What has become clear in the wake of the electoral debacle (and was, no doubt, obvious before if only we had been looking) is that not all American women subscribe to feminist norms, or even if they do, they do not subscribe to them to the extent that they would outweigh other values when it comes to making political decisions.

The task for feminist scholars, then, is to understand these women’s thinking, to view Trump’s attraction through the eyes of his most loyal supporters. Doing so requires, first, avoiding the temptation to simply reproduce our own values and assumptions by expressing our disgust and disbelief, but this is easier said than done.

Thus I was pleased to have an opportunity to present some of my ideas about this conundrum at a recent lunchtime talk at the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality and to hear from other scholars and observers who are concerned with women’s attraction to populist radical right-wing movements in parts of ­­Europe. In my remarks I suggested two approaches to figuring out why over half of American female voters voted for Trump—one cultural and one more political. I began by noting that at this point both of these were really just hypotheses—I have not used them to conduct systematic research with Trump supporters either individually or in their organizations. Rather, they are based primarily on my observations and data drawn from the popular media, although I also relied on previous research on gender and right-wing movements by, among others, Liza Mügge and Sarah de Lange, as I shall explain.

First I present my cultural explanation. Here it is important to note that the largest proportion of women voting for Trump were white non-college-educated women—that is, white working-class women:

How U.S. Women Voted in the 2016 Elections

Data: National Election Pool

To these women, according to a number of analysts, Trump’s behavior is not off-putting but seems rather familiar; his bullying and self-vaunting masculinity, even his coarse, immature sexual remarks, are not much different from the kinds of things they see and hear every day. Author Rebecca Solnit put it well in her piece in the January 19, 2017 issue of the London Review of Books:

 To be a feminist you have to believe in your equality and rights, which can make your life unpleasant and dangerous if you live in a marriage, a family, a community, a church, a state that does not agree with you about this. For many women it’s safer not to have those thoughts in this country where a woman is beaten every eleven seconds or so and women’s partners are the leading cause of injury to them. And those thoughts are not so available in a country where feminism is forever being demonised and distorted.

(Solnit goes on to argue that, in fact, Trump is probably afraid of women—but that is a subject for another discussion.)

To these points, I would add that such women feel more threatened by the kind of model projected by Hillary Clinton and her supporters, namely, one in which women are more independent, perhaps get along financially and socially and even manage to raise children without men, or at least, purportedly, in egalitarian relationships. To low-educated women in a society that offers so few supports to working mothers and still denies women equal wages and advancement, this is a situation that they want to avoid at any cost. So it makes sense to them to support a candidate who promises better (or at least some kind of) jobs for their husbands, even if it means continuing to accept male dominance in all of its manifestations. If Trump were to fulfil his promises, especially around employment, they perhaps calculate, their lives might, in fact, improve.

As their many blogs and websites indicate (see, for example, https://www.facebook.com/WomenforTrump/), central to the worldview of female Trump supporters is the issue of abortion, which, after all these years, still sharply divides the American polity. Here I am reminded of the insights developed some years ago by anthropologist Faye Ginsburg and sociologist Kristen Luker in their studies of women in anti-abortion movements.* These activists, according to Ginsburg and Luker, regarded abortion as an extreme threat for two reasons: because motherhood was such a crucial element of their identities, and because they feared that easy access to abortion might loosen sexual mores and encourage extra-marital activity which, in turn, would undermine their marriages. Although many abortion rights opponents were evangelicals—that is, religious conservatives—for them opposition to abortion was a personal matter—almost a matter of survival—as much as a moral or religious one.

It seems that this same or a similar cohort of women make up the bulk of Trump’s support among non-college-educated women (again, this is a matter for research), and for this reason, he has repeatedly emphasized opposition to abortion in his public messages. Although his sincerity on this issue appears questionable, given his own public history of sexual misbehaviour and marital infidelity, he made opposition to abortion a recurrent theme in his campaign and, in one of his first acts as president, began to fulfil his campaign promise on this issue by banning the use of American foreign aid to support overseas clinics offering abortions or even abortion counselling. Currently, he is seeking to complete his obligation by nominating an abortion rights opponent to the Supreme Court (that nomination awaits Congressional approval).

Trump has made other attempts to curry favour with religious conservatives in general that probably have particular appeal to women. Despite his stumbling at the National Prayer Breakfast a couple of weeks ago (in short order, he committed three offenses: bragging about his electoral triumph, denigrating Arnold Schwartzenegger, his replacement on “The Apprentice,” and swearing), he enhanced his credibility with evangelicals and others by indicating that he would try to loosen the restrictions on religious organizations that currently bar them from advocating political positions, and he also implied that he would do his best to curtail GLBT rights, including gay marriage. Although some female Trump supporters think he may be in need of salvation (and thus forgive him his sexual sins), others regard him as their saviour.

Finally, there is the issue of immigration, which prompts Trump to express a kind of exaggerated chivalry when it comes to protecting American womanhood from “Mexican rapists” and from Muslims intent on imposing sharia law on the U.S. However misplaced these racist fears and however demeaning the promises of protection may be, inasmuch as they imply that women are powerless to protect themselves, some working-class women may, in fact, welcome the supposed concern for their safety and regard it as part of the patriarchal bargain—they give up their autonomy in exchange for guaranteed security.

Along these lines, as one audience member at the lunchtime talk reminded us, we must not ignore the appeal of Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric to less-educated right-wing women as well as men. That rhetoric neatly encapsulates at least two of the themes mentioned above—the sexual and economic threat of both immigrants and native-born racial minorities—and also reinforces white men’s claim to rightful dominance—a claim that goes hand in hand with the patriarchal bargain, which Clinton’s candidacy implicitly challenged.

Why educated women voted for Trump is more of a puzzle. Fewer of them are evangelical, so they are not necessarily opposed to abortion, and­­­­­­­ many of them work outside the home and in that sense may wish to be treated as equals and seek understanding when it comes to balancing work and family.

Here I would disagree with Robin J. Ely and Laura Morgan Roberts of the Harvard Business School who argue that the college-educated white women who voted for Trump have been socialized “to associate leadership with a particular version of masculinity, an image Trump exemplified in his persona as the supremely successful businessman. He reinforced the masculine, leader-as-saviour image with repeated claims that he alone could make America great again.” One might speculate that college-educated women are, if anything, probably fed up with that image, whether it comes from their husbands or their bosses. How else can we explain why educated European women, who are not so different from their American counterparts, have, in recent years, supported multiple female leaders, including Angela Merkel and Teresa May?

Educated female Trump voters may also place greater emphasis on motherhood than do Hillary supporters, and they probably take conservative positions when it comes to the role of the state and the need for de-regulation to promote business growth. Also they may have found Trump’s position on immigration reassuring when it comes to job protection. As more or less mainstream Republicans who were given no other choice, these women probably put party and ideology above any reservations they may have had about Trump's persona and character, and, as the saying goes, they “held their noses” and voted for him, misgivings notwithstanding.

As I said, these are hypotheses, speculations at best—and they remain to be tested. But they indicate, I think, the need to view female Trump supporters through the other end of the telescope—to abandon, for the moment, feminist assumptions, which only serve to entrap us in a vicious cycle of outrage and disgust, and seek new analytical frameworks that help explain Trump’s attraction for so many women. Also important is to look at the rhetoric and positions of the Republican Party, which, for all intents and purposes, is now Trump’s party, at least for the time being.

Here I find it helpful to turn to the special issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice on gender and populist radical-right politics, in which de Lange and Mügge have an interesting article that lays out a typology of radical right p­­­­opulist parties when it comes to gender issues, particularly the issue of work-family balance. De Lange and Mügge divide these parties into traditional, modern-traditional (which acknowledge women’s roles as both workers and mothers in today’s societies) and neo-traditional (which more or less ignore the latter shift). As the issue editors note, such movements and parties take different forms in different national political contexts. How well do these categories fit the radical right in the US? Although one might assume that a modern-traditional movement would appeal most to American women, given the advances of feminism and the realities of current female employment rates, I would say that radical right populism in the US leans more toward the neo-traditional side, for reasons suggested above. Instead of compromising and moving at least some distance toward a more progressive or at least realistic approach to gender roles, radical right populists, if anything, lean heavily in the other direction, as if to counter-balance feminist and GLBT tendencies. In addition to its position on abortion, as noted above, the Trump campaign made no attempt to appeal to wage-earning mothers, with the exception of a brief excursion into child care by Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who proposed a policy that, on close analysis, appeared to be designed to help mainly middle- and high-income employed mothers.

In fact, Trump had to do little to bring women into the radical right-wing fold; they were already there. As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson explain in their recent book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2012), many women had already found a comfortable place in the Tea Party, which makes up part of the radical right. And for the evangelicals, radical right populism offers a platform for neo-maternalist activism—a way to bring their values and concerns regarding the home and motherhood into the public sphere and to advocate for them without undermining or contradicting their inherently domestic basis.

Again, more analysis and research are needed, but I think these are useful places to begin. And that brings me to my final point. As I said at the outset, feminist scholars will not bring women on the radical right over to our side by repeating the slogans and positions that have alienated those women in the first place. We have to figure out the appeal of the radical right populist message and somehow persuade female supporters that it is not, in fact, in their best interest. Trump himself appears to be bent on doing part of that work for us—his economic policies are, according to many experts, bound to fail and will in fact lead to job losses rather than gains. For women on the right, who have staked their security on male breadwinners, this will lead to great disappointment, but it may also open them to a message about how economic and social rights for women are not inimical to domestic harmony but in fact can strengthen families and make them more secure. Figuring out how to shape that message, not just for American women but for women across Europe where radical right-wing populism is also taking hold, is our task for the coming years.

*These are Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984) and Ginsburg’s Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (1989), both published by the University of California Press.