Here’s our reality: white women’s votes helped lead Donald Trump to victory.

We can expect, in the days ahead, to see Republicans pointing to these votes as proof that women love Trump, and that the openly misogynist president-elect really does have their best interest at heart. What will make this placation dangerous is that the incoming administration has a ready-made symbol to prop up their lie: Ivanka Trump.

Trump’s dutiful daughter brands herself as a sort of Sheryl Sandberg-lite: she launched a Women Who Work campaign, was the catalyst behind her father’s vague maternity leave proposal, and carefully curates her social media accounts to present herself as a glamorous but accessible working mom. And now, with a role on Trump’s transition team, Ivanka will continue to be presented as a salve for her father’s overt sexism and racism.

Ivanka Trump’s video for her Women who Work campaign.

In a moment when the mainstream understanding of feminism is less about politics than it is the nebulous idea of “empowerment”, this diversion could very well work.

In the last 10 years, feminist rhetoric has become popular enough to co-opt – from conservative organizations that claim women “deserve better” than abortion to “you go girl” campaigns that sell cellulite cream.



When I spoke to Ronnee Schreiber, author of Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics, about the phenomenon in 2014, she told me that for conservative women, using gender as an outreach strategy is “an identity politics angle that they often criticize but often invoke”. In other words, feminism is bad unless someone who doesn’t actually believe in feminism is touting it.

Conservative women using gender as a strategy is an identity politics angle that they often criticize but often invoke

This watering down of the movement – not just by conservative women but through commercialization – is what could very well allow Ivanka to create a smokescreen around her father’s dangerous views on women.

Indeed, for most of the presidential campaign, Ivanka functioned as a telegenic, articulate shield against accusations of misogyny leveled against Trump. She touted his female-friendly bona fides by talking about all the women he had hired over the years, mentioned the way he supported her career – she even called him a feminist.

Peak marketplace feminism

Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement and co-founder of Bitch magazine, says Ivanka is “peak marketplace feminism”.

“She’s among the many people who have opportunistically grasped at the label as a means of trying to appear relevant to women,” she says.

Even when the New York Times ran a story about Trump’s sketchy history with women, Ivanka insisted her father was “not a groper”. That statement would come back to haunt Ivanka after a video of her father bragging about sexual assault was released, followed by more than a dozen women coming forward to accuse Trump of groping them.

Still, Ivanka continued to have his back. She released a statement calling his comments “inappropriate and offensive”, but said she was glad he apologized. In a later interview, she dismissed the tape as “crude language” and claimed his words didn’t match up with the man she knew.

But as her father’s campaign seemed to unravel and Ivanka’s own brand took hits – there was a widespread boycott of her clothing line – having a stylish working mother as a surrogate served Donald Trump well.

At the Republican convention, Ivanka’s speech – in which she described her father as a champion of women – was widely lauded, despite the obvious ironies. “You felt like she was introducing Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem, not Donald Trump,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Ivanka’s continued support, combined with her Teflon-like public image, convinced many women that Trump must be a good person despite all evidence to the contrary. Anne Helen Peterson at Buzzfeed dubbed them the “Ivanka voters”: “‘If Trump produced someone that classy, that’s a testament to something,” one woman told me. Ivanka, then, as Trump launderer: a sanitized, assuring, classy Trump who makes it less troublesome to vote for her father.”

For some women on the right, Ivanka was more than a symbol of conservative femininity – she was permission to vote for a monster: the face of a distorted “feminism” that helped to usher in 53% of white women’s votes.

“Maybe [the thinking is] if she can respect him and think he’s a good guy, he can’t be that bad,” Walsh says. Still, Walsh tells me, we confused some Republican women’s dislike of Trump with the idea that their distaste would change their vote. “Research has always shown us that people vote their party,” she says.

That anything having to do with women can now be positioned as “empowered” will only help Ivanka keep up her feminist facade – not just among voters, but in a mainstream culture and elite class eager to embrace women’s rights so long as they’re depoliticized.



It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that the TEDWomen conference (with its $1,000 ticket price) told me it wouldn’t feature any talks on abortion because it was a “topical issue we wouldn’t take a position on”. Various women’s conferences have come under fire for not allowing women to bring their breastfeeding infants, and the panoply of women’s rights gatherings that have come out of the corporate world – from Thrive and Women in the World to MAKERS and SHE Summit – skew more toward feelgood talks about asking for more money in job negotiations or stopping yourself from saying “sorry” than they do toward changing politics and systems.

How long until Ivanka is headlining one of these conferences? If Trump’s first-born daughter is able to come out of this election with her reputation and brand unscathed, invited to women’s events under the guise of “diversity of thought”, the future of feminism is at risk.

What comes next for Ivanka, and by proxy her father’s message to women, is very likely to be a continuation of what we’ve already seen happen to feminism – the polite (and incorrect) belief that women’s rights are a bipartisan affair: that so long as it has the sheen and language of women’s empowerment, it’s good for women.

During our interview, Schreiber, the expert on conservative women, explained how the conservative skewing of feminism was based on the notion that if women behaved properly, we would be fine.

“The idea is that men will treat women better if we present ourselves respectfully,” she said.

It’s a sentiment we’re already seeing directed at the left: calls for reconciliation and acceptance even as white nationalism and hate crimes sweep the nation. But feminists know – especially as Ivanka is propped up as the “respectable” and docile conservative ideal of white womanhood – that there is little more dangerous to their rights than acting respectably.