In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.

Trump's "Make America Great Again" program trumpets a national identity built on scapegoating, self-pity and grandiosity, and the promise of a strongman.

All of women's aspirations--whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination--ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas--and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.

A backlash against women's rights is nothing new. Indeed it's a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.

My feminist view - that gender is on a continuum and we are all better off dropping a lot of those binary notions - is one that is shared by the more recent generation of trans activists and theorists.

When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.

The backlash against women's rights would be just one of several powerful forces creating a harsh and painful climate for women at work. Reagonomics, the recession, and the expansion of a minimum-wage service economy also helped, in no small measure, to slow and even undermine women's momentum in the job market. But the backlash did more than impede women's opportunities for employment, promotions, and better pay. Its spokesmen kept the news of many of these setbacks from women. Not only did the backlash do grievous damage to working women C it did on the sly.