This piece is my op/ed for this week in newspapers in the very red congressional district where I live (VA-07). Today, the day before 2024’s Election Day, I am of the belief that Kamala Harris is going to win, that she’s going to win relatively big, and for that this victory — saving American Democracy at least in this crucial showdown — American women will get a big share of the credit.
Speaking of credit, I want to acknowledge Emily Harris’s excellent piece — Republicans are enraged their wives might 'secretly' vote for Harris — which inspired me to write my piece here, and provided some of the nitty gritty exposure of these controlling right-wing men that I cite early in the article.
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Men Assuming Their Right to Control Women
A political ad that ran near the end of the 2024 presidential campaign – this is being written before Election Day -- had Julia Roberts telling women that they can safely vote according to their own beliefs and values — “safely,” because “What happens in the booth stays in the booth.” Meaning, it’s called a secret ballot because it is the right of citizens to keep their choices to themselves.
The purpose of the ad, as Emily Singer put it in a piece on Daily Kos, was give women in certain parts of the American religious/cultural landscape -- who are told they must vote as their husbands do -- “the permission structure” to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The backlash this ad provoked in right-wing America revealed why such women would be afraid to publicly express their choice: men in that part of the Republican world assume that women must submit to the control of their husbands.
One prominent right-wing voice – Charlie Kirk – thought it would be horrible for women to thus “undermine their husbands” even though the husband “works his tail off to make sure that she can have a nice life.” (As if the wife wasn’t working equally hard to give their family that “nice life.” Belittling the woman’s contribution.)
Fox News' Jesse Watters went “even further, saying Wednesday night that he would consider his wife’s voting independently as a form of cheating — in other words, a woman’s not allowing her husband to dominate her political voice would equate to the sin of adultery.
The 1919 constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, opined John McEntee, a former Trump White House aide and Project 2025 author, should be repealed. It should have remained the power of men, collectively, to control the power of the state.
The Trump-supporting “Christian influencer” Dale Partridge declared as “not controversial” the idea that a wife should vote as her husband directs.
Not controversial? The right of men to control women has been a major area of controversy for generations.
The power system those right-wing commentators are advocating is Patriarchy. It’s an ancient arrangement that one can find – in one form or another – in long-standing cultural systems around the world: from China and Japan in Asia, to Hispanic culture in the Old and New Worlds, to the United States, which was established in the 18th century with a relatively enlightened Constitution that kept all political power in the hands of men.
I am old enough to have grown up in an America where the attitudes of the patriarchy remained more deeply established in the national culture than they have since become. A woman could not have her own bank account, or credit card. The idea that a woman could sit in the anchor’s chair as Walter Cronkite did, or could contribute to the American military as combat soldiers, or could be a United States Senator – much less a President – were all hardly imaginable back in the 1950s.
But things have evolved considerably since then. The patriarchal idea that it is “right” and “natural” for men to control women appears as part of the larger pattern of those with the upper hand abusing their power. We no longer hold that
- Kings wield absolute power by “divine right.”
- Aristocrats are inherently superior beings whose “noble blood” makes them virtually a higher species than the common folk.
- Europeans are inherently superior to other peoples, entitled to subject those lesser breeds to their globe-spanning empires.
- Or, in the words of the “Cornerstone Speech” of the Confederacy, that “slavery—subordination to the superior race—is [the negro’s] natural and normal condition.”
Nor is it widely believed anymore that it is right and natural for wives to simply amplify the power and automatically serve the interests of their husbands, as if the women’s interests didn’t matter. Or were assumed to be altogether the same as those of their husbands.
But the 2024 election made clear that women’s beliefs, interests, and values are not identical to men’s in America today. That was demonstrated by a “gender divide” in candidate preference wide than it has ever been before.
That unprecedented gender divide – Harris’s considerable advantage with women voters, apparently bigger than Trump’s edge with men – makes sense given the nature of this election.
- One candidate has lately declared that he will “protect” women -- “whether they like it or not.” No surprise that a lot of women don’t like that offer, especially coming from someone who was lately found by a jury to have sexually assaulted a woman in the manner he’d boasted about doing in the Access Hollywood tape.
- One of the most powerfully motivating issues for women in today’s America is that the Supreme Court has lately eliminated a long-standing constitutional right of a woman to decide what to do about their pregnancies, and that Donald Trump has bragged about his instrumental role in bringing that about. Abortion is an issue on which it has largely been men – in positions of political power -- who have eliminated the ability of women to control their reproductive lives.
Julia Roberts ad dealt with the question: “Julia Roberts ad dealt with the question: “Do men have a right to exert control over women?” And that question has been an important one in the 2024 Election.”