The Self-Serving Rebellion of Republican Women
Republican women in Congress have had a sudden feminist awakening and are revolting against the party’s unfettered misogyny, if you’re to believe the headlines from the past week. An anonymous congresswoman told NBC News last week that House Speaker Mike Johnson was “undercutting” his female colleagues. “We aren’t taken seriously,” another told the outlet. “You have women who are very accomplished, very successful, who have earned the merit, who aren’t given the time of the day.”
Meanwhile, Representative Nancy Mace from South Carolina published an op-ed in the New York Times on Monday in which she criticizes how the Republican leadership in the House has sidelined female members of the caucus. She added that the party has not allowed them to rise beyond the “token slot” of the GOP conference chair position, where they are tasked with overseeing caucus meetings and other day-to-day operations. “Women will never be taken seriously until leadership decides to take us seriously, and I’m no longer holding my breath,” she wrote. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia agreed with Mace. “I read her op-ed and I thought it was masterfully written, and she’s right,” Greene told CNN. “It is extremely frustrating as a rank-and-file Republican member and in our majority, our Republican majority, that many of us women are not taken seriously, and our legislation is not taken seriously.”
These lawmakers are directing their anger specifically at Johnson, a man who has called for Americans to live by “18th-century values” and who has blamed “no-fault divorce laws,” “the sexual revolution,” and “radical feminism” for the country’s problems. As recently as last month, Johnson pushed baseless gender-essentialist ideas, such as saying that women are unable to compartmentalize like men. These retrograde views about women’s place in society have informed how he treats the female members in his caucus, according to the congresswomen who spoke with the Times, who also said Johnson often does not engage in direct conversations with them about pressing policy issues.
In response to Johnson’s apparent shunning of his female colleagues, some Republican women have openly defied him in recent months. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who is running for governor, has publicly called him a liar. Three of the four House GOP members who bucked leadership and voted in favor of a discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files were women: Mace, Greene, and Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado. When Democrats brought forward a resolution last month to censure Representative Cory Mills of Florida — a Republican who has been accused of domestic violence and threatening his ex with revenge porn — six of the eight Republicans members who crossed party lines to support the measure were women.
But these Republican women are not “rebelling” because the scales have suddenly fallen from their eyes and they now see how propping up gender inequality is baked into the party’s DNA, or because they are horrified by how President Donald Trump has emboldened their colleagues to be more openly misogynistic. They are speaking out now that it’s become clear they can’t flex more power under the current iteration of the party. Several of them are pursuing other roles outside of Congress: Stefanik and Mace are running for governor in their respective states, while Greene is exiting Congress altogether next month without having completed her term.
Even if self-serving, these public gripes expose how Republicans are no longer even pretending that there’s a place for women among their leadership ranks. There’s only one woman currently chairing a House committee, Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. In the previous term, there were three women chairing committees in the GOP-controlled Congress; in the term before that, there were eight women serving as chairs under a Democratic majority. The number of women in the Republican freshman classes has also been trending down. After the 2022 midterms, there were seven new GOP congresswomen, while only three joined the caucus following the 2024 presidential election.
Though the GOP has never been particularly interested in addressing the concerns of women as a class, the party has uplifted a specific brand of woman: ambitious conservatives who eschewed feminist values and attributed their success to their own grit and hard work, ignoring the generational fights for gender equality that made it possible for them to have a seat at the table in the first place. They served as useful mouthpieces who could help Republicans deflect accusations that the party is sexist and doesn’t reflect the makeup of the country. But in the Washington of Trump 2.0, where Republicans have consolidated power across the government, they are not needed anymore.
The party is more openly hostile to women than at any point in recent history. At its helm is a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen people, and who even before entering office the first time had a long history of dehumanizing women and publicly attacking them when challenged. (He has denied the allegations against him.) Trump has not changed his behavior at all since returning to the White House — in just the last month, he has insulted ten female reporters in separate incidents, calling them “piggy,” “nasty,” “stupid,” “terrible,” “ugly,” and “incapable.”
The president is surrounded by officials who also espouse demeaning male-supremacist beliefs and hold tight to a retrograde view of gender roles. Vice-President J.D. Vance infamously loathes working mothers and childless women, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sees women’s role only as “life givers” and is systematically purging them from the military. The rot spreads to lower-level appointees, too. Nick Adams, Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to Malaysia, is a self-proclaimed alpha-male podcast host who has described Taylor Swift as a “jezebel” who is after her fiancé Travis Kelce’s money. (Swift is a self-made billionaire; Kelce is decidedly not.) Meanwhile, Andrew Kloster — the administration’s top HR lawyer — has called himself a raging misogynist and said, “Consent is probably modern society’s most pernicious fetish.”
These noxious beliefs about women’s place in society have been the backbone of Trump 2.0 policies that are destroying feminist progress, from his anti-equality efforts and attacks on reproductive rights to the way he’s decimated public-sector jobs and social services. The Republican women who are speaking out now endorsed this agenda and voted along partisan lines to help Trump enact his plans presumably because they believe themselves to be the exception to the rule. Perhaps they’re growing a sturdier backbone now in part because the party is starting to replace the hard-charging, “I don’t need feminism — I pulled myself by the bootstraps” archetype of conservative womanhood that they represent with a softer image: hyperfeminine avatars who preach a return to traditional gender roles and tell their peers to reject professional ambitions, casting marriage and motherhood as the highest calling for half of the population. The most prominent example is Erika Kirk, who since her husband’s assassination has gained access to the top echelons of conservative politics by relentlessly pushing this messaging, even though her life has not actually followed this specific and obsolete script. Just like the House rebels are having to come to terms with now, the next crop of upstart conservative women will eventually hit a ceiling in their quest for power. As long as those calling the shots in Congress believe that women are biologically inferior to men, they will be reduced to standing beside the big guys in charge, acting as loyal foot soldiers but never leaders. If I were in their shoes, I’d be angry at the consequences of my own actions, too.
Related