Earlier this year pro-life activist and increasingly unhinged social media Trump surrogate Abby Johnson advocated returning to "household voting" that "in a Godly household" would be exercised by the husband in
an extremely cursed Twitter exchange. Last week, writer Michael Warren Davis expanded on this idea in
a full-scale diatribe against women's suffrage in Crisis magazine. (Perhaps fortunately, his sense of the political landscape is so disconnected from reality that he seems to believe it's not only a mainstream view but the
consensus view that American law and government worked better in the age of
Lochner and eugenics than they do now.)
I had never seen this before; I was under the impression that women's right to vote was the very definition of a settled issue and that any extremists who felt otherwise would keep their dissent to themselves. However, I've since been informed that this is in fact a position one has occasionally encountered for a while now in far-flung religious countercultures like Quiverfull families and some Hasidic Jews--and, evidently, the extreme edge of Traditionalist Catholicism as well.
What to make of this? Is this position actually gaining visibility in an age of massive gendered voting gaps and an increasingly normalized sensibility that unfriendly demographics should have their votes suppressed, or are the wingnuts just happening to sound off now because it's the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment? Is it possible that women's suffrage will enter the general stock of hard-right gripes with the Constitution along with the income tax and the direct election of senators, or is that a bridge too far? I open the floor to anybody who's masochistic enough to join me in thinking about this topic.
