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Rightwingers are trying to destroy women's right to vote
Calls for disenfranchisement rest on a single assumption: that women’s citizenship is partial and conditional
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/04/women-right-to-vote-disenfranchisement
. . .
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.
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.
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