“Losing about 4% of their population in the First World War didn’t make countries feminized enough to avoid the Second World War. Nor did losses in our Civil War make Americans more feminized. So I’m going to have to put the blame or responsibility on non-biological, non-genetic factors.”
Do the math. If it was 4% of the total population it would be 8% of the men assuming a 50/50 M/F ratios pre-war. Tt works out to a 48/52 ratio post war. For the voting distribution it was even more skewed. For the 16-35 age group it was much more pronounced.
Also, in the US women couldn’t vote until long after the Civil War,
If it was 4% of the total population it would be 8% of the men
= = =
Don’t think so.
Unless the population is not 50/50.
Your math is what makes the homos turn 1% of the population into 2%.
I was talking about the idea that the strong died in the war and the weak who survived made society weak -- if that was the idea. I don't think the biological argument really works. What mattered more was what the culture and society and the economy were like.
If the idea is that the wars were such great traumas that they turned Europe permanently against war, I don't really have a problem with that -- though it took two more colonial wars to sour the French on war.
If the idea is that killing off men gave women the upper hand in the elections and that feminized society, that's as much a reflection of today's gender gap as of anything that happened at the time.
Sure, women didn't like going to war. Neither did a lot of men who went through the wars. The idea that women are on the left and men on the right is something that developed more recently. In the 1920s or the 1950s women voters were often more conservative than the men.
Women couldn't vote in France until 1944, but the country was so weak and traumatized by the First World War that nobody much wanted to fight the Second.
Western Europe turned against war because people got rich and comfortable (and because of nuclear weapons). The horrors of the two world wars had a lot to do with the change, but if Europe was still as poor as it was in 1919 or 1945 (and there was no atomic bomb), they'd still be fighting over there.