At the event Melania Trump hosted for Women’s History Month, the ladies in the audience had perfect blowouts and wore pastel dresses. But the speakers who took the stage were tough. They included an Olympic athlete, a single mother who worked as a waitress and Melania herself. Most of the women honored were notorious for being abrasive: among them Pam Bondi and Karoline Leavitt. The women in the crowd didn’t clap politely but cheered and hollered, as if the East Room chairs were bleachers at a football game. Rumor on the street is Leavitt, who is pregnant, will only receive three weeks of maternity leave from her role as White House press secretary. 

“Women are either mothers, whores, or nuns”

“Women are either mothers, whores, or nuns”

The event offered an interesting view into the young women of the right – and what role they had to play in the MAGA movement. A recent article by Sam Adler-Bell published in New York magazine started out by describing why a woman called Anna joined the New Right, only to leave years later. She wanted to exist free from “woke pieties.” She wanted to go to the party, to be a woman welcome in this world of men. She valued family, seeing the longer delays before marriage and children as the main reason modern women were miserable. It was initially an “aesthetic choice” and she “found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.” She left the movement when “the theme of the party,” the extremism and misogyny, became too real to tolerate.

But there was never a stable alliance between the men and women of the New Right. Throughout........

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