8.8: Progress Is Not a Straight Line

Rights, Resistance, and the Politics of Backlash

Textbooks love arrows.

1848 → 1920 → 1945 → 1979 → 1995 → equality.

History is less cooperative.

Women's political rights expanded dramatically across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Educational attainment increased. Maternal mortality declined in many regions. Women entered professions from which they had once been excluded. Legal frameworks addressing discrimination and gender-based violence expanded. Reproductive technologies transformed possibilities surrounding fertility. Women's movements changed laws, workplaces, households, schools, political parties, and cultural expectations.

All true.

And none of it means progress is irreversible.

Rights Can Move Backward

Political scientists use terms such as democratic backsliding when political rights and institutions weaken after periods of expansion.

Gender equality can experience backsliding too.

Governments may restrict reproductive rights, limit women's education or employment, weaken domestic-violence protections, attack LGBTQ+ communities, target feminist organizations, or use nationalism and religion to promote narrower definitions of acceptable gender roles.

Digital spaces can accelerate backlash by connecting misogynistic movements across borders.

Political actors also use gender symbolically.

Debates over women's clothing, reproduction, education, sexuality, and family life can become debates about national identity itself.

Who represents tradition?

Who represents modernity?

Who is supposedly corrupting the nation?

Who is responsible for reproducing it?

Suddenly a debate about what one person wears becomes a debate about civilization.

Why Nationalism Keeps Finding Women's Bodies

Nationalist politics often assigns women symbolic roles as mothers, guardians of culture, markers of communal honor, or embodiments of tradition.

That symbolism can create enormous pressure.

Women's clothing may become politically regulated because clothing communicates identity. Reproductive policy may become entangled with fears about declining birth rates or demographic competition. Interfaith or interethnic relationships can become controversial because women are imagined as carrying group identity across generations.

This is one reason gender politics cannot be reduced to personal attitudes.

It can become part of state-building.

The Resistance Is Global Too

Backlash travels.

So does resistance.

Women's movements have exchanged ideas, legal strategies, slogans, organizing tactics, funding networks, and digital tools across borders for decades. Activists learn from one another while adapting strategies to local circumstances.

Latin American movements against femicide helped popularize new language for understanding violence.

Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom movement linked bodily autonomy to broader political freedom.

Afghan women's organizations continue advocating for education and public participation under extraordinary restrictions.

Women's rights activists across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas contest domestic violence, unequal inheritance, workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, reproductive restrictions, and exclusion from political power.

There is no single global feminism.

There are feminisms.

Sometimes they cooperate.

Sometimes they disagree sharply.

That is not evidence of failure.

It is evidence that women are political actors rather than one giant interest group.

Progress Has to Be Maintained

Perhaps the most important lesson is that rights are not historical prizes that societies permanently win.

They are institutions.

Institutions require enforcement, funding, legitimacy, political coalitions, public support, and people willing to defend them.

A right written into law can become difficult to exercise.

A policy can lose funding.

A court can reinterpret legislation.

A government can change.

A movement can fragment.

A new technology can produce a problem older laws never anticipated.

Progress therefore behaves less like climbing a staircase and more like maintaining infrastructure.

If nobody maintains the bridge, eventually you notice.