More on women’s vote and women’s liberalism
Jake F. writes:
The discussion on whether women’s political equality is a good thing for society was interesting—but I think that you and most of your commenters got it wrong.
I don’t believe that women’s suffrage caused our decline into modern liberalism. The seeds had already been planted, and indeed, women’s suffrage is one of the fruits.
If I understand your (tentative) position correctly, you think that women’s suffrage causes men to be “feminized.” You say that this happens because women are naturally nurturing, they hate to see unfairness, etc., and that this drives candidates’ behavior. But you’re really saying, I think, that it causes men to be liberalized. The implication is that women are inherently more liberal than men.
I think that position is way off. Women, if anything, are naturally less liberal than men. A woman cares much less about men in general than she does about her man. (I wasn’t there, but perhaps this non-liberal tendency of women is one of the major reasons the “free love” movement of the 60’s failed so miserably.) A woman cares about children in general, but none so much as her children. A woman is often partisan to a fault.
People often talk about how women are more emotional, as if this makes them more liberal, but I think that their emotion ties them more deeply to the concrete, human, non-technical entities of family and nation, regardless of liberal rationalizations that tell them otherwise. Men tend to be legalistic; women don’t care as much about fair as they care about their own. They complain about unfairness mostly when they’re the ones being treated unfairly.
There are certainly differences between men and women, but I don’t think that women are more liberal.
One a somewhat different note, I think that the strength of women will become increasingly important over the next decades. People think of women as the weaker sex, but I believe that they are weaker only in the sense that iron is weaker than steel. Steel is hard and will penetrate something before it bends, but under the hardest blows it shatters. Iron isn’t as hard as steel, but it’s tough: it will bend under continued pounding, but it won’t break as easily as iron. I think that man is steel and woman is iron. She endures in situations that make men despair. Note how many men leave women when, say, deformed or retarded children are born to them; note how many men leave women when a marriage gets tough.
We need the strength of men to lead the charge against liberalism, and the endurance of women to sustain it.
LA replies:
I don’t think anyone said that women are simply more liberal than men. In a traditional society, it may be the case that women exert a more conservative force. But in a modern society, when women have the vote, and women are working outside the home, and marriage ceases to be essential to survival (as it is in traditional farming community where husbands and wives divide up the indispensable activities of life), women turn into a separate constituency. Politicians begin to appeal to the women’s vote and women’s issues. They look at what is good for women, instead looking at what is good for society as a whole. They begin to think about how to expand women’s rights and women’s freedom, and those things become goods in themselves. Divorce becomes readily available, whereas it was almost non-existent in traditional society. Society ceases to be an organism and becomes a collection of individuals seeking what they want for themselves. Women begin looking to the state as their provider rather than their husbands.
Furthermore, it is the vote which transfers women’s care-giving and emotive qualities from the domestic sphere where they belong into the sphere of politics where they do not belong and where they generate PC, Nanny-Statism, and national weakness.
Thus modern conditions including the vote turn women from a conservative force into a liberal force. The vote would seem to be a key variable. The vote makes women officially and politically separate from their husbands, or, increasingly, they don’t marry at all. Instead of the basic unit of society being the family, with the man representing his family, the basic unit becomes the individual, and in particular the female individual. It seems to me that there is a good argument to be made that the single factor which more than any other makes people lose the idea of what is good for society as a whole and turns society into an atomized collection of individuals, is the women’s vote.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 28, 2007 11:51 AM | Send