risk.

The government helped dismantle these projects. Now it is asking the people responsible for rebuilding them whether they still possess the capacity to do so.

Do you still have your staff? Do you still have your partners? Do you still have your venue, your archive, your contractors, your researchers, your public-programming calendar? Can you still complete the project after we canceled it, froze the money, scattered the people involved, and forced everyone to reorganize their professional lives?

A restored grant is not restored time. It is not restored staff, momentum, trust, or institutional credibility. It is not the public program that had to be canceled, the employee who found another job, the graduate researcher who could not afford to wait, or the community partner who stopped believing the project would happen.

Courts can restore legality. They cannot place a lost year back into someone’s life.

And while NEH recipients are attempting to reconstruct projects the administration illegally disrupted, the Office of Management and Budget is proposing a much broader transformation of federal grantmaking.

The OMB proposal would revise the government-wide rules governing federal financial assistance, including discretionary grants and cooperative agreements. Federal agencies would be required to conduct additional pre-issuance reviews to determine whether proposed awards align with applicable law, agency priorities, the “national interest,” and, where relevant, the President’s policy agenda. Senior political appointees would be designated to review awards before they are issued. Peer review could continue, but its recommendations would remain advisory rather than controlling.

That distinction matters.

Peer review is certainly not perfect. No system involving human beings, institutional prestige, or academic committees has ever emerged from the sea fully neutral and holding a perfectly calibrated rubric. But its purpose is to have specialists assess the quality, originality, feasibility, and scholarly contribution of proposed work.

Under the OMB proposal, that expertise could be subordinated to a different question: does this project serve the administration’s conception of the national interest?

The proposed rule also says discretionary awards must not fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate initiatives involving the denial of the human sex binary, “illegal immigration,” or “anti-American values.” It contains further restrictions affecting work on gender, DEI, disparate-impact analysis, abortion, and other subjects the administration has repeatedly treated as ideological contamination.

There is a very specific kind of political sorcery involved in calling that neutrality.

“National interest” sounds objective until someone gets to define the nation. “Anti-American values” sounds obvious until you notice which histories and communities are repeatedly placed outside America: Black history, queer history, Indigenous history, immigration history, gender studies, reproductive justice, critical public health research, and any account of the United States that does not treat the country as a porcelain eagle requiring constant dusting.

This is not an attempt to remove politics from scholarship. It is an attempt to make scholarship answerable to political power.

The OMB proposal had drawn around 90,000 public comments by July 7, with universities, scientific organizations, researchers, and advocacy groups warning that it would politicize federal funding and weaken the role of expert review. The concern is not restricted to humanities professors becoming agitated beside the faculty-room coffee urn. Political control over grants threatens scientific research, public health, medicine, education, historical work, museums, libraries, and community programs.

It also threatens work after funding has already been awarded.

The proposal would allow agencies to terminate discretionary awards if they no longer serve program goals, agency priorities, or the “national interest” as those priorities exist at the time of termination.

That last part is the trapdoor.

A project might satisfy the published criteria when it begins, pass expert review, receive an award, hire staff, build partnerships, and start its work. Then the political definition of the national interest changes. Suddenly, the grant is no longer safe because the administration’s priorities have shifted or because someone decides the project has become inconvenient.

The NEH terminations show what that instability looks like in practice. The OMB proposal risks making the logic behind those terminations part of the ordinary machinery of federal funding.

That is the background against which I have been thinking about my own research and my own dependence on federal student aid.

FAFSA is not an NEH grant. Federal student aid is not the same mechanism as a discretionary humanities award. The OMB proposal does not automatically remove my access to FAFSA, nor does a fight over NEH grants directly determine whether my PhD receives student funding.

I know this. I am not confused about the paperwork. No one needs to sprint into my mentions carrying a laminated flowchart and the thrilling little face of someone who thinks bureaucracy counts as a personality.

My fear is not that this specific OMB proposal will cause my FAFSA application to spontaneously combust tomorrow morning.

My fear is that the public infrastructure making research possible is being narrowed, politicized, and made more fragile from several directions at once.

I am an American woman pursuing a PhD examining reproductive health, media, gender, and American political culture. My research asks how American media have shaped public understanding of women’s reproductive health from the FDA approval of the contraceptive pill, through Roe v. Wade, to Dobbs.

I study how media teach audiences what to fear, normalize, blame, dismiss, trust, or punish when it comes to women’s bodies. I study how contraception and abortion become stories about morality, citizenship, family, femininity, danger, shame, and control.

This is not exactly the sort of research the present administration is likely to clutch to its chest like a beloved heirloom. It is more the sort of work it would spot across the room, hiss at like a wet cat, and immediately convene a subcommittee.

The government does not have to formally ban my research to threaten it. It does not need to send me a letter reading, “Dear historian of gender, please stop noticing things.”

It can make grants politically conditional. It can make graduate education harder to finance. It can make universities more nervous about supporting supposedly controversial subjects.2 It can force scholars and institutions to calculate whether certain questions are worth the financial risk.

That is not academic neutrality.

That is censorship by invoice.

Academic freedom is usually discussed as a matter of speech: whether academics are technically permitted to research, teach, publish, or say something. But permission is not the same as capacity.

Research costs money.

It requires tuition, rent, food, travel, archives, subscriptions, library access, software, transcription, conferences, visas, childcare, healthcare, and time away from other paid employment. It requires institutions willing to host projects, staff willing to take jobs on them, and researchers able to survive long enough to complete the work.

Academic freedom is expensive.

That is the part people often skip. Scholars are treated as brains hovering inside tasteful cardigans rather than human beings with bills, bodies, and landlords. You can be technically free to study reproductive politics while being priced out of conducting the research. You can be permitted to ask a question while lacking the funding, institutional security, or student aid required to answer it.

That is where my fear about FAFSA enters the story.

Federal graduate aid is already becoming more restricted. Beginning in July 2026, Grad PLUS loans are being eliminated for new borrowers. New graduate borrowers will face annual limits of $20,500 and an aggregate graduate borrowing limit of $100,000, with different caps applying to designated professional programs.

Again, this is not the same policy as the OMB grant proposal. It is not evidence that the government will inspect the title of my dissertation before processing a student loan.

It is evidence that one of the public pathways into graduate education is narrowing.

The Urban Institute has warned that the new limits are likely to push more graduate students toward private borrowing. Its analysis found that students who had previously received Pell Grants, a rough indicator of lower-income backgrounds, were more likely than other students in master’s and academic doctoral programs to have borrowed above the new annual limits.

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that around one-third of graduate students with federal loans had borrowed above the incoming limits. Among those borrowers, nearly 40 percent might be unable to obtain sufficient private loans without a cosigner under existing lending standards.

So when someone says, “You can still do the research,” I want to know who the “you” is in that sentence.

Who can still do the research when federal aid narrows? Who can continue when grants become politically unstable? Who can wait through an unlawful termination and an uncertain reinstatement process? Who can absorb the cost when project funding disappears for a year? Who can choose a politically contentious subject without worrying that their institution will eventually decide the work attracts too much scrutiny?

The answer is often someone with money.

This is why the campaign against “woke academia” is about class as much as it is about race or gender politics. It does not merely decide which ideas are legitimate. It helps decide which people can afford to become scholars.

If graduate education becomes more dependent on personal wealth, family support, private credit, or access to a wealthy cosigner, the academy does not become less ideological. It becomes more exclusive. It becomes safer for people who can afford disruption and more dangerous for everyone whose ability to continue depends on public funding.

A wealthy student can endure a funding delay. A working-class student may have to leave.

A secure professor can survive the cancellation of one project. A precariously employed researcher may lose their job.

A large institution may be able to challenge an unlawful termination. A small museum, archive, historical society, or community organization may simply collapse.

Political interference in funding does not affect everyone equally. It turns existing inequality into a filtering mechanism.

And this is how an approved version of America gets built.

You do not have to burn the archive. You make sure certain people cannot afford to view it.

You do not have to ban gender history. You make researching it financially radioactive.

You do not have to outlaw reproductive health scholarship. You make institutions wonder whether supporting it will endanger other funding.

You do not have to announce that only patriotic scholarship may survive. You create a grant system in which political appointees determine what serves the national interest, experts become merely advisory, and “anti-American values” remain conveniently undefined.

Then you allow the cost and uncertainty to do the silencing for you.

Scholars begin avoiding certain subjects. Institutions choose less controversial projects. Museums soften exhibits. Researchers remove words that might trigger scrutiny. Graduate students reconsider work on abortion, sexuality, race, migration, or gender because they cannot afford to gamble their future on the continued tolerance of political appointees.

No formal ban is necessary. People learn to pre-censor themselves.

This is why restoration cannot repair what happened to the NEH grants. Even if every illegally terminated award were returned tomorrow, the lesson would remain.

The government has demonstrated that funding can disappear because a project becomes ideologically inconvenient. It has shown scholars, museums, historical organizations, and universities that legally awarded support may not remain secure. It has taught institutions to consider not only whether research is rigorous, but whether it is politically survivable.

That fear does not vanish when the money returns.

I know this move. Women know this move. Historians know this move. Anyone who studies power knows this move.

First, create the conditions for fear. Then mock the fear as proof that the people responding were irrational all along.

But fear is not always paranoia. Sometimes fear is what happens when you can read the policy document and the room at the same time.

I am not afraid because I have confused FAFSA with an NEH grant. I am afraid precisely because they are different parts of the same public infrastructure.

One determines whether many students can afford advanced education. Another supports research, museums, archives, teaching, preservation, and public history. Federal grant rules help determine which projects and institutions can survive. None of these mechanisms is identical. Together, however, they shape who gets to produce knowledge and which kinds of knowledge reach the public.

And they are all being pushed through an increasingly narrow gate.

The fight over academic freedom is not only a fight over what can be said. It is a fight over who can afford to say it, who gets paid to investigate it, who receives institutional protection while producing it, and who is pushed out before the question can be asked.

The approved version of America does not require every inconvenient scholar to be sent to the gulag. It only requires enough of us to become too broke, too cautious, too exhausted, or too institutionally inconvenient to continue.

The question is not only what knowledge gets funded.

The question is who gets priced out of producing knowledge at all.

And that, of course, is the point. They do not need everyone to agree. They need enough people to stop trying.

They are not only trying to censor us into compliance.

They are trying to starve us into it.

Today’s artifact from the Department of Absolutely Not is this 1969 Tipalet cigar advertisement, which confidently presents one of the most astonishing slogans ever approved by a marketing department:

“Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere.”

Get 15% off for 1 year

Not “be charming.”

Not “treat her with respect.”

Not even “have a conversation.”

Just blow smoke directly into her face.

Apparently the path to romance in 1969 was less about courtship and more about secondhand smoke. The advertisement promised men that a single puff of cherry-flavored cigar smoke would transform a woman into a devoted follower. The copy literally states:

“A puff in her direction and she’ll follow you, anywhere.”

Which raises a number of questions, the most immediate being whether the advertising team had ever actually met a woman.

The image itself is doing a lot of work. The man looms over the woman, confidently exhaling smoke into her face. She gazes back at him as if she has just witnessed the invention of fire. The power dynamic is impossible to miss. He acts. She reacts. He possesses the product. She becomes part of the reward.

That reward is the real thing being sold.

The cigar is almost incidental.

The actual promise is male power and sex.

Advertising scholars have long noted that many mid-century advertisements sold products by attaching them to fantasies about gender and social status. The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising archive categorizes this ad under “Objectifying Women” and notes that it presents women as something that can be attracted and controlled through the product itself.

And that is what makes this ad such a useful historical artifact.

The advertisement isn’t really telling men that women like the smell of flavored cigars. It’s telling men that women are simple creatures whose behavior can be manipulated. Buy the right product and women will respond accordingly. The relationship is presented almost like a vending machine.

Insert cigar.1

Receive woman.

What the ad reveals is a worldview that was remarkably common in the postwar decades. Popular culture often portrayed men as active pursuers and decision-makers while women existed as prizes, followers, assistants, admirers, or decorative accessories. The assumption wasn’t merely that men and women were different. It was that men acted upon the world while women reacted to it.

The woman in this advertisement has no desires, goals, opinions, or agency of her own. She exists only as a measuring stick for male success.

The cigar is proof of masculinity because it supposedly produces female compliance.

And that’s where the comparison to a much more recent advertisement gets interesting.

Axe Body Spray.

Specifically, the 2011 commercial “Even Angels Will Fall.”

If you’ve never seen it, the premise is breathtaking in its commitment to the bit. Beautiful female angels literally crash down from heaven, rip off their halos, shatter stained glass, and abandon eternal salvation because they have caught the scent of a man wearing Axe deodorant.

It’s absurd.

It’s over-the-top.

It’s clearly meant to be funny.

And yet beneath all the spectacle, it’s selling almost exactly the same fantasy as the Tipalet advertisement.

The Tipalet ad promises:

“Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere.”

The Axe ad promises:

“Spray this on yourself and women will descend from heaven itself.”

The mechanism changes. The fantasy remains remarkably similar.

In both advertisements, women function primarily as rewards. They are not individuals making choices. They are evidence that the product works.

The man consumes.

The women appear.

That is the transaction.

What makes the comparison so fascinating is that the Axe commercial arrives more than forty years after the Tipalet ad. Society had changed dramatically. Feminism had transformed public conversations about gender. Advertisers could no longer openly present women as obedient followers.

So the fantasy evolved.

Instead of one woman following a man because of his cigar, dozens of supernatural women throw away literal paradise because of his deodorant.

The sexism becomes wrapped in irony, humor, and fantasy, but the underlying message remains surprisingly familiar. The product supposedly grants men access to female desire without requiring anything from them beyond consumption.

Buy product.

Receive women.

Tipalet simply lacked the modern instinct to disguise what it was selling.

That’s what makes it such a valuable historical source. It exposes a fantasy that later advertisements often dressed up in jokes, special effects, and self-awareness.

The Axe commercial asks us to laugh because angels are abandoning heaven.

The Tipalet ad asks us to laugh because women are abandoning free will.

And honestly, I appreciate the historical honesty of the second one. At least it wasn’t pretending.

Apparently, there is a serious masculinity crisis caused by women being allowed to have courage too.

In a recent essay called “Progressives Don’t Understand Masculinity,” the pseudonymous Substack writer LastBlueDog complains that progressive commentators cannot recognise “anything distinctively good about men.” Whenever courage, ambition, assertiveness, strength or risk-taking are praised as masculine qualities, someone ruins the occasion by pointing out that women can possess them too. This, he argues, leaves masculinity defined as “purely negative” and prevents boys from seeing it as an “aspirational quality.”

LastBlueDog

Progressives Don't Understand Masculinity

The New York Times published a conversation this morning, a transcript of their Opinions podcast with the subject of masculinity and the framing of crisis. I have unlocked it for you all here…

Read more

3 months ago · 1219 likes · 454 comments · LastBlueDog

This is a fascinating problem to invent.

Courage cannot apparently inspire boys unless it belongs more to them than to girls. Ambition cannot simply be valuable to any person who has something worth achieving. Strength loses some of its affirming masculine glow once women are permitted to be strong without filing a special exemption. A trait cannot merely be positive; it must be positive in a way that helps distinguish men from women.

Perhaps the problem is not that progressives refuse to say anything good about men. Perhaps the problem is that we have decided positive traits need to be gendered before men are allowed to value them.

This debate is usually framed as a dispute over whether masculinity is good or bad. Defenders of “positive masculinity” accuse feminists of treating every traditionally male characteristic as toxic, while critics point toward the damage caused by aggression, dominance, hierarchy and emotional repression.

Both conversations can slide past the more fundamental question: why are we assigning the human personality to separate sexes in the first place?

Courage, ambition, confidence, tenderness, empathy, discipline, anger, vulnerability, leadership, care and fear do not arrive in pink and blue containers. What gender determines is not who can possess these traits, but which people will be rewarded, excused, mocked or punished for showing them.

The problem with toxic masculinity is not that anger, dominance and aggression become delightful when a woman does them. Women can be angry, domineering, abusive, arrogant, authoritarian and cruel. Margaret Thatcher did not become a nurturing communal spirit because she wore a skirt. The problem is that men are often encouraged to interpret certain harmful behaviours as evidence of successful masculinity, while women are punished for the same behaviour because it violates femininity.

A man who dominates a conversation is assertive. A woman who does it is bossy. A man who refuses to compromise is decisive, while a woman is difficult. A man who becomes angry cares deeply and will not tolerate incompetence; a woman who becomes angry is emotional, unstable, shrill or having some sort of hormonal weather event.

The behaviour has not changed. Its social meaning has.

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The Same Trait Has Two Names

Researchers distinguish between descriptive stereotypes, which tell us how men and women supposedly behave, and prescriptive stereotypes, which tell us how they should behave. That difference matters because gender stereotypes are not simply erroneous observations about the world. They are instructions backed by social consequences. Research on prescriptive gender stereotypes has shown that women and men are not only expected to possess different characteristics but are punished when they violate the rules attached to their assigned gender.

It is one thing to believe that women tend to be caring. It is another to believe that women should be caring, that they owe care to everyone around them, and that any woman who declines to provide it is cold, selfish or fundamentally defective. It is one thing to associate men with courage. It is another to teach boys that fear, uncertainty or a request for help might disqualify them from being respected as men.

The same behaviour can therefore acquire two entirely different moral identities depending upon who performs it. Anger provides a particularly neat demonstration. In a series of workplace experiments, Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann found that angry professional women were granted less status than angry professional men. Men’s anger was more likely to be attributed to external circumstances, while women’s anger was interpreted as evidence that they were angry people or “out of control.” Even a woman identified as a chief executive faced the penalty.

The man was angry because something had happened; the woman was angry because something was wrong with her.

That distinction is the whole system in miniature. A man’s anger can reinforce the idea that he is entitled to authority, while a woman’s anger becomes evidence that she cannot be trusted with it.

This does not mean that every angry man is rewarded or that every woman who expresses anger is destroyed. Race, class, disability, sexuality and professional status all shape who is allowed to display authority. A Black man’s anger, for example, is not necessarily interpreted with the same generosity as a wealthy white executive’s. The point is that the mythology of masculine authority provides men with a cultural route through which anger can become strength, while femininity provides women with a trapdoor through which the same emotion becomes pathology.

The dynamic extends far beyond anger. An ambitious man has plans; an ambitious woman has an agenda.

A confident man believes in himself; a confident woman thinks rather highly of herself. A man who makes unpopular decisions is willing to lead; a woman doing the same apparently needs to work on her tone.

Researchers studying backlash against women in leadership have repeatedly found that women face a double bind. They must display the agency associated with leadership to appear competent, but they can be penalised when that agency violates expectations that women remain warm, agreeable and non-dominant. Women can therefore be judged insufficiently capable when they behave “femininely” and socially unpleasant when they behave in precisely the manner expected of leaders.

When women become assertive, assertiveness suddenly develops a personality problem.

We Built the Boxes and Then Called Them Biology

The traits involved are often divided into two broad clusters. Agency includes independence, ambition, assertiveness, confidence, decisiveness and leadership. Communion includes warmth, empathy, cooperation, nurturance and attentiveness to others. Men are associated with agency, while women are associated with communion.

This division is frequently discussed as though civilisation discovered two pre-existing human subspecies. Men emerged from the primordial mist prepared to run companies and establish rankings in fight gyms, while women materialised nearby holding casseroles and asking whether everyone had adequately processed the experience.

Social-role theory offers a rather less magical explanation. People observe women and men occupying different social positions and infer that the qualities associated with those positions reflect their natural dispositions. Men historically occupied more roles involving paid employment, formal authority, military service and political power, so agency became masculine. Women were concentrated in domestic labour, child-rearing, caregiving and service, so communion became feminine. Society created the division of labour and then pointed to the behaviour produced by that division as evidence that the arrangement had been natural all along.

We distributed the work, watched people perform the work we had assigned them and called the result biology.

The Victorian ideology of separate spheres made this division especially theatrical. Men belonged to the competitive public world of business, politics, empire and military action, which supposedly required strength, courage and rationality. Women belonged to the domestic sphere, where they served as morally pure guardians of the home. Men were understood as physically strong but morally vulnerable, while women were physically weak yet spiritually elevated, a very convenient arrangement that allowed men to retain legal and political power while women received a decorative certificate announcing that they were morally better people.

This was not simply a belief that women and men possessed different personalities. It was an entire political economy translated into character traits. Men needed to be ambitious and competitive because they were expected to succeed in the marketplace and support a family. Women needed to be patient, self-sacrificing and domestic because someone had to maintain the home, raise the children and repair the emotional damage caused by the supposedly amoral outside world.

Courage belonged to men because courage authorised public action. Care belonged to women because care justified unpaid labour.

A “positive” stereotype can still be an extremely efficient method of control. The belief that women are naturally more caring, gentle and morally sensitive sounds much nicer than open contempt, which is why it is sometimes described as benevolent sexism. Benevolent sexism praises women as special, delicate creatures deserving male protection, but that protection comes with restrictions. A woman who must be protected is also a woman who can be told where she may go, what risks she may take and which decisions she is qualified to make.

A compliment becomes a cage when it arrives with enforcement powers.

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The Boxes Move Whenever Power Needs Them To

One of the clearest signs that these gendered traits are political rather than timeless is how quickly they can be reassigned when institutions need women’s labour.

War has repeatedly performed this little magic trick. Women who were supposedly too fragile for strenuous work became capable of running factories, transporting supplies, nursing under bombardment, operating machinery and performing technically demanding work whenever enough men were unavailable. Once the emergency ended, the same societies often rediscovered women’s delicate constitutions and profound longing for domesticity.

The point is not that war permanently liberated women. It usually did not. The point is that necessity exposed the flexibility of traits presented as natural. Governments could encourage women to be resilient, disciplined, physically courageous and technically competent when those qualities served national production, then return them to the masculine shelf once the crisis had passed.

During the First World War, more than nine million American women mobilised for the war effort, working in agriculture, industry, transport, communications, nursing and military support. Organisations still felt compelled to reassure the public that this work would not “masculinise” them, because apparently military logistics were acceptable for women as long as nobody mistook them for lesbians at the train station.

The pattern returned during the Second World War. Women were recruited into industrial jobs because wartime production could not function without them. Once the war ended, many were dismissed or pressured to leave because those jobs had abruptly become men’s property again. Women had not lost their mechanical competence between V-J Day and breakfast. The political demand for their labour had changed.

Women’s military service offers a similarly revealing history. Women have repeatedly demonstrated the courage and discipline supposedly intrinsic to men, but military institutions often responded by treating the male body and male life as the neutral template. Women could enter, provided they adapted to uniforms, equipment and standards designed around men.

A 2021 change to United States Air Force grooming regulations, for example, allowed women to wear longer braids and ponytails after service members reported that the previous requirement to wear tight buns caused migraines, hair damage and hair loss. The earlier rule had not been a timeless requirement of military efficiency. It was a standard designed around a particular idea of what a soldier should look like, with women’s bodies expected to absorb the consequences.

The issue was never simply whether women could be courageous. It was whether their courage entitled them to reshape the institution to serve within it.

The history of China’s Iron Girls makes the same point from a different direction. During the Maoist period, women who repaired electrical wires, drove tractors, welded, mined coal or performed difficult agricultural labour could be publicly celebrated for entering fields traditionally reserved for men. Women who participated sometimes described the experience as profoundly liberating, particularly in rural communities where gender taboos had prevented women from doing particular kinds of work.

Yet the state’s celebration of their strength was not primarily a feminist project. The government wanted labour, productivity and industrial development. Women’s capacity to perform masculine-coded work could be praised without requiring a broader dismantling of the gender hierarchy. Many women remained concentrated in traditionally female industries, and the burden of domestic work did not evaporate merely because propaganda had discovered that women could drive tractors.

Patriarchal societies are perfectly capable of admitting that women possess supposedly masculine traits when those traits are economically useful. What they resist is allowing women to convert those traits into permanent authority.

Women may be brave enough to win a war, disciplined enough to keep factories operating and strong enough to rebuild a village. The difficulty begins when they ask whether bravery, discipline and strength might also qualify them to govern.

Men Are Not Born Afraid of Vulnerability

The gendering of personality also harms men, although it does not do so in a way that magically cancels men’s greater access to social power. Patriarchy can advantage men as a group while injuring individual men who fail, refuse or are unable to perform its preferred version of masculinity.

The LastBlueDog essay inadvertently provides an excellent description of how this works. Its author argues that boys must earn recognition as men by acquiring a respectable career, physical competence, self-respect, male approval, heterosexual desirability, marriage, children and the ability to provide for a family. Manhood is not simply adulthood. It is a credential issued after a lengthy performance review.

This closely resembles what researchers call precarious manhood: the idea that masculinity is a difficult social status that must be earned, publicly demonstrated and continually defended. A man can lose standing by appearing weak, dependent, frightened, sexually unsuccessful, physically incapable or insufficiently respected by other men.

The author has identified the machinery of precarious manhood and mistaken it for an instruction manual.

Under this system, losing a job is not merely an economic crisis. It threatens manhood. Disability does not merely alter someone’s relationship with his body; it threatens manhood. Romantic rejection is not simply painful; it threatens manhood. Fear, grief and dependence are not ordinary parts of being alive. They are evidence that the masculinity accreditation board may need to review your file.

This is why encouraging men to be more emotionally open should not be seen as asking them to become women. That objection assumes emotional openness is inherently feminine. By the same token, emotional openness should not function as an insult to a man. The insult only works because femininity is already treated as inferior. Boys are taught not just that crying is unacceptable, but that it makes them seem girlish, weak or lesser. Emotional repression is maintained through the fear of being seen as feminine.

Men are not simply afraid of vulnerability. They are taught that vulnerability represents status loss.

This does not mean that all restraint is bad or that every emotion must be deposited into the group chat before breakfast. Emotional regulation is valuable. So are endurance, courage and the ability to function during a crisis. The problem begins when regulation becomes amputation, when men are encouraged to recognise anger but not fear, control but not need, protectiveness but not tenderness.

A large meta-analysis found that stronger conformity to traditional masculine norms was generally associated with poorer mental-health outcomes and less favourable attitudes toward seeking psychological help, although individual norms differed in their effects. Courage and responsibility are not inherently damaging. The danger lies in a rigid package that makes self-reliance, emotional restriction and status into conditions of belonging.

Masculinity then permits men to care only after care has been translated into a more respectable dialect. A man may not nurture, but he may protect. He may not need closeness, but he may demonstrate loyalty. He may not experience fear, but he may responsibly assess risk while staring into the middle distance, like the brooding hero of a Gothic novel.

We keep taking ordinary human capacities, repainting them blue and selling them back to men in packaging labelled EXTREME EMOTIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR MEN.

Revaluing Femininity Is Not Enough

A reasonable response to all of this is that traits associated with women have been systematically devalued. Care, patience, cooperation and emotional intelligence are essential to any functioning society, yet the work requiring those qualities is frequently underpaid, unpaid or treated as something women simply do because they are lovely.

Feminists have therefore spent decades insisting that care work matters. Cultural feminism, in particular, tried to challenge societies that glorified masculine-coded aggression and competition while dismissing feminine-coded kindness, nurturing and cooperation. It called for greater respect for parenting, domestic labour, mutuality and women’s culture.

There was something important in that correction. A civilisation that venerates conquest while treating childcare as a private hobby has its values arranged rather badly.

The problem comes when we move from “care has been unjustly feminised and devalued” to “women are inherently the caring sex.” That preserves the border and merely installs nicer furniture on one side of it.

Women remain responsible for care. Men remain visitors to it.

It also creates a fantasy in which women’s natural empathy will save the world from men’s natural aggression, a theory somewhat complicated by every woman who has ever enthusiastically supported war, empire, white supremacy, authoritarianism or been the president of a homeowners’ association.

Reversing the value hierarchy is not the same as abolishing it. Declaring women morally superior because they are ‘naturally’ nurturing still reduces women to a reproductive and emotional function. It also makes structural change unnecessarily dependent upon women behaving better than everyone else while men are granted a biological exemption from developing empathy.

The qualities attributed to women may instead reflect the conditions under which women have been required to live. Women may become practised at monitoring emotions because they are expected to manage families, relationships and workplaces without making anyone uncomfortable. They may learn patience because open anger carries consequences. They may learn cooperation because direct authority has been denied to them.1

Those capacities can be real, valuable and hard won without being naturally female.

The same applies to men. Men may become practised at emotional restraint because vulnerability has been punished, or confident in physical risk because risk has been rewarded. Socialisation can produce genuine patterns without turning those patterns into eternal truths about the sexes.

Feminism should not answer “men are rational and women are caring” by announcing that caring is better and women therefore win. That leaves the sorting system intact and merely changes which department gets the better promotional poster.

Not Every Woman Is Allowed to Be Feminine

Even the supposedly universal category of femininity has never applied equally to all women.

The delicate woman who needs protection has historically been white, respectable, heterosexual, able-bodied and sufficiently wealthy to avoid visible physical labour. Working-class women were expected to work. Enslaved women were expected to endure violence and backbreaking labour while being denied the innocence and vulnerability used to justify white women’s protection. Black women have repeatedly been stereotyped as stronger, angrier, more durable and less in need of care.

Some women are placed on pedestals. Others are expected to carry the pedestal.

This matters because a simple account in which men are forced to be strong and women are allowed to be vulnerable misses how vulnerability itself is distributed as a privilege. A wealthy white woman’s tears may confirm her femininity, while a Black woman’s pain is ignored because she is presumed capable of enduring it. The “Strong Black Woman” or “Superwoman” ideal can appear complimentary while demanding emotional suppression, relentless competence and self-sacrifice from Black women who are simultaneously denied care.

A disabled woman may be denied agency through excessive paternalism, while another disabled person is punished for failing to embody independence. Femininity does not simply confer weakness. It decides whose weakness will inspire protection and whose will be treated as inconvenience.

Queer and trans people make the instability of the entire arrangement especially visible. Gender policing becomes most intense when someone demonstrates that a body does not reliably produce the personality society assigned to it. A “masculine” woman, a “feminine” man, a trans person or anyone whose life refuses the binary arrangement exposes the fact that these categories require continual maintenance.

If courage were simply male, we would not need to discourage it in girls. If tenderness were simply female, boys would not require years of humiliation to learn that it is dangerous.

The punishment reveals the construction.

An Average Difference Is Not a Property Deed

None of this requires claiming that no average differences ever exist between men and women. That is the emergency exit every gender essentialist builds into the argument: identify one statistical difference, announce the discovery of biology and sprint away before anyone can ask what the difference actually proves.

Janet Shibley Hyde’s gender similarities hypothesis emerged from a review of dozens of meta-analyses and found that women and men were similar on most psychological variables, although not every variable and not in every context.

Even where an average difference exists, however, an average is not a property deed.

It does not tell us that every member of a group possesses the trait. It does not tell us whether the difference emerged from biology, socialisation, opportunity or some interaction among them. It does not tell us whether the trait should be encouraged, discouraged or made into a moral obligation. It certainly does not tell us that one sex should retain exclusive cultural ownership.

Suppose men are, on average, more inclined toward a particular form of physical risk-taking. That would not make courage male. Courage can mean entering a burning building, but it can also mean leaving an abusive marriage, exposing corruption, undergoing frightening medical treatment, admitting wrongdoing or defending someone when doing so could cost you your community.

Suppose women are, on average, more practised in reading other people’s emotions. That would not make empathy female. It might instead prompt us to ask how many girls were trained from childhood to monitor moods, anticipate needs and manage social discomfort because their safety and acceptance depended upon it.

Averages describe populations. They do not issue instructions to individuals.

Men Do Not Lose Courage When Women Acquire It

LastBlueDog worries that treating courage, ambition and strength as universal removes the positive content from masculinity. But men do not lose courage when women are courageous. Women do not lose empathy when men become emotionally attentive. A girl’s ambition does not subtract from a boy’s sense of purpose, and a boy’s vulnerability does not cheapen a girl’s compassion.

The only thing lost is the ability to use those traits as border controls.

If courage stops affirming men when women are also courageous, then the source of affirmation was never courage. It was the belief that courage distinguished men from women.

There may still be value in providing boys with male role models. A boy may find it particularly meaningful to see a respected man admit fear, care for children, seek therapy, act with integrity or refuse cruelty. People understand themselves through identity, and representation can widen their sense of what is possible.

But there is a difference between telling boys that vulnerability is compatible with being male and declaring vulnerability a new form of positive masculinity. The second approach still implies that an ordinary human capacity must be approved and repackaged before boys can safely use it.

We do not need “male empathy,” “masculine tenderness” or “manly emotional openness.” We need boys to understand that empathy, tenderness and emotional openness do not make them less male.

Likewise, we do not need to preserve courage as specifically masculine so that boys will admire it. Boys can admire courageous men, courageous women and courage itself.

We do not need to repaint the entire human personality blue before boys are allowed to enter it.

Stop Requiring Every Trait to Show a Gender Passport

The goal is not to make men more like women or women more like men. That formulation still assumes that two complete and opposing sets of human qualities exist, and that equality means allowing people to borrow occasionally from the other side.

The goal is to stop treating the human personality as sex-segregated property.

Teach courage, including the courage to acknowledge fear and ask for help. Teach ambition, paired with ethics and the understanding that other people are not rungs on a ladder. Teach leadership as responsibility rather than domination, anger as an emotion carrying information rather than an automatic claim to authority, and discipline without glorifying suffering for its own sake.

Teach tenderness without making women responsible for providing all of it. Teach vulnerability without treating it as feminine contamination. Teach care without turning it into unpaid female labour, and confidence without treating every room as a hierarchy that someone must conquer.

Boys do not need to be told that courage belongs especially to them. They need opportunities to practise courage. They do not need ambition protected as masculine property. They need ambitions worth pursuing. They do not need emotional openness repackaged as a rugged artisanal form of vulnerability. They need to know that grief, tenderness, uncertainty and need do not revoke their membership in manhood.

Girls do not need to be told that empathy is their special gift. They need permission to set boundaries around their care. They do not need to be praised for natural selflessness while everyone nearby benefits from their labour. They need to know that anger, ambition and authority do not make them defective women.

The problem with toxic masculinity is not that masculinity makes every trait toxic, or that women become morally pure whenever they perform the same behaviour. The problem is that gender assigns different permissions and consequences. It teaches men that dominance may prove their strength while teaching women that dominance makes them unlovable. It teaches women that care is their duty while teaching men that care is optional, exceptional or vaguely suspicious unless renamed protection.

Courage, care, ambition and vulnerability do not belong to separate sexes. Neither do anger, leadership, resilience, aggression, empathy or fear.

What gender often determines is not who can possess these qualities, but who will be praised, excused or punished for showing them.

That is the system we need to dismantle, not because men are defective women, but because nobody should be required to become a defective half-person in order to perform their gender correctly.

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This was a comment I once received on a TikTok I made about the impact of Title IX funding being stripped and creating maternity deserts for reproductive healthcare. To their credit, I don’t think this was meant to be a bad faith question. They were genuinely confused by the contradiction between the stated pro-baby position of the GOP and the horrifying on the ground facts.

I had to explain to that dear confused reader that the issue is not simply making more babies.

It is making the right kind of babies.

When you realize that maternal and infant mortality disproportionately rise among women of color and women living in poverty, that maternity deserts disproportionately affect those same communities, and that all of this is unfolding alongside a growing panic on the American right about demographic change, declining white birth rates, immigration, and the possibility of white people becoming a minority population, the contradiction becomes much easier to understand.

Of course, part of the project is also about punishing the “wrong” women. The “sexually irresponsible” women. The feminists. The women who had careers instead of babies. The women who wanted abortions. The women who had children under the wrong circumstances. The women who failed to perform motherhood correctly according to the increasingly deranged Pinterest board of patriarchal respectability.

But that is mostly a garnish.

The main course is demographic anxiety.

One of the most frustrating conversations in American politics right now revolves around pronatalism, which is a very fancy word for “have more babies because civilization is apparently being held together by your uterus and a podcast microphone.” Conservatives tell us they are worried about declining birth rates. They warn of a looming fertility crisis. They lament that Americans are not having enough children. They celebrate motherhood as a sacred duty and insist that society should value family formation.

Then many of those same political actors support policies that contribute to maternity ward closures, the expansion of maternity deserts, physician flight from states with abortion restrictions, and legal confusion that leaves doctors afraid to provide medically necessary care until patients are actively dying.

This should be a scandal.

Instead, we are supposed to pretend these things are unrelated. We are supposed to believe that a movement deeply concerned with babies somehow has very little interest in ensuring pregnant people survive pregnancy. We are supposed to believe that politicians alarmed by falling birth rates are simply unfortunate bystanders to policies that make childbirth more dangerous.

Or perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

Because if the goal were healthy pregnancies and healthy children, maternity care would be treated as critical infrastructure. The closure of obstetric wards would be treated as an emergency. The shortage of maternal healthcare providers would trigger actual political panic. Maternal mortality would be addressed with the kind of urgency usually reserved for banks, billionaires, and men who believe gas stoves are the final stand of Western masculinity.

But that is not what is happening.

What we have instead is a political movement obsessed with reproduction and remarkably uninterested in reproductive healthcare.

That distinction matters.

A woman hemorrhaging in an emergency room does not become safer because a politician gave a speech about family values. A woman driving two hours to reach an obstetrician does not gain healthcare access because some think tank fellow published a trembling little essay about declining fertility rates in the West. A woman with a wanted pregnancy that has become medically dangerous does not benefit from being told that motherhood is sacred while the state forces her doctors to consult lawyers before treating her.

The rhetoric celebrates motherhood.

The policies fail those carrying children.

That is not an accident of messaging. That is the worldview peeking through the curtains.

The pregnant woman is not treated as a full human being with needs, fears, rights, complications, pain, and a life outside the pregnancy. She becomes a vessel. A demographic statistic. A cultural symbol. A means to an end. The pregnancy matters. The pregnant person becomes negotiable.

And this is where the modern Republican obsession with birth rates begins to look less like concern for “life” and more like concern for population management.

One of the strangest habits in modern political discourse is the insistence that we should never take conservatives at their word. When conservative politicians, media personalities, activists, and think tank goblins spend years warning about demographic change, declining white birth rates, immigration, and the loss of “real America,” we are apparently supposed to nod politely and pretend they are talking about something else.

They are not.

The contemporary pronatalist movement did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged alongside an increasingly explicit panic about who is having children and who is not. Listen carefully to the rhetoric. America is in decline. Western civilization is under threat. ‘Native-born’ Americans are not reproducing. Immigrants are changing the character of the nation. Traditional families are disappearing. The future belongs to those who have children.

These statements are often presented as neutral observations. They are anything but.

The concern is rarely framed as a humanitarian one. It is not primarily about making pregnancy safer. It is not about reducing maternal mortality. It is not about ensuring that every child enters a world with healthcare, housing, food, childcare, and educational opportunity. Instead, the conversation repeatedly circles back to demographics.

Who is reproducing.

Who is not.

Who is arriving.

Who is replacing whom.

The language is sometimes subtle. Increasingly, it is not.

Stephen Miller, Washington D.C. Nazi-Cryptid, did not stumble into white nationalist politics by accident, trip over a copy of The Camp of the Saints, and land face-first in immigration policy. The modern right’s demographic panic is not hidden in a locked drawer. It is on television. It is in speeches. It is in think tank white papers. It is in social media posts about “replacement.” It is in the constant, sweaty insistence that immigration is not merely a policy issue but an existential threat to the nation’s identity.

This is why the pronatalist project begins to make more sense once you stop pretending it is only about population size.

Because if the concern were simply population decline, immigration would be an obvious solution. Countries facing declining birth rates have historically supplemented population growth through immigration. But many of the loudest voices warning about falling birth rates are also the loudest voices warning about immigrants.

That is because population growth is not actually the concern.

Demographic composition is.

The nightmare scenario in this rhetoric is not a country with too few people. It is a country with the wrong people.

Once you understand that, the movement’s priorities become easier to interpret. A movement genuinely concerned about population growth would celebrate every healthy birth.1 A movement concerned with preserving a particular racial, religious, and gendered social order will inevitably become preoccupied with which families are reproducing and which are not.2

This distinction explains why discussions about falling birth rates so often appear alongside hostility toward immigrants, multiculturalism, feminism, reproductive autonomy, LGBTQ families, and women who commit the unforgivable sin of having interior lives. All of those anxieties are connected. The ideal future being imagined is not simply one with more children. It is one with more children born into a specific vision of family, culture, religion, race, and gender hierarchy.

The babies matter, but they are also symbols. What is really being defended is a particular story about who America belongs to.

And that story has consequences.

Because the women most harmed by these policies are not randomly distributed across society.

Black women face dramatically higher maternal mortality rates than white women. Women living in poverty experience worse maternal health outcomes. Rural women often face severe shortages of obstetric providers. Women without financial resources are less able to travel for specialized care, seek second opinions, relocate, or force a broken healthcare system to treat them as people with options.

None of this is hidden. Researchers, physicians, public health advocates, and reproductive justice organizers have been documenting these disparities for years.

Everyone involved knows this.

Which means that when policymakers continue supporting measures that worsen these outcomes despite years of warnings, the resulting disparities stop looking accidental. At minimum, they become acceptable.

And that distinction matters.

Political priorities are often revealed less by what leaders claim to value than by what suffering they are willing to tolerate. The women most likely to suffer under this system are overwhelmingly the women with the fewest resources. The women most likely to die are overwhelmingly the women already facing systemic barriers to healthcare. The women most likely to find themselves trapped between restrictive laws and inadequate medical infrastructure are women who lack wealth, mobility, and political influence.

That is not a random pattern.

It is a structural one.

And that is where this conversation inevitably runs into America’s long, ugly tradition of sorting mothers into categories.

American culture has never treated motherhood as a universal good. It has always divided mothers into worthy and unworthy, respectable and irresponsible, sacred and suspicious, useful and disposable. Some mothers are imagined as the future of the nation. Other mothers are treated as evidence that the nation is collapsing.

Middle-class married mothers are held up as symbols of virtue. Poor mothers are scrutinized for every choice. Single mothers are blamed for social decline. Black mothers are subjected to stereotypes that have persisted for generations. Immigrant mothers are alternately depicted as demographic threats or drains on public resources. Women receiving public assistance are treated as if they personally broke the federal budget by asking for groceries.

The message is remarkably consistent.

Motherhood itself is not what earns social approval.

The right kind of motherhood does.

The ideal mother celebrated by modern conservative politics is married, heterosexual, sexually respectable, self-sacrificing, preferably Christian, preferably middle-class, and politically compliant. She understands that motherhood is her highest calling and asks for very little in return. She is not really a person so much as a decorative support beam in the house of patriarchy.

Real mothers are much more complicated.

They get divorced. They have careers. They struggle financially. They raise children alone. They are queer. They seek abortions. They reject traditional gender roles. They need childcare. They need healthcare. They need money. They sometimes regret motherhood. They sometimes love their children desperately and still want a life that belongs to them.

And this is where the punishment element enters the story.

Because reproductive politics has never been solely about producing children. It has also been about regulating female behavior. The “good woman” receives approval. The “bad woman” receives consequences. The woman who reproduces correctly is celebrated. The woman who seeks autonomy is blamed. The woman who conforms is protected. The woman who refuses is disciplined.

This is why many of the same people who claim motherhood is society’s highest calling seem so hostile toward actual mothers once those mothers require support. Paid family leave? Suddenly motherhood is your private choice. Affordable childcare? Why are you letting strangers raise your children? Medicaid expansion? Personal responsibility, sweetheart. Food assistance? Maybe stop having kids you cannot afford.

The symbolic mother is useful because she reinforces a worldview. The actual mother is inconvenient because she has needs.

The symbolic mother asks nothing from the state except the right to submit beautifully. The actual mother might demand healthcare, wages, childcare, protection from violence, or the freedom to decide whether pregnancy is something she can survive.

That is the real threat.

A woman who controls her own reproduction controls her own future. She can decide whether to have children, when to have them, with whom to have them, how many to have, and whether motherhood fits into her life at all. That level of autonomy disrupts a political movement built around the belief that social stability depends on women performing particular roles.

Which is why reproductive autonomy occupies such a central place in contemporary conservative politics. It is not merely a healthcare issue. It is not merely a religious issue. It is not merely a moral issue. It is a challenge to an entire system of gender expectations.

And when that challenge intersects with demographic panic, the result is a politics that is not simply sexist, but eugenic in its logic.

People hear “eugenics” and imagine something cleanly confined to the past, as if eugenics packed up its little suitcase after World War II and politely left American politics forever.

It did not.

Eugenic thinking has always been broader than forced sterilization, though forced sterilization is certainly one of its most brutal expressions.

And in the United States, forced sterilization was not some obscure fringe horror carried out by a few rogue doctors in a basement full of bad vibes and worse paperwork. It was law. Beginning in the early twentieth century, states passed eugenic sterilization statutes aimed at people deemed “unfit” to reproduce, which usually meant disabled people, poor people, incarcerated people, institutionalized people, people of color, immigrants, unmarried mothers, and anyone else the state decided represented a threat to the nation’s imaginary genetic future. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s sterilization law in Buck v. Bell, allowing the state to sterilize Carrie Buck, a poor young woman institutionalized after being raped, because officials claimed she came from a line of “feebleminded” women. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes gave the project one of its most chilling legal blessings with the line, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” After that, forced sterilization expanded across the country. More than 60,000 Americans were sterilized under these laws. California alone sterilized more than 20,000 people.3

This was not the state making a one-time mistake. This was reproductive control as public policy, dressed up in the language of science, efficiency, morality, and social improvement. The point was never simply medicine. The point was deciding whose reproduction counted as a public good and whose reproduction counted as a public threat.

That is the logic I am talking about here.

At its core, eugenics is about assigning different values to different populations. It asks which people should be encouraged to reproduce, which people should be discouraged, which families deserve investment, and which deaths are acceptable.

Modern eugenics does not always arrive wearing a lab coat and carrying a clipboard. Sometimes it arrives as healthcare neglect. Sometimes it arrives as budget cuts. Sometimes it arrives as moral panic about birth rates. Sometimes it arrives as a maternity desert. Sometimes it arrives as a politician insisting that “we” need more babies while supporting policies that make pregnancy more dangerous for poor women and women of color.

You do not need a formal sterilization program for a society to reveal which populations it values.

Sometimes all you need is an underfunded healthcare system, an abortion ban, and a willingness to let certain women die.

That is why the contradiction is not really a contradiction.

A political movement claims to be deeply concerned about birth rates while tolerating maternity deserts, physician shortages, rising maternal mortality, rising infant mortality, and a healthcare system that leaves pregnant women increasingly vulnerable. At some point, we have to stop describing these outcomes as policy incoherence and start asking what they reveal.

The mistake many people make is assuming that pronatalism is fundamentally about increasing the number of babies.

But when you look at the rhetoric, the policies, and the populations most affected by those policies, a different picture emerges.

The concern is not simply population decline. The concern is demographic change.

The concern is not simply motherhood. The concern is controlling motherhood.

The concern is not simply babies. The concern is which babies.

That is why demographic panic appears so frequently alongside hostility toward immigration. That is why discussions about falling birth rates often focus on feminism rather than healthcare. That is why reproductive autonomy is treated as a cultural threat. That is why policies that make pregnancy more dangerous remain politically acceptable.

The movement is not imagining an abstract future filled with healthy, thriving children. It is imagining a particular future populated by particular kinds of families. And once that becomes the objective, everything else starts to make sense.

The maternity desert stops looking like a policy failure. The disproportionate harm to poor women stops looking accidental. The disproportionate harm to women of color stops looking incidental. The obsession with regulating female sexuality stops looking disconnected.

They become different expressions of the same project.

A project concerned with preserving a particular social order. A project concerned with deciding who should reproduce, under what circumstances, and for whose benefit. A project willing to celebrate motherhood while sacrificing mothers.

So when someone asks, “If Republicans want more babies, why are they creating maternity deserts?”

The answer may be simpler than it first appears.

Because the objective was never babies.

It was always a particular vision of society.

The babies are merely the mechanism through which that vision reproduces itself.

It was failing to tell America that it is a very good country, everyone is proud of it, and none of the difficult things were really its fault.

On July 4, as the United States marked 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the White House released a 162-page report titled Saving America’s Story.1 The report accused the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of abandoning “straightforward historical education and scholarship” in favour of “extreme political activism” and “thinly veiled anti-Americanism.”

Its evidence was that the museum has interpreted American history through subjects including race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, immigration, economic inequality, environmental change, and struggles over national identity.

You know.

History.

The report is the latest escalation in a campaign that began long before the semiquincentennial fireworks. In March 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting what his administration called “improper,” “divisive,” and “anti-American ideology” at the Smithsonian and other federal cultural institutions. The White House subsequently initiated a review of Smithsonian exhibits, educational materials, digital content, and plans for America250, demanding greater alignment with the administration’s vision of American exceptionalism.

The July report is the result of that process.

It portrays the National Museum of American History as an institution captured by political radicals who have transformed a once-patriotic museum into a vehicle for criticism, identity politics, and social justice. It objects to exhibits that complicate the nation’s founding mythology, treat marginalized people as historical actors, or ask visitors to consider how power has shaped American life.

The complaint is not really that the museum has become political. The version of history that the White House is explicitly political in nature.

The complaint is that it has stopped being emotionally supportive.

The White House wants public history to perform a particular kind of affective labour. It wants museums to inspire admiration, gratitude, unity, confidence, and affection for the nation. It wants visitors to leave feeling reassured that America has always been fundamentally good, that its injustices were temporary deviations, and that every movement for equality proves the system eventually worked exactly as intended.

When exhibitions produce discomfort, grief, anger, or scepticism instead, the administration treats that emotional outcome as evidence of ideological corruption.

A History “Worthy of Our Affections”

One of the most revealing ideas in the White House report is that the Smithsonian should present an American story “worthy of our affections.”

That might sound harmless. Even pleasant.

Who objects to affection?

But historians do not begin with a required emotional conclusion and work backward toward the evidence. We do not decide in advance that the story must be inspiring, uplifting, reassuring, or worthy of anyone’s love. We examine the evidence, construct interpretations, and explain what the past reveals.2

Sometimes the result inspires admiration.

Sometimes it produces disgust.

Sometimes the same historical subject deserves both.

A national museum should not have to prove that the country is worthy of affection any more than a medical museum should have to prove that the human body is tasteful. Its purpose is not emotional validation. Its purpose is preservation, interpretation, and public understanding.

Demanding that a museum produce an affectionate national story before the research and interpretation have even begun is not scholarship.

It is commissioning a conclusion and asking curators to decorate it with artefacts.

The difference between the White House’s approach and the Smithsonian’s can be seen in the National Museum of American History’s principal America250 exhibition, In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness. The exhibition presents 250 objects across the museum’s three floors and is grounded in the idea that “the pursuit of our rights has always demanded action.” It traces how Americans have struggled to define and claim the promises of the Declaration of Independence rather than treating those promises as fully realized in 1776.

That is not anti-American.

It is an honest description of American history.

The Declaration proclaimed equality within a society structured by slavery, dispossession, patriarchy, class hierarchy, and political exclusion. It declared that governments derived their power from the consent of the governed while most people living within the new country had no meaningful role in governing it.

Those contradictions do not invalidate the Declaration’s ideals.

They do explain much of the history that followed.

Rights expanded because people organized, resisted, escaped, sued, marched, published, struck, petitioned, disobeyed, and sometimes died demanding that the country honour principles it had already claimed for itself.

Freedom was not delivered intact in 1776.

It was fought over.

A museum that explains that struggle is not attacking the nation. It is explaining how the nation changed to uphold the foundational promises it made when it was created.

But that explanation interferes with the emotional comfort of a triumphalist story. It suggests that the country was not always the hero of every battle for American freedom. Quite often, the hero was the person forcing the country to surrender power it had no intention of sharing.

That is where public history becomes politically dangerous.

Neutrality Is Apparently When Nobody Feels Bad

The White House report relies on a familiar fiction: that older forms of national history were neutral, while newer exhibits addressing race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, or economic inequality are political.

But history that celebrates presidents, wars, territorial expansion, industrialists, military victories, and founding documents is also political.

History that describes western expansion without centering Indigenous dispossession is political.

History that presents industrial growth without discussing labour exploitation is political.

History that discusses American democracy without asking who could vote, own property, testify in court, control their wages, enter professions, marry freely, or make decisions about their own bodies is political.

History that places white men at the centre of the national narrative and everyone else at its decorative edges is intensely political.

It simply spent so long masquerading as the default that many people stopped recognizing it as an argument.

When marginalized people appear only as symbols of progress, national history remains comfortable. They can be displayed as evidence that America overcame its unfortunate mistakes.

The trouble begins when they are treated as historical actors.

Then visitors must confront the fact that Black Americans did not simply receive civil rights. They organized against governments, courts, police departments, employers, schools, and white communities that actively denied them.

Indigenous peoples did not simply experience “change.” They survived invasion, land theft, broken treaties, forced assimilation, child removal, and attacks on sovereignty.

Workers did not simply benefit from industrial growth. They fought employers and governments over wages, hours, safety, and the right to organize.

Queer Americans did not simply become more visible over time. They survived criminalization, medical abuse, censorship, police violence, discrimination, and state neglect.

And women did not slowly receive equality because the country gradually remembered its values.

Women fought the country for rights the country now likes to claim as proof of its greatness.

Women Are Welcome in Patriotic History Until They Start Talking

Women have always been welcome in national history when they can be used as symbols of sacrifice, service, purity, domestic stability, or patriotic devotion.

They can sew the flag.

Nurse the soldier.

Raise the citizen.

Keep the home fires burning.

Work in the factory during wartime, provided they politely hand the job back when the men return.

They can embody the nation, mourn for the nation, reproduce the nation, and sacrifice themselves for the nation.

What they cannot do, at least not without creating trouble, is explain what the nation cost them.

Once women are treated as full historical actors rather than supportive scenery, the familiar national story begins to wobble.

The history of American freedom must then include coverture, under which married women lost independent legal identities. It must include women’s exclusion from voting, higher education, professions, financial autonomy, and political authority. It must include domestic labour treated as natural feminine obligation rather than work.

It must include enslaved women whose labour and reproductive capacity were converted into wealth, Indigenous women facing displacement and family separation, immigrant women exploited in factories and domestic service, and poor women criminalized for surviving outside respectable family structures.

It must include sexual violence, forced sterilization, reproductive coercion, medical experimentation, queer persecution, and the long history of institutions deciding that women could not be trusted to govern their own bodies.

Most dangerously, it must include resistance.

The old patriotic story can accommodate Betsy Ross sewing a flag because she contributes to the nation without challenging the structure of the narrative.

It has more difficulty with women demanding suffrage while a supposedly democratic government arrests and force-feeds them.

It has more difficulty with Black women explaining that race and gender cannot be separated.

It has more difficulty with labour organizers exposing the economic value extracted from women’s bodies.

It has more difficulty with feminists arguing that marriage, sex, motherhood, medicine, and domestic life are political institutions rather than private arrangements existing outside power.

Women are welcome in patriotic history until they start talking about patriarchy.

Then their history becomes “divisive.”

Their analysis becomes “ideology.”

Their anger becomes proof that they hate the country.

The logic has barely changed since the anti-suffrage movement associated women’s political participation with socialism, anarchy, racial equality, family collapse, and national decline. Women’s independence has repeatedly been framed not merely as a challenge to men, but as a threat to social order itself.

That history matters now because the administration is making the same conceptual move.

It is treating the examination of gendered power as an attack on America.

When women’s history becomes anti-American, the problem is not the history.

The problem is the version of America being defended.

The Nation Is Always the Hero in Its Own Customer-Service Survey

The current attack on the Smithsonian is part of a larger attempt to transform America250 from a commemoration into a loyalty ritual.

Trump’s July 4 event on the National Mall mixed patriotic celebration with campaign-style rhetoric, attacks on political opponents, warnings about communism, demands for tighter voting restrictions, and calls for proof-of-citizenship requirements. Several Democratic-led states declined to participate in official programming, performers withdrew, and Reuters/Ipsos polling found widespread concern that the anniversary had become overly political.

There is a certain grim neatness to celebrating the Declaration of Independence by advocating a narrower electorate while accusing museums of politicizing history.

The official America250 narrative increasingly appears to want the nation’s birthday without any awkward discussion of who was excluded from the original party.

It wants the struggle for equality to appear in the story only after it has been safely converted into evidence of national progress.

The government can then celebrate abolition without dwelling on the generations of Americans who defended slavery. It can celebrate women’s suffrage without discussing the government that arrested suffragists. It can celebrate civil rights without confronting the state and local institutions that enforced segregation. It can celebrate queer visibility without acknowledging the laws, police forces, churches, schools, and medical authorities that persecuted queer people.3

In this version of history, marginalized people suffer vaguely, resist nobly, and eventually receive justice from an America that remains the protagonist throughout.

The nation is always the hero in its own customer-service survey.

George Washington Can Survive the Truth

The fight over the President’s House site in Philadelphia demonstrates what this emotional editing looks like in practice.

The site, located near Independence Hall, includes interpretation of the people enslaved by George Washington, including Oney Judge, who escaped from the Washington household in 1796 and resisted attempts to recapture her.

After the Trump administration issued its order against “divisive ideology,” the National Park Service removed slavery-related panels from the site. A court initially required their restoration, but a federal appeals court later permitted the administration to remove them again.

The presence of enslaved people in that interpretation does not erase Washington.

It does not deny his role in the Revolution.

It does not remove the presidency, the Constitution, the military victories, or the political precedents.

It simply refuses to present him as a frictionless national father.

Apparently, even that is too much.

The argument for removing this history depends on the assumption that visitors cannot acknowledge Washington’s political achievements while also confronting his enslavement of human beings. But holding those facts together is not unfair to Washington.

It is the minimum requirement of historical literacy.

George Washington can survive the truth.

Nationalism cannot.

That distinction is becoming increasingly important as museums, parks, archives, and cultural organizations face political pressure and funding losses. This does not always look like formal censorship. Sometimes it looks like a grant application quietly rewritten to reward patriotism, an exhibition panel removed for “balance,” or a museum deciding that a queer-history program is no longer financially survivable.

The language is administrative.

The result is political.

Authoritarianism Has Feelings Too

Authoritarian governments understand that controlling the future requires controlling the stories people tell about the past—and the emotions those stories are allowed to produce.

They do not always begin by closing museums or burning books. Sometimes they begin by establishing an approved emotional relationship to history.

Pride is permitted. Admiration is encouraged. Gratitude is rewarded. Grief may be tolerated if it resolves into patriotic unity. Anger directed at marginalized people can be cultivated. Anger directed at the nation’s institutions becomes dangerous.

The dividing line is not factual accuracy but emotional usefulness. Facts that strengthen national pride can remain. Facts that produce solidarity with the excluded, suspicion of authority, anger about injustice, or recognition of structural inequality become “divisive.”

This is why authoritarian nationalism presents itself as a campaign against negativity. It accuses scholars of tearing the country down or refusing to acknowledge progress.

But history is not required to maintain the nation’s self-esteem. A country does not become weaker because visitors learn that its institutions inflicted harm. It becomes weaker when those institutions must suppress the evidence to preserve their legitimacy.

The American Historical Association and Smithsonian leadership have rejected the report’s premise, defending the independence of historical interpretation and the commitment to evidence-based scholarship. Their defence matters because the dispute is no longer about a few exhibit labels. It is about who gets to determine the emotional purpose of public history.

Museums are not national therapy offices. They do not exist to reassure the country that it is handsome, misunderstood, and doing its best. They exist to preserve evidence, interpret it honestly, and show how the world we inherited was made.

Sometimes that story inspires pride. Sometimes it produces anger, grief, shame, admiration, or relief—often all at once. That is not a failure of public history. It is evidence that the past contained actual human beings rather than patriotic action figures.

A government that demands affection from history is not defending scholarship. It is demanding obedience from the archive. The Smithsonian’s real crime was refusing to provide emotional support for nationalism, treating the United States not as a sacred object requiring reassurance but as a historical subject that can be examined, questioned, and held accountable.

That is exactly what a museum should do—and exactly what authoritarians cannot tolerate.

I’m trying to occasionally write about current events and not just theory or history. - Professor Meredith

The anti-abortion movement told us Dobbs was about returning abortion to “the people.”

That was the sales pitch. That was the respectable version. That was the constitutional fig leaf held delicately over the rotting corpse of Roe v. Wade. After nearly fifty years of demanding that abortion be removed from federal constitutional protection, the argument was supposed to be that voters and states would now decide. Democracy! Federalism! Local control! A thousand little civics-class buzzwords released into the air like patriotic confetti.

But something very inconvenient happened.

Voters kept choosing abortion rights.

Since Dobbs, voters in seventeen states have weighed in on abortion-related ballot measures, sometimes more than once. KFF’s tracker, last updated July 5, 2026, notes that in November 2026 voters in Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia will vote on abortion measures that could change the legal status of abortion in their states, while measures in Idaho and Nebraska are still in the signature-gathering process. In 2024, abortion-rights measures succeeded in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York.

So now we are entering the next phase: if voters approve reproductive freedom, make them vote again. If the ballot measure passes, attack the language. If the courts begin enforcing it, appeal. If clinics start reopening access, target the medication. If abortion cannot be banned cleanly, regulate the infrastructure around it until the right exists mostly as a decorative object.

This is where Missouri becomes the whole country in miniature.

Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment protecting reproductive freedom in 2024. That amendment allowed abortion until fetal viability and protected a broader right to reproductive freedom, including birth control, prenatal care, postpartum care, and respectful birthing conditions. The state had been the first to enforce a ban on abortion after Roe was overturned, but voters chose to put reproductive rights back into the state constitution.

And now Missouri voters are being asked to go back to the ballot box in November 2026 and potentially undo what they already approved.

Missouri’s certified Amendment 3 asks whether the state constitution should be amended to “repeal the 2024 voter-approved Amendment providing reproductive healthcare rights,” including abortion through fetal viability. It would allow abortions in cases of rape and incest under twelve weeks, medical emergencies, and fetal anomalies; allow legislation regulating abortion; ensure parental consent for minors; and prohibit gender transition procedures for minors.

That is not just an abortion measure. That is a political strategy wearing a “protect the children” costume from the bargain bin.

Because notice the bundling. Abortion. Parental consent. Gender-affirming care. “Women’s safety.” “Medical emergencies.” “Minors.” It is a little culture-war casserole baked in the dish of ballot language. The common thread is not life. It is bodily obedience. Fertile bodies must remain governable. Pregnant bodies must remain legally negotiable. Trans bodies must remain politically useful. Children must be invoked whenever adults want to restrict someone else’s autonomy.

This is how ballot language does political work. It does not merely describe policy. It teaches voters how to feel about policy.

A repeal becomes protection. A restriction becomes safety. A ban becomes regulation. A state narrowing access to abortion becomes a state “allowing” abortion under carefully selected circumstances. The voter is not simply being asked a question. The voter is being handed a frame.

That matters because the ballot is not neutral. The ballot is a battlefield with better fonts.

The same thing is happening with medication abortion. While Missouri shows how anti-abortion lawmakers are trying to relitigate voter-approved rights, medication abortion shows how they are trying to control the machinery of care itself. The ACLU reports that during the 2026 legislative session, lawmakers introduced more than eighty bills undermining access to medication abortion. Many of those bills attempt to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol as highly controlled substances, which would place these medications under strict controls even in emergency rooms and labor and delivery units. The ACLU warns that these measures could delay miscarriage management and care for life-threatening postpartum complications.

This is where the slogan “abortion is healthcare” stops being a slogan and becomes a very practical description of how medicine works.

Mifepristone and misoprostol are used in abortion care, yes. They are also used in miscarriage management. Misoprostol is used in obstetric care more broadly. These are not enchanted villain pills that only appear when someone wants to terminate a pregnancy. They are medications. They exist in hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and emergency rooms. They are part of the infrastructure of reproductive healthcare.

So when lawmakers try to treat these drugs like contraband, they are not just targeting abortion. They are making pregnancy itself more dangerous.

That is the point that often gets flattened in abortion coverage. The post-Dobbs crisis is not only that someone seeking an abortion may be denied care. It is also that someone miscarrying may be forced to wait. Someone bleeding may be watched instead of treated. Someone with a wanted pregnancy may discover that the hospital’s legal department has entered the room before the medication has. Someone’s doctor may know what to do medically and still hesitate because the state has made care feel prosecutable.

The chilling effect is not a side effect. It is governance by fear.

This is why the medication-abortion fight and the ballot-language fight belong in the same article. They are not separate stories. They are two parts of the same machine.

One part targets the democratic infrastructure of reproductive rights: ballot initiatives, constitutional amendments, voter-approved protections, and the language voters see when they make decisions.

The other part targets the medical infrastructure of reproductive care: pills, pharmacies, clinicians, emergency rooms, telehealth, and hospital protocols.

Put them together and the strategy becomes obvious. If people vote for reproductive rights, make the right fragile. If courts enforce it, keep litigating. If clinics begin offering care, target the medication. If medication is common, redefine it as dangerous. If women and pregnant people need emergency care, make providers wonder whether care will be treated as a crime.

This is not a clean return to democracy. This is reproductive freedom converted into a subscription service. Every election cycle, every prescription, every emergency room visit, every judicial ruling, every legislative session, the right has to be renewed. And if voters choose wrong, the state simply comes back with a new form, a new phrase, a new exception, a new “safety” provision, a new way to ask the same question until exhaustion does what persuasion could not.

Missouri makes this especially clear because the timeline is so absurd. Voters approved reproductive freedom in 2024. A judge recently struck down several abortion restrictions after finding they conflicted with that voter-approved amendment. Planned Parenthood affiliates said the ruling meant they would begin prescribing abortion pills in Missouri for the first time since 2018. But AP also reported that the ruling is not the final word, because an appeal is expected and abortion is back on the ballot in November 2026.

So a right can be approved, litigated, partially implemented, appealed, and placed back in electoral danger before people have even fully regained access to the care the right was supposed to protect.

That is not democracy working through a difficult issue. That is democracy being forced to run a marathon while the legislature keeps moving the finish line.

And yes, this is exactly where history is useful, because women’s rights have often been treated as provisional. Women can have access to public life, as long as it does not disrupt the household. Women can have education, as long as it does not make them unfeminine. Women can have work, as long as they still absorb the unpaid labor. Women can have sex, as long as they accept the consequences. Women can have rights, as long as those rights do not interfere with the political comfort of people who think female autonomy is a social problem to be managed.

Abortion rights are being treated the same way: not as rights, but as permissions. Not as constitutional protections, but as privileges temporarily extended by a state that reserves the authority to reconsider.

This is why “exceptions” language is so politically slippery. Exceptions for rape, incest, fetal anomaly, and medical emergency are often presented as proof of moderation. But exceptions do not create freedom. They create categories of acceptable suffering. They force people to prove that their circumstances are tragic enough, dangerous enough, innocent enough, or legible enough to deserve care.

And when the medication itself is restricted, even those exceptions become fragile. A medical emergency exception does not mean much if the hospital has to navigate fear, paperwork, and possible legal exposure before treating the person in front of them. A miscarriage exception does not mean much if the medication needed for miscarriage care has been politically stigmatized into delay. A rape exception under twelve weeks does not mean much if the patient has to know she is pregnant, understand the law, find a provider, arrange travel, pay for care, and survive the administrative gauntlet in time.

That is the cruelty hidden inside the word “reasonable.”

The anti-abortion movement understands that total bans are politically vulnerable. Voters have repeatedly shown discomfort with the most extreme consequences of abortion bans, especially when those consequences become visible: children forced to give birth, women denied miscarriage care, doctors afraid to treat emergencies, families confronted with fatal fetal diagnoses and no humane options. So the language shifts. The strategy softens its voice.

That last one is particularly rich. “Another chance” is apparently what we call democracy when men decide that women used it incorrectly the first time.

The danger here is not just that abortion rights may be lost state by state. The danger is that reproductive freedom becomes procedurally exhausted. Rights do not only die in dramatic Supreme Court opinions. Sometimes they are smothered by administrative repetition. Another ballot measure. Another court challenge. Another prescribing restriction. Another waiting period. Another parental consent rule. Another “safety” requirement. Another carefully worded exception. Another legislative session devoted to making care slightly harder to obtain, slightly riskier to provide, and slightly easier to shame.

This is patriarchy with a clipboard.

And that is why we should pay close attention to both the pills and the ballots. The pills tell us whether reproductive healthcare can function in practice. The ballots tell us whether democratic approval will actually be respected when voters choose reproductive freedom. Together, they reveal the post-Dobbs project with uncomfortable clarity.

The goal was never simply to “let the states decide.”

The goal was to make reproductive autonomy unstable. To make abortion access geographically fragmented, medically precarious, legally confusing, and politically reversible. To make every victory temporary. To force patients, doctors, advocates, and voters into a permanent defensive crouch.

Missouri voters already said yes to reproductive freedom. Now they are being asked whether they really meant it. Meanwhile, across the country, lawmakers are targeting the medications that make abortion and miscarriage care possible. That is not a coincidence. That is the next phase of the fight.

They lost the abortion vote in too many places.

So now they are coming for the wording, the pills, the pharmacies, the emergency rooms, and the meaning of care itself.

And they are counting on exhaustion.

That is the part we have to name plainly. This is not only an attack on rights. It is an attack on stamina. They want voters tired of defending the same amendment. They want doctors tired of navigating the same legal threats. They want patients tired of begging for care. They want activists tired of explaining, again and again, that miscarriage care is healthcare, abortion is healthcare, bodily autonomy is not a seasonal privilege, and democracy does not mean rerunning the vote until the state gets the answer it wanted.

They are trying to exhaust us into compliance.

They want the endlessness to feel inevitable. Another bill. Another ballot measure. Another court case. Another medication restriction. Another carefully worded exception. Another round of explaining that women and pregnant people should not need to survive a legal obstacle course before receiving medical care.

But exhaustion is not the same thing as consent.

A right does not become less real because we are tired of defending it. A lie does not become reasonable because it has been printed on a ballot. A medical need does not become controversial because a legislature has discovered another way to make care frightening.

The strategy is repetition. The answer has to be memory.

We remember that voters already chose reproductive freedom. We remember that medication abortion and miscarriage care are part of the same medical reality. We remember that “safety” has often been the language used to disguise control. We remember that rights treated as temporary permissions are not rights at all.

And we refuse to mistake fatigue for defeat.

Trigger Warning: the videos linked in this article contain graphic depictions of violence and death in video games. Please do not watch if that is going to disturb you. Honestly they are not necessary to watch to understand my point, but I felt illustration was important.

A few days ago I stumbled across a discussion on Reddit about the rumored removal of Lara Croft’s elaborate death animations from an upcoming Tomb Raider game.

The original poster was upset.

“If that’s the case,” they wrote, “then that’s really disappointing and sucks.”

While some responses said essentially what I’m saying in this post, but with fewer citations, most responses were largely in agreement.

“The signs so far point to them being absent, which does indeed suck.”

“Oh my, why the heck would they even do this?”

“Lara had violent impalements and deaths in the original games. Removing them is an odd choice.”

One commenter argued that the darker, more mature tone of the reboot trilogy depended on these scenes. Another compared Lara’s deaths to those of male characters like Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil and suggested that people only become uncomfortable when the victim happens to be female.

And that is the point where this conversation usually goes completely off the rails.

Because the argument immediately gets transformed into something nobody actually said.

Nobody is asking for Lara Croft to become immortal or demanding that female protagonists be protected from violence.

Nobody is insisting that adventure games should stop having death animations.

The actual question is much simpler.

Why are so many people upset specifically about losing the elaborate depictions of Lara Croft suffering?

Because that’s what is actually being discussed.

Not danger or challenging gameplay or death itself.

Suffering.

More specifically, the spectacle of suffering.

One commenter offered what may have been the most revealing observation in the entire discussion. Defending the scenes, they wrote that people who enjoy them might simply have a “personal preference” and that some people enjoy “those sounds.”

The comment was intended as a defense.

Instead, it accidentally identified exactly why so many critics have found these sequences uncomfortable for years.

Because once we start talking about enjoying the sounds of a woman gasping, choking, crying out in pain, or dying in increasingly elaborate ways, we are no longer having a conversation about game mechanics.

We are having a conversation about spectatorship. About why certain forms of suffering become entertaining. And especially about why violence against women is so often framed differently than violence against men.

This is where discussions about Tomb Raider tend to become frustrating. Critics point out that Lara Croft’s death scenes often linger on her body, emphasize her pain through detailed voice acting, and transform failure states into miniature spectacles of suffering. Defenders respond that men die in games too.

Of course they do.

Nathan Drake dies.

Kratos dies.

Arthur Morgan dies.

Joel dies.

Leon Kennedy dies.

Nobody disputes that.

The question is not whether male characters experience violence.

The question is whether violence against women is frequently animated, framed, and performed…differently.

Because there is a meaningful difference between a character dying and a game seeming unusually interested in making sure we watch them do it, linger on the impalement and their struggle, while they make sounds that are…not exactly a death rattle.

And once you start looking for that distinction, it becomes surprisingly difficult to ignore.

Violence Is Not Neutral

One of the reasons these conversations become so circular is that people often treat violence as though it is a simple yes-or-no proposition. Either a game contains violence or it does not. Either a character dies or they do not. Once that box has been checked, many assume the conversation is over.

But violence is not a neutral act. It is a visual language.

A character can be shot in a way that is tragic. They can be shot in a way that is horrifying. They can be shot in a way that is funny, exciting, empowering, or disturbing. The event itself may be identical, but the meaning changes depending on how it is framed. Camera angles, animation, sound design, pacing, and performance all influence how audiences understand what they are seeing.

This is not a radical feminist observation. It is one of the most basic principles of visual storytelling.

Film theorist Laura Mulvey famously argued that visual media often position women as objects to be looked at rather than subjects who act. While Mulvey was writing about cinema in the 1970s, her work remains foundational because it directs our attention toward a deceptively simple question: who is being looked at, and how?

That question becomes particularly interesting when violence enters the picture.

Because suffering can also become a spectacle.

A camera can document pain, or it can linger on pain. It can present suffering as an unfortunate consequence of a story, or it can invite audiences to consume that suffering as part of the entertainment itself. The distinction is subtle, but once you notice it, it becomes difficult to ignore.

This is why the common response that “men die too” misses the point so completely.

Of course they do.

The issue is not the existence of violence. The issue is how violence is presented.

Lara Croft and the Spectacle of Suffering

The Tomb Raider reboot trilogy provides perhaps the clearest example of this distinction.

Lara Croft is hardly the first action hero to endure extraordinary amounts of punishment. In the 2013 reboot, she is shot, stabbed, beaten, strangled, mauled by animals, nearly drowns multiple times, falls from impossible heights, and survives injuries that would probably kill several ordinary people. None of this is unusual for an action-adventure protagonist. Indiana Jones built an entire career out of being repeatedly punched in the face.

What drew criticism was not that Lara experienced violence. It was the remarkable amount of attention devoted to depicting her suffering.

Many of the game’s death animations are elaborate set pieces in their own right. Lara is impaled through the neck. She is crushed by machinery. She falls onto spikes. She is caught in traps that leave her twitching, gasping, choking, and writhing before the screen fades to black. The camera frequently moves in close. The audio emphasizes every cry, every ragged breath, every moment of visible pain.

The deaths are not merely functional.

They are performed.

This distinction matters because the game repeatedly transforms failure states into miniature spectacles of female suffering. The player is not simply informed that Lara has died. The player is encouraged to watch it happen.

In isolation, a single death animation might not mean very much. Taken together, however, they reveal a pattern. The game seems unusually interested in Lara’s vulnerability, unusually interested in her pain, and unusually interested in ensuring that the audience experiences both in intimate detail.

The result is an odd contradiction at the heart of the reboot series. Tomb Raider wants Lara to be a capable survivor, but it also repeatedly returns to her suffering as a source of visual fascination.

Compare the Men

The easiest way to identify a pattern is often to compare it to a control group.

Consider some of gaming’s most famous male protagonists.

Nathan Drake dies constantly in Uncharted. Kratos dies. Joel dies. Arthur Morgan dies. Leon Kennedy dies. In terms of raw body count, male characters are subjected to extraordinary levels of violence.

Yet the presentation is often very different.

This distinction is not something critics invented years later. It was visible enough that even Crystal Dynamics seemed aware of it during the marketing campaign for the 2013 reboot.

One of the most controversial moments in the game’s pre-release coverage involved discussion of a scene in which Lara is captured by a scavenger on the island. During the struggle, the man grabs her, restrains her, and runs his hand up the inside of her thigh before she escapes and kills him. The scene sparked immediate criticism because many viewers interpreted it as invoking the threat of sexual assault as part of Lara’s character development.

The studio spent months trying to clarify what audiences had seen. Some representatives insisted the scene was not intended to depict an attempted rape, while others described it as illustrating Lara’s vulnerability and growth into a survivor. Regardless of the official explanation, the controversy itself revealed something interesting: the reboot was repeatedly returning to specifically gendered forms of vulnerability. Lara was not simply endangered. She was endangered as a woman.

What makes this particularly relevant is a comment from Crystal Dynamics’ global brand director, Karl Stewart, who was asked whether the same scene would have worked if the protagonist had been a male character like Nathan Drake from Uncharted. His answer was essentially no. Stewart acknowledged that if it had been Nathan Drake in that situation, the man would not have been rubbing his thigh.

Think about what that admission means for a moment. If the scene would not work with Nathan Drake, then the scene was not simply about danger. It was not simply about survival. It was not simply about establishing stakes. The scene relied on the audience understanding Lara’s body differently than they would understand a male protagonist’s body. The threat was gendered. The vulnerability was gendered. The intended audience reaction was gendered.1

And that is precisely what critics have been arguing all along. Nobody needed to invent a double standard. The developers themselves acknowledged that certain scenes were built around the fact that Lara was a woman in ways that would not apply to a male action hero.

Once you recognize that, it becomes much harder to pretend that all depictions of violence are interchangeable. The question is not whether Lara suffers. The question is why her suffering is so often framed through forms of vulnerability, bodily exposure, and spectacle that would never be applied to a character like Nathan Drake in the first place.

When Nathan Drake falls to his death, the sequence is generally brief and functional. The game communicates failure and resets. The emphasis remains on the gameplay challenge rather than on Nathan’s suffering.

Kratos experiences horrific violence throughout God of War, but the focus tends to remain on action, impact, and consequence. The audience is encouraged to identify with him as an active participant in the violence rather than as an object of observation.

Even Leon Kennedy, frequently invoked in discussions like the Reddit thread that inspired this article, illustrates the distinction rather than disproving it. Defenders often point out that Leon can be dismembered, decapitated, or cut apart by monsters and traps. This is true.

But Leon’s deaths are generally horrifying.

Lara’s deaths are often intimate.

That difference matters.

Horror and suffering are not the same thing. A gruesome death is not automatically a voyeuristic one. A chainsaw cutting a character in half is shocking, but it does not necessarily invite the audience to linger on that character’s pain. The emphasis is on the violence itself.

Many of Lara’s controversial death animations place the emphasis somewhere else. The audience is encouraged to focus on her reaction to the violence. Her breathing. Her sounds. Her body.

The suffering becomes the event.

The Assassin’s Creed Test

Ironically, one of the strongest pieces of evidence for this argument comes from a series that rarely enters the conversation at all.

Beginning with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, players could choose whether to experience the game as Kassandra or Alexios. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla similarly allowed players to play as a male or female version of Eivor.

Because these games were designed around interchangeable protagonists, their approach to violence became revealing.

Kassandra can die.

Female Eivor can die.

They can be stabbed, shot, burned, crushed, and thrown from enormous heights.

Yet their deaths are generally presented in the same manner as those of their male counterparts because the game systems are built to accommodate both.

The violence is not removed.

It is simply no longer gendered.

No elaborate emphasis is placed on female suffering specifically because the same animation must also work for a male protagonist. The player character is treated primarily as an adventurer rather than as a female body.

This is why arguments about “censorship” often feel misplaced. Nobody is asking games to remove danger, failure, injury, or death. The Assassin’s Creed games demonstrate that violent gameplay can coexist perfectly well with female protagonists without transforming their suffering into a spectacle.

The violence remains.

The voyeurism diminishes.

And remarkably few people seem to notice the absence.

When Suffering Becomes Content

One of the most revealing aspects of the Tomb Raider debate is that it exposes a broader cultural pattern that extends far beyond video games.

Scholar Susan Sontag argued in Regarding the Pain of Others that images of suffering are never neutral. The act of watching pain creates a relationship between observer and observed. The viewer becomes a spectator to another person’s vulnerability, and the way that suffering is presented shapes how it is understood.

That observation becomes especially relevant when we consider how often female pain has been transformed into entertainment.

Horror films have long relied on lingering shots of women being stalked, terrorized, and victimized. Crime dramas routinely center stories around violated female bodies. Television, film, advertising, and popular culture have repeatedly found ways to transform women’s suffering into something simultaneously horrifying, titillating, and captivating.

Video games inherited these traditions rather than inventing them.

What makes games unique is that they add participation to the equation.

The player does not simply witness the death animation. They trigger it. They repeat it. They can watch it again and again. Entire YouTube compilations exist for this purpose. Videos dedicated exclusively to Lara Croft’s deaths have accumulated millions of views over the years. Not Tomb Raider gameplay. Not puzzle solutions. Not story analysis.

Deaths.

Just deaths.

And that is where the conversation becomes difficult for defenders of these scenes.

Because if these animations are merely functional indicators of failure, why are people so attached to them?

Why does their removal inspire disappointment?

Why are players lamenting their absence before they have even played the game?

The answer cannot be gameplay. Removing a death animation does not remove a puzzle. It does not remove exploration. It does not remove combat. It does not remove platforming.

The only thing being removed is the spectacle itself.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

What exactly is being lost?

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that objectification occurs when a person is treated less as a subject with agency and more as something to be consumed, used, or observed. While discussions of objectification often focus on sexuality, the concept applies equally well to suffering.

A person can be objectified through pain.

Their vulnerability can become the attraction.

Their suffering can become the product.

That does not mean everyone who enjoys Tomb Raider is secretly harboring violent fantasies. Nor does it mean every depiction of female suffering is inherently exploitative.

But it does mean we should be willing to ask why some forms of violence are presented the way they are, and why some audiences become so attached to those presentations.

Because at a certain point the conversation stops being about action-adventure game design and starts becoming something more concerning.

The Problem Was Never the Deaths

The frustrating thing about these debates is how quickly critics are accused of wanting to sanitize games or protect women from danger. That has never been the argument. Lara Croft can die. She should be able to die. She is an adventurer exploring ancient tombs, fighting mercenaries, surviving disasters, and throwing herself into situations that would make an insurance company quietly fake its own death. Danger is part of the premise. Failure is part of the game. Death is part of the experience.

The question is why some people seem so invested in a very particular kind of death.

Because frankly, as much as I enjoyed the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy, those sequences disgusted me every time they appeared.2 Not because they were violent. Not because they were graphic, but because they felt weirdly fascinated with Lara’s suffering. The lingering camera. The choking. The gasping. The impalements. The prolonged audio of pain. The sense that the game wanted me to spend a few extra seconds watching a conventionally attractive woman suffer before allowing me to reload my save.

That is not the same thing as a character simply dying.

And if the absence of those scenes genuinely ruins the game for you, I think it is fair to ask why. The tombs are still there. The puzzles are still there. The exploration is still there. The combat is still there. Lara Croft is still there. So why is this the thing you’re mourning?

Because if removing a few seconds of elaborately animated throttling, impalement, choking, and moaning somehow destroys the entire experience for you, then the archaeology and ancient myths was never the feature you were most invested in.

And I’m sorry, but at a certain point we can stop pretending this is about “maturity” or “horror” or “respecting the franchise.” If your enjoyment of Tomb Raider depends on briefly watching Lara Croft suffer in ways that are animated, framed, and voice-acted like discount torture porn, that is not fandom.

That is being a fucking creep.

You are not defending artistic integrity.

You are telling on yourself.

Recommended Reading

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Martha Nussbaum, “Objectification”

Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws

Kenzie Gordon, “‘Fight Back or Die’: Rape, Revenge, and the Supernatural in Tomb Raider”

Hannah McInnes, A Feminist Textual Analysis of the 2013 Tomb Raider Video Game

The meme contrasted Taylor Swift and Stevie Nicks.

Taylor Swift, according to the meme, writes “whiny songs about all her exes.”

Stevie Nicks, meanwhile, made her ex play guitar while she sang songs about what an asshole he was.

“And there you have it,” the meme concludes. “The defining difference between Boomers and Millennials.”

The joke is supposed to be that women used to be tougher. Cooler. Less emotional. Less self-absorbed. More willing to bite back.

The problem is that the meme accidentally reveals something much more interesting. It demonstrates one of patriarchy’s favorite tricks. Women are always being pitted against other women.

Sometimes older women.

Sometimes younger women.

But always other women.

Women are found wanting in comparison to the women who came before them. At the exact same time, they are expected to replace those women because the culture has decided the previous generation is too old to remain useful. A younger woman is told she will never be as good as Stevie Nicks. Meanwhile Stevie Nicks is informed that she’s old now and the industry has found a newer model.

It’s a remarkable scam.

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Women are simultaneously judged against previous generations and expected to supersede them. The standards contradict each other entirely.

That doesn’t matter, because the point was never consistency of message, the point was to put women in competition with each other. It’s a strategy where patriarchy convinces women to mean-girl each other into dust so it has to do far less work keeping us in our place. Why bother wasting energy reinforcing cages yourself when you can convince the people inside them to police each other?

So women spend our time ranking each other:

• Who is prettier.

• Who aged correctly.

• Who is too emotional.

• Who is not emotional enough.

• Who is empowered.

• Who is cringe.

• Who is authentic.

• Who is manufactured.

• Who is a feminist icon.

• Who is secretly ruining feminism.

And while we are busy sorting women into acceptable and unacceptable categories, the system that created those categories gets to sit back and enjoy the show.

Women fighting women has always been one of patriarchy’s favorite labor-saving devices.

That is why this kind of comparison matters, because it isn’t really about music. It’s about teaching women that every other woman is the competition. Ironically, Taylor Swift understands this perfectly.

In fact, she wrote an entire song about it.

The song is called Clara Bow.

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Most commentary around Clara Bow focused on fame. Certainly fame is part of it. But the song is really about replacement.

The song begins with Clara Bow, the silent film star who became one of Hollywood’s first “It Girls.”

Then it moves to Stevie Nicks.

Then it moves to Taylor Swift herself.

At every stage, a young woman is told she resembles the woman who came before her. She is assured that she is the next version. The better version. The newer version. The woman who will finally get it right. What sounds like praise is actually a warning, because every woman being compared is also being replaced.

The executive who says, “You look like Clara Bow,” is not celebrating Clara Bow. He is telling a young woman that Clara Bow is old news.

The executive who says, “You look like Stevie Nicks,” is not celebrating Stevie Nicks. He is telling a young woman that Stevie Nicks can be replicated.

And when the song finally reaches Taylor Swift herself, the message becomes obvious.

Taylor Swift is not the end of the process, she is merely the latest woman to pass through it. Someday another young artist will be told she looks like Taylor Swift. A point Taylor Swift has made before in songs she wrote earlier in her career.

The cycle will always begin again. The song explicitly uses Clara Bow, Stevie Nicks, and Taylor Swift as examples of how women are continuously compared, marketed, and replaced by the entertainment industry.

That is exactly what this meme is doing.

The meme thinks it is celebrating Stevie Nicks.

It isn’t.

It’s using Stevie Nicks as a stick to hit another woman with and if you genuinely admire Stevie Nicks, then you should probably listen to what Stevie Nicks actually says.

Stevie Nicks also explained that she was Stevie Nicks, Perry was Katy Perry, and that the entire idea of women competing with each other was ridiculous.

Which makes sense.

Because Stevie Nicks remembers how people talked about Stevie Nicks.

The most frustrating thing about nostalgia is that it tends to erase the unpleasant parts.

People now talk about Stevie Nicks as though she emerged from the Pacific Ocean in a cloud of moonlight, immediately recognized as one of the greatest songwriters of her generation.

That is not what happened.

Stevie Nicks spent years being criticized for being emotional, writing about her relationships, being “dramatic,” making music that was “too personal.”

Sound familiar?

It should.

Those are precisely the criticisms now directed at Taylor Swift.

The meme also relies on a nostalgic fantasy of the 1970s that bears very little resemblance to the actual 1970s. The decade did not consist of fearless women effortlessly humiliating men while society applauded.

The 1970s were still deeply misogynistic. Women faced workplace discrimination, routine sexual harassment, media sexism, and constant scrutiny of their appearance, relationships, and ambitions. Female artists were not exempt from those dynamics. They lived inside them.

Stevie Nicks was not somehow liberated from the gendered criticism that follows female artists. The difference is that forty years later people have forgotten.

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is often treated as one of the greatest albums ever recorded because the members transformed their collapsing relationships into art. Stevie Nicks wrote Dreams. Lindsey Buckingham wrote Go Your Own Way. The band effectively conducted an emotional civil war through songwriting while standing on the same stage.

Today we call that genius.

Yet somehow when Taylor Swift writes about heartbreak, relationships, resentment, grief, or memory, we are still treated to endless conversations about whether women should really be talking about their exes.

The double standard becomes obvious the moment we introduce male musicians. Nobody hears Bruce Springsteen write about heartbreak and concludes he is emotionally unstable. When Bob Dylan wrote about relationships no one said he was “obsessed” with his exes. Don Henley, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, or half the history of rock music has been writing about love and loss for decades and no one has concluded that men should maybe stop writing about romance.

That criticism is reserved almost exclusively for women.

Taylor Swift herself has pointed out that male artists write about former partners constantly without attracting the same scrutiny. When men do it, it is art. When women do it, it becomes evidence against their character.

What’s particularly absurd is that Swift and Nicks are not opposites in any meaningful way. They both belong to a very similar artistic tradition, in fact. Both are narrative songwriters who use autobiographical material that transforms their personal experiences into stories about ambition, power, memory, love, loss, aging, and identity.

Both have spent decades having journalists ask questions that male songwriters rarely receive and repeatedly had their achievements reduced to their relationships.

The difference is largely chronological.

Stevie Nicks is old enough to be remembered fondly.

Taylor Swift is contemporary enough to still be irritating.

One day that will reverse.

Some future twenty-two-year-old singer will be described as “the next Taylor Swift.” And somewhere in the comments, a person who currently hates Taylor Swift will explain that young women today simply aren’t as good as Taylor Swift was back in the day.

Because patriarchy is profoundly uncreative. It recycles the same stories over and over.

The women change. The script does not.

That is why I refuse to participate in these comparisons. Taylor Swift is not lesser than Stevie Nicks because she is younger. But she is also not better than Stevie Nicks because she arrived later.

Stevie Nicks remains Stevie Nicks.

Taylor Swift remains Taylor Swift.

The need to rank them is the problem.

And women, especially, need to stop doing that work for patriarchy.

The culture already spends enough time telling women they are too young, too old, too emotional, too ambitious, too loud, too soft, too sexual, not sexual enough, too successful, not successful enough.

It does not need our help.

Every minute spent fighting other women is a minute not spent challenging the structures that benefit from that fight. The competition is rigged, no one wins it except the patriarchy that set it up in the first place.

The meme’s greatest irony is that it chose the one artist who literally wrote a song explaining why the meme is nonsense.

The joke wasn’t on Taylor Swift, it was on everyone who didn’t realize Clara Bow had already explained the trick they missed.

Listening recommendation this week:

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It is an ingenious use of technology. It is also a quietly devastating commentary on American public memory.

If you spend an afternoon walking the National Mall, you will encounter presidents, generals, founding fathers, wars, and monuments to political power in all its various forms. You can stand beneath Abraham Lincoln. You can gaze up at the Washington Monument. You can move from memorial to memorial tracing a familiar narrative about the people who built, defended, and shaped the nation.

And yet it is surprisingly easy to leave with the impression that America was built almost entirely by men.

This, naturally, comes as something of a surprise to the women who were actually there and the historians who study them.

The timing of the Smithsonian project is particularly striking because it arrives amid an increasingly bitter political struggle over museums, monuments, exhibits, school curricula, and public history. Across the country, politicians, activists, educators, and judges are fighting over how slavery should be discussed, how Indigenous history should be taught, whether certain books belong in schools, and what stories museums should tell about the American past.

At first glance, these debates can seem unrelated. What does an augmented reality exhibit about women have to do with disputes over slavery, race, or national identity?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Both controversies are ultimately asking the same question:

Who gets to be remembered as part of America?

That question sits at the center of nearly every modern conflict over history. We often imagine that history is simply a collection of facts waiting patiently to be discovered and preserved. In reality, there is an important difference between history and memory. The past happened. Memory is what survives.

That distinction matters because public memory is not a mirror reflecting the past. It is a construction project.1

Every monument represents a choice. Every museum exhibit represents a choice. Every historical marker, preserved building, documentary, and textbook represents a choice. Someone decides which stories deserve preservation, which deserve emphasis, and which can safely remain in the background.

The National Mall itself demonstrates this process. Most Americans experience it as a natural landscape, almost beyond politics. Yet every monument standing on the Mall exists because someone successfully argued that a particular person, event, or idea deserved physical representation in the symbolic heart of the nation.

The landscape tells a story.

Imagine arriving from another planet and touring Washington with no prior knowledge of American history. You would quickly learn that presidents are important. Military leaders are important. Wars are important. Political leadership and state power appear to be the primary engines of historical change.

What you would learn much less about are the women who organized reform movements, fought for voting rights, built schools, transformed public health, challenged segregation, reshaped workplaces, and expanded the boundaries of citizenship itself.

The issue is not that these women were absent from history.

The issue is that they were largely absent from commemoration.

For much of American history, women occupied an unusual place in the national imagination. Americans were perfectly comfortable representing women as symbols. Liberty appears atop domes and monuments. Justice stands in courthouses across the country. Columbia once served as a national personification of the United States itself.

Female figures were everywhere.

Actual women were harder to find.

The distinction is revealing. Symbols do not demand recognition for political achievements. Symbols do not complicate national myths. Symbols cannot ask uncomfortable questions about who receives credit for building a nation.

Real women can.

That is why the Smithsonian project matters. The women appearing through augmented reality are not new discoveries rescued from obscurity. Historians have long known about figures like Abigail Adams, Ida B. Wells, Frances Perkins, Pauli Murray, Dolores Huerta, and countless others. Their contributions were never hidden from the historical record.

What was often missing was public recognition.

This raises a larger question. If these women were always there, how did they become so difficult to see?

The answer challenges one of our favorite assumptions about history.

We like to imagine that history functions as a meritocracy. The most important people naturally rise to the top. The most significant events become the stories we tell. Given enough time, truly consequential figures are remembered while less important ones fade away.

It is an appealing idea.

It is also largely nonsense.

The historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that historical silences are produced rather than accidental. At every stage of creating public memory, decisions are made about what gets recorded, preserved, archived, funded, displayed, taught, and commemorated. Some voices become louder. Others become quieter. Some disappear altogether.

Think about how many opportunities there are for people to vanish from the historical record. Someone must create documents. Someone must preserve them. Someone must decide which archives deserve funding. Someone must build museums. Someone must design exhibits. Someone must write textbooks. Someone must fund it all.

Power exists at every stage.

This helps explain why women so often appeared in history as supporting characters rather than protagonists. For centuries, the institutions responsible for producing and preserving knowledge were overwhelmingly controlled by men. Men dominated political office, universities, archives, publishing, and education. The result was not necessarily a coordinated effort to erase women. More often, it reflected a system that treated men’s activities as inherently historical while viewing women’s activities as personal, domestic, or secondary.

Politics counted as history.

War counted as history.

Diplomacy counted as history.

The labor of raising families, sustaining communities, organizing reform campaigns, building social networks, and caring for the vulnerable often did not.

This is one reason women’s history emerged as a field in the first place. Historians did not suddenly discover that women existed. They began asking different questions.

Instead of focusing exclusively on presidents and legislators, they examined activists, teachers, labor organizers, nurses, journalists, reformers, and ordinary women whose lives rarely appeared in traditional narratives. The remarkable thing was not how difficult these women were to find.

The remarkable thing was that they had been there all along.

Once historians started looking, they found women everywhere.

Women organized abolitionist societies. Women built labor movements. Women pushed for public health reform. Women challenged segregation. Women fought for suffrage. Women expanded educational opportunities. Women transformed social welfare systems.

The story had always existed.

The spotlight simply pointed somewhere else.

This helps explain why contemporary debates about history have become so emotionally charged. What is often described as a battle over facts is usually a battle over emphasis.

Nobody disputes that women existed.

Nobody disputes that slavery existed.

Nobody disputes that Indigenous nations existed.

The conflict emerges when those stories move from the margins toward the center.

Because when the cast of history expands, the story changes.

A nation supposedly built by a handful of extraordinary men becomes a nation shaped by millions of people whose names never appeared on monuments. Political change begins to look less like the work of great individuals and more like the result of collective struggle, activism, labor, and social movements.

Not everyone finds that version of history comforting.

Which brings us to the memory wars.

One of the strangest features of modern political discourse is the number of people who insist that history has suddenly become political. Museums are political now. Schools are political now. Libraries are political now. History itself, we’re told, has been corrupted by ideology.

Yet the moment you examine the claim closely, it collapses.

History has always been political.

The decision to build a monument is political. The decision to preserve a battlefield is political. The decision to omit slavery from a museum exhibit is political. The decision to include it is political.2

The difference is not that politics suddenly entered history.

The difference is that more people are now arguing about whose politics should shape public memory.

For generations, many Americans encountered a version of national history that emphasized presidents, military leaders, industrialists, and political institutions. That narrative was not entirely wrong. Those people mattered.

The problem was that it was incomplete.

Women became supporting characters. Indigenous people often appeared only when Europeans encountered them. Enslaved people were frequently discussed as objects rather than historical actors. Workers appeared when they rioted and disappeared when they organized. LGBTQ people often vanished entirely.

The resulting narrative felt natural because it was familiar.

But familiar and natural are not the same thing.

This is where nostalgia enters the story.

We often think of nostalgia as harmless affection for the past. It arrives wrapped in vintage photographs, old television shows, family stories, and promises of simpler times. Yet nostalgia is not history. Nostalgia is editing.

To be nostalgic for a period is not to remember everything about it. It is to select certain features, elevate them above everything else, and present the resulting picture as representative of the whole.

The American founding offers a perfect example.

Popular memory often presents the Revolutionary generation as a collection of brilliant statesmen gathered together to create liberty, democracy, and a new nation. The story is filled with powdered wigs, stirring speeches, and extraordinary men debating timeless principles beneath the glow of Enlightenment reason.

The problem is not that this story is false.

The problem is that it is incomplete.

The nostalgic version of the founding often has remarkably little to say about the women who sustained households, businesses, and communities during the Revolution. It tends to minimize the role of enslaved people whose labor underwrote much of the colonial economy. Indigenous nations frequently appear only at the margins despite the fact that the Revolution dramatically altered their futures. The contradictions between liberty and slavery are often treated as unfortunate footnotes rather than central tensions within the founding itself.

The result is not history.

It is a highlight reel.

And highlight reels are powerful because they transform selective memory into common sense.

The same process that leaves women out of monuments often leaves them out of nostalgic narratives. The same people who insist that feminism disrupted a natural social order frequently describe historical narratives centered on women as ideological distortions. The familiar story becomes the natural story. The natural story becomes the true story.

Anyone who points out what was left out is accused of rewriting history.

But history is always being rewritten. That is not a flaw in scholarship. It is the purpose of scholarship.

Historians revise interpretations because new evidence emerges, because new questions are asked, and because people previously excluded from the narrative become visible. The alternative would be freezing historical interpretation permanently in place.

That is not history.

That is dogma.

And this is why the fight matters.

Public memory does not merely reflect society. It helps shape it.

Historical narratives influence what feels normal, what feels possible, and what feels legitimate. If women disappear from public memory, gender equality can appear like a modern invention rather than part of a long historical struggle. If slavery is minimized, racial inequality can seem accidental rather than historical. If queer people vanish from the story, LGBTQ rights can be portrayed as entirely new claims rather than part of a longer fight for citizenship and recognition.

The stories we tell about the past shape what we believe is possible in the present.

This is why arguments about museums inevitably become arguments about education, voting rights, reproductive healthcare, race, gender, and citizenship. These debates may appear unrelated, but they are all connected by a deeper question:

Who belongs in the national story?

The Smithsonian’s Unhidden Heroines project works because it makes an absence visible. The women appearing through augmented reality are not ghosts rescued from oblivion by modern technology. They are evidence. Evidence that there is a difference between what happened and what was commemorated.

And once you notice that difference, it becomes difficult to stop noticing it.

You begin to see the gaps everywhere.

The United States is approaching its 250th birthday. Americans have and will continue to spend enormous amounts of time arguing about the nation’s past, celebrating parts of it, condemning parts of it, and debating what kind of country they believe themselves to be.

That process is not unusual. Nations are constantly renegotiating their memories and identities.

The danger emerges when we mistake inherited narratives for complete ones.

The women highlighted by the Smithsonian were never missing from history. Their absence from the commemorative landscape was not evidence of insignificance. It was evidence of selection.

The same is true of countless others whose stories have been marginalized, minimized, or excluded from public memory.

History is full of ghosts.

Not because they disappeared, but because memory is always selective.

Every generation inherits a version of the past. The responsibility of historians, educators, museums, and citizens is not to preserve that version unchanged. It is to examine how it was constructed, whose interests it served, and whose voices were left out.

Because the real question facing America is not whether history should change.

History has always changed.

The real question is whether our understanding of the past will become larger or smaller.

Whether the national story will grow more complex or more simplistic.

Whether more people will be allowed to see themselves reflected in it, or fewer.

The fight over museums, monuments, and memory is not really a fight about what happened.

It is a fight about who gets to matter when we tell the story.

And that story, like the nation itself, remains under active renovation.