Voting Booth Affairs
Voting Booth Affairs
Or: that's why the lady in the voting booth is a tramp
A pro-Harris campaign ad released on Monday (Oct. 28) showed a woman at a polling place with her husband, his American-flag-and-eagle baseball cap meant to convey that he is a Trump supporter. “Your turn, honey,” he reminds his wife, as she takes her ballot to a booth. With a voiceover by Julia Roberts, the ad reminds viewers that what happens in a polling place—“the one place in America where women still have the right to choose”—is private. In her bedazzled US flag hat, the wife pauses over the choice between Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, or Donald Trump and JD Vance. She then locks eyes with another woman looking at her over the booth partitions, and they smile at each other. “[N]o one will ever know,” Roberts says, as the wife fills in the circle next to Harris’s name. “Did you make the right choice?” the husband then asks. “Sure did, honey!” she replies. The other woman appears beside the wife, as they both put on “I voted” stickers and again exchange knowing looks. Roberts paraphrases the old Las Vegas motto about uninhibited partying, saying, “Remember, what happens in the booth stays in the booth.”
Comedian Taylor Tomlinson (@aftermidnight) noted that “this ad is also weirdly horny…this is a film about a woman having an affair with democracy.”
The sexualization of women’s voting isn’t just a punchline for late-night comedy. On Wednesday, right-wing commentator Jessie Watters said on Fox’s The Five that if his wife Ellen DiGiovine secretly voted for Harris, he would consider it “the same thing as having an affair. That violates the sanctity of our marriage.” (Watters and DiGiovine began dating while he was still married to his first wife—an affair, if you will.) Conservative activist Charlie Kirk similarly criticized the Harris ad during an appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show. Encouraging a married woman to surreptitiously vote differently than her husband, he warned, “is the embodiment of the downfall of the American family.” Yet according to a YouGov survey, 1 in 8 married American women already have secretly voted differently than their husbands.
This question of whether American women would vote with their husbands has been at the center of debates over women’s political rights for centuries. In the nineteenth century, one of the arguments for denying women the franchise was that their fathers and husbands already represented their interests in the voting booth. Advocates for women’s suffrage, by contrast, insisted that women would vote differently than the men in their lives. The issue became central to debate over whether to admit the territory of Utah as a state. Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), which at the time practiced polygamy, convinced the territorial legislature to extend the franchise to adult women. They were confident that Mormon women would vote in harmony with their husbands, amplifying the church’s power in the state. Leaders of the women’s suffrage movement meanwhile hoped that Mormon women in Utah would use their votes to liberate themselves from what the suffragists considered the “shackles” of polygamy, which they compared to slavery. A supporter of women’s suffrage predicted that “the vote of the [Mormon] women will be found a powerful aid in doing away with the horrible institution of polygamy,” but as historian Sarah Barringer Gordon writes, women’s suffrage in Utah “increas[ed] the Mormon majority to more than 95 percent in territorial elections.”
The question of whether white women’s suffrage would effectively double married men’s voting power shaped ongoing debates over expanding the franchise. (For Black Americans, the question was not whether women’s votes would replicate their husband’s but whether Black women might be able to exercise the franchise to the benefit of the entire community or race, amid widespread disenfranchisement of Black male voters.) In the early twentieth century, many white women’s rights activists argued that women’s domestic skills and supposedly gentler natures would carry over into politics; with the vote, they would “clean up” corruption and do more to help children and the poor. Leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties debated how the Nineteenth Amendment would reshape party politics. As it turned out, little changed, electorally, after ratification. Yet we might understand this voting pattern not as proof that women were doing as Watters and Kirk recommend, falling in line with their husbands’ choices, but rather that married men and women tend to share a great deal in terms of their political interests and ideals. Candidates’ ideas about the economy, race relations, and foreign policy shaped women’s lives as much as men’s. Women were voting their interests, in other words.
The idea in this week’s political conversation that married women’s electoral independence is a variety of sexual betrayal strikes a different chord altogether. To a certain extent, it is an echo of these much older ideas about married women doubling their husbands’ electoral power. But there is an important difference. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century discussions of married women’s voting behavior focused on possible challenges to household patriarchs. This week’s discourse, by contrast, drew a straight line from women’s behavior in the voting booth to their husbands’ control over their bodies. A woman voting for Harris—a president who would protect her right to choose—is either covertly defending herself against a menacing (if smiling) domestic tyrant, as the ad implies, or she is what Watters and Kirk portray as a Jezebel, betraying her marital vows. Their comments encapsulate the conservative right’s conflation of abortion rights and women’s sexual autonomy. A vote to support abortion access is, conservative critics suggest, the behavior of a whore. By comparing a vote for a pro-choice candidate to adultery, they expose both a thirst for male domination and the terror of realizing they live in a world where the women they wish to control have the power to undermine them.
Book News and Other Things
Earlier this week, my kids got to hear me talk about fornication on the radio during an interview with Krys Boyd on Think! from KERA in Dallas. Click here to listen to those details and other stories from my new book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America.
Marvin Olasky is an old-school anti-choice Christian activist, and he recently wrote an essay extolling the need for “love” (on behalf of fetuses) in the abortion debate. I responded with a letter to the editor arguing that Olasky’s politics subject pregnant people to medical harm in ways that defy any reasonable definition of love.
Fierce Desires is for sale as a hardcover, ebook, and audio book — get your copy from one of a variety of booksellers at this link!
Sources
Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
Gordon, Sarah Barringer. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.