The Gender Divide: Rights on Paper, Control in Practice

When we talk about women’s legal rights, we are referring to the foundational protections and entitlements that enable autonomy and participation in society. These include:

• The right to own property

• The right to move freely

• The right to work, sign contracts, and open a bank account

• The right to marry—or not

• The right to live alone

• The right to inherit, divorce, and retain custody

• The right to live free from violence

In principle, many of these rights are now recognized in law across most countries. Yet recognition on paper does not guarantee realization in practice. The implementation and protection of these rights vary dramatically across regions—and within countries—often shaped by political priorities, judicial independence, social norms, and resource constraints.

Even in the United States, until the 1970s, women in many states could not rent an apartment, apply for a mortgage, or sign a lease without a male guarantor—often a husband or father. This recent history underscores how newly won some rights still are—and how vulnerable they remain in the face of coordinated political and cultural backlash.

⚖️ Customary Law Still Overrides Formal Law in Many Places

In rural and conservative communities across Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, customary or religious laws often override statutory law. That means even where national constitutions guarantee equality, women are still governed by informal systems that reinforce male control.

• In parts of East Africa, widows may be denied inheritance and forced into “widow cleansing” rituals.

• In rural South Asia, child marriage persists despite laws banning it—enforced by community elders, not courts.

• In some Gulf states, women still require male permission to marry, work, or travel.

The gap between legal reform and cultural enforcement is wide—and growing wider when legal systems themselves weaken under political pressure.

The Infantilization of Women: A Structural Form of Gender Control

Across cultures and institutions, women have long been subjected to a form of systemic diminishment that is less visible than outright violence but equally insidious: infantilization. This social and political dynamic treats women not as full adults, but as beings perpetually in need of supervision, protection, or correction. The result is a kind of gendered stratification in which society operates not on a binary of male and female, but on a hierarchy that mirrors age and authority: men, women, and children.

In this framework, adult women are often placed closer to children than to men in terms of perceived competence, autonomy, and credibility. They are managed, second-guessed, and excluded from full participation on the basis of a presumed vulnerability or emotional fragility. This infantilization is not just cultural—it is encoded into law, policy, media, and medicine.

Historically, legal systems reflected and reinforced this hierarchy. In many countries, women were treated as legal minors under the authority of their fathers or husbands, unable to own property, enter contracts, or travel without permission. While many of these laws have formally been repealed, their underlying logic persists in contemporary systems. For example:

• In parts of the world, women still need male guardian approval to work, study, or leave the country.

• In the medical field, women’s pain is more likely to be dismissed, their diagnoses delayed, and their authority over their own bodies undermined.

• In judicial contexts, women are often viewed as less credible witnesses or more emotionally unstable, particularly in cases of gender-based violence.

The consequences are wide-ranging. Infantilization undermines women’s access to reproductive autonomy, financial independence, political leadership, and even basic credibility in public discourse. It also reinforces social expectations that women should be protected, guided, or corrected—rather than respected, believed, or empowered.

This construct is also evident in media and marketing, where adult women are routinely portrayed with childlike features: high-pitched voices, exaggerated innocence, and dependence on male validation. Simultaneously, assertive or ambitious women are labeled as aggressive, “too much,” or emotionally unstable—terms rarely applied to men in similar roles.

Crucially, infantilization shapes public policy. Debates over abortion, parental leave, workplace accommodations, and even school dress codes are often rooted in the belief that women cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves—or must be shielded from the consequences of those decisions.

Understanding infantilization as a structural form of gender control helps clarify why so many women’s rights battles are not simply about inclusion, but about recognition of full adulthood. Until women are universally treated as autonomous adults with the same intellectual, legal, and moral standing as men, true equality will remain out of reach.

In redefining gender justice, we must reject frameworks that blur the line between womanhood and childhood. Empowerment cannot exist in a system that continues to cast women as developmentally incomplete, dependent, or incapable of full agency.

🚨 What Backsliding Looks Like🚨

Let’s be clear: women’s rights are not just stalling—they are being reversed in multiple countries. And these reversals are not accidental; they are part of broader ideological projects that seek to reassert patriarchal authority through law, religion, nationalism, and cultural norms.

Here are some of the clearest examples of modern-day regression:

• Afghanistan: Since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, women have been systematically excluded from public life. Girls are banned from attending secondary school and university. Women are prohibited from most forms of employment and cannot travel long distances without a male escort. Female journalists, doctors, and aid workers have been pushed out of their professions. These policies represent one of the most extreme regressions of women’s rights in modern history.

• Russia: In 2017, Russia decriminalized first-time domestic violence offenses, effectively telling abusers that "a first hit is free." This legal change reflects a broader state-sanctioned return to patriarchal norms in the name of preserving “family values.” Women’s rights advocates in Russia face harassment, censorship, and surveillance, making it harder to provide support to survivors or advocate for reform.

• Poland: Despite being a member of the European Union, Poland enacted a near-total abortion ban in 2020. The law eliminates access even in cases of severe fetal anomaly, and multiple women have died after being denied life-saving care during obstetric emergencies. The ban is part of a broader authoritarian and religious nationalist agenda that has eroded judicial independence, LGBTQ+ rights, and press freedom alongside women’s rights.

• Iran: Following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, who was arrested for allegedly violating the country’s hijab law, mass protests erupted demanding justice and greater freedoms. The state responded with brutal crackdowns, reinforcing and expanding laws that criminalize women’s dress, restrict public expression, and limit participation in civil society. The regime’s enforcement of morality laws has become more aggressive, with women being surveilled, fined, or imprisoned for non-compliance.

• United States: The 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson reversed federal protections for abortion, creating a patchwork of laws that have left millions without access to reproductive healthcare. In several states, abortion is now effectively banned, and providers face criminal prosecution. The U.S. is now one of the few countries in recent history to roll back abortion rights. At the same time, an escalation in anti-trans legislation, attacks on gender studies, and the proliferation of online misogyny contribute to an increasingly hostile environment for gender equality.

These are not fringe developments. They represent a coordinated effort to push women out of decision-making roles, out of public visibility, and out of control over their own lives. Legal and policy instruments are being weaponized to discipline, contain, and silence women—often under the banner of tradition, nationalism, or religious morality.

Understanding what backsliding looks like is essential to resisting it. These trends remind us that rights are never guaranteed. They must be actively defended—and reimagined—in every generation, and in every place where gender justice remains unfinished.

🧨 The Rise of the Far Right—and the Attack on Gender

The resurgence of far-right and authoritarian movements worldwide has been one of the defining political shifts of the early 21st century. What marks these movements is not just nationalism or xenophobia, but a profound fixation on gender roles, the family, and reproductive control. Gender equality, in this context, is not a side issue—it is a central battleground.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government banned gender studies and embedded a rigid binary definition of gender in the constitution. In Brazil, former president Jair Bolsonaro routinely referred to feminism as a cultural threat and slashed funding for women’s healthcare. In the United States, the reversal of Roe v. Wade fulfilled a decades-long promise to restore “family values” by limiting reproductive autonomy. These are not isolated developments. They reflect a deeper ideological project—what political theorist Corey Robin calls “the reactionary mind.”

🔍 Understanding the Reactionary Mind

Reactionary movements are not merely nostalgic—they are animated by a belief that modernity has gone too far. Feminism, queer rights, secularism, and multiculturalism are seen as corrosive forces undermining a natural (and often divinely ordained) social order. What unites many of these movements is a shared perception that society has lost its moral center—and that the family is the last institution capable of restoring it.

Thus, gender becomes both symbol and strategy. It serves as a proxy for larger anxieties about cultural change, demographic shifts, and the erosion of patriarchal authority. The need to control and define gender—to fix it in law, biology, and culture—is not incidental. It is core to the far-right vision of order.

🧠 Why the Backlash, Why Now?

The timing of this backlash is no accident. The past two decades have seen:

• Expanding LGBTQ+ rights

• Widespread legal recognition of gender equality

• Mass movements for racial, environmental, and gender justice

• The rise of digital feminist organizing and transnational solidarity

These developments have shifted public consciousness and policy in ways that deeply unsettle conservative ideologues. In response, far-right leaders have mobilized fears of decline—economic, cultural, and moral. They appeal to a vision of a lost golden age: one in which men led, women nurtured, and families reproduced a stable, hierarchical society.

The appeal of this vision grows stronger in moments of crisis. Economic inequality, war, climate anxiety, and migration all heighten a desire for control and simplicity. Gender becomes a scapegoat for disorder—and feminism a target for repression.

👪 The Family as Ideological Fortress

At the heart of the far right’s political theology is the idealized family: heterosexual, reproductive, patriarchal. It is cast as the foundation of civilization and the antidote to modern chaos. As such, it must be protected—through policy, policing, and propaganda.

This is why:

• Gender studies are banned or defunded

• LGBTQ+ rights are framed as threats to children and national security

• Abortion is restricted under the language of “protecting life”

• Women’s autonomy is undermined in the name of motherhood or moral purity

In this logic, to question the family is to question the nation itself. And to be a feminist—or queer, or trans—is to be inherently suspect.

🌍 The Global “Anti-Gender” Campaign

What began as isolated national policies has evolved into a coordinated transnational effort. At institutions like the United Nations and the European Union, countries such as Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Poland, and previously the U.S. have worked together to undermine gender equality language, stall human rights negotiations, and reshape international norms.

This coalition promotes a narrative of “gender ideology” as a Western, imperialist imposition. It seeks to:

• Eliminate references to sexual and reproductive rights

• Ban comprehensive sex education

• Block funding for LGBTQ+ civil society organizations

• Restore rigid gender binaries in law and culture

This “anti-gender” movement is not a fringe conspiracy—it is a well-resourced, diplomatically organized backlash. And it is eroding the hard-won gains of decades of feminist and queer activism on the world stage.

🔗 When Race and Gender Collide: Black Women as the Ultimate Threat

In the worldview of the far right, the combination of race and gender is particularly combustible—and politically catalytic.

Black women occupy a unique—and threatening—position in the reactionary imagination. They represent the intersection of two domains the far right seeks to dominate: racial hierarchy and gender subordination.

Black women have historically been leaders in movements for justice, from civil rights and reproductive freedom to labor organizing and political resistance. Their visibility and influence challenge both patriarchal and white supremacist power structures.

Consequently, Black women are frequently cast as villains: ungovernable, emasculating, morally suspect, or culturally corrosive. They are targeted as welfare queens, angry disruptors, and bad mothers—tropes designed to justify surveillance, punishment, and political exclusion.

This obsession is not incidental. The far-right need to control Black women arises from their symbolic role as evidence of a social order that defies white, male dominance. To suppress Black women’s voices is to suppress the possibility of a future built on justice, solidarity, and liberation.

This dynamic has been especially visible in the United States. The rise of Kamala Harris to the vice presidency—the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to hold the office—provoked an immediate and visceral backlash from right-wing media and political figures. Much like the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Harris’s ascent symbolized a disruption of long-held hierarchies and evoked fears of demographic and cultural change. In the lead-up to the 2024 election and even after its conclusion, attacks on Harris intensified, often couched in racialized and gendered terms that questioned her legitimacy, ambition, and authority. Her continued presence on the national stage remains a lightning rod for reactionary narratives, underscoring how deeply the far right remains invested in controlling not just policy, but the very image of power itself.

🛡 What’s at Stake

This global assault on gender equality is about more than identity politics—it is about power: who holds it, who defines the future, and who is silenced in the process. By targeting gender and race simultaneously, the far right aims to redraw the boundaries of citizenship, belonging, and legitimacy.

To resist this wave of authoritarianism, gender and racial justice cannot be treated as separate issues or secondary concerns. They are foundational to democracy, pluralism, and human rights. The battle over gender and race is not a distraction—it is a defining struggle of our time.

🧭 Where We Go from Here

Understanding the regression in women’s rights starts with a clear-eyed analysis of the legal, cultural, and ideological foundations being dismantled in real time. The far right’s attacks on gender are not symbolic—they are tactical. And their success depends on dismantling institutional protections, eroding public trust, and stoking fear.

In the next section, we will turn our attention to the body itself: how the fight over reproductive autonomy, maternal health, and access to care reveals who truly has control over women’s lives—and who is systematically being left behind.