House Speaker Mike Johnson has strong opinions on the differences between men and women. On a recent podcast, Johnson’s wife, Kelly, noted that her husband likes to say, “Men and women are different in … that men can compartmentalize things.” Giving metaphorical expression to this idea, Kelly Johnson compared the brains of men to waffles and of women to spaghetti. 

This strange foray into gender essentialism perhaps explains why Mike Johnson is so reluctant to share power with his female colleagues. There are currently 33 Republican women in the House, yet there is not one elected female committee chair ( one woman has a more ceremonial post of committee gavel). These numbers lend credence to the complaint of soon-retiring Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that “there’s a lot of weak Republican men” who are “afraid” and “always try to marginalize the strong Republican women.”

Nor is Greene alone in her anger. An unexpected revolt is brewing in the GOP among women who are hardly adherents of feminism but are still angry about continually bumping against the glass ceiling—and at Johnson for shutting them out. 

Johnson’s alienation of these women is all the odder since he needs their votes. His majority is historically narrow; Republicans hold 220 seats, just two more than the 218 required. And, as Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy found out, losing even a tiny handful of supporters is enough for a GOP speaker to lose their job these days.

Despite his shaky hold on power, Johnson has frequently clashed with his female colleagues. He’s quarrelled with three congresswomen over the release of the Epstein files: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert (along with the lone male Republican who championed discloser, Thomas Massie). Johnson has also fought with Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Elise Stefanik over a congressional stock trading ban. And six Republican women broke ranks with Johnson to support the censure of GOP congressman Cory Mills over alleged misconduct towards women: Mace, Boebert, Greene, Luna, Kat Cammack and Harriet Hageman.

Even when women rise in the ranks of Johnson’s GOP, they are treated with condescension. Congresswoman Lisa McCain is a Johnson ally and GOP conference chair. Johnson has praised her by saying she’s the person he’d trust most to make Thanksgiving dinner. Johnson clearly prefers women as cooks rather than as colleagues. 

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It’s hard not to see a pattern in these fights: Johnson is consistently at war with GOP women. This is causing a serious rift in the party. As NBC reports:

A number of high-profile Republican women are fleeing the House for other opportunities, weighing retirement or quitting Congress early, fueling some concern that GOP women’s ranks could be depleted in the next Congress.

Taken together, it’s a sign of growing frustration among some House GOP women, who have less representation in leadership and hold only a single elected committee gavel. Two House Republican women, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters, said that they feel they have been passed over for opportunities, that their priorities don’t always get taken as seriously under Johnson’s leadership and that they believe that could be driving some of the exits and public fights with him.

In trying to counter the accusation of sexism, a Johnson ally has retorted with a remarkably sneering comment that female critics should be grateful for what he has done. As The New York Times reports, 

A senior Republican congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of prolonging an intraparty feud, said that after Mr. Johnson had provided Ms. Stefanik with office space and a budget for what the aide described as “a fake job and a fake title,” he would have expected her to be more gracious.

Johnson’s behavior isn’t just a quirk of his personal misogyny but reflects the larger backlash against professional women inside the GOP. Donald Trump’s culture war politics have emboldened reactionaries eager to roll back the gains women have made in the workplace. 

The Heritage Foundation, the influential epicenter of the resurgence of far-right cultural politics in the Trump era, recently hired Scott Yenor to head the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Yenor advocates legalizing sexual discrimination so employers can “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households.” He argues that, “the heroic feminine prioritizes motherhood and wifeliness and celebrates the men who make it possible.”

In keeping with the new zeitgeist, online social spaces have been flooded with kitschy celebrations of “tradwives” who conform to gender norms, shun work, and keep their men happy with home cooking and submissiveness. 

In a much-read article in Compact published in October, right-wing polemicist Helen Andrews argued that the trend of female employees becoming a majority in many workplaces—something she dubbed “the Great Feminization”—was a threat to civilization because women are incapable of rational, disinterested thought. Making the same arguments that Mike Johnson propounded to his wife, Andrews claimed, “Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women.” According to Andrews, “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. Ross Douthat interviewed Andrews at length about her views in The New York Times. The original headline of the transcript read, Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” This was later modified to less confrontational, “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”

The civil war among congressional Republicans shows the hurdles these gender reactionaries will face. True, Marjorie Taylor Greene and her allies are hardly feminist firebrands. They mostly oppose reproductive freedom and other measures to secure gender equality. But as conservative as they are, these women also have the normal ambition of politicians, indeed of most professional people. They expect to be given a chance to rise in their field and to have a place at the table. 

The feminism of these Republican women is narrow and self-interested. It calls to mind the famous 2015 meme, “’I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” Strangely, Greene never expected that an openly sexist party would limit her freedom as a woman. 

The more generous way to regard this conflict is that it is a teaching opportunity. Republican women are learning that feminism is something they need.

The thin and anemic feminism of a Marjorie Taylor Greene is still preferable to the vicious return to patriarchy upheld by Johnson and Andrews. With Greene at least, there is a possibility of finding enough common ground to establish minimum rules for a just society. With Johnson and Andrews, not to say the piggish chauvinism of Donald Trump, all that is on offer is for women to become permanently second class. Despite all their flaws, Republican women deserve commendation and support when they fight their party’s deep misogyny.