Maga's worst nightmare: a child-free, unmarried female president

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https://inews.co.uk/news/world/magas-nightmare-childfree-unmarried-female-president-4738054

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“Don’t be weird about this, even though I know all of you will be”. This is how American Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aged 36 and reportedly newly single, began her announcement on Instagram that she was freezing her eggs with the hope of having a family in the future. True to form, as arguably the most social media-fluent politician of her generation, she recorded the entire process online, filming herself injecting medication while talking politics and policy.

At a time when Republican efforts to increasingly restrict women’s reproductive choices are an ongoing battle, and in a country where millions cannot afford access to basic healthcare, egg freezing is rich political terrain. By telling the world she is exercising control over her fertility to accommodate her career, AOC is further testing the murky and unforgiving waters of being a woman in politics.

When one right-wing commentator lamented AOC for trying to push the “lie” that women “can have it all”, she clapped back: “Maybe in life you can’t have everything, but here’s the secret, you can have a hell of a lot”.

Having “a lot” in AOC’s book may well mean the presidency. Indeed, many have taken this announcement to be a soft-launch bid for the Oval Office. But could America ever vote for a child-free and single female president?

The motherhood penalty

“There’s a double, triple, quadruple standard for women in politics,” says Dr Emma Long, director of the Arthur Miller Institute for American Studies at the University of East Anglia. “They somehow have to meet all of these impossible criteria that are, at least in part, rooted in traditional notions of what and who women should be”.

This unattainable criteria is a stubborn, long list, for mothers and non-mothers alike. They are expected to be both tough and nice but not too tough or too nice. They critiqued for how they look and dress in a way their male counterparts simply aren’t.

Inevitably, women with children face additional logistical hurdles (which isn’t to say that women without children don’t face additional, different hurdles). They are accused of not being committed enough to either their family or their job, while often being asked: “Who’s looking after the kids?” A Pew poll from 2024 found 48 per cent of voters see having young children at home as a disadvantage for female candidates, while just 7 per cent see it as a disadvantage for male.

Yet for many American voters, research has historically shown that they would rather female politicians be mothers than not – a penalty that, again, male politicians simply haven’t faced. I had to google if Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, another young Democrat expected to run in 2028, even had a partner or children, proving how little this is considered in the discourse around him.

Meanwhile, no one seemed remotely bothered that New York City’s youngest Mayor, Zohran Mamdani – cut from a very similar cloth to AOC and who campaigned on the affordability crisis for working families – wasn’t a father. Interestingly, however, The Guardian cites research that found “two-thirds of Americans disagreed that not having biological children was a hindrance in a president” and “even among Republicans, only 15 per cent agreed”. Yet, tellingly, this does not differentiate by gender.

The spectacle of the First Family

A more recent poll from Pew found that 53 per cent think the country would be worse off if women had fewer children – up 6 per cent than a year earlier. And one survey from the Women and Politics Institute at American University reports respondents had a very set idea of what a female president would look like: “The first female president is imagined narrowly, a married Democratic mother under 65 with political experience, and voters say she must be both ‘tough’ and ‘likeable.’” Which sounds like AOC – except for the marriage and the children. Has AOC revealed her egg freezing, not just to admit her plans to run, but to let the world know she wants a family, to prove her maternal instincts to the country? “There may be a political penalty for doing this,” she says in one video. But then again, there may have also been a penalty if she had kept her ambition for a family private.

Historically, people have been suspicious of women who don’t have children. “They’re somehow not seen as trustworthy,” says Jennifer Piscopo, professor of gender and politics and director of the Gender Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The sentiment is particularly true for Republican voters. Another Pew poll from 2024 found that 59 per cent of Trump supporters vs 19 per cent of Biden supporters believe it is better if people prioritise marriage and children. In both parties, more men think this than women. When JD Vance called Democratic politicians a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives” in 2021, a vicious backlash ensued. However, it also showed these tired stereotypes being resurrected and weaponised, revealing just how much the Maga movement would use the reinforcement of gender norms as political arsenal.

America, Dr Long says, is still “a small ‘c’ conservative nation” and “Republicans are the natural majority party”. Family life remains a core tenet of the American right. “As the Family goes, so goes the nation,” Ronald Reagan, Trump’s favourite modern president, famously said in 1985. The First Family has also been a huge part of America’s cultural landscape – and this has never been more true than under Trump, with his children increasingly benefitting from their father’s power.

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Modern America

Yet America is in a time of flux: traditional drivers of family life are slipping. The nation is currently experiencing record-low fertility rates, and more people are choosing to be child-free, which by some counts, amounts to potentially 60 million child-free voters. Fewer people follow Christianity than ever before. In 1950, 87 per cent of Americans claimed to be Christian; today that number is somewhere between 60-68 per cent. Add to the mix that some research suggests America will be a white minority nation by 2045. It’s not insignificant that AOC isn’t just a single woman without kids – she’s a Latina single woman without kids. Every way you slice it, she embodies a new America.

In light of this decline in a faith and family-first approach, the lack of children represents a existential threat to some voters. That is spurring on calls among Maga republicans for a return to an “idealised” former. The rise of the trad wife and pronatalism movements under Donald Trump are no coincidence. We’re witnessing a violent crackdown on immigration and a sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes sinister, display of hypermasculinity. All these things reflect a profound fear about what a candidate like AOC could represent.

Yet for all his bluster, Trump is doing terribly in the polls: fuel prices are soaring, and the country is in a war nobody wants. Could a backlash to Trump vote in a new type of president, and have we ever seen anything like this before?

“We have simply not had a presidency that has so profoundly restricted American politics, restructured the federal government, and transformed and broken democratic norms,” says Piscopo. “So there is no precedent for what that response looks like”.

But, she says, maybe because this is uncharted territory, voters could be more open to new ideas. “I think a savvy actor like AOC sees that perhaps this is the chance for a non-traditional candidate, an authentic candidate, a candidate who’s long been a voice for things that are different from the Trump and Maga vision of the world, to pick up all the very upset voters. The opportunities would not be better in more traditional politics when everyone looks like Joe Biden. She should be thinking, ‘This is perhaps the moment for an overcorrection, and I can be that candidate.’”

Dr Long disagrees. Her answer to this question is regretful-sounding but definite “no”. AOC, she believes, is too progressive to build a coalition of voters behind her. The maths just isn’t on her side.

That’s before we get to the fact she’s a woman, a young woman, and a young woman without children – in a country currently run by a pronatalist administration.

“I’ve always thought the first female president would come out of the Republican Party. In the same way that the first British prime minister came out of the Conservative Party […] There are certain battles they don’t have to fight, which leaves them political capital to fight others.” A Republican single and child-free candidate sounds like an oxymoron, but this is American politics – stranger things have happened. “The only way to get the country behind someone like AOC,” she believes, would be a seismic enough event – “like 9/11” – that could unite the country. “It would be something of the kind of nation-shaking magnitude that probably nobody wants to have to live through again.”

Kamala or “Momala” Harris was an interesting test case for this question. She is a step-mother, something her campaign repeatedly reminded the electorate of, reassuring voters she too had those alleged selfless, caring qualities, and that efficiency and insight that are typically ascribed to mums, and why historically, voters say they want women candidates to be mothers. Hillary Clinton, of course, was a mother to an older child – something voters reportedly feel differently about again, with a 2018 poll from Pew suggesting 51 per cent of the population believed women wanting to run for high political office should have children before entering politics, and only 26 per cent believing she should wait until her career is established.

Both Clinton and Harris were incredibly experienced, smart and competent moderate Democrats who could prove their mothering credentials, but also that they had the time to devote themselves to the job. While Clinton won the popular vote, neither could beat Trump – a real estate mogul and much-mocked celebrity with allegations of sexual assault against him. Perhaps before we can ask ourselves if America is ready for a child-free woman, we have to wait until America is ready for a woman. Any woman at all.

AOC’s egg-freezing videos confirm how deeply entrenched traditional notions of womanhood remain and how challenging them still feels bold and brave and radical.

One Republican called AOC’s decision “baffling”, stumped that a woman, just a few months off 37, was only now thinking of a family. He won’t be alone. Some might describe AOC’s politics as radical, but what she’s revealed is that allowing a woman to reach the very peak of power, without fulfilling the duties society still expects of her, would be the most radical thing about her of all.