Why Donald Trump’s victory has left women fearing for their freedoms across the world - Jayne Dowle

Vance called out then vice-president Kamala Harris as one such pariah. It was a horrible thing to say about a woman who may not have given birth, but is known to be a devoted stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s son and daughter.

And in any case, what gave Vance the right to even say such a thing in the first place? How disrespectful to anyone who either can’t or chooses not to, have children.

A cheap shot, using the fictional character of Eleanor Abernathy from The Simpsons, a mentally-ill woman with degrees from Harvard and Yale, as a political weapon.

Under Vance’s umbrella of hatred also came a gay man, Democrat politician Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latino-American politician and activist serving since 2019 as the Democrats’ representative for New York's 14th congressional district, who took office at the age of 29, the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress.

Sadly, that ‘crazy cat lady’ comment ended up becoming a defining trope of the Republican campaign.

But it was only the start. The Republican campaign’s stance on women – from reproductive rights to the inglorious personal reputation of Trump himself, reportedly accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment, including non-consensual kissing or groping, by at least 25 women since the 1970s – went on the attack.

The message, in essence, was that no-one, except straight white men, matters. Vitriol usually reserved for the ‘manosphere’, the alternative world of podcasts and the darker corners of X, and Trump’s embrace of controversial anti-feminism pundits such as Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys and Adin Ross, gained him much support, especially from angry/impressionable young men.

For many young American women, the former president’s long history of misogyny meant that a vote for Trump would be a vote against them, personally, their rights, even their very existence as independent beings.

Indeed, Hollywood actress Julia Roberts was pressed into service for the Vote Common Good campaign. In the ad she voiced over, a woman whose husband appears to be a Trump supporter goes into the voting booth to cast her ballot for Kamala Harris.

“In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know,” Roberts whispers.

Obviously, in a land where the ‘tradwife’, who doesn’t work and stays at home to raise a brood of kids is not just a social media trend, but a burgeoning life-choice, the campaign wasn’t as successful as it could have been.

My 19-year-old daughter, a first-year law student, reports that her flatmates’ group chat set alight with fears and anxieties last week. These are five intelligent young women all studying for degrees, in charge of their own lives and bodies.

Washington DC is thousands of miles away from them, but the repercussions are already being felt. “Is it true that Trump would ban contraception?”, my daughter asked me. “Is it also true that it might become impossible for women to work in America? And why should women be expected to vote the same as their husbands and boyfriends?”.

I don’t have the answers to these questions, and never thought that in the second decade of the 21st century, in the apparently civilised Western world, they would even be asked.

It’s profoundly depressing. The only thing I could think of to say to her was that I wished she had been young when I was, in the 1980s and 1990s.

We felt the benefit of the big freedoms – voting, equal pay, contraception – our mothers and grandmothers had fought for. And we expected men to listen to us and treat us with respect; on balance, they mostly did.

Women didn’t matter to Trump in 2016, we matter even less in 2024, and now he’s got the fearful behind him in support, spreading the poison, ramping up the hate.

If you think that what happens in America stays in America, open your eyes. That special relationship is about to show its true colours.