In Chicago: Women Who Vote and the Men Who Love Them

Thoughts on the 104th Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage

Greetings from Chicago, my hometown! 

The sky is blue, Lake Michigan is sparkly, and, as I suspect most of you watching from home can tell, the Democratic National Convention this year is suffused with a future-feels-bright spirit. I’ve met delegates here who talked about crying tears of joy during the first night’s speeches, where, among other speakers, the UAW’s Shawn Fain, AOC and Jamie Raskin were on fire and anyone who missed their talks should revisit them on Youtube.

The contrast between the spirit in Chicago 2024 and the dark energy of the Trump nominating convention in Cleveland in 2016 - the last Republican convention I attended - are as different as the sunlight over the skyline today and the impenetrable long night in Antarctica at this same hour. The scene in Cleveland was a shocking orgy of misogyny that inaugurated one of the worst eras for American women in my lifetime. You can see vestiges of that abyss today in Trump re-tweeting obscene memes accusing Kamala Harris of sexually servicing her way to political prominence. This is from a nepobaby whose resume includes paying off a porn star for silence about what we can assume were seconds of activity. 

Like beaten dogs, we’ve grown almost inured to the gall. But one of the best things about the scene in Chicago this week is that the sense of outrage seems to have been reactivated and approaching a critical mass. 

By lucky coincidence, the day before the Democratic National Convention opened was the 104th birthday of the 19th Amendment. This milestone in equal rights, the culmination of a half century struggle by brave, often ridiculed and reviled American women to get the vote, was barely noted in the political discourse until Heather Cox Richardson posted late on that day one of her lovely pieces of American history. 

To wit: American women began organizing, picketing and petitioning to get the vote in the 1800s but it took more than 40 years to pass the suffrage act in enough states to get it ratified on August 18, 1920.  It’s fair to say that many of the women who were in the fight in the beginning were no longer on the moral coil by the time it passed. Supporters were heckled, ridiculed, jailed and physically abused. 

We keep the memory of these heroes alive every day that American women participate in public life. While women are not equally represented in government, our numbers are steadily increasing in Congress, with almost half (43 percent) of Democrats in the House and 15 women from both parties in the Senate. Forty-eight women have served as governors and 12 states are currently headed by women. 

Women’s participation in American government and elections would seem to be a settled question in 2024. But, incredibly, it is not. The Republican ticket and its MAGA allies, having marinated in unchecked - encouraged - woman-loathing for eight years, have been inching ever closer to mainstreaming a notion that was, until recently, off the radar except in the most toxic closets of manosphere Christian nationalism, and the Taliban.

"I think the 19th Amendment should be repealed. I think that because, first and foremost, I'm a Christian. That is the Christian position." So says Christian nationalist Joel Weddon on a podcast called Eschatology Matters recorded in May this year (video ferreted out of the incel basement by Right Wing Watch, thank you ). “If we had a Christian nation and women could vote, then within 50 years we will no longer have a Christian nation. God has not designed women for warfare, and that’s part of what politics is. It’s really all that politics is; it’s war without the blood.”

Not to be outdone, another wacko Christian nationalist, Christ Church Pastor Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho, offered up similar views as recently as June, arguing that giving women the vote destroyed American families by challenging the supremacy of the husband. 

“When women were granted the right to vote, the nation had already accepted the lie that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individuals,” Wilson said in a truly lunatic Youtube episode titled Recovering the Masculine Mind. “We were so muddled, we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families.” 

Webbon and Wilcox share an ideology that situates modern women against children and families, and regards us as mortal enemies. They are just the tip of the iceberg. Their brand of batshit patriarchy appeals to countless MAGAs and Andrew Tate stans who have never been able to get used to the loss of power that women’s right to choose when and whether to have babies represents. Webbon has been fretting since the 2022 midterms over data showing women vote in larger percentages than men. Of course, women’s rage at Dobbs turned the predicted red wave into a bathtub leak. At the time, Webbon noted that “the 19th Amendment was a bad idea” because women are “easily deceived” and are attending “institutions for deception” - meaning, maybe college?

After the 2022 elections confirmed that abortion bans goad women to vote Democratic, Webbon quote-tweeted fellow traveler Doug Wilson saying the Republican party is now the party of married couples and unmarried men, while the Democratic Party is the party of unmarried women.

Weirdly, he described female electoral power as:“The sin of empathy triumphs again.”

Wilson runs a press that has published a book arguing that women’s suffrage is a “rebellion” against God and that “voting is an act of rulership. Since rulership is not given to women, women should not vote.” Wilson has also preached that God designed the male as the one who “penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants” while “a woman receives, surrenders, accepts.’ He counsels married couples that sex is “not an egalitarian pleasuring party” so women shouldn’t expect to enjoy it as much as men. Besides endorsing bad sex, Wilson advises husbands to tell their wives how to vote.

These are fringe wackos, of course, whose opinions shouldn’t matter. Before 2016, before the rise of Trump, we could have laughed them off as just part of the mad, bad, colorful and weird sideshow of greater American society. 

Unfortunately, their slime is oozing into the mainstream. The out loud and proud eruption of this once quiet part of misogyny has grown more enthusiastic since the Dobbs decision, which overnight eliminated access to basic modern health care for tens of millions of women in the richest and most technologically advanced nation on Earth. When the Supreme Court Priest-Kings’ overthrew 50 years of settled law on reproductive privacy, they empowered the agents of radical regression —- and aggression — toward women to dream bigger.

Now, the Republican nominee for Vice President, JD Vance, is on record calling unmarried childless women “sociopathic” and suggesting that people with children deserve more power via weighted votes in American elections. 

Where does he get these nutty notions?

Vance associates with graduates of Doug Wilson’s New St. Andrew’s University. And his Silicon Valley mentor, Peter Thiel, published an essay for the libertarian Cato Institute in 2009 in which he suggested that women’ getting the vote has destroyed “capitalist democracy.” He later tried to walk it back, but he puts money behind his misogyny, financing anti-abortion candidates and anti-birth control propaganda.  Thiel’s fellow PayPal mafioso, Elon Musk, while not, as far as I know, having suggested disenfranchising the female half of the population, is a “pronatalist” who uses his X platform to spread lies about hormonal birth control. 

Their fanboys, the Bobblehead Doll toxic male influencers Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec, while not openly advocating rape like Andrew Tate (another creature unchained by MAGA) constantly accuse single young women of being mentally ill, depressed, anxious and miserable for staying unmated. These men are aided and abetted by reactionary or opportunistic (or both) women like Charlie Kirk’s protégé Candace Owens who recorded a Youtube lecture in 2023 headlined “I’m honestly asking myself whether or not women should have the right to vote. Does that sound crazy? Hear me out…” She then argued without a shred of historical context any farther back than 1980 that women are no happier with the vote than they were before we had it. 

There are places on Earth where women live under conditions these wildly regressive American men and their auxiliary apparently consider Utopian: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab oil states come to mind.

No nation on Earth - not even the Scandinavians - are completely free of the weight of millennia of patriarchal traditions. The MAGA era explosion of fury against women is at some level just a primitive male fear response to the unprecedented freedoms that science, access to education and birth control have brought to American women.

The light of the Democratic Convention in Chicago right now won’t dissolve this pattern. The new era Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will usher in won’t detoxify the unhappy men whose unearned confidence - instilled in them by reactionary churches and parents who insist on hierarchies that seat men next to God and women down with farm animals  -  is under threat. 

But here in Chicago this week, there is a palpable sense of a turning, a shift in the matrix, just as powerfully present in the crystal clear summer light over Lake Michigan as was the lowering darkness in Cleveland in 2016. 

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