The following report was given to the CPUSA National Committee by Lisa Armstrong on behalf of the Women’s Equality Commission on October 11, 2025.

The Women’s Equality Commission, CPUSA has been honing our understanding of various manifestations of misogyny on the MAGA right, including the public attempts to illegally fire and harass prominent and effective Black women. Attacks have been launched against figures such as Lisa Cook, a member on the Federal Reserve Board, and Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the National Labor Relations Board.

These attempts to undermine Diversity, Equity and Inclusion gains in our workforce, particularly the government’s workforce, goes beyond the spectacle of anti-Black, anti-women harassment. ProPublica and the Center for American Progress have both detailed the targeting of Black women in civil service in every branch of government, including the military. In August, labor statistics showed that Black women lost 319,000 jobs in both the public and private sectors — the most concentrated losses of work, even among people of color more generally, who already face disproportionate job loss. The current administration seeks to roll back pro–working class movement successes, which had won basic gains for equal access of all women to education, voting rights, housing, credit, banking, and employment opportunities.

To understand how racist and transphobic campaigns meet the misogyny of today’s fascist assault on public life, we turned to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s essay from 1947 “Hitler’s Three K’s for Women: An American Rehash.” Flynn diagnoses a similar moment in history, after WWII, when U.S. capitalism sought to steal back social justice gains won by people’s movements in the 1930s and the 1940s.

Capitalist powers and the U.S. state focused on re-instituting Jim Crow segregation of jobs, housing, education, and freedom of movement to raise profits and weaken working class unity. Their key weapon was a conservative ideology of fascism that demanded “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” — raising children, domestic work of the kitchen, and submitting to the religious fatalism of the church. Above all, this dictate demanded women and people of color know their place at the bottom of the hierarchy.

To fight for workers’ rights, we must actively destroy ideologies that degrade the value of women and all people of color.

Did working class women of all races still need paid work to survive in the 1940s and 1950s? Yes, but to fight for workers’ rights, Flynn reminded us, we must all fight male supremacist ideologies. Flynn provides a lesson that aids us in our current moment of MAGA-led white supremacy and male supremacy: we must actively destroy ideologies that degrade the value of women and all people of color.

For this report, I want to highlight two essays from members of the Women’s Equality Commission that develop our constant refusal of the dangerous transphobic violence embedded in misogynist ideology. On the CPUSA.org website, Bennett Shoop has published Stop anti-trans terror campaign. In it, they wrote:

“The scapegoating of transgender people is more than ideological warfare. It is a real-life campaign of terror taking shape by means of legislative policy, administrative measures, and vigilante violence.

“And it is not only designed to deepen division. It aims at actually eradicating the transgender population. Fascist forces across the board are seeking to accomplish this by making life-saving trans healthcare and transition services inaccessible and even illegal—to the point of being considered fraud in places like Texas.

“It is clear that MAGA fascists are mobilizing a particular gender politics which recalls the Nazi ideal of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche,” or Children, Kitchen, Church. Coinciding with attacks on reproductive rights, women’s autonomy, and DEI, it should be evident that these anti-trans attacks are part of a campaign to infringe upon working-class rights to self-expression, bodily self-determination, and the diversity of families and cultures. The MAGA movement is attempting to force us back to the 1950s, to force women back in the home under the authority of a patriarch, to define the family as exclusively white, heterosexual, and reproductive. These objectives serve a politics that seeks to exert direct billionaire control over the reproductive sphere and which attacks any way of life that does not align with their for-profit goals.”

Another essay-in-progress by Cassie Lopez, a member of the Women’s Equality Commission, describes a right-wing campaign to appeal to young women through the online glorification of “tradwives.” The term refers to wives who raise children and take care of husbands through domestic duties of baking, cleaning. and homesteading. Lopez writes:

“Tradwives, whether implicitly or explicitly, advocate for a return to a glorified mid-century middle-class American past, where women stayed at home to take care of their numerous (white) children, obeyed their husbands, went to church every Sunday, and did it all with a smile and a perm. Even the tamest tradwife content will feature women cooking up a storm — with their children in conspicuous view of the camera — while waxing about the joys of serving their husbands. Some of the most extreme versions of tradwife content actively participate in the typical anti-communism, anti-feminism, anti-vax conspiracy theories, and anti-abortion crusades of the modern alt-right.

Many of these content creators reject the label of tradwife due to its connotations with white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and the alt-right pipeline. These influencers would have us believe that they are merely offering women an alternative to the “hustle culture” of late-stage capitalism, which places a double burden upon women to both take care of their families at home and work a full-time job. Sure, some creators will “take it too far” by turning the tradwife into a fascist symbol, but these “moderate” tradwives maintain that they are apolitical and perhaps even the real feminists in the room.”

As we address current forms of ideological scapegoating, we look to our own movement that sees the interconnections of all struggles for people’s equality to fight the violence. Trans rights are workers’ rights! Women’s rights are workers’ rights! The power of our movement to create a socialist future thrives on this knowledge.

Image: Members of Local 384 at CUNY demand a raise for city workers by DC-37, AFSCME (Facebook)