Trump, Tradwives, and “Traditional Values”—We Need Socialist Feminism | Socialist Alternative

Trump, Tradwives, and “Traditional Values”—We Need Socialist Feminism | Socialist Alternative
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Trump, Tradwives, and “Traditional Values”—We Need Socialist Feminism
Published on
March 1, 2026
By
Leah Stevens
It has been nearly ten years since #MeToo went viral, sparking a movement that took down rich and powerful serial abusers and brought conversations around workplace sexual harassment, rape culture, and gender-based oppression to the fore. This was at the same time that “Grab em’ by the pussy” Donald Trump was elected for his first term, which was met with the fiery rage of working women across the country who were disgusted and terrified by what it would mean to have this virulent misogynist in power. Until the “No Kings” protests of last year, the 2017 Women’s March was the largest single-day protest in US history. Unfortunately, this marked a high point of the women’s movement, which in coming years would nearly disappear in the US.
But right now, young women are radicalizing to the left, and the anti-feminist atrocities of Trump 2.0 and his MAGA movement only add fuel to the fire. The mass outrage around the Epstein files shows that the widespread rejection of misogyny and abuse against women that #MeToo brought to the fore hasn’t disappeared. And yet, the overall picture is a complicated one—mass struggle against women’s oppression is still hardly being seen in the US today, despite mounting attacks by the Trump regime on bodily autonomy and attempts to roll back decades of social gains for women.
While millions of pages of
Epstein files
have been released, naming those involved in one of the most heinous examples of sexual violence against women and girls, there is currently no mass women’s movement to bring down Trump’s sexist regime. While the names and pictures of victims receive a damaging spotlight, names of many billionaire abusers remain redacted. Right-wing, self-identified Christian nationalist Marjorie Taylor Greene may have temporarily placed herself in a position to oppose Trump on the side of Epstein’s victims, but she is very much representative of the anti-feminist ideas exemplified by the MAGA movement.
At the time of writing, the SAVE America Act has passed the House, which would require a birth certificate or a valid passport at the time of registering to vote, to prove citizenship. This would pose an enormous barrier to the over
69 million married women
and trans women who do not have birth certificates that match their current legal name, or have a passport. Even if this doesn’t become law, it signals the pressure of a return to “head-of-household” voting, an idea championed by the Christian nationalist right.
Trump, and the MAGA movement as a whole, wants to throw women’s rights back to the 1950s, and ensure that #MeToo, the Women’s March, or even more radical movements never take place again. They are deeply afraid of the potential for mass anger that is simmering under the surface of society to take shape as a militant movement for the rights of women and all oppressed groups, especially a movement that takes aim at Trump and the billionaires’ entire economic system of exploitation. Now more than ever, we must reignite the women’s movement to face these setbacks head-on, and smash the system that requires our oppression to function.
Out of the Workforce…
Today, a staggering number of working women are leaving the US workforce, with nearly
half a million women
leaving their jobs in 2025. This trend is a reversal of previous decades during which women won more economic independence.
Women entering the US workforce en masse was an outgrowth of the post-war era and second wave feminist movement of the 1960s. This marked massive socioeconomic shifts away from the single-earner household and toward greater economic independence of women. This came alongside massive social gains won through the women’s movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, including narrowing the gender pay gap, winning workplace discrimination battles, and the landmark
Roe v. Wade
federal right to an abortion.
The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report shows that in December 2025 alone, while 10,000 men gained employment,
91,000 women
left the labor force. This is despite the fact that women currently hold more college degrees than men and are graduating high school at a faster rate than men, a shift from the 1970s. It is no secret that Trump and the right wing campaigned on the insecurities of young men feeling like they are falling behind and a promise to give them more economic opportunities in an era of economic crisis.
In 2020, the devastating COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately forced women out of the workforce as schools closed, meager childcare infrastructure collapsed, and jobs failed to provide the necessary safety measures and pay needed to sustain working women and their families. A mass exodus of millions of women left the workforce, with many never to return due to a lack of full-time employment opportunities and childcare needs. This is especially true of poorer Black and brown communities where schools remained closed longer than in wealthier communities. While working women struggled to make ends meet through years of inflation, rising food costs and rent, corporate profits skyrocketed to staggering records.
For a period
, Biden’s pandemic relief program significantly lessened the burden of childcare costs. But when funds dried up in 2023, the Democrats, including Biden, failed to fight for its renewal.
Significant progress
was made after 2020, with women’s employment, though delayed, bouncing back post-pandemic. Additionally, more men are taking up unpaid care work. However, mothers and women of color have been largely left behind, and any steps forward are already showing signs of significant reversal over the last year.
The Trump administration’s attacks on workers have had devastating effects on women, accelerating processes already in motion. Closures, layoffs, and cuts have massively affected education and healthcare sectors, both of which are dominated by women. Federal employment fell by
277,000 in 2025
as a consequence of Trump’s mass layoffs of federal jobs, affecting Black women the most of any racial group. As a result, Black women have the highest unemployment rate of a staggering 7.3%, nearly 3% higher than the national unemployment rate. As we enter another massive economic downturn, these cuts are only the beginning—women, particularly women of color, will be the first on the chopping block when another wave of layoffs hits.
Women make up a growing portion of the booming gig economy in the US, which offers more flexibility to those who desperately need it, like parents. Independent contract work is everywhere, from Uber, to cleaning jobs, to teaching. This growing “side hustle” culture to make a fast dollar inevitably means far lower wages with little-to-no benefits or protections and long working hours. For example, women make up the vast majority of
OnlyFans’ over 4.5 million global creators
, but only 10% of viewers. While the top percentage of content creators boast profits of millions, the median creator only makes roughly $150 a month. The sexualization of women to receive crumbs is acceptable to a system that needs women’s oppression to boost major corporations like OnlyFans, which reported revenues of $7.2 billion in 2025.
High unemployment, the “gigification” of the economy, and enforcing the gender pay gap is one way that the ruling class can further oppress women and drive down wages, benefits, and jobs standards down for the working class as a whole.
…Into the Home
To enforce the economic oppression of women, Trump and the Christian far right rely on an ideological offensive to reinforce “traditional” gender roles and the nuclear family. The reassertion of “traditional values,” with men as the economic provider, is used as cover for attacks on things such as abortion rights and gender-affirming care, as well as the subjugation of women through unpaid childcare and housework. This throwing back of women to be subservient to men is one way the ruling class can assert nationalism and patriarchal norms in this era of war and inter-imperialist conflict.
As we wrote
in the beginning of Trump’s presidency, the political gender divide with young men moving to the right and young women to the left is widening. The MAGA movement and manosphere have been able to capture a sense of male disenfranchisement as men grapple with their place in society and in the home. This is expressed in a variety of ways, like the manosphere leaning into the unfairness of men being romantically ostracized after being rejected for their political beliefs. The concept of the “male loneliness epidemic” has gained an echo in society, with a disturbing percentage of men reporting they have no close friends. Traditional values that prop up men as head of the household are one way to counter this feeling of disenfranchisement and assert the patriarchal values that keep capitalism running. Of course, much less is said of the loneliness of women being forced back into the home to both care for their entire families and also somehow make extra money on the side.
Signing an executive order called “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” on the first day of his second term, Trump has aimed to enforce traditional gender norms under the guise of “protecting women” (read: erasing trans people from existence). The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has rescinded guidance to apply current civil rights laws to workplace harassment. Trump’s chair pick for the EEOC, Andrea Lucas, cited her reasoning for this, saying that the guidance protected LGBTQ people at the expense of women. Again, this dog whistle for trans people will do nothing to protect working women, but the opposite. The Trump administration has relied on anti-DEI rhetoric as a cover for rolling back federal anti-discrimination laws and the gains of the ‘60s and ‘70s, including the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civils Rights Act, which banned sex-based workplace discrimination. This has included gutting federal offices that protect single mothers from housing discrimination and programs that address racial inequality. This reactionary ideological turn leaves working-class women in an incredibly vulnerable position.
One particular expression of changing gender dynamics under MAGA has been the “tradwife” phenomenon, which originated in 2020 as an online trend of women sharing the small things at home that brought them joy, such as baking sourdough bread with the kids. In some ways, it served as an escape from the crisis-riddled world of 2020 for women. It evoked the image of the perfect at-home life. Today, it quickly became a highly romanticized vision of 1950s domesticity. But, for many working women, holding down a full-time job while also being a full-time childcare provider is increasingly untenable, especially in the only high-income country to not offer universal childcare or paid maternity leave. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the cost of
infant childcare now exceeds rent
in 17 states and exceeds public college tuition in 38 states.
The right wing has capitalized on this fact, and pushes the image of a perfect, Christian, stay-at-home “tradwife” who cares for the home and provides for her husband and children. Working women should have every right to choose how they want to raise their children and if they want to stay home from work to do so. However, the “tradwife” narrative is more popular among men and the wealthy—nearly
6 in 10 men
want a return to traditional gender roles, while only 4 in 10 women want this. One of the highest-profile champions of this includes far-right multimillionaire businesswoman and new chairperson of Turning Point USA, Erika Kirk, who despite her “girlboss” image says women should prioritize marriage and having children over career growth.
But the reality is there is no economic basis today for a return to single-earner homes of the 1950s. Besides the fact that one wage is no longer enough to support a family, women make up almost half of the US workforce, and the economy could simply not afford to lose nearly 80 million workers (who are paid on average 18% less than their male counterparts). The ideological offensive carried out by the right is pure fantasy. At the heart of the matter is that ordinary women under a deeply oppressive and exploitative system are expected to do it all—to be both the perfect mother and perfect worker—an untenable situation riddled with contradictions. Ultimately, capitalism very much needs women and other oppressed groups in the workforce, who they can underpay even more dramatically.
Attacks On Our Bodies
After the right wing’s economic and ideological offensive against women, little remains but our own physical bodies. Of course, our bodies are the least safe battleground of all, from the physical abuse and sexual violence we face, to the untenable healthcare access and beauty standards we reach for. Under capitalism, our bodies are victim to power and profit by any means necessary.
The overturning of
Roe v. Wade
in 2022 was a historic loss for women and queer people everywhere. With no fight at all put up by Democrats—who controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency at the time of the overturn—the red carpet was practically rolled out for the Trump regime to have a free-for-all against women. The loss of federally protected abortion rights swung open the door for more gender-based attacks and cuts, including the closing of dozens of Planned Parenthoods across the country and the introduction of hundreds of anti-trans bills. Attacks on women and the horrific scapegoating of trans people is how the right can not only make cuts to life-saving care, but make cuts to healthcare more broadly of which the poor and oppressed bear the brunt.
The rise of Trumpism and growth of the far right has come at a steep cost for women.
One UK study
showed that Gen Z men have a lower understanding of consent and acceptance of marital rape as a valid concept. Trump and his billionaire buddies have their fingerprints all over the Epstein files, and Trump once downplayed domestic violence, saying “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.” In the workplace, women face increased harassment with little done about it. In one particularly horrific example, welder
Amber Czech was murdered
by a male coworker on the job site despite having reported him to HR at least five times.
As if sexual and physical violence to assert dominance over women isn’t enough, any semblance of a body positivity movement that may have existed in the early 2020s has vanished. There has been a staggering rise of TikTok content around
“preventative aging,”
encouraging women in their early 20s and 30s to get plastic surgery—from “baby Botox,” to facelifts, to BBLs, which are considered to have the
highest mortality rate
of any aesthetic procedure. While GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have been proven to help people with obesity and chronic diseases through consultation with a doctor, those who may most need it for health reasons aren’t necessarily the ones who are receiving it. The drugs are expensive, and
harder to access for people of color
This has led to a boom of online services and off-brand weight-loss drugs that put pressure on women everywhere to take them—without the supervision of a doctor. The prevalence of these weight loss drugs, especially in celebrity culture, has put increasing pressure on ordinary people (
1 in 8 US adults
) to lose weight quickly to meet societal body standards. In a particularly dystopic twist, a new report showed how
GLP-1s can help save airline executives millions
of dollars on fuel. Yes, you read that right—billionaires love the prospect of small waistlines so that airplanes literally weigh less. These unrealistic standards put an immense financial and psychological burden on young women, particularly trans women who have more pressure than ever to “pass.”
Revive the Women’s Movement
Struggles against women’s oppression globally, from the many-years-long #NiUnaMenos movement across Latin America to the rageful protests across France in support of Gisele Pelicot, show that despite the far-right backlash against women, the progress made against sexism has not been lost.
While the women’s movement has receded in the US, that does not mean that young women are taking attacks laying down. It is no surprise that women have been at the forefront of struggle in recent years, including the pro-Palestine movement and anti-ICE movement. Many young women identify with attacks on any oppressed group, and see no other option but to fight back.
The heroic uprising in Minneapolis against ICE has breathed fire into working-class struggle, with escalatory action providing an avenue for ordinary people to get involved in the fight against Trump. “Operation Metro Surge” being wound down shows what is possible when a multi-gender, multi-racial mass movement backed by striking workers shuts a city down. In this period of uptick in struggle where working people are willing to fight, we need to connect the fight for immigrant rights to the fight against all capitalist oppression. This means taking on Trump’s divide and rule with a united multigender movement and working class tactics that take aim at the system that produces sexism, racism, xenophobia, and transphobia.
This moment of political upheaval can lay the foundation of a much-needed political alternative to the two capitalist parties. Historically, mass movements have the power to cut across gender and racial divides with working-class solidarity. But, without a cohering political force, such positive developments can dissipate. We need a new, working-class party that actually fights on the side of ordinary women and the oppressed.
The Epstein files can continue to be a flash point of mass anger and are a damning indictment of the patriarchal abuse inherent in a society run by the billionaires. No girlboss, no Democrat, and certainly no Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to lead the battle that needs to be fought for the liberation of women. We need a socialist feminist movement that fights for a complete transformation of this rotten system with nothing short of working-class revolution. Only a socialist society can lay the economic basis for ordinary women to have their needs met, their children’s needs met, and a chance at total expression of gender, sexuality, and self.
Socialist Alternative says:
Equal rights for all, including equal pay for equal work. End all harassment, discrimination, and violence against women, LGBTQ people, Black people, immigrants, disabled people, and all marginalized groups.
Defend the right to choose whether and when to have children. Free contraception as part of a broad program for reproductive health including comprehensive, LGBTQ-inclusive sex education.
Free, safe, legal, and accessible abortion. Stop all right-wing attempts to criminalize abortion.
Paid parental leave for 18 months and free, high-quality childcare and preschool for all.
Full legal rights for all queer people, including the right to self-identify and express one’s gender freely. Free, gender-affirming universal healthcare.
Fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and all forms of oppression with working-class solidarity and struggle. Build a mass, multiracial, multi-gender movement against systemic oppression and capitalism.
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