OCTOBER 3, 2025 | OPINION | By Stecy Mwachia
According to 2024 statistics 53% percent of white women in the country we live in voted to elect a fascistic dictator. That’s a clear majority if I’ve ever seen one.
We have heard much throughout the previous year about the Republican Party’s appeal to men, particularly young men, in recent election cycles. How Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and men in the so-called “manosphere” secured the election for Donald Trump.
I would like to explore how fascistic states, authoritarian governments and totalitarian regimes alike make appeals to the women who both support and uplift them, and I’d like to take a walk through the alternate “womanosphere” as a microcosm of this conservative rhetoric.
These will be the central questions I hope to answer in this article: How can women support political organizations and parties so intent on their marginalization? How can a group of otherwise competent and rational human beings be convinced that surrendering their rights and freedoms would be in their own best interests?
Though white men as a voting bloc definitely turned out to vote for Donald Trump in large numbers last year, I don’t believe that we can scapegoat them exclusively for our political instability and stagnation in the past two decades, as I’ve written about this previously in my article “Why the Democratic Party Failed.”
Simplifying the Harris campaign’s loss to misogyny suggests that the Democratic Party as an institution led a completely perfect campaign otherwise. However, the major problem with this line of thinking is that it absolves white women of their part in this political climate or places them with an expectation of aligned thinking within their gender, which is sexist at worst and an unreasonable expectation for a group so large and diverse at best. Making white men the scapegoats we hold responsible for the election of Donald Trump gives white women a shield to hide behind.
In October 2024, social media posts flooded the internet depicting wives confessingthat they either would be voting in accordance with their husbands’ vote, or voting in secret to avoid conflict. I am not here to debate the ramifications of breaking political lines in relationships with domestic violence, nor to challenge the role religious and social conditioning plays in women’s everyday decision making.I will, however, offer that women are not extensions of their husbands. I will wager that all women are human beings in the exact same way their husbands are human beings, meaning within them lies the same capability and capacity for extreme cruelty and evil.
With college graduates marrying college graduates, and non-college grads marrying non-college grads being the most common pairing in our society, we can assume that these women are at the same level of education and intellectual ability as the men they cohabitate with. I don’t believe that this is a question of education, either.
Today, women are in greater positions of privilege than our ancestors could have ever imagined, but with that privilege comes the burden of responsibility that is also quite new for women in human history. Car maintenance, managing finances, taking control of your own spiritual journey, advocating for your health, traveling the world by yourself, climbing the corporate ladder, going out to get drunk and high with your friends.
We don’t think about how incredibly new these experiences are for women around the world. Moreover, with women dominating men in academic and professional spaces alike, they are quickly gaining economic traction.
This is beneficial in that it gives women autonomy to live their lives freely and in accordance with their own will, but detrimental in that it removes any economic or social incentive for men to raise the children they create.
Irresponsible men will assume that women—especially those in better academic and financial positions than they are—would hypothetically be ready to shoulder any social or financial burden that procreation may create. With contraceptives becoming less accessible in America, women are more hesitant to participate in recreational or procreational sex.
As the cost of childcare rises in this country and families increasingly live furtheraway from one another, single mothers are left in a desolate space with no help from interpersonal relationships nor the federal government. Women have been abandoned by both men and the state alike.
Progressive ideologies provide women with more autonomy, responsibility and freedom, as well as more raw power, but they are left with few options in terms of family life.
The control men have used to keep women subject to their will has been removed, but so has the social and economic safety net it provided. This is where feminine critiques of progressivism arise from, and where conservative ideologies gain their appeal.
Women—both right and left leaning—play into patriarchal stereotypes in the modern age almost daily. Online, Gen Z women complain of a “sassy male epidemic,” and speak of men “believing that they are the prize.”.
It seems that for Gen Z women in particular, the absence of traditional masculinity is a sign of greater social collapse. Oftentimes, the origin of this “sassiness” is attributed to fatherlessness. Single motherhood is an interesting phenomenon in that it is a bipartisan issue, depicted in completely partisan terms.
To conservatives, single mothers may be licentious women who did not think about or plan their pregnancies, or perhaps chose to have children with irresponsible men. In this way, single mothers are viewed simultaneously as morally questionable and justifiably vilified. To liberals, single mothers are victims of circumstance, and their “sassy sons” and Gen Z proclamations are a continuation of a perpetual cycle. Men are therefore doomed to disappoint women in the same way their fathers did.
“Men used to go to war.” “Chivalry is dead.” Many of these jokes are indeed humorous reflections on social changes, yet indicative of a larger phenomenon: women are just as attached to patriarchal norms as men are, and we may rely on these tropes to feel safety and security far more than men ever have.
Right-leaning politicians and their rhetoric, whether we like it or not, offer a strong sense of masculinity that liberal politicians do not provide to young people. Throughout Nazi Germany, post-colonial Africa, South Asia and the Soviet Union, children paid respect and homage to the father-like rulers of their lands.
The saviors were sent by prophecy to liberate the people from the scourge of communism, western influence or whatever scapegoat was politically expedient at the time. The protectors and providers of a nation. As women, we see these traits of traditional masculinity first in our fathers, uncles and grandparents, and then expressed through media in fairytale stories, princesses rescued by a handsome, rich and capable prince.
In the 1930s, the United Kingdom government was interested in increasing the population of the country, following the Great War and the Great Depression. To fulfill this goal, they fed audiences portrayals of damsels in distress, and preyed on the lack of power and agency women had in their own lives at the time.
The British Union of Fascists published a series of pamphlets to promote the women’s league of their organization, the cover of the pamphlet, Women and Fascism, declaring: ‘You have the vote – yet are still powerless.’ Pronatalist policies pushed by the party also gave women actual economic incentives that helped them raise their children, an action neglected across the political spectrum.
This choice of marketing is quite revealing. It is evident that fascistic parties are not looking for mindless mother and wife robots that believe in total feminine submission. They are actively seeking out women who value independence and autonomy, but want help and respect for the families they created, not disdain.
Conservative women are actively making self-interested decisions within the patriarchal system, as we do every day. They are not drones programmed to follow what the patriarch says and does while we liberal, free-spirited girls are enlightened and emancipated. They are the same women we are, living in the same society, just playing the game by different rules.