Have you ever noticed how usually when we think
about the English language, we sort of treat
words as descriptive labels? Right, like a label
on a jar. Exactly. You read it, you know exactly
what's inside. But when you step into the arena
of political messaging, words stop being labels.
And well, they start becoming architectural blueprints.
Oh, absolutely. They actually build the reality
you end up living in. Yeah. And today we are
taking a massive stack of sources, specifically
a deeply detailed, heavily sourced Wikipedia
article. And we're pulling out the mechanics
of how one of these blueprints is drawn, deployed,
and ultimately dismantled. It's a really fascinating
process to pull apart. It is. We are diving into
one of the most recognizable, explosive political
slogans of the modern era. The phrase war on
women. A slogan that completely dominated the
American news cycle. I mean, it heavily influenced
multiple election cycles. It fundamentally altered
how political campaigns talk to and about female
voters. Right. And before we get into it, I want
to make a crucial disclaimer for you listening,
because we are pulling from sources detailing
highly volatile, polarizing legislation. And
quotes from both left -wing and right -wing political
figures, too. Exactly. We're putting our own
politics completely aside today. We aren't here
to tell you who was right, who was wrong, or
who you should vote for. Absolutely not. We are
just opening up the hood of this political machine
to see exactly how the gears of this messaging
actually turned. Right. We're analyzing the term
not as an absolute given truth, but as a fascinating
case study in political framing. Yeah. We're
tracing its roots, looking at the battlegrounds
where it was deployed, and examining its measurable
impact on American elections. So let's start
with those roots. Because you might assume a
phrase, this engineered, this poll tested, must
have popped out of a million dollar political
consultants focus group in Washington, D .C.
You'd think so, right? Yeah. But the sources
show it actually started in a very different
environment. Not in a boardroom. No. The origins
are deeply rooted in academic and feminist literature
from decades earlier. Wait, decades? Yeah. If
we look back to 1989, the radical feminist Andrea
Dworkin used the exact phrase, war on women.
in an introduction to a book. Wow, 1989. Uh -huh.
And she later used a variation of it as the subtitle
for her 1997 collection of writings, Life and
Death. And Susan Faludi's massive 1991 book,
Backlash, also carried the subtitle, The Undeclared
War Against American Women. So this terminology
was brewing in the intellectual academic sphere
for a really long time. It was. It was very established
there. But why war? I mean, what was that specific
word doing in an academic context? Well, in academia,
Using a term like war is it's a structural framing
device. It was an academic framework used to
analyze subtle systemic societal trends like
media representation things like that Exactly
media representation the historical restructuring
of gender relations over decades For instance,
there were books in the mid -2000s critiquing
the George W. Bush administration using this
exact war on women framing But it was largely
confined to literature and activist circles,
right? It wasn't something you saw in a 30 -second
primetime television attack Not until the political
landscape experienced a massive seismic shift,
anyway. The 2010 midterms. Yeah, the Tea Party
wave. That helped the Republican Party win a
sweeping majority in the House of Representatives,
along with a massive influx of conservative state
legislatures across the country. And almost immediately
in early 2011, as these new lawmakers started
proposing legislation, the phrase leaped from
the pages of academic theory directly onto the
debate stage. Prominent Democrats, including
Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, grabbed this
specific phrase to push back against the sudden
surge in state and federal bills. They weaponized
it, essentially. Okay, let's unpack this because
this transition is fascinating to me. Is this
evolution essentially taking a highly specialized,
delicate surgical scalpel out of an academic
laboratory? And carrying it out onto the campaign
trail? Yeah, and forging it into a blunt political
broadsword. That's a great way to look at it.
Because when a concept moves from the nuance
of sociology or gender studies into the raw arena
of electoral politics, it inevitably changes
shape. It has to, right? To survive. Exactly.
In that transition, the term lost its academic
subtlety. It wasn't about slow, structural media
critiques anymore. It became an urgent, immediate
alarm bell. Right. And when it traded in nuance,
it gained an unprecedented mobilization power.
It gave a disparate group of voters across the
country a single unified rallying cry that felt
Well, existential. But a political broadsword
needs a physical target to strike at. You can't
just shout war into the void and expect a new
cycle to sustain it. No, you need actual ammunition.
And according to the sources, this slogan exploded
precisely because there was an actual unprecedented
wave of state -level policies introduced in 2011
and 2012. The sheer volume of legislation introduced
during that narrow window is staggering. Just
how much are we talking about? In 2011 alone,
State legislatures across the United States introduced
over 1 ,100 individual provisions related to
women's reproductive health. Over 1 ,100 provisions
in a single year? In one year, yeah. What does
that actually look like on the ground for a voter?
Well, a massive portion of these were focused
on restricting abortion access, fundamentally
changing the landscape of reproductive health
care. You had states pushing for strict new gestational
limits. Like Arizona, right. Yeah, Arizona passed
legislation banning abortions occurring 20 weeks
after a woman's last menstrual period. Other
states started testing the waters with bans in
six weeks. But perhaps the most mechanically
effective tactic was the rise of TRAP laws. Targeted
regulation of abortion providers. Right. And
the mechanism of a TRA law is crucial to understand
here. These laws didn't explicitly make abortion
illegal. Because that would immediately trigger
a Supreme Court challenge. Spot on. Instead,
they placed incredibly heavy, often medically
unnecessary regulatory burdens on the clinics
themselves. Like what kind of burdens? Imagine
running a small outpatient health clinic and
suddenly a new state law dictates that your hallways
must be the exact width of a major hospital surgical
corridor. Oh, wow. Or that your doctors must
have admitting privileges at a local hospital
that outright refuses to grant them. So you aren't
being told you can't provide health care. You
are simply being legislated out of physical existence.
Exactly. Clinics across the country were forced
to shut down entirely because they just couldn't
afford the renovations. And it wasn't just the
medical procedures being targeted, it was the
financial lifeblood of the organizations providing
them. The sources detail a massive coordinated
effort to defund Planned Parenthood at both the
state and federal levels. Which led to a massive
cultural flashpoint in early 2012 involving the
Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. I remember
this. Komen announced they were pulling their
funding from Planned Parenthood. Yes. They set
it a newly created internal rule that prohibited
funding organizations under government investigation.
And Planned Parenthood was facing a congressional
inquiry at the time, spearheaded by conservative
lawmakers. Right. And that decision triggered
an absolute public relations earthquake. It perfectly
illustrated the mechanism of corporate pressure
colliding with grassroots outrage. The backlash
was so immediate, so fierce, and heavily localized
on social media, it became a complete PR nightmare
for them. It was unprecedented. Just four days
after the announcement, the Coleman Board of
Directors reversed the decision entirely. Four
days. Yeah. And several top -level staff members
ended up resigning over it. It showed politicians
just how volatile and energized this battlefield
had become. And if the funding battles were volatile,
the push for mandatory ultrasounds was visceral.
This is where the political rhetoric really started
to collide with the physical reality of the legislation.
Right, because several states passed laws requiring
women seeking abortions to first undergo a government
mandated ultrasound. And some of these laws required
the woman to view the image or listen to the
fetal heartbeat. But because of the medical realities
of early pregnancy, an abdominal ultrasound often
doesn't work. The mandate frequently required
a transvaginal ultrasound. An incredibly invasive
internal procedure. Yes. And you have politicians
suddenly trying to defend government mandated
invasive medical procedures, sometimes with disastrously
chosen words. Like Pennsylvania Governor Tom
Corbett. Oh, exactly. He was asked about his
state's mandatory ultrasound bill, and he drew
intense national criticism when he told reporters
that women didn't have to look at the image.
He famously said, you just have to close your
eyes. Yeah. When you are the political opposition
trying to prove a literal war on women is happening,
an elected official telling women to just close
your eyes. during a mandated medical procedure
is, well, it's essentially handing the opposition
their entire campaign strategy on a silver platter.
But the legislation driving this narrative wasn't
exclusively about reproductive rights. The sources
show the narrative expanding into the workplace,
which is a major shift. A huge shift. In Wisconsin,
Governor Scott Walker repealed the state's Equal
Pay Enforcement Act. And Walker defended the
repeal by arguing the law just incentivized trial
lawyers to sue job creators and was clogging
up the legal system. But opponents immediately
framed the repeal as a direct attack on women's
economic equality. And the defense of the repeal
provided even more rhetorical fuel. Right. Republican
State Senator Glenn Grothman defended it by arguing
that, and this is a direct quote from the source,
money is more important for men because they
might expect to be breadwinners someday. a statement
that did not go over what? Wait, I'm stuck on
something here. You've got highly personal, deeply
complex reproductive health care on one side,
and then you have a purely economic policy, like
equal pay or workplace litigation in Wisconsin
on the other. If you throw all of these vastly
different issues into one giant bucket called
a war, doesn't the word war just lose all its
meaning to the average voter? Does it dilute
the impact, you mean? Yeah, exactly. Does it
just become background noise? What's fascinating
here is that grouping these disparate issues
was a highly calculated, deliberate strategy.
Really? Yeah. Think about it. If you only argue
about a 20 -week abortion ban, you are having
an isolated debate about one specific medical
and moral issue. Voters can compartmentalize
that. OK, that makes sense. But if you link that
abortion ban to a repeal of equal pay, and link
that to a defunding of a family planning clinic,
you stop arguing about individual policies. You're
painting a picture of a comprehensive narrative.
So the strategy was to convince voters that this
wasn't a series of unrelated laws, but rather
a broad systemic hostility toward women in general.
Exactly. It connects the dots for the voter.
It builds a pattern. But as we see in the historical
data, dry policy changes, regulatory text, and
even systemic narratives only get you so far.
What truly poured gasoline on this fire and made
war on women a household phrase wasn't a bill
passed in a state house. It was a series of viral,
highly personal, foot -in -mouth gaffes by individual
politicians. The legislation laid the dry brush,
but human error was the spark. And no scark was
bigger than the Todd Akin moment in August of
2012. Oh, man. Todd Akin was a Missouri Senate
candidate who was asked in an interview about
his opposition to abortion in instances of rape.
And he falsely claimed that women who are victims
of what he called legitimate rape rarely experience
pregnancy. Because, according to him, the female
body has ways to try to shut that whole thing
down. A statement that is medically and scientifically
entirely false. The medical community immediately
debunked it. But the psychological and political
fallout was a tsunami. It really was. The phrase
legitimate rape didn't just highlight scientific
illiteracy. It implied a hierarchy of assault.
It suggested some victims were to be believed
and others weren't. And the sources describe
an absolute stampede of Republicans trying to
distance themselves from a kin. Presidential
candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul
Ryan publicly disagreed with him. Republican
National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called
the comments, stupid and demanded Aiken step
down. They even pulled his campaign funding.
But the damage to the broader party's image was
already done. And the gaks kept coming. Yeah.
We also had the massive controversy over the
Obamacare birth control mandate, which required
health plans to cover contraceptives. This sparked
a legitimate, complex legal debate over religious
freedom for institutions that didn't want to
provide that coverage. But the complexity of
that debate vanished in early 2012 when Republican
Congressman Darrell Issa convened a panel to
address the religious freedom aspect. It was
an all -male panel. Yep. He actively barred a
female Georgetown law student named Sandra Fluke
from testifying about the medical necessity of
contraceptives, arguing she wasn't a member of
the clergy. So Democratic representatives hosted
a separate, unofficial panel just so she could
speak. And that led to conservative talk show
host Rush Limbaugh spending three days on air.
brutally attacking Sandra Flu, calling her a
slut and a prostitute for wanting contraceptive
coverage. Wow. And right around that same time,
you had Foster Fries, a billionaire donor supporting
Republican Rick Santorum, suggesting on television
that back in his day, women just used aspirin
as contraception. Right, by putting it between
their knees. I mean, why do these viral sound
bites, the aspirin, the legitimate rape comment,
the name calling, completely overwrite the policy
in a voter's mind? That's a great question. Do
these gaffes act like political lightning rods
that effectively blind the public to the actual
nuanced text of the legislation being debated?
Were voters reacting to the laws or just the
gaffes? If we connect this to the bigger picture,
it's a prime example of the cognitive psychology
of voting. How so? Human brains look for cognitive
ease. Processing a 500 -page health care mandate
or the intricacies of religious liberty law requires
immense mental effort. That's true. It's exhausting.
But processing a billionaire telling women to
put aspirin between their knees takes zero effort.
It triggers an immediate visceral emotional response.
So in the eyes of the electorate, these extreme
rhetorical missteps by a few individuals end
up defining an entire party's platform. Exactly.
The gaps prove the slogan's premise to voters
who are already on the fence. But there is a
massive difference between dominating a news
cycle with outrage and actually getting people
to check a box on a ballot. Oh, absolutely. When
all of this rhetoric finally hit the electorate,
did it actually change voting behavior? How did
this volatile mix perform when everyday voters?
when you stepped into the booth? In a short term,
specifically the 2012 presidential election,
it was incredibly effective. The Obama campaign
heavily utilized the narrative, particularly
leaning into the birth control mandate. painting
the opposition as completely out of touch with
modern women's lives. Right, and this contributed
to a massive gender gap in voting, which was
a significant factor in Obama's victory. But
the sources point to a fascinating academic backlash,
because as powerful as the message was for some
voters, it actually actively repelled others.
Yeah, a 2017 Cambridge Core study looked back
at that 2012 data and found that the war on women
rhetoric actually drove away a very specific
demographic of male voters. This study identified
a psychological concept called modern sexism,
right? Yes. How does modern sexism function mechanically
in a voter's mind? I mean, is it just overt prejudice?
Not exactly. It's not necessarily about explicit
hostility toward women. Modern sexism is defined
as the deeply held belief that systemic sex discrimination
was essentially fixed. decades ago. Oh, I see.
So therefore, women shouldn't be receiving special
focus or advantages in current policy. When a
political campaign heavily utilizes a phrase
like war on women, a voter with modern sexist
views feels gaslit or manipulated. They think,
we fixed this in the 70s, why are you acting
like the sky is falling? Precisely. The study
found that men who held these views, even those
who might typically lean liberal on other issues,
felt alienated by the rhetoric. It triggered
a defensive voting pattern. Right. Significantly
increasing the likelihood that those men voted
for Mitt Romney instead. Here's where it gets
really interesting. It's like this political
slogan was a highly potent but ultimately unstable
rocket fuel. And stable is the perfect word.
It propelled the Democrats to a massive victory
in 2012. But by the 2014 midterms, when they
tried to pour the exact same formula into the
engine, the rocket blew up on the launch pad.
The magic wore off. It did. By 2014, the Republican
Party had adapted to the psychological terrain.
They launched a highly coordinated counteroffensive
to neutralize the cognitive ease of the slogan.
What did that look like? Well, they actively
pushed back against the narrative by supporting
policies like over -the -counter birth control
access, trying to appear proactive on women's
health. And they also started aggressively pointing
out democratic hypocrisy, highlighting high -profile
sex scandals involving prominent Democrats like
Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer. The argument
was simple. You claim we are waging a war, but
look at how your own leaders treat women behind
closed doors. Wow. And in many races, the Democrats
severely overplayed their hand. They really did.
In Colorado, incumbent Democratic Senator Mark
Udall ran so heavily on abortion rights and the
war on women narrative, to the exclusion of almost
all other economic issues, that his opponents
in the media actually nicknamed him Mark Uterus.
Mark Uterus. That's brutal. Yeah. He ended up
losing his seat to Republican Cory Gardner, who
effectively neutralized the attacks by pivoting
to broader economic messages. And the GOP leadership
was actively mocking the phrase by this point,
totally sapping its power. RNC chairman Reince
Priebus famously said that if Democrats claimed
Republicans had a war on caterpillars and the
media repeated it enough, eventually people would
think we have a caterpillar problem. And Republican
Representative Cathy McMorris Rogers flat out
called the war on women an election year myth
engineered in a lab to drive a political wedge.
So it completely lost its bite. This raises an
important question about the strict shelf life
of political messaging. A slogan that wins you
one election can become a massive liability in
the next once the electorate builds an immunity
to it. Right. However, the academic research
shows it wasn't a total failure long term. A
study by Katrin McCabe found that while the slogan
itself caused voter fatigue, the underlying strategy
successfully made issues like abortion highly
salient. So what does this all mean for the voter?
It means it forced voters to think deeply about
their pre -existing beliefs on these specific
issues. By raising the stakes to a war, it often
caused voters to break from blind, inherited
party loyalty. And vote based on their deep -seated
moral beliefs regarding bodily autonomy and government
intervention. Exactly. Why does an autopsy of
a political slogan from over a decade ago matter
to you right now? because it is a masterclass
in how your reality is shaped by the media you
consume. It really is. It shows exactly how political
framing is engineered, deployed on the battlefield,
and how quickly a world -changing strategy can
degrade into a tired cliché. It's a reminder
to look past the label on the jar, to examine
the actual mechanisms of the legislation. the
real world impact of a T .R .A. plaw or an equal
pay repeal rather than just reacting to the viral
emotional gaff surrounding it. Because when a
political slogan like the war on women eventually
loses its polling magic, when the highly paid
consultants move on to the next phrase and the
political circus packs up its tent. What's left?
Right. What happens to the everyday people whose
actual lives, paychecks and health care are still
governed by the very real policies left behind
in the wake of all that rhetoric? The architects
who drew the The blueprints get to leave, but
you still have to live in the house they built.
A vital dynamic to consider every time you step
into a voting booth. Thank you for taking this
deep dive with us today. We'll be back soon to
unpack another stack of sources. Until then,
keep questioning the blueprints.