William T. Sedgwick believed that no good could come of letting women vote.
“It would mean a degeneration and a degradation of human fiber which would turn back the hands of time a thousand years,” Sedgwick said in 1914. “Hence it will probably never come, for mankind will not lightly abandon at the call of a few fanatics the hard-earned achievements of the ages.”
Sedgwick may have been wrong that society wasn't dumb enough to let broads mark an "X" on the ballot, but he wasn't wrong about the degeneration and degradation of human fiber that resulted from it. John Lott famously linked
extending the franchise to the weaker sex with the massive increase of government spending, which alone is degeneration enough to end the entire experiment. The impact of letting chicks vote goes beyond that, though. After all, along with voting they now also could take the reigns of power directly. The wonderful Sir Roger Moore has a nice little rant about how this goes badly in practice in a
"Jeannie", the third episode of "series three" of The Saint:
You know at one time the female of the eastern species was subservient. She walked four paces behind her husband carrying his luggage...but then they let her into politics and wham! Overnight the oriental blossom was transformed into a tiger, and our friend Madame Chen of East Vietpew makes Hitler and Mussolini look like a couple of Boy Scouts.
Templar was talking about the individual Chen in this case but the specific informs the general as they say. Chen was presumably Chinese, based on her dialogue about state farms and the fact that in October of 1964 North Vietnam was too much of an international pariah to have a top official welcomed in Paris (curiously this aired a week after China officially joined the nuclear weapons club and Labour won the UK election on October 16th), and the only suitable communist country in Asia at the time was either Mongolia (and the actress certainly doesn't look ethnically Mongolian) or China. (Ne Win's Burma was still on the express highway from socialism and could have been a candidate had this aired 18 months later, Indonesia was in the Nasakom period which was communist but also Islamist and wouldn't have a woman in a position of power, North Korea was similarly isolationist and wouldn't have been welcome in Paris...which goes doubly for Laos, in the middle of a civil war against French interests).
But it's not just fictional chicks from authoritarian "East Vietpew" that Templar was warning us about: women in politics tend to be shrill, bossy, and irrational (as in all areas of life, I suppose). Even the "good" ones like Thatcher and Deb Grey still carry a few of the less savoury qualities: they simply tend to 'misbehave' in the right directions which could be a fluke of blind aiming as much as actual sensible instincts towards sound public policy.
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| Fun fact, this feminist slogan turns out to be the exact opposite of what the author intended. |
Meanwhile the degeneration and degradation of human fiber is going full speed with too many chicks running the show:
Cardi B has precisely zero male fans. Can't blame us for this garbage.
