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Notes -
The entrance of "equality" into voting politics (later the flagship suffragette cause) came with slavery, where the non-personhood of slaves was constantly justified on grounds of moral inferiority. This is disanalogous to whatever sense of equality played a role in gender matters because it was never the dominant belief that women were not human or morally less-than, unlike the slave. They were seen as infantile and in need of wardenship under a man's discretion, for similar reasons as children. Children who, it bears repeating, retain all such restrictions without ideas about their in-equality (or really any protest around their unequal treatment) being remotely widespread. The critical point is that distinctions were essentially role ethics -- and that moral equality would have implied role equality was not really a given as it was with black slaves, and isn't today. Equivocating the two was suffragette rhetoric, and this view is just the consequence that suffragettes created by victory; there isn't a strong reason to think causation went the other way around, especially when many other more daily and tangible gender-based role demands persisted long after the suffragettes won.
So, of course, taking the simplifying assumption that a certain conception which was a product of successful political activity was always the dominant view makes said activity seem inevitable and obvious. But thinking that contentious, loaded ambiguities don't change in use over 100s of years isn't a reasonable way to think about history.
I appreciate whenever people see assumptions and point them out. Especially when they simply explain the assumption and don't use it as an opportunity to discredit the original idea. It is rarely obvious when one makes an assumption. That being said, you seen knowledgeable on the subject. Do you have an alternative explanation for the speed at which suffragettes were able to change the dominant view? or were you only correcting a mistake when you saw it?
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