On her Substack page this week (Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance), Joyce Vance writes about the Turning Point Summit held recently in San Antonio, Texas, where far right social media influencers and Republican political leaders like Charlie Kirk’s widow encouraged women to uphold American conservatism and its related “Trad Wife” movement. Although their opinions are radical within the Republican party today, many attendees at this women’s conference said on camera that they would “gladly give up my right to vote to have a more conservative country” and “…my husband and I are one flesh. I vote the same way he does, so honestly, I would be okay with giving up my right to vote, because I know that he would represent me well.” Radical and fringe as the opinions truly are by modern conservative standards, the women expressed them. No hesitation.
Who are these women?
Some are wealthy per generational wealth, marriage, or personal accomplishments. Wealth is what they know and live.
In contrast, most of the women attendees are merely financially comfortable. They are wives who practice traditional roles while their husbands (or fathers) earn most of the household income.
Others are single mothers who struggle to pay their bills and find husbands.
Because the women came together from diverse social and financial standings, some promise or ideology in the Turning Point Summit and the “tradwife” movement brings them together for these occasions. Outside the enclosures of political rallies and conferences, they do not mingle socially. This is the U.S.A. Wealthy white Republican women are privileged, protected, and pathetically pampered. They have each other’s backs. They do not shop, yoga, dine, party, pray, play, worship, or voluntarily work alongside other women.
However, it looks as if MAGA and wealthy Republican men have introduced a new function for their wives, sisters, and girlfriends – to preach the gospel of traditional values to a new generation of religious women. They preach from pulpits, political summits, social media podcasts, show off their designer clothing, hair, and shoes, all while mixing for a few hours with women who work jobs, live in middle and lower class neighborhoods, date, live with abusive bastards, hate themselves, shop at Target and Walmart, pray every day for grocery and diaper money, wonder why their God ignores them, and jealously despise liberal independent women.
What is obvious: The Republican-voting female leaders of Turning Point, MAGA, and the “tradwife” movement are wealthy, mostly of white European descent, and religious absolutists.
What lies beneath the obvious: The leaders present a set of absolutist moral and ethical values to other women. They promise God’s favor, social blessing, prosperity, and a government that will punish the women’s enemies -- to women who follow the movement as True Believers. To women who live in a different world from that in which the leaders exist.
If the movement’s goal is to grow the nation’s Right Wing by converting and uniting women into a conservative religious movement, they’ve created a huge problem.
First, the movement’s tenets are radical, fringe, and unpopular even among conservative-leaning women. Most women beyond high school age are not “homemakers.” For many reasons, most women work jobs and build careers outside their domestic arrangements.
Many women must work to support themselves because a) they have no other family to support them, b) their partners and spouses are not income earners, c) their families need financial assistance or multiple incomes. They have no other options.
Many women have chosen to earn money by working outside the home. The social aspect is enjoyable; the earnings go toward travel and fun activities; the stress is minimal; the pleasures are healthy; they can afford good quality childcare. They have options.
Many women chose entrepreneurship, specialized careers, and professional vocations from a young age and prefer their lives to the lives of “stay at home wives and moms.” Because their lives are stable and finances are reliable, they also have options.
The conservative movement’s tenets suggest that women should willingly limit their options or allow government and their husbands to limit women’s options. I have more questions:
This part is obvious: It is logistically, rationally, practically, ethically, and economically impossible to move all women out of the workforce, out of leadership, out of the institutions that hold this nation together.
This part lies beneath the obvious: The far-right, criminal enterprise we call the Republican party wants to subjugate women. To do so, they must convince Americans that the subjugation of particular groups – one of which is women – is vital for domestic and international security, critical for a robust economy, essential for a Theocracy. They must convince Americans that a conservative government is in the best interests of everyone…is what God wants.
Like sexual predators, Republicans are telling female Americans, “Don’t you worry. Just be quiet. You don’t know what you want or need. But I know. I know what is best for you.”
How do most women react when they are kidnapped, assaulted, raped, molested, abused, or enslaved? Most women react in shock and disbelief. At first. But given the chance, many women fight back. They fight for their lives. They retaliate. Therefore, most sexual predators and abusers are skillful liars. They manipulate their victims. They create false security, overpower their victims with sneaky moves and distractions, and resort to the truth after all escape and revenge options are removed.
When groups like Turning Point, which are merely arms of the white wealthy male-dominated Republican party, offer women an alternative lifestyle, they are merely seducing the women. Lies and manipulation are the tools by which they crush women’s independence and resistance. Republican party leaders and the oligarchs who own them are lying to conservative-leaning women – to the wealthy women who lead the organizations, preach from their podcasts, and parade their wealth in places like Mara Lago, and to the women who live in an entirely different world from those leaders and shysters.
The Summit was not about conservatism, “one nation under god”, traditional values, revival, destiny, or Making America Great Again. The Summit, as with all Republican outreach programs for women and minorities, was about White Christian Male Supremacy. There can be no Supremacy unless The Others are less important, less worthy. There can be no Male Supremacy unless Women are in servitude to Men. There can be no Christian Male Supremacy unless Christianity as the only government-endorsed religion is complicit in the subjugation of all other genders and religions. There can be no White Christian Male Supremacy unless all women everywhere are subordinate in their character and roles.
Tell them first that they must be quiet and submissive so that they do not suffer greater harm. Show them later that you never intended to let them be free and happy.
Authoritarian powers rely on hierarchies of importance and value. America’s conservative Christian sects are authoritarian by design. America’s conservative political party is now an authoritarian enterprise. This Republican party is not my father’s Eisenhower Republican party. Christian Nationalism, Racism, and the billionaires who this nation empowered have realigned, revolutionized, and renovated the party. It is now an openly criminal, white supremacist, authoritarian enterprise using government to enrich themselves.
Women’s lives do not matter to the Republican party. Most women’s lives do not matter to the wealthy women who live privileged and pampered lives within the Republican party. However, if most women lose their independence and freedoms, then all women will lose their independence and freedoms. The women on that stage in their Jimmy Choo shoes will be no better off than the women in the audience saying they’ll gladly give up their votes.
In 1930 and 1932, Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power because women voted for them. In 1945, women who had voted for the Nazi party were burying their husbands and sons, killing their own children, committing suicide, starving, selling sex to buy food and cigarettes, moving rocks from large heaps of rubble so that their homes could be rebuilt, wondering where all the invincible Aryan men had gone. Some of those women had known great wealth and prestige. Most of the women had simply done their best to be good wives and mothers. Every woman lost everything she had once possessed, including her dignity and self-respect.
The fascist regimes of Germany and Italy and the autocratic dictatorships in the USSR and Japan were the most tyrannical absolutist governments of the 20th century. All those regimes were male-dominated. All those regimes criminalized women’s behaviors that contradicted the regimes’ ideologies.
White Supremacy is personified Absolutism, and White Christian Male Supremacy grows its cruel reach when women – who believe only that White is a master race – fall in queue to obey and collaborate with their male leaders. Then women begin to cruelly judge other women, then they turn in women who resist, then they find out that their male leaders hate them despite their obedience and servitude.
#Resistance