INTRODUCTION Freedom is a dream Haunting as amber wine Or worlds remembered out of time. Not Eden''s gate, but freedom Lures us down a trail of skulls Where men forever crush the dreamers-- Never the dream. --PAULI MURRAY, "Dark Testament" I''m not sure if my involvement in causes, benefits, marches, and demonstrations has made a huge difference, but I know one thing: that involvement has connected me with the good people: people with the live hearts, the live eyes, the live heads. -- pete seeger I sometimes think of the Supreme Court oral arguments in Whole Woman''s Health v. Hellerstedt on March 2, 2016, as the last truly great day for women and the legal system in America. There are, to be sure, many such glorious moments to choose from, both before and after Trump, but as a professional court-watcher, I had a front-row seat to this story, one that offered a sense that women in the United States had achieved some milestone that would never be reversed. The landmark abortion challenge represented the first time in American history that a historic abortion case was being heard by a Supreme Court with three female justices. Twenty-four years earlier, when the next momentous abortion case-- Planned Parenthood v.

Casey --had come before the Supreme Court, only one woman, Sandra Day O''Connor, sat on the bench. Go back a bit further and Roe v. Wade , the pathbreaking 1973 case that created a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, was argued before and decided by nine men and zero women. And when Griswold v. Connecticut , the lawsuit protecting the rights of married couples to buy and use birth control, was argued at the high court back in 1965, that bench comprised nine males so uneasy with the topic of contraception that at oral arguments nobody was brave enough even to name the birth control device being litigated. (As a result, the entire transcript from Griswold , argued fifty-one years before Whole Woman''s Health , reads like an Abbott and Costello "Who''s on First" sketch.) From that long-ago argument one may easily derive a general constitutional precept that nobody--not even well-meaning progressive male jurists and legislators--should be in the business of regulating birth control devices they are too freaked out to name. Buried in that story is the truth about how legal decisions involving women, their salaries, their bodies, their educations, custody of their children, and their votes have been framed in American courtrooms until very recently: by husbands and fathers with good intentions and staggeringly low information.

We lucked out. We got contraception and access to military schools, the right to our own credit cards, and all sorts of equal rights over the years. But it all felt different in 2016. Women now made up 50 percent of the law school population; they were partners at law firms, members of Congress, judges, professors, and three of them sat, with lifetime tenure, on the highest court in the land. Generations of women who had played by the rules, and changed American institutions and government, were poised to be a part of a genuinely equal polity. Sure, there were hiccups and setbacks. Al- though half of America''s law students and lawyers were women, women made up only one-third of attorneys in private practice, 21 percent of equity partners, and 12 percent of managing partners, chairs, or CEOs of law firms. Hmm.

Weird. Less than 5 percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were women. And women made up only about 24 percent of Congress, 18 percent of governors, 29 percent of state legislators. So, okay, it wasn''t perfect. But it was progressing. Equal pay was around the corner, better child-care and leave policies were barreling toward us, and as arguments progressed in Whole Woman''s Health , it seemed distinctly possible that the last days of men telling women what to do with their freedom and their life choices and their family decisions, were dawning. On that bright, freezing March morning, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan tag-teamed their interrogation of Scott Keller--Texas''s solicitor general--as he stutter-stepped through his justification of why, back in 2013, Texas had passed new requirements on clinics and physicians that would effectively close most abortion facilities and prevent women from terminating their pregnancies. These were onerous regulations.

In rural areas, with clinics shuttered, women were forced to drive for days to access care. Whole swaths of Texas had no accessible clinics remaining at all. Poor women and women of color were hardest hit by the lack of facilities. They had to seek days off from work, sleep in their cars, return for repeat appointments. State lawmakers had argued that their sole interest in the new clinic laws was in protecting women''s health, but women''s well-being had declined catastrophically, and in court proceedings Texas could provide no evidence that improving health outcomes was the real reason for the regulations. Pressed on this question at oral argument, Solicitor General Keller could barely finish a sentence. As the three women justices--deftly aided by Justice Stephen Breyer, the court''s fourth feminist--took turns snacking on Texas''s beleaguered lawyer, I witnessed for the first time in my sixteen-year career as a journalist something amazing: the rules of the Supreme Court road had shifted overnight. Court argument sessions are tightly controlled, highly formalized enterprises that haven''t really changed much over two centuries, with the exception of COVID-era telephonic sessions.

The nine justices sit at the same high bench next to the same spittoons (spittoons!), sipping from the same tall, silver milkshake cups they have been using for decades as lawyers make their formal arguments. But on that morning in 2016, the three women justices ignored the formal time limits, talking exuberantly over their flummoxed male colleagues. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at one point essentially instructed the chief justice to add extra time to the clock for a female reproductive freedom advocate. And he complied. I described that day of three female justices and Justice Breyer going to town on counsel as a "four-car train of whoop ass." Not the usual controlled analysis from the staid justices. But what was exceptional and--at least in retrospect--heartbreaking that morning was that it afforded America a glimpse of what genuine gender parity or near parity might have meant for future women in powerful American legal institutions. It felt like the end of constitutionally sanctioned mansplaining.

It felt, in a way, like the end of history. That morning felt like nothing so much as an explosion of bottled-up judicial girl power that had been two centuries in the making. The 5-3 ruling that came down almost four months later upheld a woman''s fundamental right to choose to end her pregnancy. That majority opinion, penned by Justice Breyer, asked courts and lawyers to puncture centuries of accumulated lies and stereotypes about fragile, confused women making bad choices in order to consider instead the actual ways in which women live their economic and moral lives. It was a constitutional breakthrough, written by a man who saw women as agents in full. At that moment, the country appeared inches away from leveraging the law to serve women''s dignity and equality interests on a massive scale. Back in that spring of 2016, we really thought we could see gender equality from our back porches. And then it was gone.

With the death of Justice Ginsburg in September 2020; the seating of three committed antichoice justices by Donald Trump in the years since Whole Woman''s Health ; and the reversal of Roe in June of 2022, that case will now likely stand as a high-water mark we may not soon see again in the courts, or in women''s constitutional prog- ress. It has become, at least for me, a marker of the end of history, but in completely the wrong direction. In a matter of weeks after Whole Woman''s Health came down, constitutional history began to unravel quickly. Every woman I know remembers what that summer before the 2016 election felt like. The GOP candidate for president who referenced Mexicans as rapists in launching his campaign. Four short months after Whole Woman''s Health came down, we would all hear with our own ears the audio from Access Hollywood of the US Republican nominee for president boasting on camera that because he was "a star," he could "grab [women] by the pussy" without consequences. By Novem- ber of 2016, we learned that the only consequence for such an admission would be a promotion to the Oval Office. Every woman I know remembers precisely where she was when the 2016 election was called for Donald Trump.

I was covering polling places in North Carolina that day, and it was dawning on me that the number of affronted women showing up in pantsuits to pull the lever for Hillary Clinton was underwhelming. Like so many of the women in this book, I spent election night comforting distraught kids and pounding bourbon. What had happened? How did it happen? Millions of people--millions of women--had voted for a man who had proven a thousand times over throughout the campaign that he thought women were best seen as the creamy offerings on a dessert cart. If we spoke up, pushed back, we were pigs, we were dogs, we were bleeding from the whatever. On the campaign trail, Trump expressly floated the idea of punishing women for terminating their pregnancies. How did we get here and how did it happen so quickly? Who, so many of us wondered, had voted for th.