Sure! Would you like to revoke my right to be a person as well? Why don’t we just ride in horse carriages and live without electricity while we’re at it? I’ll just be in the kitchen cooking, cleaning and making babies, while you work on building a time machine to go back to erase women’s suffrage. Wait! I have a better idea! Let’s prevent anyone who is not a white heterosexual male from voting! I’m sure Trump would love that.
If that rant sounded absurd to you, then good, you’re still in your right mind; but apparently it’s not that far off reality. A group of Donald Trump supporters started using the Twitter hashtag #repealthe19th after a map showed he would win the election if we were back in 1915 and only men voted.
Take a look for yourself:
@emmaroller i know you’re being sarcastic but really this just shows women should not be able to vote.
— Deplorable #2016 (@its2016cmon) October 11, 2016
Can we just take a minute to realize that this thought process was inspired by Trump’s 2005 comments about sexually assaulting women becoming public? That says something about the kind of people supporting Trump…. they think they can wave some pretty handbags at us and women will just say “give me that purse and take my right to vote!”
To make matters worse, there are women who–without perhaps understanding the implications–are also in support of this sexist fantasy. Allow me to just give you a quick history lesson. Once upon a time, a woman’s place was only in the home. She waited between walls night and day for her husband to come home so she can feed him, and raise his children. She had no rights to an education, to her own money (there goes your opportunity to buy handbags) let alone decide who gets to rule her country. Then, some brave women got together in the 1800s and thought “wow, this is really unfair, who got to decide that I’m inferior to men?” and started a movement where many women risked their lives getting beaten and imprisoned when they tried to protest, which got us where we are today. Now who are you a century later, to tell these women that all their work was for nothing?
I can’t even decide what’s more absurd: the fact that there are enough misogynistic people to make this hashtag a trend or the hashtag itself? I wonder what Trump’s mother thinks about this. Are you going to deny the woman who gave you life to decide if you’re fit to become president?
Ladies, we have worked way too hard to be where we are now to backtrack and our journey is clearly still not over. We need to put an end to the #repealthe19th amendment campaign before it goes any further.