Women Should Make Babies, Not Vote: Why Some on the Far Right Want to Repeal the 19th Amendment

In the immediate hours after Zohran Mamdani’s victory was declared on Tuesday night, a new topic began trending on Elon Musks’s X: Repeal the 19th.

The posts were exactly what you’d think. The idea that women shouldn’t vote has existed on the crank right for a long time. But increasingly, it’s made its way into more mainstream MAGA conversations, and many advocates have become successful influencers in right-wing media circles. 

Commentators like Paul Ray Ramsey, who posts under the name Ramzpaul, and Blaze producer Aaron McIntire have been making the case for years. Some of the arguments are rooted in Christian nationalism. Others are more secular. But all are preoccupied with the idea that women are unfit by their very nature for political participation and that the greatest crises facing us today—namely, immigration and white population decline—can only be fully addressed by removing women from political life. Below, I want to explore this phenomenon, primarily through the responses to this week’s election results. 

Protecting women from themselves 

It’s important to stress that a lot of the rhetoric around repealing women’s rights is presented as being, at least in part, for women themselves. A sense that women are victims of their own nature pervades these corners of the right. But that doesn’t mean they believe women have a right to inflict their fallible, excessively compassionate politics on the rest of the country. 

Joel Webbon is a leading voice of the misogynist, Christian right in America. He is a virulent opponent of feminism in any form and has long been an advocate for stripping women of the right to vote. Webbon has stated clearly that he thinks women just aren’t meant to do politics. As he posted Wednesday, “God did not create women for war. Politics is war without the bullets.”

In this formulation, women are unsuited for politics because of their soft and empathetic nature. Pastor Dale Patridge put it this way,

I don't think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I don't love women. I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I love America and American women and want to protect our nation from their suicidal empathy.

The notion of empathy as a weakening influence in modern life is rampant on the right today. It’s something that both secular and Christian far-right thinkers have put forward as a key explanation for American society’s degeneration into a permissive, lazy, and debauched superpower in decline. Joe Rigney, author of The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterparts, not only views empathy as something to be avoided but has argued that women are more susceptible to having their emotions manipulated in the service of dangerous and immoral policies: 

…the empathetic sex is ill-suited precisely because of the ways that that empathy could be manipulated into, say, refusing to draw lines or in the name of helping a oppressed group, we're going to abandon our biblical confession or something like that.

Christian nationalist and former Trump administration official William Wolfe reposted exit poll data showing young women’s overwhelming support for Sherrill, Spanberger, and Mamdani with the observation, “The sin of empathy.”

From the perspective of Christian nationalists like Partridge, Wolfe, and others, women’s natural empathy puts both the country and women themselves at risk. They need to be rescued from this impulse by having the cup taken from their hands.

Far-right podcaster and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate struck a similar, if somewhat more menacing, tone to Partridge. Back in September, he posted this screed to his X account, which is still followed by JD Vance: 

Stop letting women vote, stop giving women position [sic] as judges, stop giving women political appointments. As soon as only men run government and law, all the problems disappear. Women now understand that without male protection they’re nothing but victims. You are not a girl boss. There is no such thing. Crying for Iryana is a wake up call for females. GOOD. WOMEN: giving you political and societal power is how we ended up here. Liberalism is just girl feels.

If you really care about womens safety, drop all female ego and obey men.We built you a safe society, you ruined it with ego, we will build it again. Obey.

Of course it’s preposterous for a man with a mountain of rape and domestic abuse allegations against him, as well as thousands of hours of documented misogyny, to talk about protecting women. But, as vile as it is, it’s easier to comprehend when you consider the far right’s view of rape as a corrective punishment. 

Far-right influencer Jack Murphy has been explicit on this point. In 2015, he wrote in a blog post that “Feminists need rape…It is our duty as men to save feminists from themselves. Therefore, I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch.” Those views have not kept Murphy from obtaining some real cache on the right. JD Vance appeared on Jack Murphy’s now-defunct podcast in 2021, and figures like Kash Patel, Dave Rubin, and Christopher Rufo were also featured guests. 

Webbon’s case for the repeal of the 19th has echoes of this logic. For him, women cannot escape their fundamentally flawed nature and as such can never be trusted with the franchise. Like with Partridge and Wolfe, they need to be protected from themselves, from their own empathetic and liberal inclinations. Webbon put it this way on X:

Correct. Blaming women is pointless.

As @dashiam41300 points out, the problem is women's desires. Their desires are wicked. Solution: Take away women's vote. Simple as.

This is not very far removed from a sentiment that sees rape as a form of purifying violence. Women have natures that must be tamed and subjugated—sexually, spiritually, and politically—so that proper order can be established.  

That order is one that is meant to liberate women through submission and domesticity. And there are plenty of far-right women influencers willing to peddle this message. This post from Katie Miller, wife of Trump official Stephen Miller, summarizes this view well: 

When society told women that our value was derived from our ability to make an income instead of derived from the joy of motherhood we all failed. Make babies. Raise those babies. It’s our highest and best value.

As I’ve written before, this is a fundamentally male supremacist mode of thinking. Extremism scholar Cynthia Miller-Idriss writes in her new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism:

Male supremacism is the belief that men are naturally, biologically, and genetically superior in ways that justify and rationalize the logical domination of women through social, political, economic, or legal hierarchies…At its core, this anger reflects fears about a loss of status, worth, respect, value, and power—manifesting in attempts to control, punish, and reassert dominance.

In my view, the clear message here is that liberalism is just an extension of femininity into political life. Controlling and subduing women, turning them back into domesticated baby-makers, is the surest means of subjugating the liberal impulse in society and of returning women to a more natural state of existence. It is also the best means of combatting white population decline and buffering against migrants from the Global South, which brings us to the ethnonationalist dimensions of the argument. 

Engineering the ethno-state

Feminine weakness and desire might be driving many women to support progressive immigration policies, but you can’t have “great replacement” without the failure of women to fulfill their role as childbearers. White Women are at the center of right-wing concerns about demographic change because their reproductive capacity is seen as a key bulwark against the browning of America. Yes, America is letting in too many immigrants—both legal and illegal—but it is also not producing enough Americans.

Here, I want to turn again to Miller-Idriss:

Fears related to a supposedly orchestrated replacement of white majority societies are a major driver of white supremacists' compulsion to control women and their reproductive rights.

On the one hand, abortion is seen as part of the so-called white genocide plot and as one factor leading toward the extinction of the white race.

This isn't only happening on the fringe, but is also echoed very clearly in the mainstream. As Time magazine reported, several weeks before the Dobbs decision was handed down, Matt Schlapp, leader of the Conservative Political Action Conference, told reporters that overturning Roe would be a positive step toward fixing the US immigration problem. "If you're worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don't we start there?" he asked. "Start with allowing our own people to live."

The far right in America sees women as a national—as well as natural— resource, a means of reversing the mass tide of migration that they think has taken their country from them. Indeed, many right-wingers have reacted to Zohran Mamdani’s victory by despairing over New York City and America’s demographic shifts. William Wolfe took to X, posting a chart showing the decline in the percentage of New York’s population identified as white and to warn that this fate awaits the rest of the country:

It’s incredibly important to understand that Mamdani was not actually elected mayor of the historic American city that we know as “New York City” because that city doesn’t exist anymore. Due to intentional mass replacement immigration, New York City is now a third world metropolis wearing the Big Apple as a skin suit. Americans didn’t elect Mamdani, foreigners did. And his election is not the beginning of the end for NYC—it’s a death certificate. Finally, it’s a reminder that everything right now inescapably comes back to immigration. If we don’t stop mass migration and accelerate deportations, denaturalization, and remigration, this will happen over and over again until the United States is nothing more than a disparate conglomeration of Mumbais, Mogadishus, and Mexico Cities.

But if denaturalization and deportation are top of mind for the far-right, so too is  the need to revive population growth among Americans of European heritage. In the past, I have referred to this convergence of nativist politics and pro-natalism as America First pro-natalism. It’s a vicious cocktail of racism, misogyny, and deeply authoritarian ideas. 

This requires once again protecting women and societies large from women’s own policy preferences—namely, their support for reproductive rights. Activists like Webbon see the removal of women from the public sphere and the end of abortion as necessarily interlinked. As Webbon once put it , “Elevate women to positions of civil authority or save the lives of babies. A nation cannot do both.”

Elon Musk has been extremely outspoken about his commitment to having as many children as he can in an effort to avert “population collapse” and ensure the survival of the best and brightest. Musk has repeatedly warned that non-white immigration into Western countries risks civil war and has publicly fretted about the disappearance of great European cultures if countries like France and Italy do not increase their birth rates. It’s these preoccupations that underlied his offer to “give” Taylor Swift a child after she signed-off her endorsement of Kamala Harris with a quip about being a “childless cat lady.” Musk may not have said Swift shouldn’t vote, but the subtext was easy to read: her misguided politics would be remedied if she just submitted to a virile man and bore his children. 

The inherent illiberalism and coercion here is clear. Women do not need full rights but rather the freeing privilege of serving men, their community, and their nation through dutiful reproduction. Crucially, though women may not be built for war, that doesn’t mean they have no place in civilizational conflict. Andrew Tate has put it in precisely these terms, musing, “If men can be forced to fight in the army to preserve the nation. Then women should be forced to have children to preserve the nation.”

Women’s political rights thus pose both negative and positive threats to the health of the nation. By participating in public life, women deny themselves the time and opportunity to be the loving wives and mothers they are designed to be. Their political disposition, which trends to the left of their male counterparts on issues like immigration and abortion, makes that participation actively dangerous. As a voter, a woman is a risk to themselves and the country. Without children, they are a walking anathema. 

Real menace

The repeal of the 19th amendment is a distant, unlikely possibility. But the retreat of reproductive rights is already well underway. Moreover, I’ve tried to show that many of the figures pushing this highly misogynistic politics on the right are not marginal. Many have sizable audiences and direct links to members of the current administration. 

What’s more, their toxic ideas are often appealing to angry or disillusioned young men and boys. We can’t dismiss the threat posed by people like Andrew Tate influencing a future generation of men. 

Turning once again to Idriss-Miller, the situation for Gen Z is not one of inevitable, progressive improvement from previous generations:

While the share of Gen Z women who identify as feminists (61%) is higher than for any other generation of women, fewer Gen Z men (43%) than millennial men (53%) identify as feminist. This means that Gen Z has both a large gender divide on issues of women's rights and a declining level of support among younger men, compared to older men, for those rights…Gen Z women are the most likely group of Americans to report being treated disrespectfully by the opposite sex.

We can’t simply assume that time and generational change will wash away our problems. It’s up to us to show young men that a politics of reaction and hatred of women is not only wrong but injurious to their own hearts and minds.  It’s up to us to re-establish fundamental reproductive rights across this country. And it’s up to men like me and any other man reading this to extol a vision of gender and sexual identity that is commensurate with the liberal belief in individual dignity and a pluralistic society. 

Featured image is Abduction of Proserpina, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini