My Americana. Politics is the place for woman.

[shkrobius]

The story of woman's suffrage in ten words: Disenfranchized women have organized and undone the centuries of injustice. They've got their right to vote! Amen.

But there is a bit more to this story. Having the right to vote and voting are not the same thing. The suffragettes not only wanted the right to vote, they wanted to vote. Something was

Comments

[shkrobius]

So what is your position on the democratic movements that seek to suppress liberties once these movements win the elections? These "disenfranchized women" wanted to be enfranchized for nothing else than disenfranchizement of the immigrants, establishing the Jim Crow, abusing the rights of the drinking males, suppression of the freedom of the press, exclusive control of education, etc. Democracy is a wonderful thing, but it has its own pathologies. Prohibition movement emerged as a proto-Nazi movement parading these suffragettes wth the same intent the Nazi were parading SA troopers in the 1920s. That they did not seize the political power is only due to the stronger party politics in the US: the prohibitionists were assimilated by the major parties faster than they coalesced into the third party, but in the early 1900s it was not decided. It could've been a very different outcome.

Frankly, I do not consider democracy that high an ideal that I would just sit and watch someone like Hitler to be elected. How far am I supposed to go in providing rights to people whose agenda is infringement of my rights?

[chaource]

We could imagine that voters all unanimously choose to vote for a permanent abolition of democracy. The democratic ideal is that the wish of voters is supreme because it is best to choose a policy preferred by people at the time of voting (rather than a policy that conforms to some fixed set of principles). The only thing that can be done against the abolition of democracy in this case is to argue publicly that abolition of democracy is a short-sighted decision. If the majority of people are short-sighted, this will not help. Ave dictator, morituri te salutant.

[shkrobius]

Anti-prohibitionists and anti-suffragists were such a voice. People like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Wheeler
considered democracy as an expendable tool for manipulation of people and furthering their agenda. Wheeler's makeup was not too different from that of Herr Hitler; the US proved to be less vulnerable to the power grab, but that's luck. Had I lived in the 1900s, I woun't be on Wheeler's side. The real choice of the 1900s was anti-suffrage or taking a gamble with the blackshirts. That the movement would lose momentum in the post-war 1920s was not evident in the 1900s. Some choice.

Here is an interview with Okrent right on this topic
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126613316

--On the political beliefs shared by a majority of Prohibitionists

"It largely had to do with a xenophobic, largely anti-immigration feeling that arose in the American Middle West, that arose among white, native-born Protestants. It also had a strong racist element to it. Prohibition was a tool that the white South could use to keep down the black population. In fact, they used Prohibition to keep liquor away from black people but not from white people. So you could find a number of ways that people could come into whatever issue they wanted to use and use Prohibition as their tool. The clearest one, probably, was women's suffrage. Oddly, the suffrage movement and the Prohibition movement were almost one and the same - and you found organizations like the Ku Klux Klan supporting women's suffrage because they believed women would vote on behalf of Prohibition."

--On the connection between the suffrage movement and the temperance movement

"Susan B. Anthony [the future co-leader of NAWSA], in the late 1840s, makes her first attempt to make a speech in public life at a temperance convention. This was before she connected with the suffragist movement. She rose to speak at a meeting of the Sons of Temperance in New York, and they said, 'You can't speak. You don't have the rights. Women aren't allowed to speak here.' And that's what pushed her into the suffragist movement. So in fact, you could say that the birth of the suffragist movement comes with the wish to get rid of alcohol."

[poltorazhyda]

>Wheeler's makeup was not too different from that of Herr Hitler; the US proved to be less vulnerable to the power grab, but that's luck.

Heh. Wheeler wasn't nothing compared to, say, Colonel House. And as far as power grabs are concerned, the US was less vulnerable to a right wing power grab, since it lacked a right wing political architecture for the usurpers to latch on to (no Weimar judges to sympathize with them, for instance.) Left wing power grabs such as those of Lincoln, Wilson or FDR? That's a whole other story.