“I am your protector,” Donald Trump declared to women voters at a Sept. 23 rally in western Pennsylvania. “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will be protected and I will be your protector.” Clips of this moment went viral on social media, and cable news hosts laughed derisively. As a historian of early American women and gender, however, I saw the deep and troubling roots of this rhetoric.
As polls increasingly find a widening gender gap between Trump and Kamala Harris among women voters, his campaign has made overt appeals to white suburban women.
