by Anne Marie Goetz
It is significant that the first mass mobilization that will take place immediately after Trump’s inauguration has been called by women. Though it has now morphed into a display of the breadth of resistance to the growing assault on democratic institutions, it will be expressed through the lens of women’s rights. The Women’s March has made diversity and inclusiveness a central theme. But the fore-fronting of women’s voice is no accident after an electoral process that saw the almost gleeful vilification and character evisceration of an exceptionally qualified female candidate by the alt-right, not to mention the subsequent surfacing of growing evidence that illegal methods and external support was used to undermine her campaign. Amplifying women’s voices in resistance to threats to democracy and equality is urgent because Trump’s victory has threatened to usher in dangerous reversals in women’s rights in law and public policy but also in popular culture. Trump’s campaign rhetoric, personal life scandals, and penchant for beauty pageants indicate a throwback preference for a time when women were mainly treated as sex objects, and where men enjoyed impunity for sexual harassment and abuse. His preference for older white and extremely conservative men in his Cabinet, some of whom have declared intentions to radically restrict or put an end to abortion rights and who have shown no interest in women’s rights issues in the past, are ominous signs. Women around the country, women of all races and classes, ethnicities and sexualities, are mobilized to hold fast against the contempt for gender equality that has, so far, been expressed by the Trump transition team and his early nominations.
Implications for women’s rights domestically
Why is it so urgent to raise women’s voices in opposition to Trump’s administration? A misleading narrative has been developed to suggest that women are fundamentally divided and that because 53% of white women who voted chose Trump, there is no gender dimension to his victory. This obscures the fact that Hillary Clinton, who won the majority of ALL votes cast also won the majority of women’s votes (54% to 42%) – a majority that is reacting with alarm at early signals of his administration’s intentions.
Dangers posed by Trump’s administration to women on the domestic front include, most immediately, the consequences for women of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which will enable insurance companies once again treat women’s gender as if it is a medical liability – and overcharge them. Trump’s intention to appoint highly conservative, even reactionary, individuals to the Supreme Court carries a long-standing explicit alt-right agenda to attack abortion rights. Issues of violence against women have simply not received policy attention by Trump or his appointees. On the contrary, the fact that several of his appointees have been charged with domestic violence, and Trump’s own boasting about abuse of women, indicate a return to misogynistic privileging of male sexual preference and domination. This bodes ill for respect for the rights and security of sexual minorities as well. Equal pay has not been mentioned. The vague, and since neglected, mention of maternity leave at the Republican Convention seems one of many cynical ploys for women’s attention, and also reinforces traditional expectation that just mothers, not both parents, have parenting responsibilities. Finally, the paucity of women and complete absence of feminists among Trump’s Cabinet choices is a sign of disdain for women’s leadership and a setback for the country’s slow progress in building women’s roles in governance.
Implications for the US’s Work on Women’s Rights Internationally
Trump’s corrosive effect on women’s rights is not just a domestic problem. Around the world, the US has been a standard-bearer for women’s rights in its foreign aid and also in its diplomatic, security, conflict prevention and peacebuilding work. Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the US developed a National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, committing a wide range of government departments to actions and expenditures to ensure that women participate in conflict resolution, and to support efforts to address their immediate and long-term needs when they are victims of conflict. In foreign policy and in US aid, Clinton embedded the understanding that women’s well-being everywhere is a developmental and international security priority, because where levels of violence against women are low, and where women are educated and employed, countries prosper and do not go to war. Of course, the US still has a long way to go in modeling feminist foreign policy and aid policy – that role has been played so far by Nordic countries. But its role has been significant nonetheless. In global and regional inter-governmental forums, the US negotiates agreements in ways that include women and defend their rights. The US has been a global champion of efforts to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS in ways that empower women. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief (Pepfar) – introduced by George W. Bush – has been a highly successful initiative tangibly holding back the spread of HIV, supporting victims, and removing stigma. Alarmingly, on January 13 the transition team sent a series of irritably-phrased questions to State department and Pentagon officials questioning the value of the US’s aid to Africa, including the Pepfar program. This follows an ominous pattern of memos seeking information foreign aid and policy that reveal startling ignorance about the US’s investments in development and human rights as well as, potentially, destructive intent. The first of these demanded names of individuals working on climate change in the Energy Department. The second, ominously, raised questions about the type of work the US does to promote gender equality overseas.
We do not yet know what position the Trump administration will take in these areas. But great damage has already been done. The credibility of the US in the field of women’s rights has been profoundly undermined by the fact that Trump himself apparently enjoys impunity for sexual harassment, while neither he nor his colleagues not even mentioned, let alone prioritized, gender equality policy either domestically or in the US’s foreign aid.
Trump’s unapologetic and persistent admiration of Vladimir Putin may, among many other harms, open space for a broader and coordinated clawback of women’s rights in international arenas. We now know that Trump’s relationship with Putin is much more than the unsolicited fanboy adulation that Trump showers on strongmen all over – for instance the murderous Duterte in the Philippines. The hints of at least indirect collusion in undermining the election, the suggestions that Trump is compromised in relation to Putin, whatever the truth of the stories, have already done permanent damage to the legitimacy of his presidency. We do not know how far the collusion goes, and the stakes are very high (particularly for eastern Europe and the Baltic states) if this is behind Trump’s statements regarding the obsolescence of NATO. The stakes are also high in relation to women’s rights, and women’s rights will be an early and easy giveaway if that is the dynamic that Trump intends to introduce. Russia is the driver behind an increasingly focused and structured defense of ‘the family’ – the nuclear traditional heteronormative version – at the UN. Since 2012 Russia has organized a growing set of conservative bedfellows—as diverse as former socialist states, Catholic-majority countries, Muslim majority countries and even theocratic states, plus the Vatican – into the ‘Group of Friends of the Family’ at the UN. This groups negotiates as a bloc to stop or stall any advances in women’s reproductive freedoms, liberty in sexual orientation, adolescent sex education — in short, any moves to create alternatives to sexual service and mothering as the center of women’s lives.
The US is now in no position to raise concerns about systematic abuse of women in other contexts, something that is vital to the US’s post-Cold War efforts to project itself as a champion of human rights. The loss of this defender of gender justice could not come at a worse time. Extremists and populist nationalists alike are turning on women and dictating restrictions on their reproductive rights, freedom to work, to marry who they wish, and even to leave the house. Misogynist governments and violent non-state actors – rebels, extremists, Al Qaeda and ISIS – will not be lectured to about their treatment of women from a US leader who has exposed himself as a sexist.
Peace is the hallmark of women’s political voice
Women in contexts of authoritarianism, conflict, occupation, and other attacks on democracy around the world are often the very first social group to take to the streets to demand equality, peace, and justice. They started the democratic wave against Pinochet in Chile, banging pots and pans and mobilizing a steady and inexorable momentum for his ouster. In Argentina the mothers of people who had been ‘disappeared’ in the ‘Dirty War’ were the only people brave enough to protest military rule, day after day from 1977, in the Plaza del Mayo, until democracy was restored. In South Africa women kept the anti-Apartheid movement alive in the 1980s when male leaders were jailed or in exile. In conflicts, women are often at the forefront of peace movements – they were the only ones to take to the streets during ghastly civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, to demand an end to the violence, and some were killed for it. Recently there has been an upsurge in women’s mass actions – protesting threats to abortion rights in Poland, demanding equal pay in Iceland, and demanding urgent action to stop rape and murder of women in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America.
An important near-universal feature of women’s democracy and rights-based demonstrations is their peacefulness. It is a sad statement of the situation of polarization and mistrust in the country that the marchers on January 21 in DC and all across the country will have to be wary of deliberate disruptors. Women who voted for Trump will certainly be there and make themselves heard, but there is every possibility that a deliberately disruptive stream of supporters will infiltrate the crowd and seek to discredit women’s voice through violence. There were some cases of this in the immediate post-election demonstrations in New York City. This demonstration, like women’s protests for justice everywhere, is absolutely committed to non-violence and peaceful expression. Women of all races, classes, sexualities, ethnicities, need to have a say and to be heard, for they will be among the first to suffer the effects of unaccountable governance that puts corporate interests above human equality.
Anne Marie Goetz is Clinical Professor at the NYU SPS Center for Global Affairs.