Women and Village Elections

Abstract

Feminists such as Iris Marion Young, Carole Pateman, and Susan Mendus hold the view that democracy has failed to deliver on its promises to women. Given the facts of history where women were denied the vote, until recendy, and confined to the domestic sphere, true democracy has never actually existed. Despite universal suffrage, women’s votes were without leverage in the 1920–70 in the United States (Harvey 1998). As Iris Young (1987:58) asserts,

Since Mary Wollstonecraft, generations of women and some men wove painstaking arguments to demonstrate that excluding women from modern public and political life contradicts the liberal democratic promise of universal emancipation and equality. They identified the liberation of women with expanding civil and political rights to include women on the same terms as men, and with the entrance of women into the public life dominated by men on an equal basis with them. After two centuries of faith that the ideal of equality and fraternity included women has still not brought emancipation for women, contemporary feminists have begun to question the faith itself.