Women, Gender, and 2024 U.S. Presidential Election in Historical Perspective

A lecture by Dr Stacie Taranto (Ramapo College New Jersey, USA) organised by the Centre for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

In November 2024, Americans went to the polls to possibly elect their first woman president. But just like in 2016--the only other time in American history that a woman was poised to win the White House--Republican Donald Trump bested his Democratic female rival (Kamala Harris in 2024). As in prior contests since 1980, more women voted for the Democratic nominee over the Republican by an average of ten points. That is, all but one crucial subset of female voters: non-college educated white women (typically married, religious ones). This was not by happenstance. In 2024, these #tradwives, as they were known in social media parlance, actively organized other women like them around traditional, (as they saw it) divinely-inspired gender roles. In doing so, they covered their extensive political organizing and lucrative sponsorships as online influencers in the cloak of alleged full-time domesticity, motherhood, and female economic dependence. The media environment they worked in was new, but their activism echoed the past. The 1970s, in particular, was a decade similarly dominated by economic anxiety and high inflation mixed with fears of recent, left-leaning political movements that sought to reorient American thinking about gender. This talk will trace those parallels, focusing on how this demographic of women continue to choose traditional gender politics over the promise of feminism--while simultaneously taking advantage of opportunities that feminists have made possible for them.

About the speaker:
Dr. Stacie Taranto is an associate professor of history at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where she has taught courses on post-1945 U.S. political and women’s history since 2010. Taranto holds an A.B. in history from Duke University (2001) and an A.M. (2005) and Ph.D. (2010) in history from Brown University. 
She is co-editor of Suffrage at 100: Women and American Politics Since 1920 (Johns Hopkins Press, 2020). She is the author of Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 
Taranto is the author of several scholarly articles and her writing and commentary have also appeared in popular publications such as Time, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. 
She is an associate editor of Made By History at Time (formerly at The Washington Post).

Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: frankg@tcd.ie