So why did western men “allow” women to have rights anyways?

hehechibby · 2026-05-24T00:53:47+00:00

If there was some spell / hive mind that literally took over the brains of every man then I suppose men could very quickly rescind any rights granted to women

But realistically a lot of men love their mother, aunt, sister, cousin, girlfriend, wife etc and won’t allow it. The number is just greater than the ones that do want to rid women of rights

Now for those other countries you stated, I think the larger group is unfortunately the ones that do vs ones that don’t

happybaby00 · 2026-05-24T04:26:09+00:00

Women in Afghanistan are treated the way they are because in pashtuns culture where might makes right between men, the leaders need keep their underlings in line and reduce rebellion via sex, children, employment and local status go make them vulnerable.

They're a commodity that's needed for this.

Keep in mind in other areas of Afghanistan which are not pashtuns, the women are not treated like this privately only around the Taliban soldiers.

Instigated- · 2026-05-24T11:32:07+00:00

It wasn’t a granting of rights, it was ongoing social progress and democracy.

Women’s rights is just one part of the greater “equal rights” movement - all people created equal and deserving equal opportunities. - abolition of slavery - workers rights movements - anti-racism movements - First Nations rights movements - anti-classism - disability rights - animal rights

Over 400 years ago slavery was considered ok. Massively unequal society where royals and upper class were often untouchable and not held to account even if they did terrible things, and the common person had very little power or access to justice even if they were an innocent victim.

Several countries had rebellions where the common people rose up and overpowered the head of state. French Revolution. English civil war. Etc. This challenged the established powers, they realised they could only rule with the support of the people, and led to democracy.

If you believe in Democracy, that everyone gets a say in what affects them, it become increasingly difficult to support inequality.

Initially people did some mental tricks like believing that certain races or genders genetically inferior, and therefor didn’t count within democracy, however the evidence doesn’t support it, and increased education, literacy, globalisation reduced ignorance.

The World Wars also had an impact. Men fighting alongside men of different class and race, seeing them as equals. Women taking up all kinds of jobs while men were at war, and nursing their injuries on the front. War was something of an equaliser, everyone chipping in however they could and supporting others.

Various equal rights movements involved many people acting to raise awareness, change laws and policies, to get more equality in its different forms.

Some people got behind it because they could see it was the ethical and moral thing to do, some because logically/scientifically discrimination didn’t make sense, some were pressured by the many movement actions and changes in laws and public opinion. It didn’t happen all at once but battle by battle (literally and metaphorically).

When it comes to the actual “vote”, in many countries women got it because the government of the time believed it would increase their own power - that women would vote for them.

Of course that notion didn’t come from nowhere. Women’s activists were already campaigning for changes and gaining influence, and a government that listened to them gained their support. (Support for politicians isn’t just in a vote - they need volunteers to be door knocking and making phone calls, persuading others how to vote - and women were a massive volunteer workforce and highly socially connected).

Often these women’s rights campaigns weren’t so much about “give us the vote”, but challenging a harmful practice. For example, the law in several countries used to be that if a marriage broke down, the children would stay with the father. So women were staying in abusive relationships to protect their children from voilent men. Or how police would do nothing to stop domestic violence or a husband raping his wife. Or that women couldn’t open their own bank account or get a loan to buy a house even if they had a job or inheritance, which made them dependent on and vulnerable to men. Or the significantly lower pay rate that made it hard for a widow or abandoned wife to care for her children. Many women & children living in poverty reliant on charity due to lack of access to jobs and equal pay.

In some countries women went on strike and refused to sleep with their husband or do housework until they were given equal status.

Men who think they can “take” it away, are nasty stupid people. Nasty, because why would you want to subject any human to such cruelty? Stupid, because it would tear our society apart and increase violence and unhappiness for all.

Most men (and women) want to feel loved, cared for and respected. You don’t get that when you effectively enslave people. You can beat a person into submission, but you can’t make them love or respect you - and why would they love such a beast? Why would they respect a man who is so weak and insecure he won’t treat women equally?

What about countries that don’t have women’s rights? Generally these nations are called “developing countries”. They don’t have the same level of political stability or maturity, or social progress, are not democratic (or it is mock democracy where they have a vote but the system is rigged), often are war torn and more difficult places to live.

You used the example of Afghanistan. Up until about 1973 Afghanistan were on the way to modernisation and women’s equality - women were educated, could go to university and enter the workforce.

However countries like that have been attacked and politically interfered with by the west or Russia many times, destabilising them and taking them backwards. Often good leaders are killed and replaced with puppets or a group that are more politically aligned with Russia or the US interests. It is highly volatile and no one trusts the system, which means many groups vie for control and fight each other.

It is difficult to progress one’s society when basic human needs like food, shelter, and peace are not stable - and your political system often interfered with.

If a man says he thinks it would be better for women to not have rights, he should be pointed to these countries and encouraged to migrate. Show him what happened to the western men who joined ISIS. In those countries it is not just women who are subject to violence and cruelty. There is a viscous cycle of violence, where men hurt other men as well as women.

aslfingerspell · 2026-05-24T03:50:17+00:00

From a purely economic perspective, the liberalization of women means more workers and consumers, which grows the economy.

Obviously women have always worked in some form or another, but we mean "work" in the form of a taxable income in a modern style job.

An office worker who buys bread from the store supports and is supported by more people than someone at home who bakes their own bread.

Source: Played Victoria 3, where a huge part of the game is turning peasants into modern consumers in an industrialized economy. Ex: you build logging camps which require Tools, tools are bought from Workshops, which need iron from mines, and so on.

Now instead of peasants being poor but making everything for themselves, you have more wealthy, specialized workers who make more goods, need more goods, and can afford them.

This increases the standard of living.

Different consumers and workers also make for different kinds of political gains and losses i.e. more agricultural workers obviously means certain land ownership policies are more popular.

WhereTheStankWindBlo · 2026-05-24T01:30:00+00:00

I'll take a crack at this. I think industrialization has a big part to play in making women's rights advancement much more likely in a country. This doesn't mean that every industrialized country is a haven for women (even the US has some negative points against it) but industrialization basically started two key things that would help advance feminism.

The gradual atomization of familial and locality relations that were brought about by especially things like the Industrial Revolution cannot be misunderstood. Cities rapidly gained population as those in the countryside south employment, refuge from famine, or any other number of comforts. This meant that for the first time it became normal for families to be split apart, as opposed to continuing th live based within the cultural environment of their locale. This is basically the beginning of the process that has been accelerated by late stage capitalism.

And then the other thing that inadvertently helped the growth of feminism was actually ironically the system of capitalism that was created. It required educated workers for many different and new roles that were rapidly proliferating. Women were advancing in education (Helen Magill White became the first female PhD in United States history in 1877, the roaring middle of industrialization on the US) and I think that that naturally makes one more self aware, especially of one's own place in the world.

Basically women realized that they were being given a very raw deal in general terms. The feminist movement begins small in the US in the mid 19th century but grows rapidly as women attain education. These women had an unimaginably tough task ahead of them, but with the economic imperatives of the era (which still apply to this day in some ways) many countries that fully industrialized have relatively strong women's rights movements/protections.

Of course there are gonna be exceptions like India, and I'm not even going to go into that because I don't want to invite anyone to make broad cultural assumptions about people. In general I think the amount of population in an industrializing or middle income country probably has a disproportionate impact on this. Think of Mexico, India, South Africa. They have the ingredients but their rural populations are highly underserved by their governments, they basically live it's the era before electricity. Many South American countries are like this as well.

So these populations hold onto their beliefs, they have children, the children go to the cities when they're old enough with those beliefs. The cycle replenishes itself.

spacetimespaghetti · 2026-05-24T07:29:22+00:00

Because western men are actually moral and ethical and want cooperative relations with women.

Power is taken, not given, and denying that is simply delusional. Even democracy and the sociological contract can only be upheld because good, ethical, decent men restraint bad, vile, antisocial men, in general. If all good and decent men instantly vanished from earth and left only women and only vile, antisocial men in equal measure, women would have no chance against them and democracy would immediately crumble. If bad, antisocial men suddenly grew larger in proportion, our society would definitely deteriorate to an extreme regime and women would be helpless. The men in extreme regimes do it not because women were not grateful, but simply because they wanted to.

The opposite isn't true. Saying that women don't dominate, as a collective, because they don't want to, would be laughable. Even movements like 4B prove that women's only real material strategic leverage in this power dynamic is natality. Women's only out from this, realistically speaking, would be population control to reduce men's population. But it would most definitely make them less ethical than men. And they'd have to coordinate with every woman in the world, even the subjected ones, to abort only males.

I find it an interesting topic, because it implies that you can't be ethical if you are harmless.

-mixedsignals · 2026-05-24T03:36:41+00:00

That's not how it happens.

Feminism grew force. In democracy, where there's people, there's power. So some politicians noticed and started fighting to have this huge amount of people, be allowed to vote, and obviously vote for them, the candidate that made it possible.

Outside_Memory5703 · 2026-05-24T02:42:44+00:00

Because it’s more efficient and moral, obviously

Artistic_Speech_1965 · 2026-05-25T10:48:21+00:00

I think the real reason is resources.

For countries in wars or with a significant poverty, it's hard to sit down and think about the rights of minorities.

I mean, being a woman in conditions where high birth rates and phisical strength are a must, that doesn't don't put them in a position of power.

In countries with greater resources (food, health, education, work opportunity in all 3 sectors), minorities have their rights to speak

SimilarChampionship2 · 2026-05-24T08:33:14+00:00

Women’s rights weren’t simply allowed or given by men. Women fought for these rights for decades through activism and pressure while often facing imprisonment. It was a reluctant surrender not a generous allowance from men.

BigMadLad · 2026-05-24T05:49:13+00:00

Adding a bit of historical perspective, a lot of people believe before feminism women didn’t have any rights, this was far from the case. In many places, women essentially ran the social hierarchy from behind the scenes, many diplomats were told to win over the queen or female relative of the king before going to the king himself. However, what prevented formalized female rule or land ownership en masse (outside of unique heir situations) a lot of times was religion. People forget how religious the world was, and essentially it wasn’t till fairly modern times where religion was seen as a stopping of intellectual thought where these ideas question. So with religion dropping out of governance, so opened up the ability for women to advance. In reality, society was making exceptions for women all the time the best they could under religious rules, that’s why you got Queens and Head of state where lineage was still passed on, had famous female aristocrats in ancient Greece and Rome who essentially took over their spouses estate and kept ownership, etc. However, across almost every religion in the world, it is written men lead, which greatly caps mobility

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balhaegu · 2026-05-25T17:07:36+00:00

World war 1 was the catalyst that gave women rights to vote. Even black men were given right to vote before white women.

WW1 caused all the men to go fight in the war and women had to leave the traditional homemaking role to work in factories to produce war goods. As a result women startrd to make money and it became more accepted for women to have careers. Suffrage was granted to women because their cooperation was necessary to win the war.

Countries like Afghanistan are extremely patriarchial. They didnt become this way because of feminism or whatever. Its natural selection. If society A is stronger and more populous than society B, society A takes over.

Throughout history patriarchial societies proved to be stronger and more populous than matriarchial or egalitarian societies. When there is equality, women are less likely to have children. That equals less soldiers and workers, and a weaker society.

Then you may ask, why are western nations more affluent and stronger than countries like afghanistan? Well egalitarianism granted a temporaty boost in productivity because it doubles the workforce. However it leads to birth rate decline. Hence in the long run, with less and less people in the workforce or armed forces, its possible that patriachial societies would be able to take over. Whether that is 50 years or 100 years, no one knows. But it is inevitable because of simple numbers game.

Few_Chain2060 · 2026-05-25T17:10:29+00:00

Anyways, so my question is: if you think that women’s rights are only a generous indulgent gift from men… why did western men grant them to western women?

It isn't a simply thing that men woke up and decided to give women equal rights, it was a evolved moral and ideological decision particular to that civilization.

why did western men grant them to western women? And why don’t men of so many other countries grant those same rights to their women? Why, for example, do the men of Afghanistan treat their women like worthless servants who deserve to be stoned to death for speaking?

Because at certain point in history western men genuinely thought it was the right and moral thing to do and it was a natural consequence of their worldview. It's the same reason why afghan men and others didn't do it, another pratical reason is that rich civilization can afford giving women equal rights.

And for the men here who argue that western women will loose their rights if they don’t praise and appreciate men more... do you think that’s why other women around the world don’t have legal protections and equal rights? Did women in Afghanistan bring their oppression upon themselves by being even more feminist than westerners?

You have to study why patriarchy arised in history.

What are the benefits western men derive from ”allowing” their women to have equal rights and from refraining from (and punishing) abuse? Why do you think western men really granted these rights? Is it economics? Logic?

Because they genuinely believed it was the right and moral thing, it was more the result of blind ideological belief and also of material prosperity than for practical and pragmatic reasons. Women being equal does benefit capitalism and wealthy people because they work and consume, but it showed detrimental to the rest of society so far.

GloeSticc · 2026-05-24T00:48:48+00:00

Off the top of my head:

introducing technology and innovation introduces convenience and optimizes life experiences, which allows both men and women to become more independent from one another and compensate for their individual weaknesses. When women have greater access to things like birth control, advanced weaponry, and social technology, they outsource the purpose of being in a relationship with a man. If men want to have romantic relationships with women, but women have the power to resist being in these relationships, it would make the most sense for men to grant women equal representation so that connection is still possible. At least as long as men want what women have.

growframe · 2026-05-24T01:12:25+00:00

So why, did western women get so many rights denied to women elsewhere?

A long list of historical reasons including natural resources, colonialism and imperialism made feminism more feasible in the West. It's a lot easier to organise for the right to vote and open a bank account when you aren't being bombed and your country doesn't have a suppression apparatus in place to prop up a monarch.

What are the benefits western men derive from ”allowing” their women to have equal rights and from refraining from (and punishing) abuse?

-Social legitamacy. People will be discouraged from an idea if it comes with social stigma.

-Economic benefits

-Proxy benefits from women they're connected to (family, friends, partners)

-Personal values

-Cultures opposed to one kind of bigotry are likelier to oppose other kinds of bigotry. Women can also be valuable allies in other struggles.

Why do you think western men really granted these rights? Is it economics? Logic?

Social momentum driven by the above factors.

Jip_Jaap_Stam · 2026-05-24T10:48:44+00:00

Because the men who allowed the rights were good people, and the men who threaten their removal are not good people.

Throwawaypmme2 · 2026-05-24T01:43:01+00:00

I mean, there's youtube videos and discussions on this exact topic. You could just read it for the exact answer. Its not a simple answer

huss1992c · 2026-05-24T08:27:29+00:00

Nobody granted anyone any rights.

The West was forced to give women rights because the communists had established a state—the Soviet Union—and were pursuing a global revolution. Besides, they had already been propagating this theoretically for a long time.

It was purely a matter of survival.

Title	So why did western men “allow” women to have rights anyways?
Author	badgersonice
Upvotes	4
Comments	61
Date	May 23, 2026 4:11 PM UTC (1 month ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/1tlkmg7/so_why_did_western_men_allow_women_to_have_rights/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/so-why-did-western-men-allow-women-to-have-rights.1581083 https://theredarchive.com/post/1581083

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