The Republican Party’s alleged “war” against women is fast emerging as a major trope of the 2012 elections. And the charge is largely true: As the GOP has become increasingly conservative, so too has it become increasingly hostile to feminism and insensitive to women’s issues.

But Democrats have not merely been horrified bystanders wringing their hands as this “war” has unfolded. The Democratic Party has actively encouraged the GOP’s descent into antifeminism. And though Democrats have reaped considerable gains from the fallout, their efforts have often ultimately been to the detriment of the country’s women.

As various accounts have pointed out, the Republican Party for most of its history was broadly supportive of women’s rights and aspirations, at any rate by the standards of the times. A Republican Congress endorsed the amendment giving women the vote in 1919, and 80 percent of the state legislatures that approved it were Republican-controlled. The party instituted gender-based affirmative action in 1940 by requiring the Republican National Committee to have one woman and one man from each state, decades in advance of similar reforms by the Democrats. Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican, was the only woman senator for 24 years, and became the first woman to run for president. Dwight Eisenhower appointed more women to top posts than John F. Kennedy did.

The GOP’s stance shifted in the 1970s: Republicans played to the backlash against Roe v. Wade and feminism in the later part of that decade, and Ronald Reagan gratified the religious right by abandoning the GOP’s long-held support for the Equal Rights Amendment. The bitter struggles by Republican women to combat their party’s rightward tilt and accompanying opposition to women’s rights have been amply chronicled by the historians Tanya Melich and Catherine Rymph, among others. The latest example was Senator Olympia Snowe, who, in choosing not to seek reelection, pointed out that the GOP’s rigid and intolerant image turns off moderate, pro-business women who believe in limited but effective government.

Snowe’s view is shared by quite a few GOP leaders, including Mitt Romney, who are well aware that the “gender gap” could prove fatal to the party’s electoral chances in the fall elections. But efforts to downplay abortion in favor of economic issues have been undone by those Republicans who organized the infamous all-male panel on birth control and the Virginia proposal for transvaginal ultrasound probes (not to mention Rush Limbaugh’s misogynist rants and Rick Santorum’s momentarily surging candidacy).