This week, the fundamentalist Christian pastor Dale Partridge argued in a series of tweets that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction”. In other words, he pits his version of the religion against the constitution, which, since the 19th amendment passed a century ago, guarantees adult citizens the right to vote regardless of sex. He argues that in marriage, the husband annexes and owns his wife’s voice and rights, so that he in effect gets two votes and she gets none. The far-right preacher is not alone in this argument that women should not have the right to participate in public life and act on their views and values.
Jesse Watters, the Fox News personality, has argued that if he found out his wife “was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair”. It violates “the sanctity of our marriage; what else is she keeping from me?” Rightwing agitator Charlie Kirk also got upset about the idea that women might vote according to their agenda and not their husband’s.
These men are offering warnings about what awaits women who marry men like them. Maybe it’s worth noting here that the rightwing opposition to marriage equality as same-sex marriage is in part because they’re opposed to marriage equality within heterosexual marriage. They want marriage to be an inherently unequal relationship with a subordinate wife and an entitled husband, a cozy little authoritarian regime at home.
One of the things the 2024 US presidential election is about is whether or not women should be free and equal full citizens of this republic. Right now too many women are not – women in conservative states are denied reproductive rights, meaning jurisdiction over their own bodies and in some cases survival if an abortion or pregnancy becomes a medical emergency.
But there’s another way that women are not free and equal which a few videos, a lot of tweets and reportedly some Post-It notes in women’s bathrooms have addressed – when women are afraid to vote for their chosen candidate, when their husbands or boyfriends are Trump supporters and they are Harris supporters. I just wrote a Guardian piece about the fact that so many women apparently are bullied over their political beliefs, despite assurances that there are ways to vote without being tyrannized, is troubling. It suggests that there’s a whole other kind of voting suppression and coercion that deserves investigation and raises questions about voting at home.
The responses cited above confirm that a lot of women have good reason to fear their partners and hide their choices (and attention to the videos may be making Maga husbands even more angry and controlling). These Maga men don’t think that wives and girlfriends should be free to vote as they choose, nor that wives and girlfriends have the right to privacy in their political choices. They, in other words, do not believe she should have a choice. Which boils down to not believing she has rights, and if they don’t believe women have rights here, they don’t believe they have them in a lot of arenas.
This aligns with the Republican party’s enthusiasm for ending reproductive rights and birth control and no-fault divorce and with Vance’s suggestion that women should stay in violent marriages. Vance’s campaign has said his remarks were taken out of context. It fits in with Trump’s ominous campaign speech on Tuesday in which he declared, “I want to protect the women of our country … I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”
Those are alarming words from an adjudicated rapist who’s facing new sexual assault charges from both former model Stacey Williams and beauty pageant contestant Beatrice Keul. Or not facing, since neither of these stories have garnered much attention, Trump’s long history of adjudicated or alleged sexual abuse apparently being acceptable, denied, or both with his supporters.
This election is about a lot of things, and whether women are endowed with certain inalienable rights is one of them.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
• This piece was amended on 1 November 2024 to clarify that the 19th amendment was passed 104 years ago, not 124 as an earlier version said.
