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Notes -
OP claimed that women are (too) empathic and that this leads to a number of (suboptimal) permissive policy choices that we tend to call progressive. Stefferi countered that there were periods of time when women were regarded as much more conservative than men, even when the Zeitgeist went in a different direction. The French example was meant to illustrate this.
My position is that women are the arbiters of social orthodoxy and are much more conformist than men. When the orthodoxy is religious, they're more religious. When the orthodoxy is woke, they're more woke. After a couple decades of Republicanism, they should be more Republican if that ideology penetrated the social consciousness deeply enough.
A number of counter-examples were raised. The rise of Hitler and the support he received from women is one, the supposedly more royalist French women is another. The question is: are those good counter-examples? The former is certainly a good counter-example to the OP's proposal that women prefer more empathetic and permissive policies. I am not yet sure if it is a good counter to my claim. It could very well be that the Weimar Republic was mainly an elite project with mores that ran counter to the sensibilities of the masses. A similar thing could be true about female royalists in France.
You might be right (I don't know). The main point of my post was to give historical data.
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