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WHY ARE SO MANY WOMEN HIDING THEIR VOTING PLANS FROM THEIR HUSBANDS?
 
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Rebecca Solnit
October 31, 2024
The Guardian
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_ A lot of households are not democracies-they’re dictatorships.
This may mean voter intimidation and suppression. Lots of memes,
tweets, posts and videos are popping up, assuring women they can keep
their votes secret from their husbands or boyfriends _

‘People doing door-to-door outreach to voters are encountering men
who prevent their wives from even conversing at the door.’ ,
Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // The Guardian


 

Lots of memes and tweets and posts and videos are popping up, assuring
women that they can keep their votes secret from their husbands and
boyfriends. The unspoken assumption is that lots of women are bullied,
intimidated or controlled by their partners, specifically in straight
couples when she wants to vote for Harris and he supports Trump. The
messages assure these intimidated voters that they can vote in peace
and privacy at a polling place. But a lot of Americans now vote by
mail, which generally means they fill out their ballots at home, where
that privacy may not be available.

On the one hand, I’m glad there’s outreach to those voters. On the
other, the way these messages are framed seem to regard the grim
reality that a lot of women live in fear of their spouses as a given
hardly worth stating outright, let alone decrying. I get that right
now we’re fighting for the future of democracy in America, the
public version in which rights and norms and the rule of law are
preserved – as the Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra
Petri put it
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“I am endorsing Kamala Harris
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president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.”

But a lot of households are not democracies; they’re dictatorships.
This may impact public life, in that it seems to generate a meaningful
amount of voter intimidation and suppression. As in previous election
cycles, people doing door-to-door outreach to voters are encountering
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who prevent their wives from even conversing at the door or who
believe their registered-Democrat wives are Republicans and women
fearful of speaking or of disclosing their party and chosen
candidates.

One Pennsylvania man who has been canvassing for several weeks told
me: “So many times we ... have knocked on doors and when both
husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend have come to the door
together, after hearing what we were there for so often the man stayed
and the woman walked away ‘to do other things’, or the man came
out to talk to us. Often the woman would come out by herself and say
or whisper: ‘I’m with her and he doesn’t know it.’” Another
friend reached a voter by phone, who told her that because her husband
wasn’t in the car, she could admit she was voting Democratic.
Coercive control is an issue in households of all races and political
orientations, but only this configuration – Maga man,
Democratic-leaning woman – seems to impact the right to vote in such
a visible and potentially impactful way. Fox News host Jesse
Watters asserted
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his wife “secretly voting for Harris” was like having an affair
and it would be “D day,” the d presumably standing for divorce.

A Lincoln Project video
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clutch of spectacularly mainstream white couples (they look like they
fell out of a real estate brochure or are going to the golf course)
entering a polling place. One of the men asks a second man who his
wife is voting for. “She doesn’t like him but she’s voting for
him,” he replies, and the first says: “Same with mine.” It’s
followed by footage showing three women casting furtive glances at
their husbands and each other as they choose Harris. It’s a hostage
video. Another version of the video
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Julia Roberts, who declares: “You can vote any way you want. And no
one will ever know.” It’s not just that the party eager to deny
women bodily autonomy is full of husbands eager to deny their wives
political autonomy. It’s also a reminder that democracy and its
opposites exist at all scales.

_[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
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* Women
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* women voters
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* bullying
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* families
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* 2024 Elections
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* Trump voters
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* Voter Intimidation
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* male supremacy
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* MAGA
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