How does a group become the backbone of a party that oppresses them? Every four years, the same pattern unfolds. In 2016, 52% of white women voted for Donald Trump, in 2020, 55%, and in 2024, 53%. The candidate changes, but white women consistently vote conservative. Of course, for the past few decades, the Republican party’s most loyal champions have been white men. But what makes the Republican party, and conservative values overall, so appealing to white women?
I was intrigued to investigate this issue because I’m sure it hits close to home for many other liberal and socialist women. I was there to see the votes pour in across the country in November of last year. I was there to see 5 supreme court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending constitutional protections for abortion that had been in place for nearly 50 years.
I’ve listened to many of my white female family members spout conservative rhetoric about men being the head of the family. I’ve heard that a woman’s duty in life is serving God and her husband. I’ve heard white women wax poetic about Trump and condemn feminism as threatening their way of life. I’ve heard women insist that their own freedom takes away from their femininity.
How did we get to this point? Where does this rhetoric come from? This is the story of American white womanhood and the illusion of protection.
Although the “ideal” American woman shifts slightly every decade, women have always been sold what sociologists call the “patriarchal bargain” a term coined by author Deniz Kandiyoti in 1988. Align with your husband, your church, and your country, and in return, you’ll be protected from chaos and criminals.
Historically, this protection was inseparable from whiteness itself. The story of protecting our women has always been code for protecting our hierarchy. In 1955, Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Mississippi, was murdered by two white men after being accused of whistling at a white woman. His murderers were found innocent by an all-white jury. White women’s purity has been used to justify lynching, segregation, and immigration bans.
When Trump ascended in 2015 on the coattails of “grassroots republican fury” as CNN put it, his audience wasn’t the downtrodden working class that we were all told it was. It was people who felt their status slipping. Diana Mutz, a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said to the New York Times in 2018, “It’s not a threat to [Trump voters’] own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”
Social change, especially equitable social change, will always activate anxiety and anger on the part of the ruling class in a race-based hierarchy. Many Trump supporters believed themselves to be losing their country. They were voting for a rewind to a fantasy version of America where white Christian heterosexual men reigned and white women were safely behind them.
As a consequence, in the 2016 election, having an education didn’t inoculate white voters. Supposedly more tolerant college-educated white voters still leaned Republican. Donald Trump sold this nostalgic picture of white American glory and a return to Christian nationalism, and white women bought it.
But by 2020, riding the wave of the Me Too movement, millions of women had marched in protest against the abuse they suffered as a result of patriarchy in the workplace. But then, they voted for Trump again. According to NBC exit polls in 2020, among white women, 43% supported Joe Biden and 55% supported President Donald Trump.
These voters said they didn’t like President Trump’s decorum and his handling of the pandemic. But ultimately, they chose to stand by him. Why?
Kate Manne argues that white women often act as moral enforcers within the patriarchy, the gatekeepers of goodness. Disgust is their tool. It lets obedience feel righteous. Psychologically, disgust separates the clean from the contaminating. It’s why some white women can call Trump vulgar, but still see him as the less disgusting option, because he is the one protecting them from feminists, immigrants, or “woke ideology”. They’re not necessarily voting for cruelty, they’re voting for order. They just refuse to see that cruelty and order have always been causative in America.
The emotional contract can be prevalent in some Christian communities. Many conservative American Christians believe in distinct gender roles. Women are the caretakers, the nurturers. Men are the protectors and defenders. They apply it to politics: they often want a candidate that aligns with this ideology. In 2024, the Trump administration made an effort to make Trump seen as a protective fatherly figure. Several times in Trump’s rallies in his 2024 campaign, Trump used the phrase, “I want to protect the woman.”
Author and sociologist Katie Gaddini described how women at Liberty University reacted after the 2024 election. They felt that Trump’s win was God’s will. Gaddini wrote that for these women, Trump’s appeal is of the “protector king.”
This rhetoric is hugely effective. A strong, father figure misogynist is always better than a weak leftist feminist to these women. It makes obedience feel safe, and makes the hierarchy feel holy.
There is, of course, a paradox of protection. Protection always needs a threat in order to justify its perpetuation. A protector with no danger to fight loses his purpose and so does the woman that he protects. Safety depends on fear.
And so in Trump’s America, fear is never-ending. Fox News pontificates about crime and border invasions. Each new fabricated threat reactivates the emotional contract. Mothers need protection for their children, and thus they need a paternalistic figure as president to shield their children on a larger scale. Older women’s primary concern tends to be immigration. They see closing our borders as keeping their neighborhood safe, and keeping other women and girls safe from perceived physical threats and immigrant men.
In this worldview, every cultural change from Black Lives Matter protests to trans rights initiatives becomes a home invasion. We’ve seen this pattern in the 1920s when the KKK promised to defend white womanhood, in the 1960s when the John Birch Society promised to defend Christianity, and in 2016, when MAGA promised to defend “real America.”
So in the 2024 election, white women voted to renew their contract. The Guardian reported that Trump’s victory was once again greatly supported by the loyalty of white female voters. Furthermore, the Pew Research Center’s 2025 demographic study found that white women, especially those who identified as “born again” Christian or evangelical, remained among Trump’s most reliable supporters before and after his election, even as his popularity among white men started to decline slightly. This isn’t an anomaly. The patriarchal bargain holds, and it just keeps rebranding itself. What began as family values became law and order, then anti-woke and “protect the children!” It’s the same deal every decade.
There’s an easy way to look at this pattern. These women are all ignorant and complicit! But that misses the deeper truth. They’re emotionally fluent in a system that rewards their fear and obedience. Meanwhile, Black and Latina women consistently expand democracy from the margins. In 2020, black women’s turnout in Georgia flipped the Senate. Black women got the vote out in urban centers, making for the close results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina.
Another insidious detail is that the new-age conservative woman doesn’t call herself submissive, she calls herself empowered. The archetype of this kind of woman is Amy Coney Barrett. She’s married to a man. She has 7 kids. And yet she’s on the Supreme Court advocating conservative values. She is the ideal version of what I’d like to call the reformed conservative woman.
These reformed conservative women sometimes say things along the lines of, “I want to have the choice to work part-time or full-time or stay home with my kids.” (Funnily enough, feminists have been fighting for years to let them have that option. Now they’re voting to take it away.) They appropriate feminist language, like “empowerment,” to defend patriarchal outcomes. It’s faux-feminism infiltrating their conservative sphere. This is one way the social contract adapts. It learns the language of liberation to preserve the logic of control.
Truthfully, acknowledging the existence of the white female social contract is an uncomfortable task. I’m a white woman. It’s difficult, but necessary to concede that a lot of the women who look like me, women raised on the same commodified and repackaged ideas of feminism with glittery “girl power” T-shirts from the 2010’s and Barbies in astronaut suits, are foundational in a far-right movement built on fear. This movement takes rights from us and plunges us further into a monarchy with a felon as our king.
Ultimately, this discourse forces us to confront a moral reckoning: What does safety mean if it always comes at someone else’s expense?
I don’t believe, however, that white women will never see safety differently. My dream for American women is finding safety in our detachment from the patriarchy. Security, not from protection from men, but from collectivism and solidarity. But this is no easy transformation. Giving up the shield of patriarchy feels like danger in a country that wants you to be in constant fear of the other. The more comfortable white, conservative women feel, the more stifled all women’s voices become.
