We Don't Need Another Hero

News columns and online conversations lit up this week after Donald Trump repeatedly reassured American women that, once he’s president again, they will feel safe because he will “be their protector.”

On Truth Social late Sunday, September 22, he wrote: “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES.”

As Sarah Jones noted at the Intelligencer, the first line of that “Truth” “sounds like an Always commercial.” (I had a similar thought, but my mind called up an ad for Summer’s Eve vaginal douche.)

Trump elaborated on this theme the following day at a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, telling women,

“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. ... You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion — that’s all they talk about, abortion — because we have done something nobody else could have done.”

Many commentators quickly noted that these statements are not only misogynist, portraying women as child-like creatures incapable of making their own decisions, but also menacing, given that Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. The predator who offers protection is a trope as old as the story of Little Red Riding Hood. As an attempt to woo female voters, the lines likely missed their mark.

But what much of the commentary this week missed, and what I’d like to outline briefly below, is that these comments are not simply patronizing pats on the head for women whose brains are tired from all the thinking that autonomy requires. They evoke a long, ghastly history of paternalistic campaigns to convince white women that their interests are better served when they hand over control of their lives to white men. In the nineteenth century, defenders of white supremacy portrayed slavery and Jim Crow segregation as benevolent gifts, bestowed upon white women by heroic white men. White women would remain legally subordinate to white men, but they would receive protection in return. In the vulgar sexual mythology of white supremacy, racial discrimination allowed white men to defend white womanhood from allegedly predatory Black men. Racial equality, the theory continued, would endanger white women by enabling Black men to challenge white men’s authority.

It was a theory with deadly consequences. Between the 1890s and 1930s, thousands of Black men were lynched for supposed violations of white women’s purity. In 1955, a teenager named Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for supposedly whistling in the direction of a white woman. Yet during those same decades, not a single white man was ever prosecuted for raping a Black woman in the South. Not one. Black women’s historians argue that the ever-looming threat of sexual assault motivated many Black women to leave the South during the Great Migration.

White paternalism sustained a myth of white women’s sexual purity, putting them “on a pedestal” where they would be safe (in theory) from all sexual harm. Reality contradicted that theory in multiple ways. Many white women and Black men had consensual sexual relationships. And as trailblazing journalist and activist Ida B. Wells first documented, most allegations of rape against Black men occurred after these men had been lynched by vigilante terrorist groups. Most of those allegations were false anyway.

American historians have amply documented the creation and consequences of this ideology, particularly but not exclusively within the American South. In the decades between the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, white southern women campaigned for suffrage less vigorously, and in smaller relative numbers, than western or northern white women did, in part because many of them continued to see white patriarchy as their best bet. Yet they were consequential political actors. White women were among Jim Crow’s staunchest defenders. They raised funds for Confederate monuments and commemorations from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth; ran organizations that supported the southern white Democratic Party; and became grassroots organizers opposed to to racial equality and the civil rights movement. We see their faces in black and white photographs of protests against school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

You might identify an implicit irony in what I’ve just written. I’ve described white southern women who took action, assumed leadership roles, and participated in political debates yet did so in the name of their subordination to men, an exchange of autonomy for protection. There were millions of white women who supported Jim Crow—like the millions of women who today support Donald Trump—who saw no irony in this convergence of leadership and submission.

I honestly don’t know how many of the women who admire Trump will find this latest promise of protection appealing. But as an attempt to diffuse the abortion issue in the upcoming presidential election, it is really… weird. Why would a woman need Donald Trump to protect her from abortion? Women have made decisions about their bodily health whenever and however they could, in all times and places, to the degree that their own beliefs, access to interventions, and relative autonomy permitted. This is true across region, race, and class status. When he reminds American voters that he is to thank for current restrictions on abortion, in the very state-level policies his recent statements tout, he reveals what a limited understanding he has of women as human beings, capable of making decisions that will affect their health, safety, and lives. No one needs to douche (just a public health FYI), and no one needs this patronizing garbage either.