Happy 100th Anniversary Women’s Suffrage

During this week 100 years ago our Nation took its next another step into what was already, now looking back, an irretrievable decline. During this week 100 years ago women were given the right to vote. Historically, in marking the decline of this Republic this unfortunate event certainly ranks right up there with Mr. Lincoln’s War, the creation of the Federal Reserve, FDR’s “New Deal” legislation, Breton Woods, the Civil Rights Act, the Immigration Act of 1965 and Nixon’s closing of the Gold Window. With each of these and many others the united States as a Republic continued to slide into eclipse.

Prior to women’s suffrage, women had already been primed in claiming independence from their husbands and family. World War I had pushed larger numbers of them into the workforce thus giving them independence they had never known before. What was a rivulet in World War I became a mighty river in World War II with the advent of Rosie the Riveter. Women’s right to vote was also almost assured by the extending of the vote to the African-American after the Jacobin War Against the Constitution and the following Reconstruction (1861 – 1877). White women especially were going to feel cheated as they watched a constituency vote who they believed were not as capable and qualified as they in having the franchise.

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835-1930), first female member of U.S. Senate (1922), supported female suffrage because the right to vote had been given to negro men, most of whom were unable to read. She reasoned, “The negro carriage driver of the wealthiest woman in America had the right to vote, but not his female employer.”

So, being primed in the direction of the Franchise the next step into egalitarianism came to the fore and women were deemed just as fit as men to enter the voting booth. Not all women believed that this egalitarian move was a good idea. A couple decades prior, when this debate was beginning, Susan Fenimore Cooper (daughter of American author James Fenimore Cooper) could write,

First. Woman in natural physical strength is so greatly inferior to man that she is entirely in his power, quite incapable of self- defense, trusting to his generosity for protection. In savage life this great superiority of physical strength makes man the absolute master, woman the abject slave. And, although every successive step in civilisation lessens the distance between the sexes, and renders the situation of woman safer and easier, still, in no state of society, however highly cultivated, has perfect equality yet existed. This difference in physical strength must, in itself, always prevent such perfect equality, since woman is compelled every day of her life to appeal to man for protection, and for support.

Secondly. Woman is also, though in a very much less degree, inferior to man in intellect. The difference in this particular may very probably be only a consequence of greater physical strength, giving greater power of endurance and increase of force to the intellectual faculty connected with it. In many cases, as between the best individual minds of both sexes, the difference is no doubt very slight. There have been women of a very high order of genius; there have been very many women of great talent; and, as regards what is commonly called cleverness, a general quickness and clearness of mind within limited bounds, the number of clever women may possibly have been even larger than that of clever men. But, taking the one infallible rule for our guide, judging of the tree by its fruits, we are met by the fact that the greatest achievements of the race in every field of intellectual culture have been the work of man.

(The rest of this worthy and highly recommended essay can be found here.)

https://jfcoopersociety.org/SUSAN/SUFFRAGE.HTML


Giving women the right to vote was an attack on the family because it allowed the wife to vote in such a way as to negate the leadership (covenant headship) of her husband. Women voting allowed women to seize authority from men thus overturning God’s required patriarchal social order. Women voting was an attack on the patriarchal family because over the course of time it allowed women to vote in such a way as to make the state her husband and then after that, through her vote, she could do successfully what many women could not do successfully in the home and that is to nag the new husband (the State) to do her bidding. And as women are selfish (as are men) her bidding was to create a social order that would allow her to putatively flourish without her husband.

Giving the women the right to vote moved woman’s chief concern from hearth and home and the raising of the next generation and placed her into the public domain where she could rough and tumble with men over the pressing social issues of the times. This reality combined with the pressing of women into the workforce had the effect of diminishing the natural characteristics of women found in kindness and gentleness and yielded to them a male hardness that was not present in the generations of their Mothers before them. As such not only was the nature of the family attacked with the achievement of women’s suffrage but also attacked was the nature of women themselves. Giving women the right to vote presaged the subsequent shift of females becoming more male-like. This shift of women become more male like was then continued with the sexual revolution which found women being allowed to be just as sexually perverse as the most perverse man and with the fashion revolution which allowed women to dress like men. From voting to sexual habits to fashion to placement in the work force the egalitarian movement has resulted in women becoming more like men and men become more like women. Of course this is the ultimate goal of gender blender egalitarianism – the creation of man as woman as egalitarian cogs with no differentiation between the two.

One objection of course that will immediately arise is the idea that having voting restricted to land owning Christian men over 25 only is that it is not fair. Obviously the retort here is “fair by whose or what standard?” Clearly from what I have said above restricting the right to vote is fair to the family, and fair to the nature and roles of men and women. Any lack of fairness that is discovered in women not voting is only found in an egalitarian worldview. In the Christian worldview it is not fair to women, family, and the biblically required patriarchal social order for women to vote.

We should note that given the situation we are in now if our Biblically Christian women don’t vote then it is clear that the country will slide even faster and deeper into the rat hole it is in already. Therefore it is my recommendation that Biblically Christian women do vote but only as they are instructed to by their husbands or fathers. In this way women are supporting a Biblical patriarchal social order, are supporting the clearly delineated nature and roles of men and women in Scripture and are supporting the Christian family.

You want to understand the destruction of the extended family as well as destruction of women themselves? One place to start is looking at giving women the right to vote.

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.

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