Monday, March 17, 2025

Self-Contradictory Victory Announcements

Today’s post about my new book, We the Men, focuses on another form of forgetting in America’s dominant stories about itself—forgetting the work the nation still has to do.
As modern Americans, many of us have encountered people who announce or assume that the nation has left the sexist bad old days behind.  Still, I was surprised to discover just how early in American history those premature declarations began appearing and how important a role they have played in perpetuating inequality.
Wildly exaggerated accounts of American progress toward sex equality have been common in both everyday settings and legal institutions since before the Nineteenth Amendment’s 1920 ratification made sex-based disenfranchisement unconstitutional. These declarations are routinely framed in terms of American women universally, although white women have tended to be top of mind.
The stories forget what remains undone, even to the extreme of proclaiming that the United States has already achieved sex equality. For example, a 1918 textbook assured young readers that: “All men and women are regarded as equals before the law.” At the time, thirty-three out of forty-eight states maintained sex-based restrictions on the franchise. Although women had spent decades mobilizing for equality, discrimination against women at work, in marriage, and in every other arena was still legal and pervasive throughout the nation.
Judges have been suggesting or proclaiming that the nation has moved past sex discrimination for almost as long as American women have been mobilizing to challenge male supremacy. In fact, many of the judiciary’s sunniest proclamations about American progress have appeared in decisions denying women equality, as courts rationalize their rejection of women’s claims by insisting that women already have so much.
I call these decisions “self-contradictory victory announcements” because judges boast about America’s embrace of sex equality while simultaneously enforcing male supremacy. While women are not the only marginalized group to have experienced the judiciary’s self-contradictory declarations, cases perpetuating women’s inequality have long been prominent triggers for self-contradiction.
The Supreme Court continued its long tradition of self-contradictory victory announcements in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). This decision overruled Roe v. Wade (1973) in the course of upholding an anti-abortion law from Mississippi, the Gestational Age Act of 2018.
This line of argument turned on obscuring how far America still has to go. Dobbs never mentioned that men held 85.1% of the seats in the Mississippi legislature that passed the Gestational Age Act in 2018. Dobbs also did not mention that the Mississippi governor who championed the bill and signed it into law was the latest in the state’s uninterrupted line of white male governors. Boasting about women’s electoral and political power while ignoring these persistent inequalities made it easier to deny how politicians can endanger women when constitutional safeguards disappear.
— Jill Hasday