This weekend on Velshi with MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) anchor Ali Velshi, Kathy Spillar—executive editor of Ms. and executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.)—joined to discuss a sweeping new policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that lays out a vision for reshaping American family life and rolling back women’s independence.’
Velshi summarized the underlying logic of the proposal starkly: “You cut off opportunities outside the home. You make the public sphere hostile to women’s independence. You create a system where the only viable path left for women is dependence on a man for survival. In other words, you drag the country back to a time when women had fewer choices.
“Women today have opportunities their grandmothers could only dream of. From the perspective of the new right, that’s the crisis.”
Spillar said the report spells out a broader political strategy. “They are determined to use whatever levers of power they have under the Trump administration—to change tax laws, to provide incentives for women to have more children, to get married younger and to stay married, even in bad relationships,” and added the proposed policies primarily target heterosexual, middle- and upper-income families.
“This is the game plan of an authoritarian regime,” she said. “It’s designed to support an authoritarian government that has control over its women—and therefore over its men as well, making men more compliant because they now have larger families who depend on them economically.”