![]() And in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s victory has erased 20 years of progress on women’s access to education and representation in public office and the workforce. In Saudi Arabia, women still cannot marry or obtain health care without a man’s approval. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un has spurred women to seek refuge abroad at roughly three times the rate of men, and in Egypt, President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi recently introduced a bill reasserting men’s paternity rights, their right to practice polygamy, and their right to influence whom their female relatives marry. In Russia, Vladimir Putin is rolling back reproductive rights and promoting traditional gender roles that limit women’s participation in public life. In China, Xi Jinping has crushed feminist movements, silenced women who have accused powerful men of sexual assault, and excluded women from the Politburo’s powerful Standing Committee. ![]() ![]() The patriarchal backlash has played out across the full spectrum of authoritarian regimes, from totalitarian dictatorships to party-led autocracies to illiberal democracies headed by aspiring strongmen. ![]() Yet in recent years, authoritarian leaders have launched a simultaneous assault on women’s rights and democracy that threatens to roll back decades of progress on both fronts. Throughout the last century, women’s movements won the right to vote for women expanded women’s access to reproductive health care, education, and economic opportunity and began to enshrine gender equality in domestic and international law-victories that corresponded with unprecedented waves of democratization in the postwar period. ![]() The pantheon of autocratic leaders includes a great many sexists, from Napoléon Bonaparte, who decriminalized the murder of unfaithful wives, to Benito Mussolini, who claimed that women “never created anything.” And while the twentieth century saw improvements in women’s equality in most parts of the world, the twenty-first is demonstrating that misogyny and authoritarianism are not just common comorbidities but mutually reinforcing ills. ![]()
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