This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 3 episode of “All In.”
We are two months out from the midterm elections, and there is one really interesting divide that shows up in the cross-tabs of poll after poll after poll all across the country: the gender split.
It truly is one of the defining aspects of the Donald Trump era. The Democrats are seen as the “mommy” party, one that wants to nurture, and the Republicans have effectively become the “daddy” party.
You may remember Tucker Carlson’s bizarre speech at a Georgia rally in 2024, in which the former Fox News host analogized Trump’s relationship to the country to that of a father and his misbehaving daughter.
“He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be,” he said. “When Dad comes home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”
And if you spend any time at all on a platform like Elon Musk’s X, you will see that many of the most hardcore MAGA acolytes are absolutely obsessed with that kind of perverse, toxic gender politics.
Many of them hate women, to put it bluntly. “Your body, my choice” was a particularly popular refrain during the 2024 election. I believe that animus was a huge motivating factor in getting some young men to swing so hard to Trump in that race.
It is a sentiment that is made manifest every time we see photos of a Trump Cabinet meeting, where it is a sea of white male faces — a Cabinet run with a kind of inverted affirmative action where steps must be taken to advance the careers of white dudes, no matter how unqualified or mediocre.
Many of the most hardcore MAGA acolytes are absolutely obsessed with a kind of perverse, toxic gender politics.
Guys like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who performs a kind of theatrical, juvenile masculinity. He renamed himself the secretary of war as part of his battle against the so-called woke, DEI military, which really means a military that includes people of color, women and transgender people.
He’s also a guy who was investigated by authorities in 2017 after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her. He has repeatedly denied the allegations, and officials declined to pursue the case. But the secretary later paid the woman a $50,000 settlement.
In a previous era, an allegation like that would have been disqualifying. But now, it’s almost like a badge of honor.
This latest iteration of the culture war we’ve seen unfolding over the past few years is, in many ways, a backlash to a movement that has blossomed for nearly a century: American feminism.
And it is against that backdrop that we mourn the loss of one of the movement’s most iconic heroines, Gloria Steinem, who died Tuesday at the age of 92. For more than half a century, Steinem was synonymous with the cause of women’s liberation. She rose from a humble upbringing with a transient family to perhaps the most visible face of the second-wave feminist movement.
In 1963, she made a name for herself with a two-part series in Show Magazine about her time working undercover at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in New York. I encourage you to read it for yourself, but suffice it to say, it was not a particularly welcoming environment for women.
Ironically, that groundbreaking article was used to diminish her for a time. Steinem recalled that the journalist Gay Talese accused her of being a “pretty girl” who was “pretend[ing] to be a writer.”
But Steinem proved the critics wrong. She was further radicalized in her 30s by her involvement in the abortion rights movement in pre-Roe America, having had an illegal abortion in London in the late 1950s. Steinem dedicated much of her newfound social capital to fighting for reproductive rights, as well as the Equal Rights Amendment.
Her journalism was part and parcel of her activism. In 1971, she founded Ms. magazine, the first national publication dedicated to feminist issues. One of its most iconic editorials was an open letter signed by more than 50 women about their experiences receiving illegal abortions.
In 1972, Steinem brought that fight to Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern over his decision to omit a plank on abortion rights from the party platform. She later told writer Nora Ephron, one of the signatories of that letter, that McGovern “didn’t understand it was a women’s issue,” and added, “They won’t take us seriously. We’re just walking wombs.”
Steinem was undeterred. In 1973, she organized protests across New York in defense of abortion rights. She described those efforts to me back in 2013, during one of the many, many times I was lucky enough to interview her. She explained how she began covering the issue for New York magazine, and was told by male colleagues not to “get involved with these crazy women.”
But Gloria got involved. And, not long after that article, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.
Steinem’s activism continued. She continued to be a public face for the feminist movement for the rest of her life. During an interview in 2018, she told me that the activism she was witnessing far surpassed that of previous eras. Still, she warned of “a third of the country,” which she said was “opposed to losing their old hierarchical identity by sex and by race — and they are mad.”
That reactionary third of the country soon took its revenge when Trump’s handpicked judges overturned Roe, plunging this country back into the reproductive dark ages.
But the odds that Steinem faced, as a young woman participating in these organizing spaces in the 1960s, were much, much greater than they are now, and she and her compatriots persevered.
During that same interview in 2018, Steinem stressed that despite those setbacks, she was hopeful for the future and offered this advice: “You can’t let them take your hope away.”
Allison Detzel contributed.
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