One Thing We Get Wrong About Equality

women and the right to vote

Let us only consider the right to vote.

PhD study facts of the day: Did you know that women in France got the right to vote in 1944 (and actually voted in 1945), 152 years after independence? And women in Switzerland got the right to vote in 1971, 333 years after independence?

White Women got the right to vote in the USA in 1920 and it wasn't until the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that the right to vote was secured for Black Americans. That is nearly 200 years after independence.

Women got the right to vote in Djibouti in 1946 (while it was still a French colony) and retained that right upon independence in 1977, 0 years after independence

Women got the right to vote in Somalia in 1961, 1 year after independence.

Women got the right to vote in India in 1949, 2 years after independence.

Women got the right to vote in Afghanistan in 1919, though the implementation of this right has been spotty, at best.

Women got the right to vote in Turkey in 1934.

Women got the right to vote in Italy in 1945.

All women got the right to vote in Canada in 1960. Before that, in 1940 non-indigenous women could vote but indigenous women had to give up their Indian status in order to vote.

The USA and Canadian examples clearly show the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity.

Other than the interesting facts represented here, I’m making no larger point or more profound argument than that the assumption that the West is leading the charge in terms of chronological progression toward a mythical ideal is wrong. That this idea of progress is troubling, problematic, and at the root of essentially every form of despotism and environmental degradation you can think of is for another day and is what I am immersed in reading about this summer.

I guess I will make one other point beyond voting…I am writing 25,000 words on this over the summer and fall quarters at school. It is a lot. I’m reading a bazillion words on this. That is also a lot. Apparently, I have more to say, but also? My brain is full of mush as I try to process and synthesize and critique it. Anyway -

The idea that comparison of when women got the right to vote can shed any light on the reality of gender equality or inequality around the world is ridiculous. Women got the vote in 1920 in the USA. Great. They got the vote before women in Turkey. Woohoo. Why didn’t they get the right to vote when the Founding Fathers designed the original Constitution? Why does there even have to be a date for women to get the right to vote? Historian Joan Scott argues that this is related to the notion of the “citizen” needing to be masculine and the masculine needing to be a citizen, a topic I don’t have space to develop further here, hence the 25,000-word paper project¹. Then, if women were to vote, they would become masculine and all differences would be erased. This can also be extrapolated and applied to race and the full humanity of Black Americans. It sounds absurd but this is precisely the argument I have heard raised about women in leadership roles in politics, in religion, in academia. When considering the idea that women could be leaders, politicians, pastors, I have literally been asked: “Are you saying there is no distinction between man and woman?”²

As though what makes a person masculine, or male, is their position of authority or leadership.

What a ridiculous question, but one baked right into ideas of what it means to be human, to be a citizen, to be a leader. The fact that there are differences between men and women is what ought to necessitate the full equality and inclusion of both. Difference does not require hierarchy and hierarchy does not inherently or benignly maintain, discipline, or govern difference.

Thanks for listening to what has been on my mind for the past few weeks!

1. Read more in Sex and Secularism

2. There are still people who think women should not have that right today. That their husbands should vote for them. Because we all know that every woman has a husband and that every woman thinks exactly like that husband, right? Or that if she voted, she would become just like him, and so what would be the point anyway? Question - if that happened, if by voting she became masculinized, could she/he then vote next time, as a man?