Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace aren’t exactly feminist firebrands, but they didn’t need to be to defy Trump.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images and Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

A year after the most openly misogynist presidential candidate in modern U.S. history defeated, for the second time, an ultracompetent woman and brought a politics of unabashed male dominance to the White House and country writ large, it can feel like something of a quaint throwback to remark on why it’s important to have women in positions of power.

The man sitting behind the Resolute Desk recently snapped “Quiet! Quiet, piggy” at a female reporter after she asked him about his refusal to release the Epstein Files, simply the latest in his career-long impulse to hurl sexist insults at women who challenge or question him. His secretary of defense has tweeted a video of his own pastor arguing that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. His White House intervened on behalf of accused rapist and sex trafficker (and self-identified misogynist) Andrew Tate and his brother after the two flew back to the U.S., fleeing human trafficking and rape allegations in Romania (Tate faces 21 similar criminal charges in the U.K.); the Trump administration official who intervened, Paul Ingrassia, faced sexual harassment allegations after a colleagues said he intentionally canceled a female co-worker’s hotel room on a work trip so she would have to share one with him. The president has pushed most of the military’s highest-ranking women out of their posts. He won election in part by catering to men who resent women’s increasing economic and social power.

But his administration and the coalition that supports it is far from exclusively male. And the women in it tell us a lot about women in power—how some replicate and perpetuate the same misogyny that limits their opportunities; how many women, including conservative ones, really do have unique life experiences that can shape their leadership in surprising ways; and how electing women is certainly not by itself sufficient for feminist change, but is absolutely necessary for it.

The MAGA women who broke ranks to successfully force the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein are illustrative. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace aren’t exactly feminist firebrands or social justice warriors. But it does seem like something more than coincidence that three of the four Republican members of Congress to support the discharge petition to release the documents were women. The fourth, Thomas Massie, is a longtime Trump antagonist; the three women, though, have been among the most loyal MAGA acolytes in Congress. They’ve defied the president to whom they have historically catered over Epstein: a man widely known to be an abuser and exploiter of women and girls.