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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Well yeah, that's what the second to last paragraph was about. I understand algebra and statistics on a basic level but I lack the ability to truly model this, so I didn't try. Is the difference between the average(adult) man and woman similar to the difference between the average 16 year old and the average adult? It probably isn't that big- women don't on the whole seem to be as bad at managing their own lives as teenagers are. As I got to, arguing that the average woman is incapable of voting isn't actually an argument for American gender roles in 1910; that wasn't the argument in use against women's suffrage at the time, and American law and gender roles at the time gave women more independence than that attitude would suggest(which would be norms more similar to Saudi Arabia before the recent liberalization). Factually Iran gives women's suffrage while maintaining guardianship laws(don't know much about how they work out in practice).

Instead a western argument against women's suffrage has, of necessity, to be rooted in arguments about how individuals should interface with society- either as members of a household or on their own. And enfranchising landless males seems like it set the anti-suffragette position up for defeat on the grounds of household voting being good, except possibly for heavy reliance on gender roles. Which is what we lost on.

Being genuinely reactionary, the issue with expansion of the franchise dates back to the introduction of universal male suffrage, which made truly universal suffrage inevitable.