Women's suffrage is apparently up for debate again in America [View all]

[BlueWavePsych]

Last month, for example, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, shared a video on X in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote as individuals. “In my ideal society, we would vote as households,” one of the pastors in the CNN clip says. “I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.” While Hegseth didn’t explicitly endorse the video, he did retweet it with the caption “All of Christ for All of Life.”

Slate then contacted the Pentagon to give Hegseth a chance to clarify his thoughts on the matter. The reply wasn’t a straight answer; instead it just said Hegseth was a member of a church affiliated with Pastor Doug Wilson and “very much appreciates many of Mr Wilson’s writings and teachings”. Wilson is a Christian nationalist who has said “women are the kind of people that people come out of” and written blogposts with titles such as “The Lost Virtue of Sexism”.

Then there’s the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who helped bankroll JD Vance’s political career. Back in 2009, Thiel published an essay that argued it may have been a bit of an error to give women the right to vote. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron,” Thiel wrote.

Predictably, Elon Musk also has some views on this matter. While the tech billionaire (soon to be trillionaire?) has never explicitly argued women shouldn’t vote, he has amplified tweets that undermine the idea of universal suffrage. Last year, for example, he wrote “interesting observation” on a retweet of a post by an account called Autism Capital which stated a “Republic of high status males is best for decision making.” The same post argued “women and low T men” are “malleable” and can’t think freely. A year before, Musk appeared to endorse the idea that “democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents”.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/13/womens-suffrage-week-in-patriarchy

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