‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’ wrote Guardian editor C.P.Scott in 1921. The same sentiment has been put more pithily with ‘opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.’ Sadly, the modern day Guardian has plenty of journalists with lots of opinions but little in the way of facts to back up their arguments. High on this list of opinion rich but evidence poor journalists comes Rebecca Solnit. She has been listed among the Lit Crit Femsplainers, like so many media feminists she studied English Literature at University. She describes herself on her website as an independent writer. That may be true in the sense of not being affiliated to an institution, but in her writing, independence of thought is not much in evidence.
Her writing that caught my eye appeared in the Guardian in October (here) and my reason for writing about it now is that her hyperbolic claims are still being repeated on ‘TwitterX’. According to her article, women were having to hide their voting intentions from their husbands. Because postal votes are made at home rather than the privacy of the ballot box the door was open for those and wicked and evil men to control the votes of their female partners. She argued that ‘a lot of households are not democracies but dictatorships’. I am sure some are dictatorships and sometimes the dictator is male and sometimes female, but the evidence that this could have a systematic effect on voting intentions is slim to non-existent.
The only evidence that Rebecca Solnit could provide was a few anecdotes. For example, that the man would often answer the door to canvassers. There is of course a more obvious explanation than seeking to stymie his wife’s voting choices, for why a man might answer the door when a stranger knocks.
What I suspect prompted this article was emerging polling data that showed married women were breaking for Trump rather than Harris (a pattern that was repeated in the election). This had to be explained away and what better way than unverifiable claims of coercive control of female voters by their male partners?
However, there were some predictions that could be made from the hypothesis of widespread voter suppression by abusive partners. We should see different voting patterns in postal or so-called absentee votes, compared to votes cast in person in the secrecy of the polling booth. And we do, but in the opposite direction to what might be expected from the Rebecca Solnit hypothesis. Data from the 2020 US election (here) would have been available to her, had she bothered to look. That data does not fit with her speculative slur. Absentee votes leaned quite strongly towards the Democrats and away from the Republicans. The opposite of what we would expect if there was widespread intimidation of Democrat supporting wives living in tyrannical households. Indeed, postal voting favouring the Democrat Party was a factor that made Trump mistrust ‘absentee’ voting and encourage people to vote in person. The same data from the 2024 election does not appear to be available yet, but I would be surprised if it doesn’t show a similar pattern*.
Another problem with the Solnit hypothesis is that it assumes married women tend to be to the left of their husbands. This is not necessarily so. While young college-educated women lean strongly left or progressive compared to their male peers, that is not the case for older married women, particularly those with children (here). This means the gender imbalance between married couples does not skew the way Rebecca Solnit assumes. Furthermore, people tend to marry or cohabit with partners of a similar political persuasion, further limiting the opportunities for coercive control of Democrat-supporting women.
Rebecca Solnit’s article was speculative and poorly researched, or not even researched at all. It is astonishing that a paper whose motto is that ‘facts are sacred’ should have seen fit to publish what was little more than a lazy slur. The Guardian can only have done so because the article coincided with its own misandrist world-view.
- Once again, in the 2024 elections, absentee votes skewed Democrat.
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