So, what, Women's suffrage was unnecessary
No, I'm not saying that. I never made any such statement, or even alluded to the idea you said there.
What I said is that it's
misleading to say "women only got the vote 100 years ago" while omitting the important fact that, most men did
not in fact have any such right much earlier than that, either.
After the American Revolution, the Constitution did not originally define who was eligible to vote, allowing each state to determine who was eligible. In the early history of the U.S., most states allowed only white male adult property owners to vote (about 6% of the population).
The only thing the voting-men and non-voting men had in common is their genitals, which is a silly argument, basically, that "all men" had this right, as a group.
This is
much more aligned with class rather than gender, since people tend to pair up in male/female pairs, and the female of these super-rich pairs could exert a
lot more influence on the male-partner than any regular male-person could. The actual truth
isn't that all male people wielded "voting power" denied to all female people, the truth was that the super-wealthy class monopolized all the voting power, and wielded that as a
class, for the benefit of both male and female members of that class. This was the norm in the previous economic era (pre-industrial) because the family was the organizing economic principle. The male head-of-household isn't excluding others in his family from having influence: It's a one-vote-per-household ethos.
To use a bit of Marxist historical materialism here: it's no accident the order in which male and female suffrage was enacted. Men started working in factories around 1800, and male unionism grew from that point on. The working men got organized, and won the right to vote. For women, the big influx of women into factories didn't occur until after the American Civil War. Partly because of the lack of manpower, but also because of technological advances that meant physical strength wasn't as important. After this point, you get the early suffragettes, female unionists etc. The historical materialism here is clear: the technological and economic factors created the conditions under which critical masses of men or women came together in these 19th century workplaces, but at different times. Organization and political advances for those classes followed
from the economic and technological advances, not the other way around.
That's why men got the vote a few decades earlier: working men merely organized themselves a few decades earlier than working women, in American history, due to having moved into factory employment much earlier. By assuming men always had the vote, you'd completely gloss-over the details linking the union movement to how
anyone even won the right to vote. Suffrage flowed from unionism and collective action, which only makes sense in the context of the industrial revolution and capitalism. The differing date of male and female suffrage simply reflects the time lag for female industrial workers getting organized vs male workers, which in turn reflects the changing nature of the work from manual labour to machine-operated.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14961228 times)