Alastair Roberts: Women's Suffrage, Gender Ideology and Decline of Mediating Institutions

It seems to me that the most likely reasons why the vote was limited to men had to do with a society where the family was far more integral to societal structure and the realm of the 'political' far more closely bounded. While we often think of our relationship to the government primarily as detached individuals, the family would have been the more fundamental social entity in the past, performing many of the tasks now performed by the state (education, welfare, etc.). Men represented their families and their interests as their figureheads and voted accordingly, not as detached individuals in a private capacity.

Restricting the vote to men was a way of limiting the realm of the state, ensuring that the state didn't deal with individuals directly, but that it had to operate through the mediation of families. Where the state deals with individuals directly, it has the tendency to usurp or undermine the traditional functions of the family and other such institutions and form a society where mediating structures are eroded.              

Restricting the vote to men (much as the restriction of military service to men) was designed to protect a domestic realm from the agonism of politics and the business of the state as much as possible, ensuring that the antagonisms of the state didn't spill into all areas of life. As men had the duty to protect the domestic sphere, they were to represent it politically. Having women involved in politics would make them combatants and mean that men would need to attack and need to resist their urge to protect them in political discourse, a discourse whose integrity relies heavily upon confrontational dispute and critique. The agonism of political discourse was one of the reasons why it was for the most part restricted to males from the earliest Athenian democracy onwards.

On account of the changing understanding and configuration of the citizen, the political realm, the family, and the individual in their various relations, the old settlement and jurisdictional boundaries between family and state became unsettled, leading to the falling away of the original rationale for the restriction of the vote to men. Once that occurred, although some appreciated and spoke of the original reason for the limitation, a widespread tendency was to appeal to grossly sexist justifications to shore up the restriction when the social realities that once formed its foundations had largely collapsed. Of course, these are the reasons that we are most acquainted with today, reasons which tickle our sense of moral superiority. These secondary and reactive rationalizations should not be confused with the original reasons, however.

The clash of rights and jurisdictions between state, family, and individual provides an important background of the feminist movement that few really pay attention to. For instance, while we commonly speak of the entrance of women into the workforce (a significant term) as a victory for women in their individual rights, we also need to recognize how closely this breakthrough has been related in many national contexts to the desire of the state to mobilize entire populations for war and economy. Also we need to recognize the state's tendency to break down anything that would mediate its relationship to the individual, in this case breaking down the role of the husband and father in provision and representation, encouraging a greater direct dependence upon the state and the increased politicization of civic society.

Let me be absolutely clear: I am not intending to attack women's suffrage here, nor am I wanting to justify the old order, which is definitely not something that I want to return to. However, I think that it is important to recognize that women's suffrage is part of a far more complex reconfiguration of the social and political landscape and one that is not without its fair share of problematic dimensions, dimensions of which more Whiggish thinkers typically lack all cognizance. The movement from a differentiated society build around families and more stable relations to one built around more free-floating private individuals, a movement in which women's suffrage was a key stage, is one with huge ramifications, ramifications that we are continuing to feel today.

Our tendency to attribute all resistance to women's suffrage and its earlier non-existence to unenlightened sexism all too easily arises from a chronological snobbery (to borrow an expression from Lewis) and a failure to reckon with some of the larger social issues that were at stake in the question, larger social issues that we still haven't properly processed.

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/10/lets-stop-calling-it-complementarianism.html