Female Power and the Vote

Before female suffrage there had already been a huge and influential temperance movement for decades.  It was partly the cause of sanctimonious WASPs trying to sabotage the finer things in life for Catholic immigrants.
More importantly, though, it was staunchly backed by legions of matronly housewives who resented their husbands spending money at the pub instead of on her kids.

The prominence of the temperance movement shows us that women had great political influence long before they got the vote.  Not to mention, history is replete with concubines and mistresses who molded the most iron-fisted emperors to their wills.
Average Joes were like play-doh in their hands when it came to pursuing a political agenda.  Moral pontificating from ladies’ associations backed by sob stories about drunk and abusive husbands was enough to trigger vast armies of white knights into action.

Female suffrage, then, was overkill.  The temperance movement grew from an already powerful political lobby into an overwhelming force that banned alcohol altogether, with disastrous results.  With females given the vote themselves soon afterwards, they were all but crowned as empresses.

As we would expect, the West has become a de facto matriarchy.  Women bloc vote more than men since they are by nature more collectivist and can recruit the millions of white knights who are already under their control.  

 If we look at the particulars of the female vote, we notice there is one great divide in the matriarchy.  Single and married women play a great game of tug-of-war over society’s resources.  Married women mostly try to enable the wellbeing of their husbands and families.  Single women, on the other hand, try to provision themselves by using government as an extractive proxy provider.  Worse, they form traitorous alliances with hostile outside tribes to pry even more concessions from the married woman side of the matriarchy and the masses of hapless male helots.

An eternal truth, though, is matriarchies last only until the next invasion.  A society that doesn’t make its men the primary shareholders, always loses.  As much as people like to speak of fairness and equality, women simply don’t have the same territorial impulses common in men.  Whenever some bereaved band of unfortunates comes begging at the gates, women evaluate the situation through the nurturing instinct rather than the male’s timeless drive to act as guardian.  The territory itself to some extent is naturally a male concept.  Females, in some sense, have no country, especially when they are young and single.  A conquerer who just butchered all the boys she grew up with will get her pregnant just fine.  He might even be an upgrade as far as her genes are concerned.

When the walled city is under attack, every man knows he will be killed or enslaved, his family dissolved, his property plundered if he’s on the losing side.  For young women, especially those without kids, the consequence of conquest has been the inconvenient shuffling from one sheikh’s tent to another’s.  Even older women are not expected to risk their lives on society’s front line as men are though they have outlived their immediate usefulness to mother nature.  Modern society erroneously continues to assume they are involved in nurturing young ones even as they age.  

Women simply don’t have as much skin in the game.  As a perpetually protected class they haven’t undergone the brutal culling of life and death struggle for power, status, and territory every male ancestor has survived through back to y chromosomal Adam.  Women just don’t understand high stakes and danger in the same way or with the same sense of urgency that goes down to every male’s very marrow.  The way women fear rape by undesirable men to the very bottom of their psyche, men fear being conquered and disenfranchised.  

First the tribe must protect its holdings, then other issues may be settled.
At the very least, we could recognize the incentives and natural tendencies that make single and childless women unreliable potential traitors and thereby strip them of the vote and bar them from political office.  Principles aside, we might hope this would sufficiently compensate for the vast underground reservoir of female soft power that has always been there.

When weighing whether someone should vote, whatever their sex, we might ask: “What happens to them and their own if the walled city gets sacked?” Beyond that, we ought to test for judgment and intelligence.  After all, weak and stupid men were pawns of women anyway back in the “good old days” before women could vote.  Maybe it’s better a competent woman who owns property, has kids, and runs a business can vote while a man of poor character and weak wits who she’d manipulate with ease loses his vote.  Perhaps then we approach a somewhat more balanced equation where soft influence and hard power coincide.  Though the tribe is founded and defended by men, the reality of female power might then be incorporated within reason into a functional political system.