We need to talk about the right’s new voter suppression target: Women

This past November, I wrote about some of the figures on the American right calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment. At that time, the subject was trending as Democrats celebrated big election wins in Virginia and New York City. For these right-wing misogynists, women pose a threat to their reactionary vision for society because their empathetic natures and weak minds make them more likely to support liberal candidates and foreign immigration.  

Now, as we head into the 2026 midterms—elections Donald Trump has all but promised to interfere with—concrete threats are emerging to women’s access to the polls. 

The Trump and MAGA-backed SAVE Act puts onerous identification requirements in order for Americans to register and vote in elections. The legislation would force individuals to present a passport or birth certificate, documents many Americans either don’t possess or to which they lack easy access. More than one observer has noted that this could end up disproportionately affecting married women, as these restrictions would leave wives who have changed their names  having to prove they are the same person as the name listed on their birth certificate. Republicans have insisted, sometimes in direct contradiction of the facts of the bill, that the SAVE Act neither targets women nor puts an undue burden on their access to the ballot. 

My view is that this cannot be taken strictly as an accidental byproduct of more general anti-democratic measures. Rather, I think it should be analyzed in the context of a wider constellation of misogynistic views on the right, including the extremist push to deny women the franchise. 

The good wife trap

Progressive and liberal observers have commented on how the SAVE Act’s restrictions could most prominently affect conservative women, given that they are more likely to be in heterosexual marriages and potentially have taken their husbands’ names. 

Republican defenses of the bill seem to suggest they are aware of this issue, with Rep. Tom Emmer going so far as to say that he is confident in any woman’s ability to overcome the hurdles presented by the bill because “they are brilliant.” On Fox News, he countered questions about married women’s possible disenfranchisement by asking rhetorically, 

Why do you suggest they don't know how to prove their citizenship by bringing a passport or birth certificate or a marriage certificate and/or the new Social Security card that gets issued right after they get married?

This is, at best, a patronizing and condescending approach. Women are smart enough to jump through unnecessary hoops to cast their ballot, but Emmer clearly doesn’t think they are so intelligent as to see these extra steps for the violation of their civil rights that they are. Emmer’s ideal woman must be savvy enough to navigate absurd bureaucracy as needed but not so smart she knows when she’s getting a raw deal. 

Furthering this, I think it’s worth stressing the paradoxical traps into which right-wing men consistently force married women. As I noted in November, a central part of the misogynist case against women voting is that their caring and emotional natures makes them vulnerable to supporting bad policy like liberal immigration reforms, welfare protections, and multiculturalism generally. In short, women are too delicate, too submissive, too pliable to be trusted with the franchise. 

Partridge and his male supremacist org Relearn constantly post along these lines:

Women vote with emotions
National policy is feminized
Immigrants flood in
Sexual immorality is legalized
Multiculturalism is celebrated
Feelings become the arbiter of morality
Justice is labeled as "harsh"
Western nations collapse
Women blame men
Repeal the 19th.

What is crucial to apprehend here is that only a woman who is willing to be led by the men around her—and particularly her husband—can possibly be deserving of her vote. But that very quality makes her undeserving, as she is too empathetic and submissive to be trusted with an independent vote. On the other hand, rejecting male leadership and supporting woke, feminized, and degenerate liberal policies places a woman entirely outside the love and respect accorded to her as God’s intended partner to man. The only way out is submission, and yet that way lies not tenderness but domination.

It’s a wretched proposition. By her divine nature, a woman should not want to go against her husband’s wishes and would not even object to having her access to the ballot restricted or even abolished. A good wife is so in sync with her husband that to object to such an arrangement reveals a rebelliousness that requires correction. 

Not her body, not her vote

It’s important to understand that for male supremacist influencers on the right, a married woman is not an autonomous individual. Her body is not hers, and neither is her mind. 

This is especially true among extremist Christians. Men like Dale Partridge and Joel Webbon, both of whom support repealing the 19th, talk regularly about the “household vote.” In this configuration, the key unit is the family, but only the male head of that family exercises a political voice. Webbon has complained that women’s suffrage not only gave women an undue role in politics but also actively robbed him and all other married men of a degree of their rightful authority. To quote Webbon: 

The way I see it, half of my household vote was stolen from me. And my loving, Godly, wonderful wife, what we’re practicing is not hypocrisy. What we’re practicing is restitution. My loving wife said, “Wicked people stole half of your vote, husband, and I would like to give it back to you. 

Partridge has made similar comments, like this post made across this social media accounts:

In 1920, the serpent said to the woman:
"You're a voter." And from that point forward, the household was divided, women were political pawns to be exploited, and America fell.

The indivisibility of the household that these Christian extremists extol is just a stand-in for total male authority. By suggesting that the household has one voice, one will, and then insisting on the indisputable role of the husband as the head of the household, they are saying that any deviation by the wife is already morally and spiritually illegitimate. What they want is to make it legally illegitimate as well. 

But this aggressively patriarchal thinking isn’t relegated to actors like Partridge and Webbon. As Tal Levin, author of Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, discussed in a 2025 interview with Religion News Service how many women across evangelical Christianity became trapped by a theology of submission:

You cannot divorce. You cannot disobey. You can’t be shrill…And the purpose of your body is to create babies for Christianity, right? So anyone who falls outside that very narrow heterosexual remit is a sinner and an abomination

This logic is also how right-wing Christianity operates as a legitimizing framework for spousal rape. The wife is an unbroken extension of the husband—his will, his wants, and his wisdom. 

Eric Conn, the right-wing influencer and owner of Christian nationalist press , has repeatedly denied that he supports marital rape even as he regularly posts about how sex within a Biblical marriage is not a matter of consent:

Feminist Twitter: "The Bible never says that men are entitled to sex or entitled to their wives bodies."

Bible: "The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body..." 1 Cor 7

Conn insists this goes both ways, that both husband and wife have claim on one another’s bodies. But it’s hard to see how this view is in any way empowering to wives who are framed in every aspect of right-wing Christianity as servants of their husbands. It’s easy to see how it is a blueprint for rape. 

In his book, Lavin details multiple Christian women subjected to years of abuse and rape at the hands of their husbands. He adapted one of those for a piece at The Nation: 

At 19, she met the man she would marry—the first one who had ever asked her on a date. Over the course of their courtship, the man, a fellow student at her Christian high school, became sexually abusive. He began by groping her; when she refused his advances, they only became more forceful. In Dobson’s teachings, men cannot control their lust, and the burden is on women to ensure that they do not fall into sexual sin. Even as the assaults escalated into rapes, Ruth felt—and was encouraged to feel by her future husband—that the “sexual sin” was hers, even as he had her pinned down. She had not screamed loud enough, she had not managed to overpower him, and so she was to blame.

[…]

By the time of her wedding, Ruth had already begun to question the education she’d received about what it meant to be a woman. But it takes a long time to uproot a lifetime’s worth of indoctrination. So when the moment came, she walked down the aisle toward the man who had assaulted her, the man who, according to all she had been taught—through beatings and fire-and-brimstone sermons, through books and tapes and quiet Bible study sessions—ought to lead her through a life of wifely submission and child-rearing.

Shocking as such accounts might be, we are only a few decades removed from a time when marital rape was both legal and widely accepted in American life. If men like Partridge, Webbon, and others had their way, it would be our future, too. 

We can’t disentangle the assault on the vote from other authoritarian logics, male supremacy included. Denying women the vote, making it harder for them to vote, all suits the political agenda of a movement interested in White Christian domination of the public sphere and total male control of the private sphere. 

And this formulation offers the women it purports to honor and protect a trap: submit or reveal themselves to be unworthy of that honor and protection in the first place. 

Featured image is The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives receiving a deputation of female suffragists