What have women done with the vote?

The point of democracy is to empower the people to defend themselves against the elites who actually run everything, and ensure their interests are in some measure served.

Within the context of modern capitalism, it is chiefly to enable progressive interference with the free market in order to safeguard workers, consumers, and the public as a whole.

But that is already accomplished as far as may be by universal manhood suffrage.

What does the political enfranchisement of women, as voters and office-holders, contribute?

Well, for what have women used their power?

First and foremost, for upper and middle class women to claw their way out of the home and into the whole host of middle and upper-class positions in the economy, government, and academia.

Women of the lower orders were always condemned to hard labor, anyway, just like their husbands.

That is,women's power has been used to enable upper and middle class women to escape the roles of homemaker and wife so far as possible, and of mother as well, consistent – for those making this choice – with actually having children and “raising” them through heavy reliance on surrogates or pushing off half the job onto Dad.

Hence their insistence on contraception, abortion completely at their own option, coerced child support in case they don’t choose abortion and don’t choose to marry, and so on.

And they have since the earliest days of the suffrage movement interfered endlessly with the freedom of men, always to serve their sisterhood interests, ordinarily dressed up as virtue and propagandized as the minimal demand of moral decency.

The best example being the temperance movement throughout its history, from the earliest days at the beginning of the 19^th Century right up through the great fiasco of Prohibition.

On the up side, it is often thought that women, being less bellicose as a group than men, exercise a moderating influence with respect to foreign affairs.

And that could be true.

The argument is also sometimes made that, historically, to the extent that women as a group have been literally confined to the home, half the talent of the human race for anything requiring talent has been wasted in housekeeping and baby-sitting.

So many female Einsteins changing diapers.

So many Madame Curies dusting under the beds.

But the housekeeping and baby-sitting still need doing and so far as we can't all push it off onto recent immigrants - usually also women - then shifting the burden redistributes the wastage from being entirely on the wife to being shared in some measure between her and her husband, at no net gain to society.

Of course, what has actually happened is that women, given the option, have stopped having anything like as many children as their stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers did, so there is now a bit less housekeeping to do, and a lot less baby-sitting.

When women stayed home they had enough children to not only replace themselves and their men but even to generate overall population growth, even in a world of much greater risks than we face today.

When women get out of the home, if they can, they just have a lot fewer children.

That is what women have done with their political enfranchisement.

On the other hand, it was really advances in reproductive technology that enabled all this.

So it might all have happened even if women had not got the vote.

Or a lot of it, anyway.