Women in the US are being pushed from the frying pan into a five-alarm authoritarian fire. Religious conservatives, Christian nationalists and the tech bros of Silicon Valley, who have long conspired to put women back in their pre-civil-rights boxes, are not only winning, they’re becoming bolder and more organised.

In January, the Heritage Foundation published a sweeping roadmap for rolling back a century of women’s progress called Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. These are the same ultraconservative folks that developed the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term, Project 2025 – so this is not simply wishful thinking.

The premise of the report – reversing population decline by putting marriage and family first – seems benign on the surface. But beneath the white picket fence messaging there’s something more sinister.

Their strategy for addressing the “emergency” of low fertility rates – a trope they share with white supremacists and the manosphere – is to limit women’s choices so that their only option is to marry and have babies.

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Goals include: banning same-sex marriage and limiting IVF, limiting contraception, ending what it characterises as the “normalisation” of no-fault divorce, penalising single mothers, reducing women’s opportunities and making the tenets of conservative Christianity the new American way.

Notably, the Heritage Foundation’s solution for increasing fertility rates isn’t economically sound – there is no suggestion of affordable housing, better pay for workers, flexible work options, childcare supports, paid parental leave or ensuring men and women share duties equally. Instead it simply blames women for societal collapse.

In this worldview, women who pursue college, careers and financial independence are the reason everything has gone to hell. “If women view marriage and children as disrupting their careers or straining their finances, they may forgo or delay marriage,” the report says.

Tech broligarchs are only too happy to help. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp said recently that its AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often woman voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men. He said the quiet part out loud. Opportunities for women are shrinking, thanks to a world increasingly driven by AI algorithms that, research has shown, routinely favour white men.

Award-winning author Jessica Valenti says of the movement: “They want our daughters and granddaughters to have zero information about their bodies and sex, no ability to protect themselves from pregnancy, limited choices for an intellectual and professional life, and – once our girls have been corralled into early marriages – few opportunities to leave. Push them into the home, force them to get pregnant, rinse and repeat.”

[ The American dream now is to leave - at least for young womenOpens in new window ]

From Ireland, there is a temptation to view this as an American crisis: distant, weird and someone else’s emergency. But we know – from our own painful history – what happens when conservative institutions decide to codify narrow visions of society and how long it takes to undo that damage. Church and State solutions for women here included: mother and baby homes (1922-1998), rape legally allowed during marriage (until 1990), men allowed to sell the family home out from under the family (until 1976), the marriage bar (1924-1973), no sale of birth control (1935-1980), no divorce (until 1995), assumed foetal personhood (until 2018), no abortion (until 2019), and small state pensions linked to marital status.

Women’s employment and educational options from the 1920s until the 1980s were abysmal. Poverty and domestic violence rates were high. Alcoholism and gambling contributed to tough times for families with one breadwinner. Most if not all societal metrics put Ireland at or near the bottom of the league tables.

The marriage bar was one of many laws that aligned with Catholic social teaching about women’s roles as wife and mother. This ideology was copperfastened in Article 41.1 of the 1937 Constitution – the “a woman’s place is in the home” clause. Almost 100 years later this article remains in place.

According to an annual report on the state of world democracy by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden last month, “the gains of the third wave of democratisation since the mid-1970s are almost eradicated” and the US has lost its standing as a liberal democracy.

Women and minorities are most likely to vote against authoritarians so they are specifically targeted. Harvard research shows authoritarians use five consistent mechanisms: controlling women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy through forced pregnancies or forced abortions; blocking equal access to the workplace, political office and public life; reinforcing gender roles that confine women to domestic life as wives, mothers and caregivers; reducing penalties for domestic and sexual violence; and reinforcing strict gender and sexual hierarchies.

[ ‘It’s the start of an attack on women’s rights’: Crowds protest Roe v Wade decision outside US embassy in DublinOpens in new window ]

Most Americans have been sleepwalking into authoritarianism for the last year. The US media has been rocked by mass lay-offs and chastened by new billionaire owners.

The unholy trinity of conservatives, Christian nationalists and tech bros are creating a policy architecture in which humans who do not conform are technologically monitored, economically penalised, politically marginalised, educationally disadvantaged and reproductively controlled.

Ireland provided the blueprint for this kind of society but, even today, we have few reasons to be smug. Look at our epidemic rates of sexual violence; the limited number of domestic violence shelters and gardaí trained in this area; the ghastly number of single parents and children living in poverty; and almost 900,000 jobs threatened by AI.

Often when we think the fight is won, we realise our rights have been eroded without our noticing.

Margaret E Ward is a leadership consultant and a contributor to The Irish Times

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