The Two Front War Against Women

Women's Rights

19 Mar

Kajsa Ekis Ekman
Aftonbladet, Stockholm
published 14 March 2025

‘Ingen försvarar längre kvinnornas intressen’

The woman in the West faces a major dilemma: no contemporary political force is advocating for her interests. One side wants to abolish her rights, while the other wants to erase her name. The conservative right wants to strip her of the right to abortion, sexuality, and freedom of movement. The liberal left, on the other hand, argues that women do not even exist, wants to open women’s sports and female prisons to men, and has launched a campaign to remove the word "woman" from public documents, replacing it with terms like "uterus-bearer." The most recent attempt to remove the word "woman" from the Swedish abortion law—fortunately stopped—is just one example.

These sides are waging an all-out war against each other in what is often referred to as the "culture war". A rather odd term, because what do the rights of women have to do with culture? In reality, it is a war of the sexes that is taking place, but a very strange one, where women are not protagonists, but pawns, scapegoats, excuses or targets.

At the same time, the political situation for women has not been worse in a long time. In one out of four countries women’s status worsened in 2024, according to UN Women. Three out of four politicians in the world are men.

To describe the situation, Clara Berglund, former chair of the Swedish Women’s Lobby, used the term "two-front war." It is an apt description of the situation, where women are forced to choose between two evils. One front is conservative and argues that women belong to their husbands as property, while the other is neoliberal and argues that women belong on the market as products - using feminist rhetoric to defend it - as Berglund wrote.

The conservative right has gained enormous momentum worldwide and within most major religions. It celebrates "tradwives" and has already scored successes with abortion bans in Poland and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US. Online, an entire generation of young men is being indoctrinated by Andrew Tate and other podcasters' patriarchal pedagogics. The woman who ventures online to debate is met by an army of misogynistic incels demanding she return to the kitchen. Ten years ago, this was unthinkable; now they have the support of the world’s most powerful politicians.

Progressive liberalism claims to be the enemy of everything the right stands for, believing in "rights for all." There’s just something eerie about it: it refuses to utter our name. The woman here is not a political subject or an oppressed sex, but a privileged "cis-person" (always white) who needs to apologize for her existence.

On March 8, 2025, many organizations in the West used Women’s Day to declare that women must not dare to believe the day belonged to them. Liberal Students Stockholm didn’t have a single concrete demand to improve women’s situation, but wrote: "All women deserve respect— uterus or not… Trans women are women. Questioning their existence or getting hung up on body parts goes against both liberalism and feminism’s core values."

In sum, the two-front war has had a devastating stereo effect on the women’s movement in the West, which has been nearly eradicated as a living grassroots movement in just ten years—except for Spain and a few other countries. Sweden has had some immunity thanks to our gender equality reforms, but even here, they’re being undermined by gender-neutral language—men’s violence against women is increasingly being called "domestic violence" or "intimate partner violence".

Not only do both sides oppose feminism, they don’t even recognize its existence as an independent ideology. In the eyes of the conservative right, we are "cultural Marxists" responsible for society’s decay. In the eyes of the liberal left, we are "far-right" and "exclusionary" if we don’t center men and their needs. Both accuse us of being the other side. No side acknowledges classical feminism as its own autonomous position. This makes it almost impossible to debate women’s issues at all. Just try saying "Women have the right to abortion," and one side will shout "baby killers!" while the other will shout "not only women have abortions!"

Faced with this two-front war, some feminists have felt compelled to choose sides. Those who choose the liberal left are allowed a certain freedom of movement as long as they don’t organize as women and as long as they prioritize other groups. Their role in the movement becomes nearly maternal—they are to care for and nurture everyone else but without thinking of themselves.

"It doesn’t matter," the progressive woman might think, "What’s in a name, after all?"

The thing is, a name is everything. What would Black Lives Matter have been without the word "Black"? That’s right—a watered-down All Lives Matter. Every oppressed group needs to know its name, because without a name, it’s impossible to organize. Without a name, the oppressed group exists in itself but not for itself, in the words of Marx - i.e. it is an oppressed group but it has not gained consciousness of its status as an oppressed group. If you remove the word "woman," you remove the very possibility of fighting back and, consequently, cannot organize against the right-wing attacks on abortion rights.

How defenseless the women’s movement is without a name becomes evident in the case of Poland, a country that recently adopted some of the world’s strictest abortion laws. As Polish feminist Magdalena Grzyb describes in her article "Did the Woke Movement Hjack Feminism in Poland? (Did the Woke Movement Hijack Feminism in Poland? | illiberalism.org), Polish women had previously successfully rallied en masse to defend their rights. But by 2020, the abortion movement had been overtaken by progressive liberals, whose main point was that abortion wasn’t a women’s issue. The movement’s leader was a non-binary individual who burned a car and was detained, making a big deal about being placed in a men’s prison. The conservatives could easily depict the pro-choice side as wacko freaks, the mass movement did not materialize, and abortion was made illegal, costing the lives of several women.

A similar thing happened in the US: Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest reproductive rights organization, hardly mentions women anymore. Instead, they talk about how an abortion ban affects LGBTQI individuals, people of color and marginalized communities. It is not a coincidence that it is precisely when our name became taboo that our rights also are restricted. Recently, two hundred organizations signed a petition against the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women, Reem Alsalem, because she talks about sex —women and men—rather than gender identity, and she has had difficulty speaking even at UN events.

There are also feminists who have become fed up with this and abandoned, or been excluded from, the liberal left. They have instead been embraced by the right—leading them to adopt the right’s politics in other areas. Many well-known Western feminists were socialists 10 years ago - now they vote for Trump or the equivalent in their country. Slowly but surely, their political thinking is drifting rightward: migration is bad, freedom means freedom from the state, and even the rhetoric around women’s rights is starting to change: it’s no longer feminism but common sense that takes center stage, not liberation but decency.

The consequence is that women’s issues have become subordinated to other political ideologies and ceased to be an independent force. This is what is so devastating, because feminism cuts across all political parties, countries, ages, and backgrounds. Feminism exists because women exist. We are not a minority, we are half the world’s population. Every human who has ever existed was born of a woman. Sex is the single biggest factor determining what a woman’s life will be like in most countries in the world. This is not a small matter to get "hung up" on.

Translated by the Swedish Women’s Lobby with updates by Kajsa Ekis Ekman