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To: x
Do you really think if women didn't have the vote through the 20th century our politics would be that much different?

Aren't you reading my posts? Of course I do, quit making personal attacks and try and read our posts.

You keep making things up about divorce and social programs for women being something that the men wanted, but you don't seem to understand that females created an entirely new focus for American politics, you can see it today as most of the issues driving American politics are women issues, with an all male electorate they would not even be discussed, much less be the most important issues in America.

It isn't whether they vote democrat or republican, it is what they changed the conversation to, the issues to, the focus to, now soft language, soft issues, and soft men dominate American government and politics, because female voters of either party will recoil at masculine politics and issues.

Blunt, tough talking politicians who wouldn't stand a chance today, tough stances that wouldn't stand a chance today, issues that wouldn't stand a chance today, would do fine if all voters were men, both parties would be totally different, and much farther to the right.

145 posted on 03/09/2013 2:10:55 PM PST by ansel12 (Romney is a longtime supporter of homosexualizing the Boy Scouts (and the military).)
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To: ansel12
Women did want safety and security -- for their children -- but more women than men saw that security in marriage, the family, and religion. Then came the social and sexual revolution of the 1960s, spearheaded by men.

You seem like an older person. Do you really not remember the atmosphere of the Sixties? It wasn't women who were driving social transformation. Not at the beginning anyway. Nor did the original sexual revolution have very much to do with women's concerns. Nor was it women who were building and expanding the welfare state.

Once that work was done, once marriage had become a much shakier institution, women came to look for security in government programs, rather than in families that often were left high and dry by men's abandonment. Or so the story goes. In fact, even in the last elections more married women voted for Romney. It was single women who gave Obama his edge, and that was most likely a result of abortion and sexual politics, rather than economic or social policy. To be sure, most women aren't in favor of a significant rollback of federal power, but neither are most men.

There's a parallel between your attitude on this thread and your view of Catholics on other threads. White women, married women, churchgoing women, White Catholics, married Catholics, churchgoing Catholics all voted (so far as I know) for the Republicans in the last election. Neither the male-female or the Protestant-Catholic divide was as significant as you've maintained. For better or worse, race, marital status, and religious observance count for more.

Do women and Catholics trend more Democrat than men or Protestants do? It looks like it. But so what? Some groups will always tend a little more in one direction than other groups. It doesn't mean everyone in the group or the group as a whole is somehow depraved. You can ignore the whole group or you can try to win over individual voters within the group (the wiser course), but condemning the whole group and praising your own doesn't serve much purpose in politics.

Once upon a time groups that are the most Republican today, say Southern White Evangelicals, were very much on the outside, and very much trying to use political power to get things for themselves, voting for Bryan and Wilson and Roosevelt, enjoying all the pork that seniority in Congress brings. Now other groups think of themselves as outsiders and follow similar strategies. That changes over time. Maybe we can do things about it. Doing little superiority dances probably won't do much good.

Talk about the evils of women's suffrage is a lot like talk about the evils of direct election of Senators. People think if they could just correct that things would revert back to a better state of affairs. But the 17th Amendment, like the 19th (or the 16th) was as much a result of trends as a cause of them.

In an age that prided itself on its democracy and egalitarianism, a non-elected body would either lose power or be forced to consent to having its members directly elected by the public. In such an age the vote wasn't going to be confined forever to men. Between suffragists who would go to prison or die to achieve their ends and a broader public that didn't really care, the franchise was going to be extended to women.

So is society more feminized now than it once was? Sure. But that's more a result of larger trends, many of them set in motion by men. Women's suffrage is a result of those trends, not a cause of them. Once women got the vote they did contribute more to increasing federal power, but that's very much a recent trend, something that's happened over the last 30 years or so.

There's a parallel here in the arguments about the "greatest generation" and the Boomers and post-boomers. The GI generation (and its precursors) set into motion a welfare state for working men. Lately the welfare state and society as a whole have become more "feminized." You can complain about that, but it wasn't women or their influence that originally established the welfare state, just as it wasn't the 60s and post-60s generations that made government so powerful and domineering. Maybe that older welfare state was better than the current one or maybe it wasn't so different. But it wasn't something women built.

163 posted on 03/10/2013 11:53:05 AM PDT by x
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