By Paul A. Djupe and Brooklyn Walker

[Image credit. National Women’s History Museum.]

Every election cycle, millions of women cast votes. For many of them, their right to vote seems uncontroversial. After all, the 19th Amendment, which guarantees a federal right to vote for women, is over 100 years old, and women were voting in many western states well before 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified.

It’s easy to forget that the 19th Amendment was only adopted after a long period of advocacy dating from the beginning of the republic. Granting women suffrage was controversial. Though common in the western frontier states (as a way to encourage women and families to settle in Wyoming and other states), critics argued that women were inexperienced, ill-suited for the rough and tumble world of politics, and instead belonged in the home. It seems that some of those old debates are reigniting.

CNN recently featured an interview with Doug Wilson, a far right pastor from Moscow, Idaho. In that interview, some of Wilson’s affiliates stated that “[i]n my ideal society, we would vote as households. And I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”

There are several rationales for restricting women’s right to vote coming from these quarters. The first is rooted in a belief that the household is the core unit of society, not individuals. One pastor associated with Wilson’s denomination explained that “When the founders founded America, it was household voting. So this is how it was for a long time. This is not some radical idea. It’s not that the women don’t get a vote. It’s that households vote, and then the head of home, man or woman, on behalf of the household, casts the vote.” (Note: there is no evidence that the Constitution provided for household voting – states provided for an individual franchise with particular qualifications; some argue that granting white male property owners is synonymous with household voting).

A second rationale is theological. Wilson is a prominent advocate of a religious worldview called complementarianism. Complementarianism argues that God created men and women to have distinct (but complementary) roles. Men lead, women follow. Complementarians agree that men possess authority in the church and in the family (though some argue that men also have authority over women in the workplace and politics, too). So if, in a household vote system, the head of household casts the household ballot, that head of household will almost always be male.

Third, there’s a political element to the repeal of the 19th Amendment. In 2016, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight tweeted a series of posts showing that if women didn’t vote, Trump would win the majority of Electoral College votes. The hashtag #repealthe19th quickly spread through social media, with Trump supporters (both men and women) arguing that women’s suffrage threatened the success of the Republican Party, especially Trump, and therefore should be rescinded. Joel Webbon, another affiliate of Doug Wilson’s, tweeted perhaps the hottest of hot takes:

So far, we have seen some religious elites and social media warriors call for the end of women’s suffrage. But we don’t have a sense of how everyday Americans feel about women’s political rights.

Until now.

We recently (September-October 2025) fielded a survey of American adults, asking ~3300 respondents a series of questions to identify their level of support for our new measure of complementarianism. Complementarianism is far from an obscure worldview. Approximately 40% or more of Americans agree with each item in our measure, and two of our items get majority support.

The graph below illustrates the distribution of complementarianism among Americans. There’s a cluster of Americans who oppose this worldview, but the majority of Americans lean towards support for complementarian beliefs. Moreover, it’s interesting to note that both the patterns and level of support don’t diverge dramatically when we analyze men and women side-by-side.

The Household Vote

We also asked our respondents about women’s political rights, starting with the idea of a household vote. In our weighted sample, 20.5 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with this proposal. Predictably, there is a gender gap – 24.2 percent of men and 16.9 percent of women agreed.

There is a strong link with the religious gender worldview of complementarianism (see the figure below). Respondents who oppose the tenets of complementarianism are overwhelmingly opposed to a household vote system (about 0 percent agree). But over 30% of female complementarians and 50% of male complementarians agree that men should be speaking politically for their entire households.

Repeal the 19th Amendment

We also asked about the repeal of the 19th Amendment. We explained in the survey question that the 19th Amendment established a right to vote for women, so our respondents had a clear sense of the rights we were referencing in the question. Similar to the household vote, 22.6 percent agree that the 19th Amendment should be repealed (28 percent of men and 18 percent of women).

Again, complementarianism is a driving factor for support for women’s suffrage. Respondents who don’t hold to complementarian views support women’s right to vote. Our most complementarian respondents are much more likely to oppose women’s suffrage. More than 25% of women complementarians and more than 40% of men complementarians would like to see women lose the right to vote.

Our data shows that the messages of religious elites like Doug Wilson are resonating with a significant segment of the American population. There are also hints that political elites also would like to roll back women’s suffrage. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, attends a church affiliated with Doug Wilson’s denomination (Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches). And John Gibbs, who served a stint as acting Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Community Planning and Development, argued that women lacked the capacity to make rational decisions and that women’s suffrage had turned the United States into a totalitarian state.

Though we cannot tie it to complementarianism, we found in an October 2024 survey (weighted) that 25 percent of the population said that they heard someone “in the past few months” making the claim that the 19th amendment should be repealed. One interesting nugget about that statistic – it is much more common among younger people who are more likely to be chronically online.

We are observing a toxic stew in the making: religious elites are calling for the denial of women’s political rights, the public is absorbing those calls, and select political elites are sympathetic to the call. If you thought that the debate over women’s right to vote was a thing of the past, think again.

Paul A. Djupe directs the Data for Political Research program at Denison University, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the book series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog. Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Bluesky.

Brooklyn Walker is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Learn more about her work on Twitter, Bluesky, or at her website.