For women, all forms of progress are reversible

Last weekend, the Taliban closed the only woman-run radio station in Afghanistan, another sharp drop in a downward spiral. Before attacking women’s free speech, the Taliban targeted education. In 2022, they banned women from universities, and in 2021, they banned girls from attending high school.

At the time of the American Revolution, women in the 13 colonies had approximately the same status as women in today’s Afghanistan. The first right they gained, advocated by Abigail Adams, was the right to attend high school. The second, for which abolitionist Angelina Grimké fought, was the right to speak publicly. Afghanistan is dismantling these exact rights in reverse.

Sadly, there is little we can do for women there, but we can try not to follow in their cobbled footsteps. The right to use birth control in the United States, guaranteed in 1965, and to obtain an abortion, won in 1971, are among the most recent rights American women have won over the course of two centuries. Access to abortion has now disappeared in many states (along with maternity care), and birth control is under serious attack.

How much farther might American women have to walk back? Before we get cavalier about the stability of progress, it’s worth reviewing the goals of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who dined with former President Donald Trump shortly before Thanksgiving last year. Fuentes advocates a future in which “women don’t have the right to vote,” where “women are wearing veils at church,” and “women [aren’t] in the workforce.” Fuentes tells followers it is not enough to be against trans people, “you’ve got to be against women’s rights, too.”

There is a simple way of preventing this kind of decline. It is not hard, but it is critical, lest American women find themselves with bags over their own heads in 50 years.

According to the Pew Research Center, 91 percent of citizens consider it “very important” for women to have the same rights as men. That’s good news. Now, each of them needs to tell everyone they know that they are a feminist, since the first step in defending common values is to name and teach them.

The label “feminist” has acquired some tarnish, but it is our only universal word for the global effort to achieve equality between the sexes. Eleanor Roosevelt’s sterling definition, penned in 1935, is worth polishing up.

“The fundamental premise of feminism is that women should have equal opportunity and equal rights with every other citizen,” wrote the First Lady of the United States.

In Roosevelt’s era, women had just won the right to vote. But many other rights that we take for granted today — at the risk of losing them — had not yet been established. In the 1930s and 40s, many states still banned women from juries. Pay discrimination was entirely legal. Schools fired female teachers who married. Girls could not wear trousers. Husbands remained entitled to demand sexual services from their wives by force.

Each step in our nation’s upward ascent followed upon the one before. Citizens should know the trajectory of women’s rights — a trajectory shared by many nations — so that we can avoid traveling in reverse.

The right to education came right after the Revolution of 1776, followed by the right to speak in public before the Civil War. The right to lobby government, established by Susan B. Anthony above all others, came in the mid-19th century, followed by the right to vote in the early 20th.

Next came the right to earn — for decades women could keep their wages only if husbands permitted them — followed by the right to equal protection under the law. In 1973, Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who would later become a Supreme Court justice — won the first sex discrimination lawsuit establishing the principle of equal treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment. Laws should be gender-neutral unless there was a compelling reason for them to be gender specific.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, women won the right to compete economically with men. Pioneers like stockbroker Muriel Siebert, the first woman to sit on the New York Stock Exchange, made access to corporate boardrooms a test of free enterprise. Tennis phenom Billie Jean King literally leveled the playing field.

In the 21st century, the right to physical safety has taken center stage. The #MeToo Movement raised consciousness about the degree to which women’s bodies remain in peril. Olympic gymnasts like Simone Biles and Aly Raisman enjoyed an indisputable right to get an education, speak publicly, lobby government, vote, earn money and compete athletically. But as they told the U.S. Senate in 2021, what their government had failed to guarantee them was the sanctity of their own bodies, unmolested.

Why rehearse this sequence? Why should citizens, regardless of political party, proudly claim the label that Eleanor Roosevelt defined nearly a century ago?

Any historian can tell you that after the Vandals dismantled the Roman Empire, the recipe for concrete was lost for 1,000 years. Undefended, all forms of progress are reversible. Women in Afghanistan were forced back another step just this week.

Elizabeth Cobbs, Ph.D., is the author of “Fearless Women: Feminist Patriots from Abigail Adams to Beyoncé” and a professor of U.S. foreign relations at Texas A&M.