Douglas Wilson

Back in the bad old days, before the 19th Amendment—

the men were considered to be the heads of their households and represented their families at the ballot box.

So what happened when their wives were granted suffrage?

Let us take a typical presidential election to illustrate it, using the first one in 1920 after women's suffrage was accomplished, the election between Warren Harding and James Cox.

If both the husband and wife vote for Harding, say,

then what you have done is simply multiply the number of total votes cast for him by two.

And if the husband votes for Harding, say, and the wife votes for Cox, then what you have done is cancel out the voice of that particular household.

Upon discovering how they were each going to vote, what would be the harm if the two of them just stayed home for a quiet dinner together in order to cancel out one another's vote that way?

Where was the great progress supposed to be located?

The net effect of women's suffrage was not an advance in women's rights, but rather part of a push to replace covenanted entities, like families, with raw individualism.

An overweening state greatly prefers governing an atomistic populace, where each individual is like a BB thrown into an electoral sack.

There's no structural rigidity to it, especially after laxity in the law concerning porn, pot, and poker has now greased all the BBs.

Nothing coheres anymore.

In the older system, the people were grouped in molecules, Birch little platoons, some of them quite complex, and molecular societies are much more capable of resisting the demands of statism.

So the suffrage movement was actually not taking up the cause of women, but rather was part of a long, sustained war on the family.

The nadir of this kind of thinking says that a decision to abort a child is a decision between a woman and her doctor.

The father of the child is stripped of any legal ability to protect the life of his own legitimate child.

We need to retrace all of our steps in order to discover how travesty like that could ever happen.

And when we do, we discover that a lot of it started at Seneca Falls.

I called certain women small-breasted biddies.