Except that’s not really accurate. Rather far from. The reality is more difficult to state, and does not imply that they are simply “barred” from “contributing to the economy”.
First of all, what is a “criminal record”? Even that is a little bit nuanced and murky. If you look online, at least one definition says it means the record of your convictions for crimes. But that’s NOT how the term is generally used. Another site says it includes ALL of your records with the police, including traffic violations. But that too is not how the term is used. In the employment area, it is generally used to refer to mean your record of arrests, charges, and convictions, and employers generally neither ask about nor care about your traffic violations. But you don’t have to have done a crime or be convicted of a crime to have a criminal record. So, what is the truth here?
What is true is that somewhere (nobody seems to be able to state a definite number) upwards of 65 million people in this country have been arrested / charged with a crime. Because they have been arrested, there is or was a police record of them (a “record” more significant than your record of speeding tickets). With arrest, some go on to be charged, tried, and either are convicted or plea guilty. That latter number is not the 70 million cited in the headline.
From: xkcd
If an employer provides you with an employment application form (some don’t, they just take resumes – presumably many people are smart enough to keep their arrest records off their resume), many use an employment form that asks about your criminal past. Many such forms ask about “arrests” and some ask about “arrests and convictions”. Some ask instead if you have been “charged with a crime,” which is a little different from “have you been arrested.”
While there may have been a time when merely saying yes to “have you been arrested” would simply prevent you from getting most jobs, that day is not now. It may make it more difficult to get a job, but that’s a different thing. Many states preclude an employer asking blanket “arrest record” questions. In some states the employer cannot use the arrest record for a hiring decision. In general, since having been arrested does not mean you did anything wrong, apparently federal interpretation of labor rules imply that if an employer asks you if you have been arrested, and you say yes, the employer cannot use that unless they follow up and get the details (including what you were charged with, whether you were tried or convicted, and even then they have to establish a relationship between the job and the matter of which you were the subject of an arrest).
It is much more likely that if you have a conviction, that will prevent you from getting a lot of good jobs (but not all). But even there, the reality is more nuanced. For example, even convictions can be expunged from your “record”:
Many youth believe their criminal record is wiped clean when they 18. THIS IS NOT NECESSARILY TRUE. Changes in the law have made it more difficult to leave your record behind and get on with your life. If you have committed a less serious crime, your record will be sealed. This means you don’t have to tell anyone except a judge that you have been convicted of a crime as a youth. So, employers won’t be able to find this out. What crimes are serious and less serious? Keep reading. ================================ If you were convicted of a Class A crime (Murder, Attempted Murder, Arson 1, Assault 1, Robbery 1), or a "sex crime" you will never be able to seal your record.If you were convicted of a Class B crime (Possession of Stolen Property, Burglary, Sale of Drugs, Theft 1), you must wait 10 years, and not be convicted of another crime in order to seal your record.
If you were convicted of a Class C crime (Forgery, Possession of a Firearm, Taking of Motor Vehicle without Owner's Possession), you must wait 5 years, and not be convicted of another crime in order to seal your record.
If you were convicted of a crime for which you had to only perform public service or take a class, your record will be sealed when you are 18.
So, the reality is that
(a) not all employers ask about convictions – so you might get a job there.
(b) not all employers who ask about convictions ask about arrests – so you might get a job there if you were arrested and not convicted.
(c) not all employers refuse to hire people who have an arrest, so you might get a job even you disclose an arrest.
(d) some people who were arrested and convicted have their records sealed, so an employer cannot get or regard that information.
(e) some of the people arrested and/or convicted are not Americans, they are aliens, so even though they are part of the 70 million, they are not part of “70 million Americans”.
(f) some of the people who cannot get jobs receive other income or spend money from other sources, and so they still contribute to the economy.
So it is just not true that 70 million Americans are barred by law or stigma from contributing to the economy.
The statistically correct sub-headline, then, is this:
Some number, with 65 to 70 million as the upper limit, of people IN America, for a time, have _more_trouble_ contributing to the economy, by employment, in their preferred jobs, than people who have not come to the attention of the police.
Just to make sure the article tugs on your heartstrings a little more, there is this nugget:
“We are talking about a large number of people who were never even incarcerated – they received a sentence of probation or had a mere arrest,”
Let’s see what that means: The prisons are full of offenders, so when the jury finds you are guilty, the judge gives you probation instead of a prison sentence. Or, it is a first offense for a non-violent crime, so there is no pressure on the judge to get you off the streets, so he gives you probation. In neither of these cases does it make sense to say anything like “awwwww, you didn’t DO TIME, so we aren’t going to take your conviction for a crime into account.” Is there somehow a principle that lenience / clemency in the courts implies that the REST of society must look the other way and pretend that the crime was no crime? That not having done TIME is what makes me confident you are trustworthy? Why? This is just irrational, sentimental blather without a hint of thought.
There is indeed a problem in our system – actually more than one. First, there are way too many laws, so if the officials want to “get” you, they can always find something. That’s wrong. Second, there are way too many people committing real crimes, things that really should be on the books as crimes. So the natural result will be way too many people in disorder with respect to the state and in disorder with respect to the trustworthiness of solid employment. Third, there has grown up far too much opposition between the officials of the justice system and the people, from the police to the investigators to the prosecutors to the courts. But it is not wrong in principle that employers consider your criminal past in considering whether to hire you. Yes, there are ways to abuse that, but this is not the 1830 France of Jean Valjean, where even a petty criminal was effectively barred from employment as a matter of law (talk about irrational!). And just as we would want, the severity of the crime is (at least sort of, with local variation) reflected in how long your record follows you.
And admittedly, there are states that make expunging your conviction record ridiculously difficult. In Virginia, apparently, you must BOTH prove that you were actually innocent, AND get a pardon for the crime! That’s kind of dumb. And I would think that most states would be pretty easy on cleaning your record of one single arrest (with no conviction) some years after you have had no further incidents, but apparently they don’t see it that way. So there is room for improvement.
But the improvement needed is not to legally bar employers from ASKING, as a blanket rule. This kind of law is silly. And using the actual cases of abuse to claim 65_Million_Need_Not_Apply is even more silly.
If employers are mis-using the information, then target the misuse. It isn’t an abuse to try to find out if a person being hired for a position of trust is trustworthy, and a recent conviction for fraud would surely matter to that inquiry. It isn’t an abuse to try to find out whether an applicant is physically safe to have around, and a recent conviction for assault would surely matter to that inquiry.
And so we find, yet again, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Comments (18)
And so we find, yet again, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics.
So, was the number in the title an extrapolation? Just kidding.
I'm inclined to say that only convictions should count against a job applicant, but if somebody keeps getting arrested for the same thing over and over again and for some reason they aren't convicted then I think the employer has a right to know and consider it in their decision. So perhaps something along the lines of "Have you ever been arrested for the same crime more than twice?" would be sufficient to figuring out a real pattern of suspect behavior in addition to asking about convictions.
Posted by Step2 | September 10, 2015 2:51 PM
That's fair enough as a general approximation. But since different jurisdictions define things differently, you could get a string of arrests that are technically for differently named offenses but are effectively all in the same boat.
In some cases, an employer simply doesn't need to know about my problem X. In other cases X matters, but Y doesn't. I don't know how, as a matter of general law, we can set forth a prescription that "such-and-such information cannot be legitimately useful to you" and have it work even reasonably well, except in VERY loose terms. Like, maybe we can have a general rule to wipe out arrests for which no conviction or trial was held, after 5 years, if no further arrest is made. And to expunge convictions of minor sorts 10 years after (a) you paid the penalty, and (b) no further arrests were made.
Posted by Tony | September 10, 2015 5:31 PM
What the SJWs don't understand is that employers are constrained in who they can refuse to hire, and because not everyone is equally capable and qualified to do the same job, some measure(s) distinguishing candidates for a job must be used. Ideally one's criminal history would be only one measure of many, but the courts and activist media have been successful at shutting down other ways employers used to screen job seekers and deal with employees.
Griggs v. Duke decided that because a favored racial minority group did worse on a competency test that all competency tests employers use to screen prospective employees had to be "reasonably related" to the job at hand--with the judgment of what constitutes "reasonably related" decided by the courts of course.
Of course civil lawsuits against employers are a concern as well, who you hire may end up being very very costly someday. Ideally troublesome employees could be replaced or disciplined to make way for competent and honorable ones, but courts have been very sympathetic to the grievances of racial and now sexual minorities. Iffy candidates with criminal records may be passed over for the sole reason that they may be tough to get rid of once hired. These policies tend to disincentivize companies from taking a chance on someone with a checkered past.
The first thing the SJWs need to do is outline what qualifications and abilities are legitimate benchmarks. Once it's pointed out that any qualification you choose will necessarily lead to some demographic groups being underrepresented they may be led to believe that not even they can chose non-discriminatory hiring qualifications.
Posted by GW | September 10, 2015 9:13 PM
There can't possibly be "non-discriminatory hiring qualifications" because, after all, you are making the decision to hire based on DIFFERENCES between people (or you just pick out of the phone book, regardless of who applied). To notice differences is to discriminate.
Yeah, I get that what you mean is improper discrimination. And yes, there are differences in persons that should be used to create the difference of "hired" versus "not hired". And if those differences happen to fall unevenly across race, sex, or other categories that are supposed to be protected, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the idea of anti-discrimination objective. In my estimation, this is an area where MOST of the barriers against wrongful discrimination should be moral and social and religious, not legal. But I also get that the moral and social and religion were not doing the job, and so we got the legal barriers.
But we don't have to create NEW legal barriers that are simply irrational.
Posted by Tony | September 10, 2015 10:37 PM
I'm afraid GW is right. The more categories that employers cannot use, the harder they will lean on the remaining categories that they can. Moreover, it is quite likely that any legitimate category in many jobs will have "disparate impact" upon at least some of the mascot groups. This means that the left's goals make it almost impossible for employers to engage in anything like rational hiring practice.
There is a similar problem with admission to schools that have high admission standards. I have often wondered if Justice Thomas was being facetious in some way when he suggested that U of M simply *not use* the LSAT scores in the first place in connection with admission to its law schools rather than using the LSAT scores and then correcting for race. His point seemed to be that using the LSAT scores in the first place had "disparate impact" by race and that then U of M had to engage in an extremely strong-arm and blatantly reverse-discriminatory form of gerrymandering to add points to persons of certain races to "balance" their incoming class. With a fairly straight face, one of his opinions (I forget the case) suggested that the wrong move was using the LSAT in the first place, because that was what created the "problem"! I remember reading that and wondering if he was seriously suggesting some random form of admission to U of M law school.
Posted by Lydia | September 11, 2015 9:17 AM
Ironically, one of the things they haven't figured out is that their obsession with education and experience as the most valid qualifications, combined with their elitism on what constitutes education effectively blocks out a lot of black and hispanic potential STEM workers from getting off the ground. Odds are good that an elite employer or a start up won't hire a self-taught black kid who went to a historically black school if someone from CMU, MIT or Stanford is interviewing for the slot. You could say "well, of course they shouldn't" but that doesn't answer the question of whether the degree signifies a major difference. My team scared away a Duke University graduate after two weeks on the job because he couldn't cut it; most of the people on the team went to normal state universities.
Posted by Mike T | September 11, 2015 1:18 PM
I would agree that school snobbery is one of the few remaining allowed forms of screening. I also agree that it's very rough and ready indeed. But again, the more people aren't allowed to discriminate in some ways, the more they will overemphasize the remaining allowed forms of screening. It should be _much_ more allowable for an employer to use a test, and standards for relation to job success should be relaxed. That would be individualized evaluation rather than crude measures like, "Did you go to an Ivy League school?"
In the academic world it scarcely needs to be said: Scores like the GRE verbal are a much better indicator of how well a student will do in graduate school than the college he came from. Of course, many committees use both, but college of origin bears to my mind a disproportionate weight, to the point that it is quite easy to engage in not-very-disguised religious discrimination against an applicant who, say, went to a Christian college on the grounds that his college isn't "top tier."
Posted by Lydia | September 11, 2015 2:36 PM
In the politically ideal world, an employer in general should be able to explicitly discriminate on the basis of race, or creed, or whatever: "I just don't like Catholics" should be a legal criterion. And then the businessman would have to put up with being a social outcast, or put up with losing business from Catholics (and from others who don't want to do business with a jerk who publicly says things like "I just don't like Catholics").
And in the same politically ideal world, bigoted misogynists employers are balanced by bigoted misandrist employers, and it all comes out even.
But in this world, you're going to get employers doing whatever they can to make their judging criteria look like they are not illegal discrimination against the mascot groups, even when they really have a disparate effect on the mascot groups. You are also going to get very nearly _explicit_ illegal discrimination against white male Christians (even apart from affirmative action programs, that is) by various persons in power - women executives fairly clearly prefer to hire women, for example - without a significant chance of directing the ire of officialdom at it. But that's a discussion of another stripe.
Posted by Tony | September 11, 2015 7:41 PM
Be careful about saying it like that. In a politically ideal world, employers would generally not want to hire women who are at an age where they should be married and having children. They would reserve most good opportunities for men, not women, to promote traditional gender roles and actively crush the "I can have it all" mentality in both genders.
Posted by Mike T | September 12, 2015 5:16 AM
I didn't mean balanced in terms of mere NUMBERS.
Including the women who are not called to marry and have children?
This harks back to a point made in an earlier thread: while we DO need to restore to society the correct relationship of the roles of males and females, we do NOT necessarily want to return to those social forms that put unreasonable constraints on men and women so as to demand of them what is, effectively, putting a square peg into an oblong hole. For instance, having women work outside the home as a NORM might be destabilizing to the home economy of care for children, but having there be no economic model by which an unmarried woman might be economically stable effectively forces on women the need to marry even when not called to, or (what is little better) to marry THIS MAN when that is not her real desire, because that's the only offer on the table right now.
I don't think the solution is a social format that has only one viable pathway for men or for women. My feeling is that we need a format that heartily encourages women to raise children and thus have the home be their focus, while not absolutely closing off (without social stigma) other pathways for the women who are called to something else. I don't know how that would work.
Posted by Tony | September 12, 2015 8:39 AM
I think the percentage of women are actually called to not marry and have kids is statistically insignificant, to the point where there is no valuing in discussing them here. Chances are high that they'll be almost entirely religious women and religious organizations can find them ample opportunities for gainful employment.
Sometimes people cite the high percentage of "career women" who hit their 40s with no kids or a husband as something analogous to that. I think that's wrong because such women are almost never celibate and the primary reason they have never been mothers is the advent of legal contraception and abortion, not personal conviction.
Obviously, society shouldn't go to extremes to promote gender roles through the economy, but there are some very serious dangerous to going the more egalitarian approach. The medical field is a good example, as female doctors may take years off to be with their young kids, depriving a community of their labor which is artificially limited due to intentionally limited medical school seating and licensure. From a societal perspective, that's just FUBAR; society should generally make the more prestigious, more committed positions available to men because men won't take time off--years off--to be with their young kids.
Posted by Mike T | September 12, 2015 9:14 AM
What used to happen is that employers were just somewhat leery of hiring women within that age range because of the possibility that they would get married and quit, which would be inefficient. It wasn't always (not even usually?) some kind of desire to "foster proper gender roles" in an ideological sense but more of a pragmatic concern about putting a lot of time and money into training an employee only to lose the employee. Now that calculation isn't allowed even where it is rational on the part of the employer. And even in our two-career world I bet that kind of thing still happens. In fact, now you aren't allowed to discriminate against a woman who is eight months' pregnant even if she tells you right in the interview that she's planning to take family leave for months after the baby is born and would expect you to "follow the law" and keep the job open for her to return. Mind you, I bet a lot of employers _would_ discriminate in that situation, finding some excuse not to hire that applicant, and I certainly can't blame them.
Posted by Lydia | September 12, 2015 9:21 AM
I disagree with this. I don't know the numbers, but in this world where so many people (men and women both) have been made unmarriagable material (by their parents' divorce, by abuse, by pornography, etc), many people are in no position to marry and therefore, in their actual condition, God is not actually calling them to marriage. And, likewise, the potential spouse they would have had, were they fit, also is bereft of what would otherwise be the ideal opportunity for marriage, and maybe God is not ACTUALLY calling them to marriage either.
Which doesn't itself imply God is calling them to the religious life. Maybe God's design is that they remain single and "in the world" and doing good there.
In any case, my primary issue is with some (not necessarily all) of the former social forms in which patriarchy was enforced with rules that were NOT truly good: treating a woman like her father's possession to be sold / given away in marriage, but until then with no particular rights of her own. No right to own property, no right to become an independent citizen (no right to vote), and economically speaking no opportunity to create an independent household of her own (as well as, in some places, no legal capacity to do so). Even apart from young women constrained by such limitations, widows were sometimes effectively treated as social pariahs merely because they had no husband. As a result, women sometimes were emotionally, psychologically, and economically forced to accept "offers" for marriage (sometimes made to their fathers, not to them) which were not good marriages, which were not ordered to a union of minds and hearts and wills.
I do want women to be free to be homemakers, mothers, not just legally but economically. This seems to imply, at a minimum, that employers should be able to pay a head of household differently from a different employee who is not a head of household. And a large percentage of jobs should be such as to support a family, not just one or two people. These are needed economic changes. But I don't know why we would want to justify paying a man a "head of household" salary for a responsible job, and NOT paying a widow head of household the same salary for doing the same job. (It would be one thing to forestall this by simply making available to her social support equal to the amount earned by a head of household, but since that has NEVER happened in history, I can't quite see waiting for it to emerge "on its own" as the answer to not wanting single women in the workforce taking away the economic possibility of family-wage jobs from those men who are supporting a family.)
In fact, now you aren't allowed to discriminate against a woman who is eight months' pregnant even if she tells you right in the interview that she's planning to take family leave for months after the baby is born and would expect you to "follow the law" and keep the job open for her to return.
Yeah, talk about insane! I am sure that most employers would move heaven and hell to "find" a reason not to hire her that was so-called "legal". And they would be right to do so, there is no way in heck the law should force this idiotic result.
I don't know if this can be done or not, but it seems to me that it might be legal: an employer establishes 2 tracks for his employees: the "career" track and the "adjunct" track. The career track is for people who expect to stick around for a long time, who will put in long hours when asked at the drop of a hat, who will (in some sense at least) be putting the company's needs ahead of their own or their family's (not in every sense, of course). The "adjunct" track will be for people who expect to take time off when a kid is sick, (at little or no notice to the boss), for people who might want to go on part time for the summer while the kids are out of school, etc. The career track gets way better pay, but way fewer of the boss's "that's OK, go ahead and go on vacation when it suits you even though it puts me in a bind". The adjunct track gets more lenient treatment, at the cost of lower pay and benefits.
Now, two features: first, each employee puts themselves in whichever track they choose. If a woman wants "career", she can have it, but she is held to a higher standard than anyone in the adjunct track. Secondly, neither men nor women get maternity / paternity leave on career track. Remember the "putting the company ahead of the family" concept? This is one of those places. Career track means the company doesn't make room for that. Dad, you can use up your vacation time to take a week off when the baby is born, just like dads have done for decades, but that's it, that's your vacation. There is no months and months off stuff. Women: getting pregnant constitutes electing to switch from career track to adjunct track, period. It's your choice, either way. Up to you. You elect to put your body at the service of a baby, or you elect to put your body (and mind) at the service of the company, but it's mutually exclusive. And as a result, there is no special coverage maternity leave when the baby comes - that's one of the benefits that adjuncts don't get. They don't have the commitment to the company that warrants maternity leave and getting her job held for her, so the company doesn't have the commitment to her to preserve her job. While she is out, they will probably have to hire another adjunct to fill the gap, so while they are not promising the adjunct a permanent position, neither have they promised her that. She has to compete for it on the same basis as her replacement. If she really does want to come back after 3 months (or 6 months, or 2 years), fine, she can compete for any new opportunities (maybe the adjunct hired to replace her got pregnant...)
This is how I propose we achieve this objective, without mandates or even social stigma:
Posted by Tony | September 13, 2015 4:42 PM
All they have to say is that she's not a good fit for the culture of the team. What's she going to do, explain to the judge that her demeanor is simpatico with people she probably doesn't even know?
And yet we see those things taken away, combined with a few other factors and it's all gone to Hell. Slumlord makes similar arguments on his blog, but at the end of the day you have to ask yourself if it's actually possible to have a "balanced approach" that meshes modernity with traditional life in a good way or if you're just trying to have your cake and eat it too.
FWIW, Zippy's writings on freedom had a profound impact on how I perceive arguments about individual freedom from a "moral imperative" perspective. Individual freedom to do what is the more important question we are finding. The hard left truly believes its crusade is about freedom, the only catch is that it's about the freedom to use contraception, get abortions and be homosexual (with a few other things thrown in depending on the faction).
See, I look at the wreckage that is my generation and see ample evidence that the old patriarchy was superior. It may not be truly what God intended, but the results were a lot better than this. I am convinced that we are God's ironic justice against the Boomers as we embody most of their bad traits and have virtually none of the preparation they had to keep civilization going.
Posted by Mike T | September 13, 2015 7:42 PM
That is to say, you look at us and you think "uh yeah, bull#$%^ they're going to be the ones keeping Social Security and Medicare running." (We have a 45% out of wedlock birth rate as an entire generation now, we're crushed under debt, so many of us have a self-esteem to competence ratio that exceeds the P/E ratio of Netflix, need I say more)
Posted by Mike T | September 13, 2015 7:45 PM
Superior to WHAT is the question I am asking.
I have no issue with the point that patriarchy is better than the formless mass of "anything goes" that we pretend is a "culture". Fathers are the authority figures of families, and they ought to act like it (and be treated like it).
My point, though, isn't so much about patriarchy as such, as about certain specific practices under certain patriarchal societies, that I think ought to be characterized as deranged and deforming of family. Treating daughters as chattel is one: a father's patriarchal authority extends to his family, his household, precisely for the reason ALL authority holds: for the good of the community. But what is critical about "the good" of the family is that children mature and become WHOLE as adults, as mature, complete, self-regulating members of society - and then leave the family. Nature intends not the child, but the mature individuals, in full fruition. Hence a father's objective is to raise every one of his children to become those mature, complete members of society, which means members who are no longer under his authority because they are mature, they are capable of no longer needing the day-to-day shelter of his household, they are capable of participating in the establishment of their own households. Nature intends that a man and a woman leave their fathers' houses to form their own families.
Since this is the case, a father's authority over his daughter is inherently bounded, limited, constrained: It is, first, limited because his object is to enable her to become complete, which means independent of him. It is limited because his purpose in using his authority is for her good, not his own personal good. It is constrained because the family is not the whole of society, it is not a complete and "perfect" (in Aristotle's sense) society, and thus a father does not have the authority of a polity, or a state, he has not the authority of life and death. Thus, for example, a father's ordering his daughter to marry X noble because it will enhance the prestige of the FAMILY (i.e. his family) is a kind of disorder: he only has the authority to direct her to the welfare of "the family" to the extent she remains a part thereof, but in marriage a woman leaves her father and mother and cleaves to her husband to form a separate family.
Similarly, a social arrangement where a daughter can leave her father's household ONLY at his permission distorts the natural law, because when she is that fully complete and mature adult intended by nature, he has no further right to so limit her options. His authority over her was in order to achieve that state of capable independence. Once reached, the authority diminishes, even to the point of cessation, as having run its course.
Where a patriarchy operates with these deformities of the natural law in only mild and soft manner, the result may well be far less evil than the evils our current ill culture suffers. But where these deformities operate with an iron and inflexible harshness, (such as, for example in Taliban tribes of Afghanistan) the tyranny is gravely evil and cannot be dismissed as "mere" occasional excesses: the culture itself needs to be changed. Perhaps even eradicated.
If 18th century US patriarchy had its way without any interference, I doubt that we would have nurses in hospitals today, because back then women were not "supposed to" be involved in such work. But who can contend, today, that we are diminished as a society by having the women's professional cadre of nurses? Who can suppose that we ought to return to a day when nursing care was by men (or not at all, more like)? Who can demand that we must not educate our women well enough that they might choose, in college, to get a nursing degree? Or imagine that a woman, educated and trained to a high degree to be an emergency room nurse, must ALSO remain in her father's household and at her father's minutest beck and call until married, and submit to his choice for her future husband?
No, society needs to rediscover the truth of patriarchal family, and make provision for men to have jobs that support a household and allow a woman to be a full-time mother, and also learn to allow there to be place for unmarried women in society without that damaging the economy of households.
Posted by Tony | September 13, 2015 10:18 PM
I agree that a practice wherein a father can coerce a woman to marry a particular man is wrong, same with the refusal to leave the house. The one area I firmly disagree with you is on the matter of voting. The exercise of political power is not neutral in the context of patriarchy. It either goes toward it or against it. We've seen that proven by the actual policies that came about rapidly since voting laws were greatly expanded. In fact, it happened in every Western country at about the same time and degree, so one cannot claim it's a quirk of this or that country. Another thing is that in the context of marriage, it does two things. First, it creates a system wherein the couple may feel that the man's political choices may not reflect the wife's interests. Second, it gives the wife the ability to act independent politically if she does feel that way or wishes to contradict her husband's vision of the good in a way that has an actual impact on society.
I can't find it now, but I read a historic letter from an anti-suffragette who made some interesting points about the state of law in the late 19th century. She said that women could marry freely, contract freely, own property, work for themselves, had full constitutional rights aside from voting and holding office and that their husbands were ultimately responsible for making good on the bad economic decisions they made. Plus, she said that married men could not own property independently of their family while a woman's property was generally not considered community property at the time. She went on to say that in her opinion, this gave women almost too much freedom. That is, a woman could act independently on a number of things and then leave her husband with a ruinous responsibility (I think she also included presumed paternity). She finally went on to say that in her opinion, leaving political power in the hands of men was the only real check that men had on women since it was the only way men, as a group, could ensure that women as a group did not turn their freedom into an assault on the law and society.
Anyway, I think the right to vote, while fairly important, is still not nearly as big of a deal as most people believe. The best argument for taking it away from most people, including most men, is that it would force people to wake up to the reality that "they are not the government." Today, it is often more of an opiate for the masses than an effective political tool because it's so diluted. I think the public would actually start judging the government much more by what it does than theory if most people had literally no direct say in how it does things.
Posted by Mike T | September 14, 2015 5:40 AM
But I haven't SAID what I think in the matter of voting.
Suppose that a family gets as many votes as they have adult members of the household (or total members?). Suppose that the head of the household casts them. Given that Dad is the head of household, Dad is casting the votes for himself, Mom, and adult kids (or all kids?). No dichotomy between Dad's vote and Mom's. No disturbance to the integrity of the family.
However, when Dad has died (casualty in war, died as a policeman in the line of duty, etc), Mom does not become deprived of her right to participate in the political order because she no longer has a husband, she is the head of household so she casts the votes.
I don't know the exact extent to which the states varied on these matters, but I do know that they varied to some extent. She sounds to me like she is talking about an unusual state, not the norm. I know that in at least one state, as late as 1969, the law provided that in purchasing a home, the DEFAULT position of ownership provided definitively unequal rights to the property: they both shared equally in the property while they were alive, but if the wife died first the husband took over ownership full and clear, but if the husband died first the wife merely continued to retain the right to live in the home while she lived, but at her death the property was disposed of by Dad's will, not hers. She could not dispose of the property (e.g. by sale or gift). Similarly, I have heard tell of state law that provided that a married woman could not sign to ownership of real property without her husband's approval, while a husband could do so.
Well, just make it so that you don't get the right to vote until age 30, and you have to have a positive net worth.
Posted by Tony | September 14, 2015 7:57 PM