Suffrage was primarily a class issue, not a gender one.

TheTinMenBlog · 2021-01-20T16:02:37+00:00

This was the moment I decided to start posting what I do, 2018 rolled past and there was virtually no mention of any of the men winning the vote, alongside women, 100 years earlier.

That these millions of men could be ignored was unacceptable.

Since the beginning of democracy, the vast majority of British men couldn’t vote either. Only a small number of men could. That is the truth and it all changed 100 years ago.

So, in the UK, how long were all men able to vote, when all women weren’t?

It was 10 years. All men (and most women) won the vote in 1918 and then all women won the same full legal rights to vote in 1928.

This is part of a great blog called The Empathy Gap, that unearths information and blasts apart a lot of the myths that plague our debate on gender, I recommend reading the full article here!
Image by Marc Sendra Martorell

Oncefa2 · 2021-01-20T16:46:52+00:00

Canada, and in fact most nations around the world, followed a similar pattern. Many specifically in response to drafting policies implemented during WW1.

http://www.familyofmen.com/when-did-men-and-women-have-the-right-to-vote-in-canada/

There are very few places where a meaningful number of men could vote when women couldn't also vote. The US is one of the only places this happened, and even then it was mostly limited to the federal level. Many US states had universal suffrage for everyone, including women, half a century before the federal government mandated that all states in the union had to do the same thing.

LacklustreFriend · 2021-01-20T17:40:54+00:00

It actually quite interesting to look at the arguments the anti-suffragettes (who were largely women themselves) were making against women getting the vote. My understanding is the anti-suffragette arguments essentially boil down into three key arguments, two of which are related (though there are others).

Politics is a horrible, immoral, dirty business that no woman should get involved with lest she be sullied by it.
By directly getting involved with public politics through voting, women would be sacrificing their unique moral authority on social issues. In other words, women as a group were able to successfully instigate social change specifically because they were seen as being non-partisan, non-political and moral. "If the women are concerned or protesting about it, it must be important and requires immediate action!". See the abolitionist movement, the temperance movement, and the white feather campaign for some examples.
Voting, as a right, was directly connected to responsibility and duty. Men's (voting) rights, where they existed, were strongly associated with the draft or other forms of civil service such as bucket brigades (this remains true in many parts of the world today). The concern was that either women would have to gain undesirable responsibilities such as conscription, or alternatively women who had no personal stake in an issue would fail to consider the repercussions e.g. voting on war when they wouldn't get conscripted.

While these arguments are quite interesting in their own right, what I find particularly interesting is they reveal something that is essentially something we have forgotten in our modern liberal democracies.

What we have forgotten is that voting and democracy is simply a means to an end. That end being "what is the best way to organize a government, society or state, to produce the most prosperous and 'functional' society?". Instead, today we consider voting and democracy as the end itself (Fukuyama anyone?), in large part because our culture and society tells us to value it so highly, even when it is not ideal. This is not meant to be an argument against democracy. What I am saying is that in our modern society we have fetishized voting and democracy, rather simply acknowledging it as just an (important) tool for organizing society. Moreover, as a tool, it may not be useful for every society in the past (or present), and alternatives exist.

floriandeckard · 2021-01-21T01:57:53+00:00

Wow wait, the feminist Pankhurst said "men have to redeem their word to women" while they were having fun in mainland and asking for rights ONLY FOR THEMSELVES? Selfish murderers. They wanted 18 years old boys to die in muddy trenches, losing their faces, eyes, ears, noses, fingers, hands and legs while they only cared for themselves. Feminism is really an bourgeoisie ideology. The main goal is not to change system, but become a part of the system. Anything that doesn't oppose this capitalist/imperialist system and wants total equality only serves to bourgeoisie.

throwra_coolname209 · 2021-01-20T16:44:45+00:00

I'm usually okay with these being posted, but if I'm being completely honest here, I think the next to last slide about suffragetes staying safely at home, campaigning for women only, is a bit disingenuous.

I know it's a bad period to compare to since men were literally being shipped off to war, but it wasn't solely wartime for men. Everybody in this time period had to sacrifice. Not to mention that surely not all of these people were campaigning for women only.

Sorry, I just feel like this misses the mark a bit and the message loses something by suggesting women's lives are safe and easy because only men faced the horror of war. It's not exactly a fair comparison, though I do empathize with the anger and frustration of that particular issue. A better way to convey the same message may have just been to highlight the number of men who couldn't vote at this time and not compare it so much to women, since that is more obvious in the data itself.

Long_Cut_7015 · 2021-01-20T22:06:28+00:00

It's both.

ShotPomegranate8246 · 2025-02-24T16:44:50+00:00

a great read about the fight for suffrage in the 1950s if anyone is interested: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Spell-Freedom/Elaine-Weiss/9781668002698

FlyingSwords · 2021-01-20T19:19:21+00:00

The reason they're campaigning for women only in the UK, as far I can see in a few minutes research, is because there was already a universal suffrage movement, but this ill-named "universal" suffrage applied to men only (This fact is the 2nd sentence on the Wikipedia article on Universal Sufferage.) This lexical quirk, as far as I can tell, is because of the Chartists' work in the previous century who campaigned for male suffrage, but not women's suffrage, because they felt that would delay their charter getting implemented.

Forward to the 20th Century, the natural next step would be to piggyback on to this existing "universal" suffrage campaign and say, "Hey, let's do women's suffrage too!" And now 100 years later there's a reddit post about how women were just campaigning for women, those selfish bitches(!) So non-egalitarian(!) Don't they know this is a class issue(?)

But I admit, this is just a few minutes' reading, and I'm not a history expert, so let's ask some historians. If it turns out I'm wrong, then I'm ready to admit that.

Ok-Bag-1276 · 2021-01-21T01:08:32+00:00

Seriously wondering how this subreddit is left-wing

Title	Suffrage was primarily a class issue, not a gender one.
Author	TheTinMenBlog
Upvotes	321
Comments	49
Date	January 20, 2021 3:58 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/l1byes/suffrage_was_primarily_a_class_issue_not_a_gender/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/suffrage-was-primarily-a-class-issue-not-a-gender.1062067 https://theredarchive.com/post/1062067

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