The Government Is Coming for Female Personhood

On January 2, 2015, the writer Annalee Newitz offered a disturbing warning in an essay on Gizmodo. “The Future of Women on Earth May Be Darker Than You Thought,” the headline declared—and over the course of one thousand words, Newitz outlined an argument for why modern gender equality could easily be an aberration, rather than a new normal.

At the tail end of the Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton in line to be the first female president, it was easy to read Newitz’s words as paranoid. One of the few comment section responses that’s been preserved by the Wayback Machine is an outright dismissal of the essay’s thesis: “No reason or indication that that would happen,” the commenter johnboynyc asserted in reply to the line “How easy it would be to take my rights away.” 

But over a decade and two Trump administrations later, Newitz doesn’t sound paranoid at all. If anything, their words feel prescient. Abortion rights have been eradicated in many parts of the country, and contraceptive access has come under attack as well. As trad wives trend on TikTok, an “anti-DEI” purge removes women from the public eye, the State Department literally erases women and LGBTQ+ people from reports on human rights, and DOGE attempts to torpedo the very social safety net that enables women with children to work outside the home, it can easily feel like the current government is trying to roll back American progress, and American gender roles, to the 1950s. But one proposed bill could make things even worse: If the SAVE Act were to pass, it could send some American women back to the 1910s.

On the surface, the SAVE Act has nothing to do with gender roles. According to its sponsor, Texas Republican Chip Roy, it is merely a bill intended to “protect the integrity and sanctity of American elections” and “thwart Democrat efforts to cement one-party rule by upholding and strengthening current law that permits only U.S. citizens to vote in Federal elections” — specifically by introducing a set of incredibly aggressive voter-ID regulations across the nation. 

But for many voters, the SAVE Act’s proposed ID requirements could ultimately bar them from casting a ballot. And for married women in particular, it could be tantamount to a reversal of the 19th Amendment. In order to vote under Roy’s proposed guidelines, Americans would need to have the exact same name on both their birth certificate and their current ID; a functional impossibility for the 80 percent of women in mixed-gender marriages who’ve legally changed their names to match their husband’s.

The SAVE Act isn’t the only GOP talking point that’s taken aim at the votes of married women. Last fall, conservative commentators got into an uproar after a campaign ad suggested women secretly vote for Kamala Harris against their Trump-supporting husbands’ wishes. According to Fox News host Jesse Watters, a woman voting for a candidate her husband didn’t support could be considered “the same thing as having an affair”; other prominent Republicans, including Charlie Kirk, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Donald Trump, weighed in to share their disgust at a political ad that would encourage women to use their right to vote to disagree with their husband. It should go without saying that a woman who cannot freely choose whom to vote for is, effectively, a woman who does not have the right to vote — and that in nullifying the votes of married women, the SAVE Act is doing little more than putting the wishes of men like Watters into law.

Granted, it’s certainly possible that that outcome would be an unintended one: Let’s face it, if there are any women the current administration would be eager to see vote, it’s more likely to be the ones who are changing their names after marriage than the ones who opt to keep their original names, or, gasp, stay unmarried. But the fact that any woman might need to worry about voiding her right to vote is chilling—and a reminder that when it comes to the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and other marginalized groups across the country, nothing is for certain any more.

Newitz’s warning that gender equality might be less the spoils of a permanent victory than a temporary blip might have once seemed overblown. But in the current moment, we need to hear it loud and clear. Republicans aren’t going to stop at compromising reproductive health care or even taking away contraception. They’re not just going to sabotage public schools and state-supported childcare. Their end goal is nothing short of the eradication of women’s rights. If we don’t take that thread seriously, we may not be able to fight back until it is far too late.