Fundamentalist Leaders Push Household Voting, Raising Questions About the 19th Amendment

Tia Levings, a memoirist who fled a fundamentalist Christian marriage in Tennessee, says she did not vote in the 2004 election because her husband made all decisions for their household. Now, as the United States approaches midterm legislative elections, Levings tells EFE that she never imagined the right of women to vote would be questioned so openly online. She argues that leaders in these communities have spent years subtly restricting women's voting freedom and are now doing so more explicitly. "I know firsthand that their ultimate goal is to change the Constitution and our citizenship rights as American women," she stated.

The issue gained national visibility in August 2025 when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a CNN report on X. The report featured evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson and other leaders from his church network defending household voting headed by men. One leader in the report said he planned to repeal the 19th Amendment, which grants women the right to vote. The Pentagon later clarified that Hegseth believes women should be able to vote, and no major political leader has formally called for the amendment's repeal. However, the discussion has remained active among conservative voices.

In February, pastor Dale Partridge posted on Instagram that he expected the 1920 amendment to be repealed within ten years. In June, conservative influencers and activists argued for replacing individual votes with a single household vote at a Turning Point event. Turning Point is the organization founded by the late conservative leader Charlie Kirk. Levings noted that she stopped voting after reading the blog of Doug Phillips, founder of Vision Forum Ministries, which promotes patriarchal structures. She now writes and educates on religious trauma, using her experience to illustrate how religious interpretations of male authority can influence political life.

Juliet Williams, a professor of Gender Studies at UCLA, said that repealing the 19th Amendment is not imminent. Such a change would require two-thirds support from both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Williams told EFE that she once considered the idea completely unrealistic but no longer finds it impossible. "I think we have to recognize that all the protective barriers we thought existed are no longer there," she said. She warned that the debate matters in these elections because women lean more Democratic than men.

A Pew survey from July showed that 45 percent of registered female voters supported the Democratic congressional candidate, compared to 33 percent who supported the Republican. Among men, preferences were nearly even, with 41 percent backing the Democrat and 42 percent backing the Republican. Williams noted that the gender voting gap has narrowed over time. She attributed this shift partly to the success of the conservative right in discrediting feminism by associating it with negative stereotypes, such as the idea that feminists hate men or oppose sex.

Williams argued that the danger extends beyond a single election. She believes the actions of officials like Hegseth should not be ignored. "We should take this seriously. I think that is how it starts. You get people to think it is normal to joke about or imagine fundamentally undermining the central principle of democracy: one person, one vote," she said. She added that trivializing decency or the rule of law brings them one step closer to disappearing.