Shannon Watts Isn’t Going Back
The Moms Demand Action Founder on Why We Have to Talk about Project 2025
Shannon Watts still remembers the tweet, and the pushback she received after hitting the POST button.
Trump had just been sworn in as president and Watts made a parallel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel about an authoritarian regime that forces young, fertile women to have babies for wealthy, powerful families.
“I was told by so many people — even progressives — that I was overreacting. In fact, I think I was under reacting because the vision that Project 2025 lays out is so terrifying.”
Project 2025, conservatives extremists’ playbook if Trump wins a second presidency, would remove hundreds of hard-fought protections for women, LGBTQ+ individuals, Black Americans, educators, federal workers, people who live in poverty, and so many others.
I wanted to speak to Watts about Project 2025 because I’ve long admired her fiery activism. In 2012, after the Sandy Hook shooting took 26 lives, Watts launched Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
At the time, I watched the Sandy Hood tragedy in disbelief, sobbing as I held my 11-month old in my lap. I wondered who would be brave enough to take on America’s gun violence epidemic. In Watts, I had my answer: It would be the moms.
Watts said shortly after launching Moms, she learned that parents in large cities had been doing this work for decades and that activism requires awareness of the needs of others.
Through Moms Demand, I’ve locked arms with the million-mom army Watts coalesced. Mothers and others from urban centers, suburban outposts, and rural America (like me) have donned Moms Demand Actions’ signature red shirts and filled school board meetings, city council chambers, the halls of Congress, and even the White House.
So when I spoke to Watts, I wanted to know if she imagined there would be an even more dire threat around the corner than the school shootings that inspired her to begin Moms Demand Action.
“If this happens, I’m not sure how we recover within our lifetimes,” she said of Project 2025.
On page 6 of the 920-page document, Project 2025 promises, “The Dobbs decision was just the beginning.” Its pages teem with horrors that do, in fact, resemble The Handmaid’s Tale. It would roll women’s rights backward by at least a century, as we’ve seen in Arizona.
Watts said her grandmother had to have a back alley abortion in the 1940s, and later her mother had a safe, legal abortion in the 70s after Roe. Watts herself had access to an abortion when she found herself pregnant as a teen.
“My own daughters don’t have that same ability because of where they live. I think it’s terrifying that now we have generations of women who now have less rights than the generations before them. It’s supposed to be the opposite of that.”
Project 2025 treats women as vessels for procreation, mythologizing a time when white men were the only Americans who enjoyed true freedom. For many women, those days were bleak. We couldn’t establish our own health care, make major purchases, or open our bank accounts without the co-signature of a father or husband. The term “egg money” was coined by farm wives’ practice of saving money from selling chicken eggs — transactions too minor for their husbands to notice.
This is the future Project 2025 has in store for us — a future that requires the subjugation of women, BIPOC, and anyone who does not fit into a narrow authoritarian vision of the white, straight, Christian ideal.
“If you think they aren’t coming from your IVF and your birth control and everything having to do with women’s sexual freedoms, you’re mistaken,” Watts said.
Protections that have been in place for women for decades would be eliminated. For example, Project 2025 wants to ax the federal office of Gender Equality & Women Empowerment and replace it with the office of Women, Children, and Families.
“I think Katie Britt would be in charge of that office,” Watts quipped, offering welcome levity in the midst of such a stark conversation.
“From her kitchen!” I laughed, remembering the scenes of Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal. She sat in her own kitchen, wearing a gold cross and a modest green satin blouse, telling America she worries about curing the very real ills of drug addiction and inflation, while pondering how to get a casserole on the table by 6 p.m. Just like all of us!
During Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal, I half expected a recipe for sourdough bread to appear on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. All of America wondered if we were watching a political rebuttal by a U.S. Senator or a trad-wife Instagram reel.
It struck me that Britt was discussing the pressure of making dinner for her family as a U.S. Senator. I thought surely her husband could download Pinterest like the rest of us. But in a conservative marriage dynamic, called complementarianism, the wife exists as a utility to complement the husband’s skills and ambitions. Women are “helpmeets”, a phrase from the Bible that describes a woman who makes life easier for their male partner. This is the role they are consigned from God, regardless of their job outside the home.
If you read The Handmaid’s Tale, you may remember that women were categorized into roles meant to fit the men’s needs: Handmaids were impregnated against their will and forced to have their babies. Aunts were the trainers and disciplinarians; Marthas cooked and cleaned. Wives oversaw the others.
And men held all the power.
Project 2025 is rife with this language. Defeating it depends on a singular outcome: Electing Joe Biden. So how do we do it? According to Watts, we all need a reality check and a heavy dose of tough love.
“I believe apathy and cynicism are incredibly dangerous, and none of us can afford to live that way. It’s lazy and an excuse for inaction because democracy is hard work.”
Fortunately, Watts came to the conversation armed with great tips and suggestions for how to have these hard conversations to ensure our friends, relatives, and neighbors know what’s in stake for this election.
Come back on Thursday, and I’ll share her grassroots activism wisdom.