The Guardian - More and more, influential voices in the Maga movement and the far-right Republican party are calling to strip women of the franchise. It’s not that this is strictly a new development. Opposition to women’s voting rights has long been a fringe, but persistent, feature of the American right. It’s been a favorite hobby horse of extremist preachers; it trended among Trump supporters on social media in the lead-up to the 2016 election, when polls showed that Trump would win if only men voted. (As it happened, he won anyway.) In the century that followed the passage of the 19th amendment – which barred the United States or any state from restricting the vote on the basis of sex, and enfranchised hundreds of thousands of women when it was ratified in 1920 – opposition to women’s right to vote has simmered at the extreme edges of political opinion.
It was kept alive in large part in ultra-conservative Christian communities, which tend to cast women as something between children and property. Claiming women to be intellectually and morally unfit for citizenship, these sects declared that women should withdraw from the public sphere, including from political participation, and submit to the rule of their husbands.
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