GOP Women Sound Alarm as Lindsay Clancy Backlash Revives Calls to Repeal the 19th Amendment
When a Murder Trial Turns Into a Fight Over Women's Right to Vote
If you've been anywhere near social media this week, you've probably seen it: a wave of posts calling to "repeal the 19th Amendment" — the constitutional amendment that gave American women the right to vote back in 1920. And the strange part? It's all tangled up with a heartbreaking criminal case that has nothing to do with voting rights at all.
Let's break down what's actually going on, and why some Republican women themselves are sounding the alarm.
How Did We Get Here?
It starts with the case of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother who admitted to killing her three children in January 2023. Her defense argued she wasn't criminally responsible because she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis at the time. The trial ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked, with 11 of the 12 jurors favoring a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
That outcome sparked an intense online reaction. As jury deliberations played out, a segment of social media users began calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment. Some critics zeroed in on the jury itself, which included nine women, arguing that a not-guilty outcome would somehow justify stripping women of their voting rights entirely. One widely shared post put it bluntly: "Convict Clancy. Also Repeal the 19th Amendment!"
Female jurors later spoke publicly about disagreements during deliberations, and that only fueled the fire further online, with some claiming it strengthened the case for repeal.
Not Just Internet Trolls
What makes this moment feel different from past "repeal the 19th" flare-ups (and yes, this hashtag has resurfaced before, including around the 2016 election) is that some of the rhetoric has crept beyond anonymous accounts. Commentary from a few conservative-leaning outlets reportedly framed the Clancy case as an argument against women's suffrage, and the conversation has spiraled into broader culture-war territory, including calls to institutionalize women who express sympathy for Clancy and viral videos of men declaring they'll never vote for a woman again.
Republican Women Are Pushing Back — Hard
Here's the twist: some of the loudest voices pushing back aren't liberals. They're Republican women, worried this rhetoric could badly damage their own party.
Political and legal strategist Mehek Cooke told Fox News Digital she believes there's a genuine threat brewing inside the Republican Party right now, and warned that calls to strip women of voting rights — largely coming from accounts identifying as conservative — risk alienating female voters from the GOP. She added that fringe activists pushing this kind of talk online simply doesn't help the party's standing with women.
Fellow Republican strategist Tiffany Losee offered a different theory about where the rhetoric is coming from, suggesting the whole controversy is being amplified to make the GOP look bad — that critics will seize on anything that looks fringe on the right to paint the party in a negative light.
Both women, notably, reject the idea that this reflects the actual mainstream position of the Republican Party. They see it as a fringe element getting outsized attention, and one they'd like to see stamped out before it does real damage.
The Bigger Picture
It's worth stepping back and noting: this isn't the first time "repeal the 19th" has trended. A similar hashtag went viral back in October 2016, after polling suggested Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide if only women voted — a moment that also drew widespread backlash and was partly dismissed by some as trolling.
What's different this time is the emotional charge of the underlying case — a mother, postpartum psychosis, dead children, and a jury made up mostly of women — which has made the debate feel more visceral and personal than a purely political poll number ever could.
Whatever your view of the Clancy verdict itself, the fact that a small but vocal corner of the internet is using it to argue against a constitutional right that took nearly a century of activism to secure says a lot about how quickly a single case can get swept into much bigger cultural battles. And the fact that it's Republican women themselves raising the flag shows this isn't cleanly a left-versus-right story — it's also very much a fight happening within the GOP about its own identity and future with women voters.
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