Roughly 100 years ago (Aug. 18), women got the right to vote in the U.S.
I’m glad women can vote, but I question how we got here.
Why did women get the right to vote when they were not required to fight in our wars?
That might sound like a strange question, but there are Supreme Court decisions that clearly tie the two together. I.e., men could vote because men fought in the wars.
But women got the right to vote without having to fight. Why?
Don’t get me wrong. I want women to vote, and I don’t want them fighting in our wars. But there is a clear contradiction here. How is it reconciled?
No problem at all. Both men and women have a right to vote. Neither men nor women should be required to fight in wars, though both are welcome to join the armed forces voluntarily.
Has voting ever been tied to fighting?
Has voting been denied to older men? The otherwise qualified lame? Should the franchise be limited to the under-35 crowd? Hit that last birthday and you’re done?
You seem to be making an assumption that there is, or ought to be, a tight association between voting and fighting, but you haven’t really explained why you think that.
The Supreme Court was making that assumption.
But let’s not be so backward that we cite such archaic decisions with approval.
As you’ll see in my other comment below, I do not approve of the Supreme Court’s reasoning. My question is why — if that reasoning was out there in the public, by the Supreme Court no less — that issue doesn’t seem to have been raised when women’s votes were considered.
Perhaps it was, and I missed it. But it’s rarely discussed these days.
Ah, gotcha.
I have not read the Supreme Court decision. I will try to find it, but haven’t been successful so far.
From what I’ve heard, the Supreme Court defended the idea that only men can vote because only men are sent to fight in wars. The weird thing about that was that 18 year olds were being sent to war, but they weren’t allowed to vote until they were 21. So it wasn’t a situation of “if you fight you can vote,” but rather “if you’re a member of the group of people who have to fight, you can be a member of the group of people who can vote.”
I think the correlation is wrong-headed. That men should fight and woman should not can be (should be) defended on completely different grounds.
Men and women should both vote because our society is currently organized around the individual as the basic unit of society. If society were organized around another unit — like the family — then it would make sense for a representative of each family to vote. But that’s not the case.