Posted on 08/29/2009 1:37:05 PM PDT by Lorianne
IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.
Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Women’s lib to China!
China, Russia and all of Islam.
Bull! The elites want to kill their babies.
I'm waiting for Obama to add that the United States has sins of its own.
Very odd reasoning. The last-named group of problems has existed through all history, including both the 19th and 20th centuries. The author apparently thinks they came into existence about the time GWB was elected.
Like Anne Coulter has said, if women couldn’t vote, there’d have been no Democrat presidents.
John Lott wrote, “...Academics have long pondered why the government started growing precisely when it did. The federal government, aside from periods of wartime, consumed about 2 percent to 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) up until World War I. It was the first war that the government spending didn’t go all the way back down to its pre-war levels, and then, in the 1920s, non-military federal spending began steadily climbing. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal — often viewed as the genesis of big government — really just continued an earlier trend. What changed before Roosevelt came to power that explains the growth of government? The answer is women’s suffrage.
For decades, polls have shown that women as a group vote differently than men. Without the women’s vote, Republicans would have swept every presidential race but one between 1968 and 2004.
The gender gap exists on various issues. The major one is the issue of smaller government and lower taxes, which is a much higher priority for men than for women. This is seen in divergent attitudes held by men and women on many separate issues. Women were much more opposed to the 1996 federal welfare reforms, which mandated time limits for receiving welfare and imposed some work requirements on welfare recipients. Women are also more supportive of Medicare, Social Security and educational expenditures.
Studies show that women are generally more risk averse than men. Possibly, this is why they are more supportive of government programs to ensure against certain risks in life. Women’s average incomes are also slightly lower and less likely to vary over time, which gives single women an incentive to prefer more progressive income taxes. Once women become married, however, they bear a greater share of taxes through their husbands’ relatively higher income. In that circumstance, women’s support for high taxes understandably declines.
Marriage also provides an economic explanation for men and women to prefer different policies. Because women generally shoulder most of the child-rearing responsibilities, married men are more likely to acquire marketable skills that help them earn money outside the household. If a man gets divorced, he still retains these skills. But if a woman gets divorced, she is unable to recoup her investment in running the household. Hence, single women who believe they may marry in the future, as well as married women who most fear divorce, look to the government as a form of protection against this risk from a possible divorce: a more progressive tax system and other government transfers of wealth from rich to poor. “
From “Women’s suffrage over time” by John R. Lott, Jr.
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/WashTimesWomensSuff112707.html
No Democrat presidents in the last century or so, that is.
You post has nothing to do with the article.
If Coulter actually said that she’s misinformed.
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
James K Polk
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Grover Cleveland (2 terms)
Woodrow Wilson
I didn’t get the impression the authors think these problems just arrived recently. I got the impression they thought it was time to get around to doing something about them.
I will say that the authors were remiss in not stressing that slavery has never been eradicated and it continues to this day.
You may be right.
I don’t think, however, that the authors adequately confronted the fact that the problems of women they lament are largely a result of the cultures of non-western nations. That solving these problems will require doing considerable violence to these cultural traditions.
Indeed, the very idea they are problems is an imposition of western values on other societies.
Very true.
It’s not PC to promote cultural imperialism even when you’re promoting cultural imperialism.
This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870 to 1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.
And also very related, from Men’s News Daily,...
Why Republicans Will Lose in 2008
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1969426/posts
Why Republicans Will Lose in 2008, Part II
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1969429/posts
COULTER: If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.
It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’
And there’s Donna Brazile, AlGore’s 1999 presidential campaign manager for a while, saying that the Gore for President campaign would be built on the “Four Pillars” of the Democratic Party -women, labor unions, African-Americans, “and what I call other ethnic minorities,” plus the “emerging constituencies” of environmentalists,
homosexuals, and disabled people.
If you take Coulter’s pronouncement to its logical conclusion, you get to a very ugly place very quickly.
Let’s leave the totalitarianisim to the Left shall we?
In any case, none of this has to do with the article I posted.
And we’ll leave the sense of humor to Coulter and her ilk, too?
Sorry, Lorianne, I beg to differ with you. I believe my posts are pertinent, and apt. ‘Twould seem to me, that if we take a Women’s Crusade to its logical conclusion, we’ll also eventually get led toward a very ugly place surprisingly quickly, that place being the smothering, restrictive totalitarianism of a femocracy, a well-intentioned, fat, blubbery, blubbering, bloated, ever-expanding, female-vote-empowered, cradle-to-grave regime of government-panel-condescension, infantilistic security concerns, and Nanny-knows-what’s-enough-for-you income confiscation. Think Schwarzeneggie’s Cullyforniya. Think dead Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts. Think formerly-Great Britain. “Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution,” according to your posting, but, in the long run, in western, representative democracies, womens’ and girls’ emotionally-driven voting may doom us.
The article is about women in other countries.
Has nothing to do with our own country or voting in our own country.
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