Note: This is one of three sections on Rights Theory. They have in common my belief that Rights theory is usually the weakest way to support any issue. Rights is a weak justifier for three reasons:
o It is easily countered logically with what I call the DMV Defense, "That's not a right, that's a privilege."
o Rights are tightly connected to prosperity because most rights must be materially supported by a community's prosperity -- Rights do not come cheaply, so they are a product of luxury thinking.
o The emotional power behind most rights appeals is guilt thinking. Guilt is a strong emotion, so it leads to some really wacky choices when those choices are looked at from a cost/benefit point of view. Which means the choice is very expensive for the community to support, but the expense is often not noticed by the rights enthusiast.
I see the dark side of Rights Theory being that it is often the Theory of Beggars.
The influence of women in American society has grown steadily during my lifetime, and this has been a good thing. Women have steadily moved into more fields of endeavor and gained more education -- these days women college students outnumber men.
The effect of this has been powerfully beneficial for America and the world. Much of America's increase in prosperity has been due to women's greater participation in business and industry.
Mixed with all this shining brightness have been a few steaks of dark, and those should be recognized. This is a cautionary discussion.
o The first caution is that women's rights depend on prosperity. The two are symbiotes: If we lose prosperity, we will lose women's rights. Women's rights have grown as they have become able to do the jobs men can do, and this is because of mechanization and automation.
Conversely, in a world where productivity depends on the strength of your back, women lose out. In a world where child bearing and child raising must take up much of a person's day because poverty and disease are killing many children, women lose out.
Productivity and prosperity are the foundation of women's rights. This should not be forgotten as society strives to give women more rights.
o The second caution is about the future: Women's rights depend on Male Enfranchisement.
Enfranchisement is the feeling that a person belongs to a community. This means that the person feels that what he or she does effects the community's well being, and that the community is paying attention to his or her wants and needs. The opposite is disenfranchisement, the condition where a person feels the community is not paying attention to them and where they feel their actions are not important to the community's well being.
Disenfranchisement is the root of much crime, which makes it generally a bad thing. In this context of women's rights it has one other seriously bad effect: It liberates male violence thinking. It is a deep mammalian instinct for males to be violently territorial. The classic movie scene of two men in a Wild West bar getting drunk and fighting over a woman is an example of this kind of instinctive thinking expressing itself.
What suppresses this territorial fighting instinct is enfranchisement. When men have a stake in their community an alternative instinct stays strong, the instinct to cooperate -- the "I've got your back." instinct.
If women's rights implementers ignore the importance of Male Enfranchisement, they are going to find their utopia marred by the chronic and serious damage done by disenfranchised males. Two examples of communities currently afflicted with male disenfranchisement are aboriginal societies where incoming settlers have displaced the aboriginals and taken away the aboriginal communities' means of support, and matriarchal welfare communities in urban environments.
The from-the-heart way of looking at this is: If the woman who is supposed to be in a man's life is not there because she is being all that she can be somewhere else, and as a result the man becomes a disenfranchised drunken gangster, there has been social loss, not gain.
In sum, these are two pillars that women's rights advocates need to keep in mind: The pillar of Prosperity and the Pillar of Male Enfranchisement. Any women's rights program, policy or advocacy that chips away at either of these will be self-defeating.