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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26712 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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If all of this is true, the trick is simply understanding how to switch these masses of women to your side, and let them enforce whatever policy you create. The problem here is, imho, that the entrenchment of female power and powerful media has created a block that is too strong to destroy.

I don’t see how. As a political group, they’re a status quo anchor with heavy susceptibility to ‘care-based’ arguments and other immature, conventional justifications. You can’t use them as trailblazers and schock troops. They’ll just follow the mass of winners and push them a bit further by inertia. One should always emphasize self-interest, conformity, and good intentions when speaking to large groups of women, but that also applies to large groups of men (where it is referred to as ‘populism’).

The power of women as political actors is overrated. Like black people and other ‘oppressed’ groups, their privileged legal position and the prestige they enjoy in mainstream discourse is not down to anything they did, it has been granted to them by others, and can be taken away.

their privileged legal position and the prestige they enjoy in mainstream discourse is not down to anything they did, it has been granted to them by others, and can be taken away.

This implies that women were not the main force behind the women’s right movements or various waves of feminism in the 20th century. Is there evidence for that?

Famous suffragist Susan B. Anthony said that woman suffrage laws "probably never would have passed if it had been up to women to vote on them," and that men were actually more progressive about women's suffrage than women were (1902).

Women’s suffrage happened first in states where there were less women.

Our results provide strong evidence that women obtained the right to vote earlier in US jurisdictions in which they accounted for a smaller share of the adult population. This result survives a battery of robustness checks, including the estimation of linear probability models with state-level fixed effects. Indeed, sex ratio imbalances appear to be the single most important determinant of jurisdictions' transitions to women's suffrage.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014498313000119

Women’s suffrage happened first in states where there were less women.

Wasn't that due to powerful madams getting women the right to vote in places like Wyoming?

and that men were actually more progressive about women's suffrage than women were (1902).

Probably the most interesting book I've ever read on the topic was Jane Jerome Camhi's Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880-1920.

All of this let us assume that "political violence" is a good tactic when you need to move women's opinion.

Controlling the status quo is useful for moving women’s political opinions and applying political violence can be a good way to control the status quo.

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