Patriarchy and the Republican Party- a Brief Exploration

by Dr. Robert L. Reece.

No one would accuse Georgia Congressional Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of being progressive. Many people would not even accuse her of being rational considering her stance on many issues, but even she has tired of how the Republican party views and treats women, recently remarking "I think there's other women in our party that are really sick and tired of the way men treat Republican women.” Moreover, she has become one of the leading Republican voices asking for more transparency about the so-called “Epstein List.” And she cites support of women and girls and survivors of abuse as one of her primary reasons, going as far as saying that she would walk onto the Capitol floor and “name every damn name” if the survivors asked her to.

I am not attempting to rehabilitate the character of Greene, who has largely been abhorrent as a politician. My point is to show that the Republican Party has become so embedded in patriarchy and misogyny that even their own people are speaking out. Always a party with regressive politics that sought to place women in allegedly “traditional” roles that were subservient to men, recent years has seen them rise to new heights in their pursuit of white male dominance. From their draconian anti-abortion policies to their outsized focus on “saving” women’s sports to their lack of support for gender equity bills, Republicans have consistently demonstrated that they see women as second-class citizens in American society.

The obvious effect of anti-abortion policies across the country is that it takes control of women’s reproduction out of their hands and puts their lives at risk by forcing doctors to second-guess whether abortion is an option in complicated or dangerous pregnancies. Pages and pages of ink have been spilled on those topics, and the stories of women dying or narrowly surviving while navigating pregnancy have gripped national audiences all year, so I won’t rehash them here. Instead, I am concerned with the unspoken ideological implication of anti-abortion policies, specifically the idea that we should force women to have children in unsafe conditions, or, that they simply do not want.

While many pro-choice campaigns shy away from this idea to focus on the risks of pregnancy as a way to avoid alienating people, we should acknowledge that damage that befalls women who are forced to give birth and the resulting damage to children forced to grow up in a home in which they were unwanted. But the GOP sees pregnancy in a “you made your bed, you lay in it” way, where pregnancy and children are the rightful punishments for choosing to have sex. Punishments exclusively for women. They are not simply trying to protect “unborn babies” as they claim, they are also trying to chastise women for engaging in “immoral” behavior. In their minds, if women were simply good, chaste, Christians, pregnancy would not be a concern, but being a “loose woman” comes with consequences. And those consequences are children. Never mind the struggles the resulting children may face—even if submitted for adoption, which is often touted as a solution—punishing women for having sex is more important, and Republicans have been shaping American public policy in that direction.

A similar unspoken ideology undergirds Republicans’ focus on “saving” women’s sports from incursions by trans people. Again, these bills at first glance seek to explicitly target transwomen under the guise of safety, but they carry deeper implications that show how Republicans view women as inherently inferior to men. The idea that they should save women’s sports from “men disguised as women” rests on not only their willfully ignorant and dangerous beliefs and narratives around sex and gender, but also the claim that women cannot compete with men because they are biologically weaker. To them, all men are more athletic, stronger, and aggressive than all women, and those categories of men and women are determined by God and assigned by a doctor at birth. Therefore any person who was assigned male at birth allowed to compete with women in sports is in a position to dominate, regardless of their actual performance.

However, while cisgender men and cisgender women have differences biologically on average, society tends to associate “athleticism” with the sports where men perform well, emphasizing their explosiveness and strength in events such as sprinting, basketball, and American football. In other sports that receive less attention women perform equal to or better than men. For example, people widely acknowledge that women are better gymnasts, but they also outperform men at hyper-endurance sports such as ultrarunning, ultraswimming, and free diving. We could discuss the reasons why cisgender men excel at some sports and cisgender women at others, but that is beside the point here. Instead, we should focus on the patriarchal and misogynistic idea that women simply cannot compete with men athletically and thus they should be relegated to their own protected leagues where transwomen are presented as an existential threat. Meanwhile, the same people who purport to be "protecting" women in sports are ignoring very tangible issues of inequity and misogynistic violence. Transwomen in sports is used as a political dog whistle to reinforce patriarchal structures and avoid working toward solutions for real threats women face.

Finally, one of the most damning examples of the Republican commitment to patriarchy is their consistent blocking of pay equality legislation. Time again over the past few decades, Democrats (to whom I am certainly not giving any flowers) have sought to strengthen legislation ensuring that women receive the same pay as men for comparable work. While this would seem to fit purported Republican ideals of fairness and meritocracy, they almost never gain any Republican votes. In fact, in 2021, Republicans filibustered such a bill in the Senate. Apparently, meritocracy falls to the wayside when women may take home a larger share of the payroll. Opponents argue that these bills would put an unfair burden on businesses to pay employees fairly and lead to lawsuits when women feel as if they’re mistreated.

But like abortion and sports, this opposition has deeper ideological roots than it appears; indeed, it is intermingled with the above points. Many Republicans, as religious conservatives, simply believe women should not work at all. Women’s rightful place is at home, whereas men are in charge of supporting the family financially. Therefore, they fail to see the point in allocating government resources to ensuring fair treatment in a role that they do not believe women should occupy at all. Much like the idea that if women performed femininity appropriately and avoided sex outside of marriage to a man, they would not need abortions, if women performed femininity appropriately and avoided work, they would not need equal pay, let alone equal pay legislation.

Indeed, I could write a book—and others have—on the myriad of ways Republican lawmakers and Republican voters seek to deliberately disadvantage women to meet their political and ideological goals. Nonetheless, they maintain a stranglehold on the votes of white women, who continue to vote primarily for Republicans in presidential elections. However, if MTG, one of the standard bearers of the far-right, shows sign of waking from her slumber on women’s rights issues, there is hope for everyone that change is possible.