How many husbands control the votes of their wives? We'll never know

Progressive organizer Annabel Park told the story that made me start to wonder. “I can’t stop thinking about this woman I met while doorknocking for Beto in Dallas,” Annabel wrote on social media a few days before the midterm elections.

“She lived in a sprawling low-income apartment complex. After I knocked a couple of times, she answered the door with her husband just behind her. She looked petrified and her husband looked menacing behind her. When I made my pitch about Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, her husband yelled, ‘We’re not interested.’ She looked at me and silently mouthed, ‘I support Beto.’ Before I could respond, she quickly closed the door.”

Annabel told me afterwards, “It’s been on my mind. Did she get beaten? That was my fear.”

There’s a form of voter intimidation that widespread and unacknowledged;. It’s the husbands who bully and silence and control their wives, as witnessed by dozens of door-to-door canvassers across the country I heard from.

I started asking around and found that a lot of get-out-the-vote ground troops had witnessed various forms of such bullying, intimidation and silencing in relation to this election and in earlier elections, too.

Wives asked their husbands directly who the two were going to vote for. Many seemed cowed. Husbands answered the door and refused to let the wife speak to canvassers, or talked or shouted over her, or insisted that she was going to vote Republican even though she was a registered Democrat, or insisted there were no Democrats in the house because she had never told him she was one. A friend in Iowa told me, “I asked the woman who answered the door if she had a plan for voting, and a man appeared, behind her, and said, quite brusquely, ‘I’m a Republican’. Before I could reply, he shut the door in my face.”

Another friend reported, “A woman I texted in Michigan told me, ‘I am not allowed’ to vote for the candidate.” Many canvassers told me those experiences were common. I did not find stories of the reverse phenomenon – wives dominating their husbands, or husbands pushing their wives to vote for the Democratic candidate. Of course I talked to people canvassing for Democrats, and domestic violence takes place across the political spectrum, but the bullying seemed to be mostly either to oblige the wife to lean to the right or to not participate at all.

“The wife spotted me and jumped up from her table to intercept me at the door before I could knock,” one canvasser from California told me.

Without saying any words, the wife softly put both hands out in front of her body, palms facing me. She moved her hands from side to side as though to tell me, “No thank you, please go away without making a noise.”

She was one of many who appeared to be afraid of their husbands.

Going door-to-door is an extraordinary experience. You see demographics break down into actual faces, stories, shabby or manicured front yards, see subdivisions and slums, see people who are clear and fierce or indifferent or confused about the upcoming election. You meet people where they are, and where some of them are is in fear of the man of the house.

My friend Melody had a Nevada man who never turned off his leaf-blower roar at her over the din, “This is a RED house! This house is Republican!”

Melody told me: “I say I’ve come by to speak to Donna. ‘No, she doesn’t want to speak to you.’ I consider saying, ‘Looks like this house is kind of purple, since Donna is a Democrat.’ But then I think, ‘Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe she just goes into that booth and votes the way she wants without telling him.’ But what if she doesn’t go into a booth? What if they vote at the kitchen table? Does he supervise her ballot? Is she afraid to fill it out according to her own wishes rather than his?”

No one knows to what extent this domination may prevent women from voting according to their own beliefs and agendas or participating at all.

Of course there are plenty of right-wing women who are enthusiastically voting for the conservative of their choice, but when you look at the enormous gender gaps between Democrats and Republicans or hear the myriad door-to-door stories, you recognize that there are many marriages between Democratic women and Republican men, and many Republican men who intend to control their wives’ political expression.

The problem matters for voting rights whether or not it influences outcomes, and it’s also a reminder that many women are not free and equal in their domestic lives. Yet another canvasser reported that one of those husbands, this time in Turlock, California, told her, “And if she needs to know how to vote, I’ll just take her in the back and beat her.” He was sort of joking but sort of not.

This ordinary, ugly scenario raises another question, about whether voting by mail takes away the privacy of the voting booth and the ability for women to act on their beliefs without consequences. And it’s a reminder of why women’s long quest for the vote in the US and elsewhere was such a radical thing. Insisting women should vote was insisting that we should be equal and independent participants in public life, with the right to act on our own behalf and in our own interests.

The women’s suffrage movement clashed with laws that defined women as, essentially, the property or wards of their husbands who had the right to control their bodies, their labor, their earnings, and their assets. It clashed with custom, which held that women’s sphere was private life and role was deference and obedience to the man of the house. Despite the last of those laws ending in the 1990s (when the last US state recognized marital rape as a crime), that clash is not in the past tense.

Last week, Mark Harris, a preacher fond of Ephesians 5:22 – “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord” – won North Carolina’s ninth congressional district, and Ohio Republicans made more attempts to take away women’s right to control their fertility. The conservative agenda is, of course, what you could call marriage inequality, an asymmetrical relationship in which men hold disproportionate power.

The right to vote according to your own conscience and agenda is not really so different than the right to control your own body or have equal access and rights in the workplace. It’s a right that we’re meant to have because the laws say we’re all equal. But we’re not. As with the myriad Republican measures to prevent citizens from voting on the large scale – Crosscheck, voter ID laws, limits on polling places and voting hours – this domestic tyranny is an attempt to limit who decides what this country should be.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions