“I am your protector,” Donald Trump declared to women voters at a Sept. 23 rally in western Pennsylvania. “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will be protected and I will be your protector.” Clips of this moment went viral on social media, and cable news hosts laughed derisively. As a historian of early American women and gender, however, I saw the deep and troubling roots of this rhetoric.
As polls increasingly find a widening gender gap between Trump and Kamala Harris among women voters, his campaign has made overt appeals to white suburban women.
They aren’t subtle.
At the same Pennsylvania rally, Trump claimed that his second term would offer protection for women “at the border, on the sidewalks of your now violent cities, in the suburbs where you are under migrant criminal siege, and with our military protecting you from foreign enemies.” He invoked an insecure masculinity rooted in the use of violence against real or often perceived threats, which requires a submissive, helpless, vulnerable woman to protect in order to validate its existence. In other words, to legitimate this brand of manhood, there must be a woman (or women) to protect. It’s a gendered performance that women of our historical moment, and of centuries past, know well.
Trump’s extended attempts at appealing to suburban women voters by identifying himself as their “protector” echo the language of gender inequality, steeped in Anglo-American common law customs from centuries ago. In the 18th century, these legal customs invoked the social and legal need for women to be protected by their husbands. The concept of “coverture,” as legal commentator William Blackstone opined, made “the husband and wife … one person under law.” It was only “under” a husband’s “wing, protection, and cover” that “she performs every thing.” A married woman could not own property in her own name, sue in court independent of her husband or conduct business on her own. Any wages she earned belonged to her husband. 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.
The protection of women — purportedly a benevolent, paternalistic gesture — has instead been historically grounded in and applied for the purposes of controlling women. In many cases throughout American history, it has been those tasked with the protection of women who have violated their safety, health and well-being. 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.
Consider, too, the issue of abortion. A majority of women (and a majority of Americans) believe that abortion should be accessible and legal in many if not most cases. The Trump campaign knows that his central role in ending abortion protections (about which he has publicly bragged) is deeply unpopular with the American public. Yet Trump insists that in his role as “protector” of women, they “will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
In fact, public opinion polls suggest that voters are thinking about reproductive rights as they consider for whom they will cast their ballots in November. Regardless of Justice Samuel Alito’s ahistorical opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion and reproductive rights are "deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition." In the colonial period, American women worked together to pass on knowledge related to their reproductive health, fertility and family limitation. That same set of English common law customs that confined married women under the promise of husbandly protection also provided women with the legal ability to terminate their pregnancies. In his “Commentaries,” Blackstone argued that life "begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother's womb," known as "quickening." Following those legal parameters, then, Anglo-American law protected women’s ability to obtain an abortion prior to quickening — sometimes as late as 25 weeks into pregnancy. (Notably, the 1973 Roe decision utilized similar parameters as this legal precedent.)
It’s important to note that quickening was a subjective standard determined by the pregnant person themselves, providing bodily autonomy under the common law. 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.
It was men — these “protectors of women” — who later wrested control of women’s health and reproduction from women themselves. The American Medical Association successfully campaigned to criminalize abortion procedures in the 1840s and 1850s. Critics demonized female physicians like Madame Restell, belittling their medical knowledge and skill and the health care they provided to women in their communities. These practitioners prioritized protecting women’s reproductive health, yet lost their power to do so as state after state moved to criminalize their work. Anti-abortion activists employed fear-mongering tactics by sensationalizing women’s deaths in local papers, convincing legislatures of the need to criminalize the procedure under the guise of protecting women.
Later, Anthony Comstock’s crusade to pass the eponymous “anti-obscenity” measures through Congress followed. These laws criminalized sending “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion” through the mail. Notably, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — drafted in large part by former officials of Trump’s administration — promises to enforce the long-dormant Comstock Act, originally passed in 1873, to limit access to abortion even in states where reproductive rights are codified under law.
Donald Trump, who has admitted to what many would describe as sexually predatory behavior and has been found liable for rape by a jury, claims to be a "protector" of women, yet the effect of his presidency was to limit the protections that American women need to be autonomous. The notion that American women require the protection of men come from an era in which women were the king’s subjects, not voting citizens of a republic. The idea that women require masculine protectors derives from a legal system that presumed their submission to men and their inability to assume an independent legal identity.
Instead of protection provided by the chief executive, echoing outdated assumptions about women’s helplessness, what American women need are protections for their basic human rights codified into law.
