Program will feature an interview with Katherine M. Acosta, author of: "American Fascism: Implications for Women of a Second Trump Administration" (https://tinyurl.com/yeys9axv).

In Part Two, we will have an update on the intensified campaign to publish the ERA during the last days of the Biden Administration.

Drawing on knowledge and documentation of programs for women carried out by Fascist regimes of the 20th century, Katherine Acosta has assembled an impressive list of parallels that justify her use of the term 'nascent Fascism' to describe a 2nd Trump Administration.

She begins with the following quote:

"We reject the misguided direction of the democratic, liberalistic, international women's movement… A woman's entire education, development, vocational pursuit, and position within Volk and state must be directed toward the physical and spiritual task of motherhood."
--Nazi Party principles for the National Socialist Women's League, 1933

She points out that the above quote, as well as ones from the fascist program of Benito Mussolini, echo Project 2025's 'mandate for leadership' which lays out male-headed "biblical marriage" as the approved model that is to be supported by law and funding; the loss of a federal right to legal abortion (Roe v Wade, overturned by Trump appointed judges) and the proposed elimination of laws against discrimination against women in the workplace--are all of a piece. To this she adds the "bare-knuckled misogyny" ("your body, my choice" --Nick Fuentes) let loose by the Trump win and the planned elimination, shrinkage or privatization of public entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid and Title lX), relied on more heavily by women than men -- all combine into a "pincer effect" that, if successful, will significantly shrink women's chances for independent fulfilling lives and force them into into traditional marriages with less protection against domestic violence and less economic options to exit oppressive situations.

Speaking more generally about Fascism, Acosta quotes Loyola University professor of history and Women’s Studies, Anne Wingenter: "Attacks on “reproductive rights, are an important sign for democratic backsliding.”

Acosta writes:

"There's been contestation of who gets to count as the people. And in some ways, the last century or more has really been about trying to define the people and… for various groups, to trying to be admitted into full personhood. Fascism is a rejection of… an expansive definition of the people. What we seem to be experiencing today looks a lot like an attempt to define down that notion of the people again. And some people get to be fully autonomous and some don't".

She ends with a note of hope and warning:

"Although US women have made great strides towards equality in the last century, we are vulnerable as a class, in part, because we have not been explicitly affirmed as citizens in the Constitution. Both political parties appear unwilling to publish the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which has been fully ratified since 2020. But we have advantages women in earlier fascist regimes did not. For example, though access to education for women was restricted under Mussolini, few women at that time pursued higher education. In the contemporary US, more women than men - 39% - have college degrees. Most women have access to paid employment. We have more resources and a base from which to launch a defense, and ultimately, full expansion, of our civil rights. This is the urgent task before us now." 

In part two of this program, we will provide an update on the intense campaign to pressure President Joe Biden to instruct the U.S. Archivist to publish the Equal Rights Amendment, which would make it the law of the land--and the split among feminists over tactics over how to get to the goal of making the ERA a part of the U.S. Constitution. We will play an excerpt of Attorney Wendy Murphy speaking passionately to this issue.h,D

The program will also contain a feminist news update and timely music.

BIO's of Guests

Katherine M. Acosta is a lifelong feminist, a sociologist, film maker and writer. She has a BA in Women's Studies (from before it was 'gender studies') and a Ph.D in Sociology. Her substack is: "She's right you know"; she can be found on Bluesky under that name..

Wendy Murphy is a reknowned women's rights lawyer, who took the Biden Administration to Court for failing to publish the ERA.