The 51st anniversary of the Equal Credit Act – the law that for the first time in history enabled women to be treated like adults and not minors, both financially and in the workplace – came and went last month with barely a whisper. Instead of acknowledging (much less celebrating) the anniversary of this seismic shift, New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat took to the airwaves with a radically different message.

At first his podcast was titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” but that was quickly changed to something presumed to be slightly less enraging to female readers: “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” Nevertheless, my Instagram feed has been exploding with videos and memes by irate women for over a week. If you haven’t listened to Douthat’s discussion with conservative writers Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant, you can find everything you need to know in his opening statement: “Men and women are different… Should the right be trying to roll back the entire feminist era? Or is there a form of conservative feminism that corrects liberalism’s mistakes?”

This latest broadside against feminism is actually a gift, because it lays bare the misogyny in the current backlash. Helen Andrews’ polemic was published in Compact, a small conservative on-line magazine. In a gigantic leap backward to the zeitgeist of the 1950s, “The Great Feminization” makes the case that women have damaged workplace culture because of their feminine personality traits, like back-biting, gossiping, and over emoting. She relitigates the excesses of #MeToo (did Aziz Ansari deserve to be canceled because of a bad date?) and identifies women’s recent ascendency in some white-collar professions as the principal cause of the horrors of “wokism.”

Andrews claims that the “tipping point” of this malign feminization began when law schools became majority female in 2016, followed by medical schools in 2019. She dangles statistics that 80 percent of veterinary students and 75 percent of psychology PhD students are women -- not as a sign of women’s success, but as a threat to civilization. Even the staff of the New York Times, Andrews warns, became majority female in 2023. A slippery slope to a bitch-fest is the only possible next step.

Douthat and his guests seem to be completely oblivious of the fact that women’s rights – and even women’s lives – have been under direct assault since the dawn of Trump’s second presidency. Their intellectual framing of the search for causes of male frustration or discomfort in today’s workplace blithely "dick-washes" any and every glaring insult to the integrity of women’s hard-earned advancement.

Instead of the Trump administration’s war on women, Douthat argues that “liberal feminism” is a bigger threat, a notion he sums up with an offensively ignorant question: “What is wrong with existing feminism — liberal feminism — and how has it failed women?”

How has feminism in November 2025 failed women? Really, Ross? What rock have you been living under? Douthat never identifies these phantom feminists who are ruining women’s lives and emasculating the workplace. Clearly, he is a victim of historical amnesia. At 45, Douthat may be too young to realize that just 50 years ago, the only jobs available to women outside of the home were domestic work, secretary, teacher, nurse, or stewardess (with the latter fired at age 32 or if they got married).

Just one generation ago, the white male establishment presumed that women were intellectually inferior, physically weak, and in need of protection by the patriarchy. Before the 1974 Equal Credit Act, women could not get a credit card or a mortgage without the consent of a father or husband. Before 1970, women were less than four percent of all lawyers, seven percent of doctors, and one percent of engineers and scientists. Ninety-four percent of all gynecologists were male. Women earned only one third of all college degrees, and one in 10 Ph.D.’s. There were almost no tenured female college professors, and only nine percent of college varsity athletes were women. Women weren’t allowed to run the Boston Marathon until 1973, because male doctors thought their uteruses would collapse.

Prescription birth control wasn’t legal nationally until 1972, and before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, at least 1,000 women died every year from botched back-alley abortions. At the New York Times, women were almost exclusively assigned to write for the fashion and the society pages. It wasn’t until after winning a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit that the first woman was allowed to become a copy editor. That was just 50 years ago, in 1975.

The second wave feminist movement (the first wave fought for suffrage 50 years earlier), destroyed the deeply entrenched misogynistic barriers that denied women dignity, independence, and power for thousands of years. Incredibly, these are the hard-earned victories that Douthat and Andrews are now arguing have “failed women.” They have found eager allies in the Trump administration.

Within hours of taking the oath of office last January 20, Donald Trump and his henchman Elon Musk immediately began to eviscerate laws, departments, and funding that promoted and protected women’s rights. It is safe to say that we are witnessing the biggest anti-feminist backlash since the start of the second wave feminist movement in the 1960s and ‘70s. Following Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist playbook, the Trump administration has drastically cut funding for women’s health care, reproductive care, and medical research. It has eliminated women’s civil rights protections in education and employment, cut Medicaid, SNAP, and childcare funding.

Trump, a sex offender himself, has hired sex offenders, and pardoned others, while firing dozens of leading women career civil servants and many thousands of rank-and-file women in the federal work force.

The tidal wave of this administration’s anti-woman policies has swept through every government agency. Let’s just look at one aspect of its policy backlash: reproductive health. On day four of his presidency, Trump pardoned 23 convicted criminals (many of whom were in jail) who violently threatened and harassed patients and doctors at abortion clinics. He then froze federal funding for contraceptive care (Title X), which will shutter many Planned Parenthood clinics, and fired the entire staff of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs, eliminating their $300 million budget. And that’s just the beginning when it comes to the attack on women’s health.

Meanwhile, thanks to Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court majority, forty-nine years of women’s constitutional right to abortion had already disappeared with the Dobbs decision in June 2022. Today, 41-percent of American women of childbearing age (15 to 45) live in states with abortion bans. Just like racial segregation before the 1960s, Jane Crow is now the law of the land in 16 states in the American South, Midwest, and West.

The problem in those states isn’t just access to abortion care; the ban has an impact on every aspect of reproductive care. If a woman has a miscarriage in one of the 16 ban states, she is unlikely to get the medical attention she needs and could bleed out, get sepsis, become infertile, or even die. We already know of two women who have died in Georgia and three in Texas because their miscarriages weren’t treated.

These states are also becoming reproductive health care deserts. Idaho has lost 20 percent of its obstetrician/gynecologists and there is only one high-risk pregnancy specialist in the entire state. Pregnant women in Idaho now routinely purchase special insurance in case they have to be medevacked out of the state for a medical emergency. Applications to medical residency programs at University of Texas, Vanderbilt, Emory, and Washington University are down 20 percent. Those future doctors must be asking themselves, why risk criminal prosecution?

But Douthat and his podcast guests still insist that feminism is a greater danger to women than Trump. Andrews waxes on about how “wokeness” is “shutting down conversations, intruding politics into spheres that had previously been neutral — importantly neutral.” Bafflingly, she adds, “Pillars of civilization — neutrality, things like the rule of law — were suddenly subject to politicization in a way that was really, really harmful.”

She is saying this with a straight face, and yet she neglects to mention that freedom of speech is under threat in America today. Universities are losing billions of dollars in research funding if they don’t comply with draconian demands by the administration to control their curriculum, student admissions policies, and faculty hiring practices. The Trump administration is “shutting down conversations,” and “intruding politics into spheres” when it comes to science by terminating more than $7 billion in federal research grants to over 600 colleges and Universities. Any kind of research bearing a hint of “diversity, equity, or inclusion” has been summarily cancelled. As for freedom of speech, scores of foreign students have been deported for expressing their political beliefs and thousands of books have been banned, if only for the crime of being written by or about women, LGBTQ, or Black people.

This is our new and truly virulent cancel culture, Ross. Let’s not blame it on “the feminists.”

Clara Bingham is the author most recently of The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America1963-1973.