Individual Women Should Not Have The Right to Vote
In the civic realm, the 19th Amendment, by giving the franchise to women as individuals, transformed male voters into mere individuals, and wound up disenfranchising the household.
In Douglas Wilson’s own words: 7 quotes from 2025 to 2026, from Blog & Mablog, NPR Morning Edition and Christianity Today, each cited to the source.
Over the last year or so, from time to time you may have wondered to yourself why I have taken it into my head to go around talking about the 19th Amendment so much. This, along with my supposed interest in repealing the right of women to vote. Why on earth would I ever do something like that? Well, you can’t expect me to talk about slavery all the time, can you?
What I envision is a system we have practiced in our church here for four decades, and that is household voting in our polity, in our church system. About 7% of the votes are cast by women because we have a number of women who are heads of their households.
In the civic realm, the 19th Amendment, by giving the franchise to women as individuals, transformed male voters into mere individuals, and wound up disenfranchising the household. So the issue for me is not who got the franchise, but rather who lost it.
[Leila Fadel: “And you’ve called for repealing women’s right to vote, which is protected by the 19th Amendment. Why?”] Because it’s a good idea... I don’t want women voting as individuals because I don’t want men voting as individuals. So what I envision is a system that we have practiced in our church here for four decades, and that is household voting... The vote would be cast by the head of the household.
Her husband wouldn’t vote instead of her; her husband would cast the vote... representing the whole household. [Sam Harris: “But presumably he would have the power to simply decide what the household should be voting, right?”] Yes, if they disagreed, he would break the tie... Under the current system where the husband and wife both go vote, if they agree with each other, all you’re doing is multiplying the total tally by two. And if they disagree with each other, then they’re just canceling each other out. They might as well just save the gas money and stay home and have a nice steak dinner.
If you say I think men should vote and not women, snip, then that's going to be inflammatory, and actually rightly so. [Host: "Mhm."] But if you say that our concern is the disenfranchisement of households, why are households not represented in America's political system?... And so I just absolutely want to see the household represented in American polity.
There are plenty of unqualified, inflammatory things I could say this month. Some might even be true. Millennials are betas. Women are bad at voting. Men are bad at leading women. Empire's great. Hamas got what it deserved. Abolitionists are silly. White people are the worst. Black people are the worst. People are the worst. I could spend my entire month triggering simpletons.