Women’s History Month: How Trump is Trying to Keep Women at Home

On the campaign trail in 2024, President Donald Trump claimed that “whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.” Now, that claim is proving to be more a threat than a promise. His administration is undermining women’s economic freedom and security, strictly enforcing archaic gender roles, gutting reproductive freedom and women’s health, and pushing women back into the home.

Trump’s notion of “protection” rests on the prevailing, outdated view that “men were the doers in the world and women were the stay-at-home types.” This limiting understanding of gender assumed that men and women must occupy “separate spheres” based on supposed biological differences. In decades past, this “separate spheres” theory kept women firmly on a patriarchal pedestal: out of public life and in the domestic sphere. It also confined men to economic roles and excluded them from many aspects of family life. Through policy and rhetoric, the Trump administration is steadily executing the proposals at the core of Project 2025 to limit opportunity based on gender. Now, the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, has released a blueprint to advance an agenda that pressures women into marrying men and raising children to the exclusion of all else. This Women’s History Month, we must recognize this project for what it is: a full-scale onslaught on women’s rights.

Similarly, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, Justice Ginsburg argued that widowers must be allowed to collect their deceased wives’ Social Security benefits just as widows were able to do after their husbands passed. She explained to the Supreme Court that laws recognizing only a “one-earner family composed of breadwinning husband and child tending wife” were untenable since an increasing number of women were participating in the paid labor force. Justice Ginsburg said that, as a result, “this stereotyped vision of man’s work and woman’s place lacks correspondence with reality for millions of American families.” The Supreme Court agreed, concluding that the view that only “male workers’ earnings are vital to the support of their families” could not be “tolerated under the Constitution.”

Today, 77 percent of women, ages 25-54, in America work outside the home, whether by choice or necessity, but Trump and his allies are trying to reverse that progress. In his first year in office, Trump has already implemented a significant portion of Project 2025, the administration’s playbook for enacting its most extreme policies which undermine women’s economic security, weaken their civil rights protections, and eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

And that is only the beginning. The Heritage Foundation’s latest plan mandates heterosexual marriage and parenthood and even proposes camps to prepare couples for marriage. It reserves in vitro fertilization for heterosexual couples and limits its use for unmarried couples or individuals. Its vision also criticizes finding fulfillment through career and public life, suggesting that prioritizing family life is in tension with obtaining professional credentials and higher education. The goal of this agenda is to drag us back to a time when women were financially dependent on men, and queer people had no rights.

Already, the Trump administration is enacting policies that limit women’s ability to work. It has targeted the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor and other federal programs that help women get high-paying jobs in male-dominated industries. Meanwhile, protections against sex discrimination in the federal contractor workforce were overturned following an Executive Order which ended anti-discrimination policies in the federal government. The Department of Defense also shuttered a committee that expanded women’s role in the military and is now undertaking a review of women in ground combat positions — a question the Women’s Rights Project thought it had put to bed after we sued over the original combat ban in 2012.

The infrastructure that supports working women is also under attack. After Trump attempted to dismantle Head Start, a childcare and early education program for children from low-income families, the Women’s Rights Project sued, blocking the action. Citing unverified fraud claims, the administration has restricted federal funds for childcare, shifting caregiving responsibilities to women and inhibiting their labor market participation. The Women’s Rights Project recently filed a public records request to force the administration to disclose the extent and reasons behind these restrictions. And for professionals who already provide care for seniors and people with disabilities, most of whom are women of color, a proposed regulation would strip them of minimum wage and overtime protections. Now millions risk greater economic insecurity and a widening gender wage gap.

The administration has also targeted women’s reproductive freedom. President Trump approved “defunding” Planned Parenthood, further weakening access to preventive and reproductive health care for millions of women. The administration is also laying the groundwork for severe restrictions on a medication commonly used for abortion and miscarriage care, mifepristone. These restrictions, if adopted, could stop women from accessing this medication via telemedicine — a crucial lifeline for women who might otherwise struggle to get care in-person, including survivors of domestic violence. The Trump administration also changed or rescinded policies that protected abortion access, such as abortion care for veterans and out-of-state abortion care covered under Medicaid.

Last month, the House of Representatives passed the SAVE America Act, which would bar eligible voters from registering if they have documents that no longer match their name. If enacted, the law could disproportionately affect married women who have changed their last names and transgender people whose documents may not reflect their gender identity.

Under the guise of “defending women” and “restoring biological truth,” Trump also signed an Executive Order on day one of his second term restricting the rights of transgender and nonbinary people. Since then, policies that seek to erase them from public life followed, from banning transgender people from serving openly in the military to restricting access to gender-affirming care. By reinforcing the idea that men and women must conform to strict gender-based stereotypes, the administration’s attacks on transgender people and efforts to police gender norms harm everyone.

The Trump administration’s assault on women’s rights is relentless, but so are we. The Women’s Rights Project will continue to resist these dangerous efforts and defend the essential infrastructure that enables women to go to work, attend school, and support their families so that all of us can thrive inside the home and out.