TIL The vast majority of men in the United States weren't allowed to vote until 1856.

HellstromC · 2017-09-20T03:00:42+00:00

It was much worse in Europe. The American civil war sort of forced politicians to grant suffrage rights to poor men (yet poor men continued to be subject to discrimination, mostly blacks but also eg Irish-Americans).

In Europe, voting rights continued to be based on property rights for decades longer. Almost half of the men who died in WWI did not even have the right to vote.

Feminist mythology suggests that men were "given the vote" while women "had to earn it". The exact opposite is true. Men achieved the vote with blood. Women just asked for it.

68696c6c · 2017-09-20T01:11:20+00:00

You still don't have a right to vote. If you have to register for the draft under threat of imprisonment to exercise a "right", then what you actually have is a privilege.

geniice · 2017-09-20T01:07:44+00:00

So why do we only hear about women's suffrage and how men oppressed women's rights?

Texas text book purchasing patterns. England on the other hand covers the civil war (how much power parliment should have), the Peterloo Massacre (who should be allowed to vote) and rotten boroughs (should a bit of land no one lived on get 2 MPs).

dontpet · 2017-09-20T03:50:33+00:00

In New Zealand women had the right to vote only 4 years after men had universal suffrage. Still, women's experience of the occasion is drawn out in many different formal occasions.

I think it sucks to hold a grudge over something that happened so long ago. Bizarre really.

DavidByron2 · 2017-09-20T17:08:30+00:00

That date is probably a little late or at least it's near to an upper bound for when 50% of adult men had the right to vote for the first time.

Around the 1820s and 1830s states increasingly got rid of the property qualifications for adult men and it's possible perhaps even likely that 50% of the male population first had the right to vote around then. Men between 18 and 21, native Americans, slaves or former slaves, and people living in US territories (not states) and a few other exceptions could not vote (in a federal / national election).

But there's a good chance it wasn't until after the civil war when former slaves got the vote that it first crossed the 50% line.

I've researched the length of the gap from when 50% of men vs 50% of women first got the vote and the lengths are generally quite short. For the UK for example it's zero and that's true of many countries. Australia I think was a year or so. The US, France and Switzerland were the longest (though in the US men and women always had the right to stand for election which is the other voting right that in most countries is granted at the same time as the right to vote).

It's very hard to find out when the majority of men first got the vote in a country. Nobody cares. For women it's usually very easy although in some cases as with the UK they give a different statistic namely the date that women could first vote on the same basis as men. Of course if you take that definition literally then in any non-democratic state "women have the vote" meaning they have it as much as men do and on the same basis as men do (ie zero / none). In the UK most women got the vote in 1918 the same act of parliament as most men, but some women didn't get it until 1930 and so feminists have claimed the second date is the one to use.

Of course there's no point when you can say "right now everyone has the right to vote" because you don't know the future. In the US many men are denied the right to vote because of criminal convictions so in the sense the feminists use, ie that they don't have an equal basis for voting with women, you could say men don't have the right to vote in the US today, but only that most men have the right as with women in the UK in 1918. Again in the future maybe the age for voting will be reduced to say 16. Since we can't know what constitutes "all" I think the best way to set a date is to go by the 50% rule.

Just to add: the reason that the US, France and Switzerland had long gaps is that they got the vote for men early, not that women's vote was late. However in the early 19th century the vote was a public one, not a secret "Australian ballot" that we know today. As soon as the Australian ballot became popular women got the vote all over the world. In fact it's fair to say that in some countries men got the public vote, but women didn't get the public vote. When the secret vote came in both sexes got the vote. If you look at the two kinds of vote separately it explains a lot more.

Basically legislators figured that the public vote was unsuitable for women or other people economically dependent on some other person, such as how a tenant was reliant upon a landlord. The reasoning was that if you had to stand up in public and declare your vote then you could be bullied and threatened into changing your vote. Indeed this was a "feature not a bug" of public voting at the time. As a result landless men and women and women dependent on a husband were not allowed what would in effect just be an additional vote for whoever they were dependent upon economically. Why give landlords extra votes? Why give married men a second vote? This argument against women's vote then, depends on stereotyping men as people who would bully and beat their wives, which was a false stereotype but one that early feminists pushed heavily, just as they do today.

Once the secret ballot was introduced these arguments were nullified (indeed this was why the secret ballot was introduced so rapidly) and landless men and women and any others who were dependent economically, were given the secret vote.

TL/DR:

The public vote was never given to women, because men were stereotyped as bullies who would force their wives to vote a certain way.

The modern secret vote was always given to women on the same basis as men.

To the extend women didn't get the vote earlier it was because of the stereotyping of men as evil.

MelkorHimself · 2017-09-20T13:26:34+00:00

If we had a fair system where rights were always tied to responsibilities, voting rights would look very different today. Now, I don't think anyone should be tied to the threat of a draft in order to vote for two reasons. First, no one should have to write a check for their life against the ability to vote. Second, a draft is a very passive responsibility, so one's right to vote isn't based on what one has actually contributed. In my opinion an ideal system would bequeath voting rights to net tax payers. This means you would have to have not used any public assistance during the previous election cycle (i.e. for a Presidential election you would have be welfare-free for the past four years).

2017-09-20T01:41:00+00:00

Most men, not just "white men".

philksigma82 · 2017-09-20T01:58:11+00:00

Edit: moved the comment to the correct location

jeff_the_nurse · 2017-09-20T11:28:29+00:00

Black men didn't even get it until over a century later!

InDurdenWeTrust · 2017-09-20T13:25:03+00:00

The problem is that the wealthy land owners were men. This allowed feminists to paint it as a product of the Patriarchy, not the class warfare it actually was. Convenient, as it absolves women of any responsibility. In many countries women were given the right to vote with no strings attached. Men, on the other hand, had to agree to march off to war to have their ballots cast. That's not equality.

Rethgil · 2017-09-20T22:04:14+00:00

Similar story in the UK. And globally really. Men's rights supporters have known this stuff all along. Only feminist liars have tried to rewrite history to claim women were somehow the heroes who changed things. Many of them actually used bombs and tried to murder government leaders. True.

fmlom · 2017-09-20T16:27:39+00:00

The restrictions on the right to vote should have never been lifted. Property owning white men are the only people who should be allowed to vote.

Title	TIL The vast majority of men in the United States weren't allowed to vote until 1856.
Author	Gamer_Jack_Gameson
Upvotes	107
Comments	42
Date	September 20, 2017 12:06 AM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/717a0f/til_the_vast_majority_of_men_in_the_united_states/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/til-the-vast-majority-of-men-in-the-united-states.914125 https://theredarchive.com/post/914125

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