Should Women Vote?

 

The pendulum is swinging with remarkable speed. Now I see some talk of repealing the 19th amendment in the US—that is, the constitutional amendment requiring that states give women the right to vote.

Of course, there are reasons for doing this. The basic principle, so often forgotten, is that our ancestors were not idiots. They had reasons for what they did, and so must have had reasons for restricting the right to vote to men for a hundred years or so. Do we understand their reasons? If not, Chesterton’s rule should have applied: never pull down a fence because you do not know why it is there. You must know why it is there before you pull it down.

Begin with the recent Internet discovery, by informal census, that men on average think of the Romen Empire every day; and this astonishes women, who never do. This shows plainly a basic difference between the male and female mind. Men think in more abstract terms, being concerned for people and things not immediately present—about society as a whole, mankind as  whole, about the distant past and distant future, not just what is immediate to their own lives. For women, in contrast, to cite the proud feminist slogan, “the personal is political.” They are by and large concerned with their own lives and their circle of family and acquaintances. Why would they ever think of the Roman Empire?

In other words, men are more concerned with the health of the community and the greatest good for the greatest number. Women are more likely to distort public priorities to serve special interests. On balance, this is bad for everyone.

It is also in everyone’s interest to accentuate different sex roles. This encourages pairing off, and so is a way to approach the current crisis of depopulation. 

Voting has often been tied to serving in war: by sacrificing their youth and risking their lives for the country, many a group have established their right to participate in government. Most recently, during the Vietnam War, this was the argument for lowering the voting age to 18: if old enough to serve, old enough to vote.

But on this basis, women have not established a right to vote. Nor would we want to ask this of them—women are too valuable to a society as childbearers. It is suicidal to throw them into the front lines. Men fight for the women back home.

All this might not have mattered when women tended to vote the same way as men. However, in recent years, voting tendencies between the sexes have increasingly diverged, raising concern.

Of course, it is probably practically impossible now to pull back the franchise from women—they would have to consent to allow it to happen. We can only hope we have not made a civilization-ending mistake.