A sweeping rollback of reproductive freedom, workplace protections and economic rights is pushing gains once won within living memory back into the realm of history.
Every March, we look back to honor the lineage of feminist progress. But in the wake of the Trump administration’s sustained assault on women’s rights, “history” has taken on a darker meaning. This Women’s History Month, the celebration is overshadowed by an ominous reality: The rights we assumed were permanent have become dangerously historical.
True freedom is predicated on the right to full civic participation, bodily autonomy and equitable access to healthcare and economic security. While generations of feminist struggle have successfully expanded these freedoms to strengthen the fabric of our democracy, the Trump administration is rolling back the clock on the hard-fought progress we have made in these areas over decades.
The Rights Women Won—Often Within Living Memory
The last century has been defined by a transformative expansion of women’s political participation and a slow narrowing of the gendered wage gap.
Access to birth control increased women’s ability to further their education and work when the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling finally ended the prohibition of birth control for married women. It wasn’t until the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decided that reproductive sovereignty was codified as a constitutional right—a right then painfully ripped away in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022.
These legal pillars afforded generations of women the fundamental freedom to determine the trajectory of their own lives, educations and careers.
Economic sovereignty is a surprisingly modern invention for women. Until the 1974 passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a woman’s financial identity was legally tethered to a male co-signer, barring access to credit or loans.
Workplace protections followed an equally grueling timeline: It wasn’t until 1978 that pregnancy was no longer a fireable offense, and another 15 years passed before the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guaranteed unpaid leave related to a pregnancy.
The basic biological necessities of pregnancy, the right to drink water, access a restroom or pump breast milk on the job, were not codified into federal law until the 2024 implementation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
A Coordinated Rollback Is Already Underway
Since January 2025, the rollback of gender equity hasn’t just been a threat—it’s been a policy mandate. The Trump administration’s targeted attacks on workplace safety and bodily autonomy are already undoing the progress it took our predecessors a century to secure.
The freedom to choose is being replaced by a state-mandated struggle. We are witnessing an aggressive campaign to reclassify standard and safe contraceptives, including the pill and IUDs, as forms of abortion, a move designed to legislate morality over access to healthcare.
This erasure of reproductive agency is further compounded by a fiscal assault on clinics, revoking and denying funding for essential reproductive services.
The Trump administration and GOP majority Congress are effectively turning back the clock to a pre-1965 era where birth control was a privilege of the few rather than a right for all.
The interference in reproductive autonomy is matched by an equally aggressive assault on working mothers. Under the guise of combating fraud, the administration has launched a targeted campaign against Somali communities that threatens the childcare infrastructure of the entire nation.
Consequences for Mothers, Families and the Care Economy Are Mounting
The fallout is staggering. The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) imposed freeze on childcare funding across five states threatens to displace over 150,000 mothers from the workforce and drain more than $400 million in parental wages. Simultaneously, the administration is eroding the rights of the domestic workforce, those providing essential childcare and home health services, by deliberately carving them out of federal labor protections.
The administration is currently executing a hostile takeover of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). By replacing veteran advocates like chair Charlotte Burrows and commissioner Jocelyn Samuels with ideological loyalists, the executive branch is poised to ignore the civil rights precedents established in the 1960s.
This shift directly threatens the recent gains of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, as new leadership prepares to weaken its enforcement. By rescinding harassment guidance without public oversight, the new EEOC is effectively deconstructing the mechanisms of workplace accountability, leaving millions of vulnerable employees without a clear path to justice.
The national consequences of this regressive shift on women are already visible in the data: a stalled labor market and rising unemployment that disproportionately targets Black women. In 2025, the gendered divide became a chasm: As men reentered the workforce at three times the rate of women. For mothers, labor force participation hasn’t just plateaued—it has actively declined.
The convergence of restricted reproductive care, eroded anti-discrimination enforcement and a crumbling childcare infrastructure is not just a social crisis, it is an economic one that will widen the gender and racial wealth gaps for generations. Women already navigate a lifetime of lower earnings and the motherhood penalty, which compounds into diminished retirement security.
Further exacerbating this is the administration’s assault on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. By undermining disparate-impact liability, the legal recognition that systemic bias occurs even without explicit intent, the Trump administration is dismantling the most effective tool for unearthing the embedded sexism and racism that still governs access to capital.
Without Women’s Equality, Democracy Cannot Hold
The gap in female wealth and income is a direct barrier to civic participation. Without economic sovereignty, the ability to care for one’s family or express individual agency becomes a luxury rather than a right. Pay inequity and the caregiving penalty are not mere side effects of the market; they are structural tools that keep women from the tables where policy is made and innovation is born.
As we measure the fallout of the Trump administration’s regressive platform, the stakes are clear: if we allow the state to seize power over our bodies, our credit and our labor, we aren’t just losing progress, we are watching our fundamental rights be relegated to the archives. We must act now, or “women’s rights” will cease to be a living reality and become, once again, a chapter in a history book.
