Rightwingers are trying to destroy women’s right to vote | Moira Donegan

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Sexism can be very modern and tech savvy. Misogyny is an ever-evolving idiom, and men and women alike have found particularly of-the-moment ways to operate within the genre. Think of the apps that take images of women and remove their clothes, or the AI bots that men and boys can use to generate pornography or depictions of graphic violence against women and girls for the crime of going to the same school as they do or running for office. Think of the influencers of the so-called “womanosphere” who tell their female audiences that women who seek out friendship or equality with men are morons or cows, all through the gleam of a TikTok filter. Sexism may be the world’s oldest prejudice and its first unjust hierarchy, but it is continually innovating, adapting to new technologies and the most recent rhetorical needs of male supremacy.

But some of the forms of misogyny that have been bubbling up in American political discourse lately can seem a bit retro. I don’t just mean the tradwives, who dress alternately like June Cleaver or like Ma Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie – evoking bygone eras, or at least the ways those eras are depicted on television. And I don’t just mean the pro-natalists, either, who don weird bonnets and propose national breeding medals for prolific mothers. Since last month’s massive election victories for Democrats, some on the right have looked to revive a form of sexism that has been out of fashion for more than one hundred years: the idea that women should not have a right to vote.

More and more, influential voices in the Maga movement and the far-right Republican party are calling to strip women of the franchise. It’s not that this is strictly a new development. Opposition to women’s voting rights has long been a fringe, but persistent, feature of the American right. It’s been a favorite hobby horse of extremist preachers; it trended among Trump supporters on social media in the lead-up to the 2016 election, when polls showed that Trump would win if only men voted. (As it happened, he won anyway.) In the century that followed the passage of the 19th amendment – which barred the United States or any state from restricting the vote on the basis of sex, and enfranchised hundreds of thousands of women when it was ratified in 1920 – opposition to women’s right to vote has simmered at the extreme edges of political opinion.

It was kept alive in large part in ultra-conservative Christian communities, which tend to cast women as something between children and property. Claiming women to be intellectually and morally unfit for citizenship, these sects declared that women should withdraw from the public sphere, including from political participation, and submit to the rule of their husbands.

Joel Webbon, a pastor and YouTube personality, has been at the forefront of this brand of misogynist Christian reaction. (Webbon claims not to be a misogynist but is rather a self-identified “sexist”; what he imagines the difference to be is not entirely clear.) In 2022, just before the nation’s first post-Dobbs midterm elections, he tweeted: “The 19th Amendment was a bad idea.” He is broadly opposed to women’s participation in the political realm, saying in an interview last year that “God has not designed women for warfare, and that’s part of what politics is – it’s really all that politics is, it’s war without the blood”. (That war is not politics would be news, I think, to those who have waged it, women among them.)

Dale Partridge, also a pastor, justified his own opposition to women’s suffrage using a term of art that has become popular on the fringe right: “I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I love America and American women,” he said, “and want to protect our nation from their suicidal empathy.”(Emphasis mine.) Here, women are cast as supposedly naturally, inherently more empathetic than men are – and this, in turn, is undesirable, indeed suicidal. It is something of a back-handed compliment.

Like the racist “great replacement” theory and other strains of white nationalism, the opposition to women’s suffrage has entered the mainstream as the Republican party has radicalized. In August, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault, reposted a video in which pastors explain their opposition to women’s right to vote, with the caption “All of Christ for All of Life” – a Christian nationalist slogan. (Hegseth, who denied the allegation, reached a settlement with the alleged victim.)

But in recent decades, a more secular brand of anti-suffrage feeling has also challenged women’s voting rights, this one emerging from the strains of the right invested in biological determinism – a set of commitments ranging from evolutionary psychology to eugenics. This worldview tends to cast women as inferior not due to divine mandate, but due to nature, which, it is claimed, has made them either too stupid or too irresponsible for the vote.

Helen Andrews, a rightwing magazine editor whose recent piece The Great Feminization suggests women’s presence in public life may pose “a threat to civilization”, claims women have “evolved” toward several various and seemingly contradictory habits – too empathetic and consensus-based, on the one hand, and too gossipy, conniving and passive-aggressive, on the other. The logical conclusion to Andrews’s argument is that women should be immediately excluded from political life and from all major institutions; perhaps lacking the courage of her convictions, she does not argue women should be deprived of citizenship, instead proposing a shift of public life towards further male dominance – claiming, for instance, that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female”. In describing women as an obstacle to conservative priorities, she echoes Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, rightwing mega-donor and longtime mentor to JD Vance, who wrote in 2009 that his ideal libertarian world had been rendered politically unfeasible by “the extension of the franchise to women”. (He later seemed to contradict this, saying he did not “think any class should be disenfranchised”.)

These two assertions – that women are ordained by God to be men’s inferiors, or that they have been designed by nature to be men’s inferiors – use pseudoscience, lies and heresy to conceal their plain sexist bigotry behind a thin veneer of patronizing condescension. They claim, implausibly – with the sneering tone of a cartoon villain baring his rotting teeth at a child hero – to be looking to strip women of their rights, freedoms and dignity for their own good.

But they are now joined by a third strain of anti-suffrage sentiment: that of undisguised misogynist contempt. A growing number of rightwing influencers simply state that they feel that women should not vote because they hate women, and want women to be subjected to male domination. Andrew Tate, the men’s rights influencer and alleged human trafficker, posted in September to his X account: “Stop letting women vote, stop giving women position as judges, stop giving women political appointments … WOMEN: giving you political and social power is how we ended up here.”

The opponents of women’s suffrage have, for now, no way of enacting their ambition: there is no path to repealing the 19th amendment. But they are part of a growing movement to blame women’s advancement – and their increased access, participation and visibility in education, the workforce, politics and public life – for a slew of social problems, from political polarization to economic stagnation to a vague sense of spiritual anomie. As Jessica Winter recently pointed out in the New Yorker, in a piece on the centrist pundits who have declared a crisis of men, this sentiment – that women’s citizenship and status should be lower, and that recognizing it has hurt the country – is peddled by thinkers and writers far more respectable than the likes of Webbon or Tate. “The [New York] Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights,” Winter writes. “Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.”

This range of sexisms that have attained mainstream credibility in politics and the press rest on one assumption: that women’s citizenship is partial and conditional compared with men’s, that we have less of a claim on rights, dignity and public participation than our brothers do. That this assumption is even held is an insult to women’s dignity; that it is now so blithely accepted is a sign of how far women’s status has already sunk.