Generational change as the kernel of social progress: why women did not win the right to vote

Every village believes their customs to be the correct ones, while the practices of other communities are dismissed as not normal. And the vast majority of nationals of a particular country are convinced that their way of life is the right way, whereas the foreign cultures are weird and irrational. Obviously, they would not defend their customs and their way of life if they believed them not to be the right ones, or the most rational ones. And this is totally understandable. What the villager or the particular citizen of a country rarely considers, however, is the fact that had they been born on the other side of the threshold, they would be as fervently defending the practices of the other camp - as constituting the “right way” of living.

Such relativism is also scarce, unfortunately, within the question of historical social change. Understanding the processes of this historical development involves an honest appreciation of the relativeness of our own social conceptions. It is both intellectually dishonest and arrogant to assume that whatever epoch I would have been born into, I would still have held the same social conceptions that I do believe in today, namely in the early part of the 21st century. Rather, while the contemporary progressives are still eagerly fighting for an ever greater equality between men and women, at a particular historical moment we would all have accepted the idea, for example, that women should stay out of politics. The following concerns the USA history:

“Opposing votes for women may seem surprising today, but anti-suffrage views dominated among men and women through the early twentieth century. Suffragists had national organizations since 1869, but anti-suffragists did not found their own group until 1911.”

Different socio-economic realities provide different social consciousness, and no individual mind has an autonomy beyond the material reality that dominates the epoch he or she lives in. And just as today we might still see the backlash against the rights of the transgender community, there was equally as much backlash a century or so ago against something that today we all take for granted:

“Artists created political cartoons that mocked suffragists. Religious leaders spoke out against women’s political activism from the pulpit. Articles attacked women who took part in public life.”

And just as women's suffrage was historically inevitable, so are the equal rights of LGBT or transgender individuals. But beyond this progressive optimism there is also the necessity to clearly grasp the inner mechanisms of this social change. For once, this is not an issue of particularistic interests of a social group. To frame the question of women's suffrage as men vs women is extremely naive, for “just like men and women supported votes for women, men and women organized against suffrage as well.” Otherwise, why were there no female suffragist movements in the 17th century, for instance, and why have the near totality of men now fully embraced women’s voting rights? The ideas that “women were emotional creatures” and therefore “incapable of making a sound political decision” were “taken seriously by a wide cross-section of women as well as men”. Consequently, there is no paradox to find women today who are against abortion rights, or immigrants supporting Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies.

Moreover, such historical ideological shifts should neither be treated as the outcome of the battles of ideas. It would be easy from our contemporary vantage point to ridicule the arguments of the bygone generations. For instance:

“If women became involved in politics, they would stop marrying, having children, and the human race would die out.”

Of course, the human race did not die out. And neither will our civilization collapse as a result of gay marriages or large-scale immigration. Here is another example of historically distant social consciousness:

“The acquirement of the Parliamentary vote would logically involve admission to Parliament itself, and to all Government offices. It is scarcely possible to imagine a woman being Minister for War, and yet the principles of the Suffragettes involve that and many similar absurdities.”

It is essential to note that these were reasonable propositions within the societies in question. It would be intellectually arrogant to assume that our generation is inherently more intelligent than those that struggled to accept women’s suffrage. We have our own social consciousness, whereas they had their own - which corresponded to their material realities. It would be wrong to propose that the “more rational ideas” have simply defeated the deficient ones. These “irrational ideas” were once “rational”, and they were not defeated - they simply died out alongside the material socio-economic world that had created them.

And finally, the ideas are nothing without the human beings that believe in them. Therefore, it is the generational change that lies at the basis of all historical social change. From a scientific perspective, women did not win their right to cast a vote. Rather, the generations that did not believe in women’s suffrage have simply died out. The majority of those individuals have arguably taken to their graves the conviction, for instance, that "all government rests ultimately on force, to which women, owing to physical, moral and social reasons, are not capable of con­tributing”. All the while as the subsequent generations have grown up with a different social consciousness.

As for our contemporary era, there will also be many individuals who will die while still opposing gay marriage, racial equality, or abortion rights - at the same time as the new generations will more and more embrace these social realities. While there is a firm scientific foundation for such progressive optimism, the most important lesson here is to acknowledge our own historically relative social consciousness. There is no end of history, hence the future generations will judge our “social truths” in the same manner as we judge the ideas of our predecessors. And once again, it is not that our ideas will be defeated by the new radical ones. Simply, our generation is no less mortal than the previous ones. And the ones that will take our place will think differently.

Sources:
https://www.crusadeforthevote.org/naows-opposition
https://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm

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