Look, just because this man’s wife is a moron, doesn’t mean that the rest of us are as well! I have an emotional reaction to George W. Bush too, but it’s not sympathy that I’m feeling even if I do suspect that he’s really going to be shocked when he loses in November. He doesn’t even have a clue as to the blistering effect that he (and his policy, more specifically) has on rational and compassionate people.

Considering that women overwhelmingly vote Democratic, I would say that it’s men who shouldn’t be allowed to vote! Although this woman’s instincts are clearly scrambled, most of us choose our candidates based on a combination of political, logical AND emotional factors. You see, we ladies generally think in terms of what’s in the best interest of the kiddies, not just our own greedy selves, something you certainly cannot say about the Republicans. If they had it their way, kids would be brainwashed in religious schools and the poor would die off from “natural” causes after they were used for slave labor in corporate America.

Miss Doe protests my saying that all women are morons, which I certainly did not say. But then this critic of vicious generalizations writes:

“You see, we ladies generally think in terms of what’s in the best interest of the kiddies, not just our own greedy selves, something you certainly cannot say about the Republicans.”

So according to Miss Doe, Republican voters—half this countrys’s electorate—are thinking about nothing but their own greedy selves. This is the sort of statement that she, and much of today’s Democratic party, regard as a legitimate political argument.

Also, Miss Doe writes: “Considering that women overwhelmingly vote Democratic, I would say that it’s men who shouldn’t be allowed to vote!”

This is simply untrue. There is no “gender gap” when it comes to women voters. There is, however, a most significant marriage gap. A large majority of married women vote Repubican, while a large majority of unmarried women including unmarried mothers vote Democratic. What this means is that the women who were responsible enough and unselfish enough to get married and form stable families before they brought children into the world are Republicans, while the women who were so selfish as to bring their children into the world without a father to provide for them are the ones who want the government to serve as the surrogate father of their children, which in practical terms means that these women want to appropriate the earned wealth of OTHER people to subsidize their own improvident, irresponsible, and selfish life style.

So, if we’re speaking about greed, who are the truly greedy people in America?

I hate to have to point it out to Ms. Jane Doe, but the majority of married women vote Republican, and only a heavy majority vote among single women, including single mothers, tips the scales to the Democrats. Quite obviously, Uncle Sam becomes the “man in their lives” and is looked upon for security. Without the social pathologies favored by liberals (e.g. easy divorce, shame-free illegitimacy supported by taxpayers, etc.), it is hard to see how the Democrats could ever win an election. If this were a country of people who settled down happily into marriage and child-rearing and stayed together, Democrats in their current incarnation would pull a steady 40% of the vote in presidential elections.

Thus, the net effect of women’s suffrage is (1) two votes for a certain candidate from a certain married couple where there would have been only one before, and (2) single women voting for the emotional security of a big government that promises to be their “safety net”, etc., so that they need maintain no dependence on more personal means of security, like husbands, other relatives, churches, etc. No misogyny is needed to motivate my conclusion that women’s suffrage is a net loss to the country.

Mr. Coleman makes a point that had never occurred to me. Prior to women’s suffrage, the vote of a man represented his wife as well. Never-married women and widows did not have such representation.

With women’s suffrage, in the case of married women, no further “representation” of an unrepresented group is gained, since most married couples vote alike. But the unmarried women, who HAVE gained a representation that they did not have before, vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party and the Provider State. Thus any net increase in representation that has resulted from women’s suffrage serves only to advance socialism.

The argument that women were “represented” by their husbands was, I believe, often made in the nineteenth century and even earlier. It was taken seriously enough so that widows with property were actually allowed to vote in New Jersey, and I believe sometimes in New York, in the late eighteenth century.
The “marriage gap” is a relatively recent phenomenon which has developed precisely from the perverse social developments of the last 30-40 years and as far as I know was not and could not have been foreseen when women got the vote. It should be noted however that the women’s vote did have one dire early impact in one Western country. In Germany women were considerably more pro-Nazi than men and it is doubtful Hitler would have gotten into power without the women’s vote.

The fact that the marriage gap could not have been foreseen in 1920 is besides the point. We NOW know on the basis of 80 years’ experience that the course of modern liberal society is toward ever more radical individual freedom including sexual freedom, combined with ever greater demands on the state to provide for peoples’ needs, which become greater as people practice more and more sexual freedom. Therefore a reasonable argument could be made that one way to forestall both the radical atomization AND the statism that develops from it would be to withhold the franchise from women.

America is supposed to be an “experiment,” right? Well, can’t we finally say that we have _learned_ some things from this experiment?

Had women not voted, neither Kennedy nor Clinton would have been elected. The history of the United States is a record of expansion of the franchise. Literacy requirements, once abused in the South as a part of Jim Crow, have been abolished. Property requirements, though modest, were eliminated, as were poll taxes, both of which tended to assure that only responsible citizens would vote. As a practical matter, once the franchise is expanded, it can never be taken back. Next: votes for illegal immigrants.

There seems something vaguely leftist in the notion that some procedural remedy will save us from our deep cultural problems. Property requirements, all male suffrage—not only are these merely band-aids, no procedural technique can safe us from our own decadence. We need radical cultural change to save us from the governmental realm; if the culture gets fixed, with or without universal suffrage and female suffrage, we’ll be on the road to recovery. The one must precede the other.

Moreover, nothing we do to government can save us from its reflection of cultural and civilizational rot. You may be able to slow down the tide, but in the end human character, beliefs, and spirit will determine our collective fate, not one or another law.

I was not suggesting that the U.S. in 2004 attempt to withdraw the franchise from women. I was speaking of historical lessons that have been learned, giving us an idea of the way an intelligent society would have proceeded, before it had gone down this road in the first place. Our present cultural ills are the sum result of everything that has happened in the past. Seeing how we went wrong in the past, and imagining how we might have done it differently, gives us a new perspective into the present. Even the mental act of thinking to ourselves the shocking thought, “It’s not necessarily good and right and inevitable that women have the vote,” gives us a certain distance from liberal society and its assumptions, thus helping us better to resist liberalism and to work toward a different kind of society.

I was first led to question the One Man (er, pardon me…) One Person, One Vote doctrine by William Flax, Esq. while reading his Conservative Debate Handbook — which I commend to everyone here.

Chapter 10 is entitled “Universal Suffrage—A Threat To Liberty, Not A Guarantee Of Virtue!”
http://pages.prodigy.net/krtq73aa/vote.htm

That chapter provided a helpful context in considering the specific question raised on this excellent thread.

“Had women not voted, neither Kennedy nor Clinton would have been elected.”
—Thucydides

Of which Kennedy do you speak? Certainly not John F.— he lost the female vote to Richard Nixon. All the sources I’ve seen concur that women were more likely to vote Republican than men in the first half-century since the Nineteenth Amendment. Women also supported Margaret Thatcher to a greater degree than did British men.

It was long a given in poilitical science that women vote more conservatively. I think it’s still true. It all depends on what one wishes to conserve. Married women— married white women, that is— vote nearly the same as their husbands. After all, they’re in the same boat.

What single women want to conserve is the same welfare state their great-grandmothers opposed. Both want(ed) to stick with what they grew up with.

(They also, along with academics, Jews, public employees, and a few other segments, muffle the otherwise stark racial divide in politics— i.e., the GOP having become the default white party and the Democrats the anti-white party.)

Nor is discussing the effect of women’s suffrage necessarily a hypothetical before-and-after deal. You have over 50 years of federal elections in North America to study, from Wyoming’s statehood in 1890 to Québec’s belated adoption of suffrage in 1946, in which some women could vote and others could not. The tight presidential race of 1916 is probably the best to examine. California’s women nearly sent that state’s electors— and the White House— over to Charles Evans Hughes. (Illinois’s no doubt inflated his landslide there.)

Now while I appreciate women’s wariness in the voting booth, please don’t mistake me for a suffragist. The 19th Amendment ruined the opportunity for an experiment in one or another state— replacing individual voting with a family vote. This was more or less the de facto situation in the 19th century, when almost all voters were married men with property and families.

The question with a family vote is, should a man with a wife and eight children cast one vote, two votes, or ten?

In Wednesday’s local paper, the day after Virginia held its Democratic primary, there was a very cute story about a mother who took her three year old son into the voting booth with her. She wanted to vote for Edwards, but the little boy was shouting “Clark” as she read off the names. “What about Edwards?” she asked. “Clark”, the 3-year-old shouted again. So, she showed him how to push the button for Wesley Clark, and they left the voting booth. She explained to the newspaper reporter that she had decided in advance to let her son cast the vote this year.

Thank God for the ladies and American womanhood. Who do you think really runs this country? It is the secreataries in all our major corporations. While the boss is off golfing and goofing, in many cases, it is the women who maintain the operations to its effectiveness. Who pays all the bills? Who makes a dollar do more than the federal government? Yes, it’s Uncle Sam’s girls that keep the econpmy moving decade after decade! And if they sometimes vote their emotions, I say at least they vote and if their equation was wiped out, where would we be?