Formerly, when the father of a family voted, he did so as the head of his household. The household as such was thus represented in the counsels of the nation. What should we think of an army where the commander-in-chief would take advice from the lower ranking officers but not, on principle, from the higher-ranking officers who have charge of these? We should say that the army was functioning badly, and that its proper hierarchical requirements were being ignored. How much more incongruous, since contrary to a more basic and universal hierarchy, for a State to seek to be directed by private citizens and not by heads of families. The family is the cell of the State; that is, it is the only natural society that exists beneath the level of the State. So it is a disorder to give some authority over the State to a private citizen while denying any authority over the State, in principle, to the family.
A film is coming out, or maybe has already come out, about the suffragettes. I wonder how many of those who oppose the abolition of marriage that has recently taken place in formerly Christian countries would be willing to trace the problem back to female suffrage. Yet the link seems clear.
The ‘same-sex marriage’ advocates require two things: a denial of the complementarity of the sexes, except in the most obvious physical sense, and a denial of the family as a natural society. Female suffrage achieved both things. First of all, it reduced people’s sense of the complementarity of the sexes by giving man and woman in principle an identical role in the direction of public affairs, contrary to the innate tendency of man to act primarily within the public sphere and woman primarily within the private sphere. Secondly, it took away from the man the power to represent his family in the State, and therefore weakened the idea that the family is not the creature of the State.
Politically speaking, female suffrage pulverised the family. The husband and wife may well vote in opposite directions, and then their family for all practical purposes has no voice. But even if this does not happen, their family ceases to have any organic place in the State; it is changed into two isolated individuals who have no more relation to each other than if one were voting at Land’s End and the other at John o’ Groats.
But who will chain herself to the railings in Downing St and demand change?
October 10, 2015 at 5:15 pm
It seems to me that universal manhood suffrage is already wrong. Why should an unmarried man have the vote? Conversely, a widow should have the vote. It was the enlightenment that abolished votes for women. Prior to the eighteenth century the household had the vote not men. If a woman was the head of the household she could vote. A woman did turn up to vote in 1789 for the Estates General because the (mediaeval) law entitled her to do so but was turned away (illegally) because the idea of a woman voting was offensive to the sensibilities of eighteenth century deists. Manhood suffrage implies the falsehood that women are intellectually inferior to men while still atomizing society into an aggregate of individuals rather than families. It is clear from the magistracy of the prophetess Deborah that there is no intrinsic bar to the possession of political office by women.
October 10, 2015 at 7:32 pm
Yes, certainly if per accidens the woman is at the head of the family she should have the vote, if every family has one. The more difficult question is about single people who have left their parental house and authority. We might perhaps consider them as the nucleus of a new household and thus have a right perhaps to half a vote.
October 12, 2015 at 5:41 pm
There seems to be an element of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. If suffragism has had negative consequences in term of gender ideology, that does not seem to be a necessary outgrowth of a campaign that the basis on which women can vote be the same as men (whether on an individual or household basis). One should be able to keep the good while discarding the bad, surely.
I don’t understand why a single unmarried man or woman should not be able vote. Perhaps you could expand, Aeliane?
October 12, 2015 at 6:42 pm
The problem is that the family is the basic unit of society and not the individual. Universal individual suffrage implies that the individual is the basic unit of society and so implies that the basis of the state is some sort of contractualism not man’s nature as a social animal. This (contractualism) is implied by the claim that the individual is the basic unit of society because it is clear to everyone that man more fundamentally belongs to a family than he does to a state, so if you make the family a non-sovereign structure that the state can ignore and deal with the individual directly, then that implies that no form of society is truly natural to man. If man is not essentially a member of the family then he is not essentially the member of any society. This places the family and the state on the same level as artifacts that individual chose to create. As the family is evidently weaker and less sophisticated than the state it would seem to be a merely provisional lesser version of the same arrangement now surpassed by the state. Indeed, given that many people are less than satisfactory parents and/or fail to provide for their offspring without state assistance it would not be illogical given his line of reasoning to propose that the state discard the family altogether and centralize the raising of children. Even the biological requirement of two parents and a physical relationship between them is now almost dispensable. This is all quite inimical to Catholic doctrine and sound philosophy. To quote Leo XIII:
“A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say, ‘at least equal rights’; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire. The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.”
If then the commonwealth is an aggregate of families and not individuals it would seem that it should be heads of households (fathers or widowed mothers) who get to vote not individuals. However, I have one disagreement with Cordatus and one serious concern. My disagreement (although I think he may have conceded the point above) is that I think universal male suffrage is worse than universal suffrage because male individuals are no more the basic unit of society than individuals in general. So universal male suffrage imples all the same errors as universal individual suffrage with the additional error of denying the intellectual equality of men and woman by treating women as perpetual minors. Obviously, the sort of household suffrage I have described does not raise this problem. It does, however, raise another problem that worries me a great deal. My serious concern is this: man is fallen and he abuses every form of power he enjoys. One of the most fundamental forms of power enjoyed by men in human society is that of a husband over his wife. With grim inevitability this has therefore been one of the most abused forms of power. This power has been greatly weakened in the recent past as much I think by technology (which has eliminated the vital role of brute strength in providing for a family) as by ideological shifts. Women quite reasonably do not want to expose themselves to the kind of servitude too often imposed upon them by bad or morally weak men in past eras. Any new social/political form proposed on the basis of Catholic doctrine and sound philosophy needs to take account of this or (whatever the reality of the situation) it will be perceived to be a mere disingenuous apologia for oppression.
October 26, 2015 at 9:20 pm
[…] is fashioned in the image of the constitutions of the Order of Preachers. A few weeks back Cordatus wrote a post arguing against women’s suffrage on the principle that the family […]