‘My wife had this baby’: Vance criticized for ‘misogynistic’ views on women and family (2024)

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) speaks during a campaign rally at Middletown High School on July 22, 2024 in Middletown, Ohio. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance's views on women and family came into greater focus on Wednesday after unearthed audio from just four years ago revealed him agreeing with a right-wing podcast host's claim that grandmothers helping to raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.”

While many reacted to that line, some critics looking deeper into the audio latched on to another portion of the interview, a story which the 39-year old U.S. Senator and venture capitalist hand-picked by Donald Trump shared to support the podcast host's views.

“My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship, still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval, and her mom just took a sabbatical,” Vance said. “She’s a biology professor in California, just took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year.”

Former Republican and former GOP communications director Tara Setmayer, a resident scholar at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the co-founder and CEO of the women-led bipartisan super PAC The Seneca Project, weighed in:

"Is it me or does J.D Vance seem alarmingly detached emotionally from his wife and family?" Setmayer asked. "And what is with JD Vance's obsession with diminishing a woman's value based on her fertility? And now post-menopausal roles?"

"It's all very weird," she concluded.

Dr. Jack Brown, a physician and nonverbal communication and emotional intelligence expert who analyzed both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on CNN during a 2016 presidential debate, honed in on Vance's "My wife had this baby" remark.

"Note Vance did not say 'our baby' or 'our son/daughter' – nor did he use his wife's or his child's name. Profoundly non-affectionate, distancing, & objectifying," Dr. Brown wrote.

He added Vance's "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female" remark "is beyond-words Creepy AF–misogynist AF."

Shannon Watts, the gun violence prevention activist and Moms Demand Action founder wrote: "So J.D. Vance believes young women exist to find husbands; women in their 20s, 30s and 40s exist to have children; and older women exist to help other women raise their children. No f*cking thank you."

Journalist, lawyer, columnist, and author Jill Filipovic, who has reported on human rights and women’s health issues from around the world, wrote extensively on the latest unearthed Vance remarks.

"What Are Females For?" she asks at Substack. "According to JD Vance, 'females' are for reproduction, childcare, and not much else."

"Vance has opinions about many different kinds of women," Filipovic writes. "Those who don’t have kids are 'childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too' and lack 'a direct stake in the future of the country.' Women who care about their work and plan their families are suckers: 'If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,' he tweeted after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade."

"Stepmothers (and stepparents generally), he has suggested, are not real parents," she continues. "We have not yet heard his views on the purpose of pre-pubescent girls, but he has said that he believes even raped and impregnated children should be forced to give birth, even though their circ*mstances are 'inconvenient' — and Ohio, the state he represents as a US senator, has done just that, notoriously refusing to allow a ten-year-old rape victim to end her pregnancy (she had to travel out of state, at which point Republicans targeted the doctor who helped her)."

Revisiting Vance's story about his mother-in-law, the California biology professor taking a sabbatical to help with his newborn child, Filipovic observes: "The concept of a male caregiver doesn’t come into the picture at all.

"What was Vance doing around the time of his son’s birth and earliest months? Running a useless nonprofit and then joining an investment banking firm. His wife was clerking on the Supreme Court, the kind of rare career-making opportunity few law school graduates are ever going to turn down," she notes. "Was what Vance doing when his son was born all that important? No. But it was paid, and he’s a man. And in Vance’s view, care work is women’s work. The idea that he might take a year-long sabbatical to raise his own son doesn’t come up. His mother-in-law, on the other hand, is purposed to do just that."

"Yes," Filipovic concludes, Vance's "way of speaking is extremely weird. But his views on women and work are much worse than weird: They’re dangerous."