“The husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.”
This provided one argument against women’s suffrage. The woman didn’t need the vote because she voted in the Husband. When the husband voted as covenant head the wife voted by her covenant head proxy. Did women ever lack the vote then? No, not in Christian history. She always voted in her husband. As it stands now the wife “votes” in a way that technically separates her from her husband. So what else was women’s suffrage but an incremental declaration of universal divorce? The institution of marriage was weakened in all existing and future marriages as women were encouraged to act apart from their husbands.
When the woman is allowed to vote it potentially strips the husband of the leadership in the home as a wife can potentially negate her husband’s vote. Further, when women vote, statistics demonstrate that the weight of their vote is for paternalistic statist policies supported by politicians. Women are created to desire protection and security and because of that, the weight of their vote will be (and historically have been) for candidates who promise protection and security, even at the cost of liberty. Ironically, when women vote, they tend to vote for candidates who promise from the state what their husbands ought to be but often are not providing.
So, we see, that women having the vote aids and abets in the destruction of the Biblical family unit as women in voting have an independence from their husbands that was never present before women were given the vote. Women voting also has the unhappy consequence of hardening women as they are forced to enter the coarsening world of politics. Biblically, we see the woman’s role as creating hearth and home as well as nurturing children. It is not without reason that women were once referred to as the “fairer” and even the “gentler” sex. As we have pressed women into both the voting booth and workplace the effect has been a coarsening of the “fairer sex,” so that she is just as bawdy and just as full of rough and tumble as the guys. We lose some of the feminines in our women when they become masters of the political realm.
We no longer think that women not voting is”fair.” There is a reason why we no longer think that fair and that reason is that we hate biblical covenantalism, we hate God’s law, and we hate God’s law order. Further, the reason we think this is not fair is that we have so reinterpreted “equality” that we think that if members of both sexes can’t do the same exact thing that they, therefore, are not “equal.” However, because a woman might not be allowed by law to vote, does not mean that therefore said woman is not equal to her husband. It merely means that she is different than her husband. As a man, I am not able to give birth to children. That does not lead me to conclude I am not equal to women.
Of course, this is a much older way of thinking as the Blackstone quote demonstrates and so I do not expect it to be very popular or to be cheered in the streets.
One more practical note we need to add here. If Biblical Christians kept their wives from voting given the current arrangement then obviously the statists would even have a higher proportion of the vote. Because of this, my recommendation is for husbands and wives to sit down and converse before going to vote in order to make sure that both will be voting for the same slate of candidates. This is what my wife and I have done for decades now. To my knowledge, my wife has never canceled my vote with her vote.
