Read on Twitter
For as long as there have been feminists pushing for women's rights, there have been anti-feminist women arguing that women are the privileged sex, women have more than enough, and protection is better than freedom. You hear similar arguments today. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/anti-suffrage-movement-vote.html
You hear this in arguments against abortion: abortion hurts women, women deserve better than abortion. Feminists argue for women to be free, even if that sometimes means having to make difficult decisions. Anti-feminists argue for penning women in under the guise of protection.
This also isn't just an American dynamic. In places where women's freedoms are legally restricted, you hear that it's for their safety and protection. There are often many women arguing that these constraints are about women being cherished, protected, and fully valued.
There is a claim that limiting women's rights is about protection, not sexism -- that sexists hate women; an impulse to protect women by curtailing their rights isn't sexist. Of course it is, it's just sexism run through the language of benevolence instead of outright hostility.
This permeates debates about female "modesty" and what it means to legally or socially enforce what a woman should wear. A claim that modesty rules are about valuing women is about as sincere as a claim that the male-only vote is about valuing women.
There's often a question of why: Why do women agitate against women's rights? I don't think it's much of a mystery. You see this dynamic everywhere, but it's the strongest in places that are the most conservative. Women are choosing between benevolent sexism or hostile sexism.
If you have few opportunities for economic independence and social acceptance outside of the bounds of traditional family & community, and if your choices are feeling respected and valued but with less personal liberty or being attacked & ostracized but "free," what do you pick?
And in the U.S. specifically, there is a racial dynamic at play too. Enforcing racial hierarchy benefits white women, and part of that enforcement is glorifying white men as the necessary protectors of vulnerable white women.
Essentially, benevolent sexism is the carrot and hostile sexism is the stick. For women, and especially women in conservative communities, benevolent sexism promises that if you behave yourself, you will be treated well. There will be space for you to be valued and respected.
If that goes away - and feminists do indeed threaten this model of women funneled into a narrow set of "good woman" roles - then a lot of women imagine hostile sexism is the only other option. And of course that is how feminists are often treated. Imagining something new is hard.
This is why you typically see anti-feminist arguments couched in the language of benevolent sexism: That women are uniquely moral, uniquely suited to nurturing, etc. The argument against women's suffrage wasn't "women should stay home." It was "women are too moral for politics."
These arguments -- that women are different but better, or the moral center of family and society, or uniquely tempting, or the holders of sexual purity, and should therefore have fewer opportunities or freedoms than men -- are very old, and they always serve the same purpose.
