Whenever I spoke with Gloria Steinem on my program over the years, I came away with the impression of a person combining remarkable charisma and intellect with a genuine grasp of what power was and how to use it. She was a force of nature — a co-founder of Ms. magazine and, in 1972, of the National Women's Political Caucus, organizations built to convert feminist organizing into durable political and media power. When the news broke yesterday morning that she had passed away at 92, it stood in sharp juxtaposition to a piece the major conservative site Townhall had published titled, “No, the World Would Not Be a Better Place If Women Ran It”. Its argument was:

“Anyone who went through middle school, junior high or high school knows full well the kind of nasty behavior that females are capable of.”

Nobody planned that coincidence. There is enough animosity toward women circulating in Republican circles today that if it had not been that piece, it would have been something else. But it highlights a troubling trend in American culture and politics, one with echoes of a disturbing past.

Back in 1972, Louise and I got married. When she went to get her first credit card in her own name, I had to co-sign for her — not because I was more creditworthy. She had been supporting herself through work since she was 15. It was the bank’s requirement because she was a woman.

That year was a touchstone for the women’s movement. It was the year Steinem’s Ms. magazine sold out its entire 300,000-copy run in eight days; the year the magazine’s first issue ran a “We Have Had Abortions” statement signed by 53 women — including Steinem, Billie Jean King, and Susan Sontag — confessing to what was then a crime; the year Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states; and the year Title IX became law. Yet even as the culture raced ahead, my bank still demanded a man’s name on the signature line.

It was not until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 that a woman — of any age or income — no longer needed a husband, father, brother, uncle, or male friend to co-sign for credit, a mortgage, or much of anything else. More often than not, the credit history belonged to the man and made no mention of the woman, so a divorce or a death could erase everything she had built.

While this may sound dystopian — and like ancient history — to today’s young people, it is a world many within the GOP are actively trying to recreate.

Pastor Joel Webbon, for instance, has preached for years that women should not have a voice in American politics because, in his telling, a woman’s political voice properly comes from her husband — and if she is unmarried, from her father, brother, uncle, or whichever man in her life “loves her most.” It is the same list Louise’s bank used: husband, father, brother, uncle, family friend.

Webbon helped write “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” alongside Oklahoma state Senator Dusty Deevers and former Trump administration official William Wolfe. His “Right Response Conference” has put Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolfe, Steve Deace, and Auron MacIntyre on stage. He has endorsed candidates and sat for a ten-part interview series with notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

He is part of the “TheoBros” network, which connects to Republican officeholders mainly through Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church membership and Vice President JD Vance socializing with people in it.

Hegseth belongs to Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), and last year the Defense Secretary reposted a CNN segment in which Wilson and other CREC pastors proclaimed their belief that women should not vote. Instead, they argued, an entire household should have a single vote, cast exclusively by the man of the house.

In February of this year, Hegseth invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon’s monthly worship service — itself a violation of the Constitution, the author argues — stood beside him on stage, and broadcast the entire event on the Defense Department’s internal TV network.

Inside the Pentagon, Hegseth has pushed women out of leadership roles and instituted mandatory testosterone screening in the name of “lethality.” Over at HHS, the former lawyer with no medical training whom Trump put in charge — a man who has publicly described past heroin and sex addiction — appears equally preoccupied with his own masculinity and testosterone levels.

These, the author contends, are the men Republicans hold up as role models for the generation of boys and young men coming of age today:

— Hegseth paid $50,000 in a confidential settlement to a woman who told Monterey police that he took her phone, blocked the door of a hotel room, and assaulted her as she kept saying, “No.”

— Kennedy kept a 398-page journal in 2001 with a ledger in the back listing 37 women by first name, each rated on a scale of one to ten according to how far things had gone. His wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, found it, and her family has long believed his promiscuity contributed to her death by suicide in 2012.

— Trump was held liable by one jury for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and by a second for defaming her about it. The Epstein files the Justice Department tried to keep buried include FBI interview summaries in which a woman alleged that Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was somewhere between 13 and 15, that he forced oral sex on her, and that he beat her when she bit what she described as his tiny penis. He publicly cheated on all three of his wives and bragged to Billy Bush that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because, he said, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

— Then there is Musk, who has fathered at least 14 children with multiple women. While Hegseth, Trump, and Kennedy seem to view the sole role of women as arm candy and sexual pleasure, Musk apparently regards them as most useful as, in the author’s phrasing, toaster ovens for white babies.

These are the men writing the rules for our daughters and granddaughters.

The year Louise and I married appears in retrospect to have been one of history’s hinge points. Lewis Powell wrote his infamous Memo in 1971, and Nixon put him on the Court the following year to carry it out. Phyllis Schlafly started her Eagle Forum in 1972 to fight ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The Heritage Foundation was founded the next year, 1973 — the same year the Supreme Court decided Roe — and together these developments laid the foundation for Rush Limbaugh to spend decades trash-talking “Feminazis” and promoting his “Hillary Clinton Testicle Lock Box.” Andrew Tate carries on that crusade, as does Trump’s former body man John McEntee, who joked that when conservatives said they wanted mail-only voting, “they meant male, spelled m-a-l-e.”

Many men and businesses believe they benefit when women cannot lead an independent economic life — cannot start a business, take a risk, or even negotiate on their own behalf. Women’s liberation gave half the American workforce the power to walk away from a bad marriage or a bad job, and Republicans resent it.

The cost to women and to society of this resurgence of naked misogyny is enormous. ProPublica found, examining 7 years of Texas hospital data, that after the state banned abortion, sepsis rates jumped more than 50 percent and maternal deaths have climbed in Texas while falling in blue states. Texas’ Attorney General is currently pursuing criminal charges and a $1.6 million bond against a Houston midwife, while in Missouri, Republican legislators are pushing a state registry of expectant mothers that could be used to monitor them and ensure they do not obtain an abortion.

Elon Musk’s Grok AI generated an estimated 23,000 sexualized images of children and a reported 1.8 million sexualized images of women in just 11 days, after which Musk posted that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” as his company placed the feature behind a paywall, monetizing it.

Meanwhile, accused rapist Andrew Tate — whose $8,000-a-year “War Room” allegedly ran a course on seducing, isolating, and pushing women into sex-cam work — has cultivated the president’s youngest son. An associate told the New York Times he had given Barron dating advice while Tate became a big brother figure to him.

All of this is deeply damaging to young men as well. These views of women and male dominance produce men who cannot ask for help, cannot be true partners, and can never get genuinely close to anyone — including their own families. And these incels blame their loneliness on women, sometimes with murderous violence.

One of the great missions of Gloria Steinem’s life, as she told me more than once on my program, was the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment — first introduced in 1928 and reintroduced in 1972 — which says simply:

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

It is impossible to measure how many discoveries and accomplishments humanity has already lost to the suppression of women’s agency and rights, but now is the moment to take the next step toward ending it.

The Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified by 38 states — the number the Constitution requires — but Republicans continue to fight it, claiming the ratifications that came after 1982 are invalid. That 1982 date matters: Congress, when it passed the amendment, attached a ratification deadline that it later extended, and opponents argue ratifications after the deadline lapsed — even though Article V’s text, as the author notes, sets no such requirement. The Republicans on the Supreme Court refuse to examine the case. Two weeks ago, the new Archivist of the United States told senators he will stick with his predecessor’s refusal to certify it, following a Justice Department opinion rather than the plain text of Article V of the Constitution, which mentions no deadlines for constitutional amendments at all.

Congress can settle this and establish women’s rights in law with a simple resolution requiring a majority vote.

So call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative and both senators you want them co-sponsoring the resolution affirming ERA ratification. Then check your registration at vote.org, because Republicans are again openly discussing repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the vote.

I signed for Louise in 1972 because the bank required it; nobody should ever have to do that again. We need to put women’s rights into the Constitution, where no right-wing politician can challenge them again.