Women's suffrage under attack: 1931 arguments resurface online

Women's suffrage is once again under attack with arguments from a century ago

Can a book review revive a debate that history already settled? Judging by the recent uproar in digital politics, it seems it can. Women's right to vote, a hard-won achievement that took decades of social pressure, is back in the crosshairs with a discourse mixing biology, hormones and distrust of democracy.

History has been here before

This is not the first time women's suffrage has caused panic. In 1931, when the Cortes of Spain's Second Republic debated women's right to vote, a wing of the Spanish left opposed it with an argument that today reappears almost word for word: women would vote as directed by the confessional. The memory is not idle; the arguments now repeated under pseudoscientific garb have their roots in that debate.

Between oestrogen and 'managed democracy'

What is really new is not the content but the packaging. There is talk of female biology, excess oestrogen and the feminisation of politics, as if a century of electoral science had not passed between physiology and ideology. Some dismiss the criticism with a remark that sums it up: the author, verbatim, 'has read Sigmund Freud'. And there is something to that.

At the same time, alongside the disparagement of women's votes looms the ideal of a 'managed democracy', even the idea that democracy only divides. When you distrust the judgement of half the electorate, the next step is distrusting the whole electorate. After all, what are thousands of votes when a few know how to manage things better?

It is the same old path: first doubt women, then doubt the electorate as a whole. And in the end, what is proposed is not more representation, but less. I'll leave it there.