Janice Fiamengo on feminism versus history:
After 1832, about one in five men had the right to vote. Almost half of adult males, though, were still not eligible to vote when they accepted the call to fight and die for their country in the First World War. It wasn't until 1918 that the right to vote was extended, not only to women - which of course we hear a great deal about - but to all men. So how can this be - that this part of the story is almost completely unknown? How come when we celebrate the extension of the franchise to women, we don't talk about its extension to poor and working class men?
Celebrate?
As a student of history, I applaud the clear and dispassionate presentation of facts. However, she's pretty much preaching to the choir.
If she wants to reach more people she needs to "jazz it up". A catchy background beat. Some more gruesome film clips. A little humor..... you know, some catchy tweets, picture of Catlyin Jenner voting, something like that. Come on folks. Let's give her some ideas to pump up the facts.
P.S. I am only being partly facetious.
I think the greatest social abomination of the era was perpetrated against in a collusion between suffrage fembos, temperance fembos and the Liberal government -
While our boys were away being shredded in WW1 trenches, with the lack of male vote they snuck though prohibition acts to close breweries and distilleries - dirty rotten back stabbing contempt to the men returning from the great war to toil on neglected farms and deal with amputations in the industrial east - and they couldn't even get a beer to quench their thirst or a rye whisky to sooth their pain. Ask yourself why women's movements always target anything that gives a man some small pleasure?
Once again proving there is nothing less liberal than a liberal and nothing progressive about progressivism. Feminism in all waves has ridden the crest of progressive/liberal trends which result in either social damage or gender polarization
Conversely you would never hear of a men's temperance movement or a Men's eugenics movement, or a Men's movement focused only on men's gender issues - primarily because we are not wired to be that petty.
Until Vietnam, men in the US could still be drafted and not be eligible to vote. So it actually goes a lot further than the first World War still.
Good one! I too remember my own research into suffrage in Canada and the USA. One of the more shocking discoveries was the treatment of Irish men in what is now the Atlantic provinces of Canada. The current bleatings of outrage from the descendents of interned West Coast Japanese tend to diminish quite a bit when compared to that period in Canada's history. And there was the added benefit of not having the inhabitants of the Emerald isle bayoneting and raping their way across a quarter of the planet in order to please their Emperor god.
And speaking of enfranchisement and the Pacific Theatre of WW II, in George MacDonald Fraser’s book "Quartered Safe Out Here" is a passage about his experience during the Burma campaign where as a 19 year old Corporal he had to escort and ensure that his section voted in the 1945 UK election. The thing was that Fraser, despite being the non-com of his section and tasked with the responsibility of seeing that his men were escorted to the polls, was not of voting age, which at the time was 21.