Right to vote

Right to Vote

Today there are still a few countries in the world that deny women's right to vote or condition it based on education grounds, like Lebanon or age, like the United Arab Emirates, but in the vast majority of the countries women have earned the same right to vote as men have.

have certainly come a long way since 1920, when women gained the right to vote nationwide according to the nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Although active in the equal suffrage movement, African-American Women would still have to fight to be able to use their constitutional right to vote and the Southern states were the last to give up on African-American civil rights and thus on Africaan American women's right to vote. Yet, on November 16, 2009, the American people had the chance to listen to Sarah Pallin, the ex-candidate for the U.S. vice-presidency from the Republican Party in 2008 and former governor of Alaska answering for a thousandth time the same question: If you had become vice-president in 2008, how would you have managed to be a mother of five, a wife and number two in our government? The very fact that questions form this category are still asked to women who candidate today in one of the most exemplary democracies in the world show that women may have gained the right to vote, but they still have to find the right to express themselves as free and unrestraint as their male counterparts. Gender stereotypes are as dangerous as are extremists on the other side of the barricade: the feminist movement.

The world exporter of revolutions, France, gave birth to a movement favoring women's suffrage. The Enlightenment created the proper conditions for women to find better ways of making their voices heard in society. Although, ironically, women never directly acceded to power in the French royal courts, the Enlightenment a movement that promoted values such as reason, humanity, liberty and tolerance offered women new unexpected perspectives and eighteen century in France was a "good time to be a woman" (McMillan, 2000, p. 3). Women of the French aristocracy who were intelligent and highly connected were able to make a name for their own, but they were also intensifying the voices that argued against this new type of a woman and militating for the traditional role a woman should have in a family.

Although the segregation based on sex lasted for millennia and ancient societies that were occasionally matriarchal were exceptions, the evolution was bound to bring humanity to the point where women, as components of the human society that represented the necessary half for it to perpetuate, started claiming equal share in the process of governing a society.

The relatively new sciences of sociology and psychology are facing new challenges in the problematic of gender psychology, gender roles and discrimination based on gender since the discrimination still exists, even if in a diminished form, in the most advanced societies. In the overwhelming majority of the countries, women's suffrage is a matter of the past and women are now deciding who they want their contry to be led by just as men.

The questions that immediately arise from the topic related to women's suffrage are: why have women waited for so long until they finally started to ask for the right to vote? And of equal importance: are women easier manipulated into voting a certain party then men?

Modern science has offered women several ways to become free and to affirm themselves as they wished in a society that was no longer asking them to resume to the role of children care taker and household administrator. Birth control, the two world wars that offered them the possibility to work along men, even if after the wars they would return in to their three K: Kueche, Kinder, Kirche -- kitchen, children, church (as the Nazis preached a good Hausfrau and devoted wife should).

The implication of men in a movement of liberation and women's suffrage is also equally important to take under the scrutiny of psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists alike. In England, in 1907, at the initiative of a few writers and others who followed their example men have organized into a league: Men's League for Women's Suffrage. Politicians on both sides of the political English scene were starting to support the movement that was destined to gain the right t vote for women. In 1913, Reverend Rupert Strong explained the importance of the movement for women's suffrage in England, but it can be extended to the whole human society as: "one of vital importance to the morality and welfare of the nation. I believe women should have some share in the government in order to promote clean living" (Rev. Strong, 1913). Finally, in 1928, after struggles and also violent episodes in their fight to gain what was in the nature of things, English women were officially given the same right to vote, under the same conditions as men.

Holly J. McCammon examines the relationship between organizational tactics and movement strategies and political opportunities that play a role in the success or failure of a social movement like, for example, the movement for civil rights. McCammon found empirical evidence to support his theory that movement strategies are adopted or changed not necessarily as a response to political opportunity, but rather as a reaction to political defeat. The researcher found the American women's suffrage movement at the beginning of the twentieth century a good example in his close examination of the reasons for taking action and changing strategies and tactics in a movement of such sort. "Just after the beginning of the twentieth century, suffragists in many states began to use a new tactic, the suffrage parade. Marching in public was a bold step for the suffragists, and, as the discussion below will reveal, the tactic signaled an important shift in the repertoire of collective action for the suffragists.2 Their parades led them "out of the parlors and into the streets," into the very public sphere in which suffragists demanded a formal political role" (McCammon). So, it was not until women were ready to go forward and be publicly exposed in numbers never seen before that they were able to make their voices heard at all level of society. Women gave up their right to privacy and the very qualities they were praised and respected for: their reserve and way of keeping away from the public eye and marched forward, as African-Americans, gays and lesbians, and other minorities did, following their model. The parade manifestation proved to be effective since it brought under the public eye an issue that could no longer be ignored or misinterpreted. The suffragettes were ridiculed and accused of being fanatics or lesbians, or just too unappealing for men. They kept marching and asking for their rights so that women who were educating their children and working along with men, even if most of them still mostly reduced to the work around the house, could have a decisive influence in the way the American society was governed. Politics have always used manipulation as a way of determining the outcome of an election and modern politics are heavily based on psychological profiles: of populations, societies, political adversaries etc. Women were also providing a new ground for manipulating the public opinions in a direction or other, and the votes of women became too important at some point in American politics to oversee them. Without the women's suffrage movement probably men would have postponed the moment, but they were certainly able to seize the opportunity of gaining an important share of society they could manipulate into voting their way.