early American

As a historian of early American women and gender, however, I saw the deep and troubling roots of this rhetoric.

Early American women were subject to laws steeped in coverture’s assumptions of gendered inequality, and these restrictions continued long after the United States won its independence from Britain.

While husbands were charged with the protection of their wives under coverture, early American law and society justified the use of violence by husbands against wives, as a “moderate correction,” to enforce women’s submission and obedience.

In other words, women in early American history — before, during and in the wake of the American Revolution — had greater autonomy over their own reproductive health than tens of millions of American women have today.

This storied historical legacy helps explain the attraction of so many Americans to Trump, who claims to be bringing back the greatness of an early American system governed by wealthy white men in the name of all the true American patriots.