The War on Women Is a Fascist Trademark

The War on Women began slowly. First, the new administration began discouraging women from attending college, pushing them to remain at home, caring for as many children as they could produce. Then, lawmakers targeted abortion and reproductive rights, along with a feverish focus on the demonization of the trans community. Next, women began losing high-profile positions in both the government and private sector, as both scrambled to blame women for the myriad problems facing the nation. Eventually, women were banned from holding leadership positions in law, academia, politics, and medicine.

If any of that sounds familiar, you might be surprised to discover that I’m not talking about the U.S. in 2025, but Nazi Germany in the years immediately following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

A lot has been made of Trump’s destruction of the federal government in just over eight weeks in office, which has drawn comparisons to Adolf Hitler’s complete remaking of the German government—taking it from a democracy to a dictatorship—in a mere 53 days. Like Hitler, Trump has been pushing to elevate the executive branch over the two other “co-equal” branches of government, and his complete dismissal of any mechanism that would enforce checks and balances.
But Trump and the Republicans are also following the Nazi playbook when it comes to rolling back the progress women have made since the “Women’s Lib” movement of the 1970s, removing women from leadership positions in the federal workforce and encouraging them to return to domestic life, a false ideal that’s been embraced by TikTok trad wives and right-wing ideologues like Vice-President JD Vance and Senator Josh Hawley.

Our laws that empower and protect us are extremely vulnerable right now, as history has shown us. Back in 1919, German women won the right to vote, a full year ahead of their American counterparts. The first time they voted, women took 10 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, the German parliament. In 1931, women comprised 35 percent of the workforce, and by early 1933, women held 37 seats (out of 577) in parliament.

But that November, Nazis were one of the few parties that didn’t run a single woman candidate. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, justified their misogyny by claiming, “It is necessary to leave to men that which belongs to men” and “The role of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world.”

In 1934, the year after the Nazis took power, not a single woman remained in the German parliament.

We have to wonder whether American women—in the 21st century, no less—are facing a similar fate, when the GOP has proposed the SAVE Act, a bill that could take away many women’s right to vote. If it passes, the law requires voters to show proof of citizenship by providing documentation in person at the time they register to vote or update their voter information. “Proof of citizenship” can only be shown by producing a passport or a birth certificate with a voter’s current name on it. While some 43 percent of Americans don’t have ready access to such documents, 69 million of them are women who changed their surname after they got married. Given that more women than men tend to vote for Democrats—in 2016, Hillary Clinton won their vote by 13 points; Joe Biden, in 2020, by 15; and Kamala Harris, in 2024, by 10—it’s easy to see how the SAVE Act would intentionally disenfranchise women voters. At the very least, it would make for a happy accident for Republicans.

This virulently misogynist overhaul should come as little surprise from Trump, a man found liable for “sexual abuse.” The president eagerly nominated four men credibly accused of violence against women for cabinet positions, three of whom were confirmed by the Senate. In fact, sexual harassment and abuse of women would appear to be a job qualification. Even Elon Musk, the president’s partner in crime, had allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation wielded against him by eight former employees.

And Trump’s administration goes out of its way to excuse and enable sexual predators and abusers: They reportedly lobbied Romania to lift the travel ban against Andrew and Tristan Tate  and allow them to leave the country, where they’d been on house arrest awaiting trial for charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. Most recently, the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche fired the DOJ’s Pardon Attorney, Liz Oyer, for refusing to reinstate the gun rights of actor Mel Gibson, who has a history of violence against women.

Oyer was far from the first woman to be pink-slipped. Firing the first woman to head up a branch of the U.S. military was so high on Trump’s list of priorities that he acted on it within 24 hours of his inauguration, terminating U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Linda L. Fagan. He claimed part of the reason was due to Fagan’s “excessive focus” on diversity. Three weeks later, with little warning, the administration evicted Fagan from her home. Trump also canned the first woman to ever hold a permanent seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Lisa Franchetti. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former FOX News host accused of both sexual assault and domestic abuse, called Franchetti, who had 40 years in the military under her belt, a “DEI hire.” Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN) called FEMA administrator Diane Criswell a “DEI hire,” despite her stellar résumé working with disaster relief.

In just six weeks, the Trump administration has sent a loud-and-clear message: Every white cis man is inherently qualified for the job he holds. Everyone else got their job because of diversity initiatives.

The Trump administration has declared an all-out War on Women, with more horrendous news coming down the pike each day.

The House Judiciary GOP, headed by Jim Jordan (himself, credibly accused of ignoring sexual assault), thought it would be hilarious to Rickroll the country by claiming he was releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files, which were thought to contain details of powerful men sexually abusing underage women. The joke did not land.

The same day he took office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at “ending radical and wasteful” government DEI programs, of which women, and white women in particular, were among the biggest beneficiaries. NASA was ordered to scrub any content involving women in leadership roles from their website. The National Science Foundation has a list of “hot button” words it is reportedly cross-referencing against grant proposals to determine denials. One of the words is “women.”

It wasn’t just in government that German women were pushed out of the workforce and back into the home, in alignment with the Nazi’s “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” movement, which translates to “children, kitchen, church.” The Nazis’ demonization of working women spread to multiple fields and foreshadowed the rise of the popular “trad wife” trend on social media.
Beginning in 1933, women were discouraged from attending university. By 1936, they were banned from high-ranking judicial roles, such as judge and prosecutor, and were forbidden from practicing medicine. In Weimar Germany, women held only one percent of university posts. After the Nazis came to power, women were banned entirely from roles in academic administration. In 1942, the Nazis refused to allow a woman to serve as the director of a scientific institute, even though there weren’t any male candidates who had applied.

The year before the Nazis seized power, more than 44,000 German women applied for permission to get an abortion; more than 34,000 of those requests were granted. Between 1935 and 1940, only 9,701 abortions were approved. Hitler’s regime locked down women’s reproductive rights, outlawing contraception—even prohibiting the public discussion of contraception—and declaring abortion a “crime against the state” punishable by death.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, 18 states have outlawed access to mifepristone—the abortion pill—and ten others have severely restricted how it can be used. On Monday, March 17, a Houston-area midwife was arrested and charged with performing illegal abortions—a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison in a state with a near-total abortion ban. A Louisiana woman is currently charged with giving her teenage daughter mifepristone and faces five years in prison. Much of the discussion around abortion and contraception on the right these days centers on the idea that women are being “coerced” into abortions or birth control, as if being a mother is a natural state that women must be pressured to abandon against their will. Trump’s pick to head up the FDA, Marty Makary, recently expressed concerns that mifepristone “could be used for coercion” in the wrong hands.

Now that 19 states have outlawed abortion, the GOP has turned their sights to birth control. The Senate has twice blocked the Right to Contraception Act, which would have established a legal right to access to contraception in every state in the union. Meanwhile, 12 states have also blocked bills aimed at bolstering their citizens’ right to birth control.

Equally as alarming, in February, Trump ordered the CDC to scrub thousands of pages of health information from its website, including data and guidance about contraception. And a key goal of Project 2025—the proposed script for the administration—is to have abortion removed from classification as “health care” and to revoke FDA approval of mifepristone. Project 2025 also seeks to render contraception inaccessible to women, by allowing employer-provided insurance to opt out of covering it and only allowing the government to fund programs that “provide information about the importance of marriage and family.”

Even the talking points used by the Nazis to convince women to remain barefoot and pregnant are echoed by the right-wing anti-DEI machine. At an opening of a women’s exhibition in Berlin in 1933, Goebbels told his audience, “German women have been transformed in recent years. They are beginning to see that they are not happier as a result of being given more rights but fewer duties. They now realize that the right to be elected to public office at the expense of the right to life, motherhood, and her daily bread is not a good trade.”

What’s worrisome: In a 2021 podcast interview, VP Vance said that women “pursuing … gender equality is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery.” Sen. Hawley sat by and smiled approvingly while Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butker advised women to “maybe just step aside and prioritize their family and spend time with their children and raise their family.” Same sentiment, fewer words.

Lest we think right-wing politicians like Vance and Hawley are alone in their obsession with masculinity, the Nazis stoked fear about the “masculinization of women,” and the “feminization of men.” Within days of taking office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at banning trans girls from participating in women’s sports. When Maine government Janet Mills told Trump, in a roomful of governors, that she would abide by state and federal law and not his order, Trump sicced no fewer than six federal agencies on Maine to “investigate” the state. Worse, the administration has begun moving trans women in federal prisons to men’s units, despite court orders blocking those moves.

The right-wing fascination with “feminine” women, homemaking, and raising “godly” children is a direct throwback to the Nazi idea that Aryan women should stay home and contribute to the race by having as many white children as possible. Women who birthed multiple children were celebrated as heroes, and women who went so far as to have four or more children were actually awarded medals.

The U.S. may not be giving out medals to women who are prodigious in childbearing (yet), but the idea of a “baby bonus,” a lump sum paid to Aryan Germans for each child they produced, Vance wants to increase the child tax credit to $5,000 per child, 150 percent larger than the current CTC. While such a tax credit would undoubtedly be helpful to families struggling to raise children in the current economic climate, Vance’s motives seem to be more grounded in wanting more children in America in general, which he made clear in his first speech as VP in January.

I want more babies in the United States of America. … I want more happy children in our country and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.

Just as the Nazis urged women to take a back seat to men, Vance’s digs at “childless cat ladies” and vilification of working moms aims to disparage women who chose to work outside the home. Vance is joined by Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation—and former Real World cast member—in his weird fascination with babies. Duffy recently issued a memo saying his department will “prioritize projects and goals that … give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Duffy has six children with Real World San Francisco cast member Rachel Duffy.

After World War II, it took decades for German women to get back the rights taken from them by the Nazi regime. It wasn’t until 1977 that married German women were allowed to work outside the home without their husband’s permission. How far will the Trump administration go to roll back women’s rights? And will the 53 percent of white women who voted for Donald Trump side with him in this fight? If history tells us anything, it’s that women who embrace fascism to satisfy their own prejudices often lose their own freedom in the process.