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You people are blinding yourselves by only focusing on modern times in the USA and getting all partisan. This is about cities and rural areas as general concepts, and they existed in the distant past and all over the earth. To get a more universal idea about how cities shape social and political values, its useful to stop fighting your same old local battles over and over again and take a broader look at situations you aren't emotionally connected to. When you deal with the USA as your only topic you're inherently biasing you arguments because you have a political agenda and a stake in it.
Well, I know in the UK the vote traditionally split along class line, with much of London voting Conservative and the more poorer more industrial north tending to vote Labour. The countryside does tend vote Conservative more, but even more so than the US, the UK rural population is small.
Various news programs have been done over the years on American attitudes towards interracial marriage, including places where the attitude towards it is still sour. Journalists' interest in the subject matter has thankfully provided lots of first hand testimony from people on both sides of the issue, thankfully in the context of allowing the rest of us to be privy to the reality of attitudes.
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Originally Posted by nei
But there's no evidence there was rural/urban divide for women's suffrage.
I have heard countless elderly women talk about attitudes of men over their lifetime. Fortunately I had one set of grandparents who were rural their whole lives to spend enough time in that world and another set of grandparents who were urban to get their perspective to add to my own urban perspective to inform me. I've talked to enough people over time to realize that men's attitudes towards women basically from the '40s on has been more backwards in rural areas. My own mother, who grew up rural, was determined to never go back to that because of such attitudes. She got an advanced degree in the urban fabric and continued and continues to live in the urban fabric. I've got a host of aunts and uncles who grew up rural and moved to the urban fabric in the '50s and some lived there ever since, others retired back to the country. I have heard the life experience of enough people from both environments and who have lived in both environments to inform me that men's attitudes towards women were more progressive in urban areas than in rural areas, despite what the law allowed. And today's political divide on an issue like equal pay informs me that the same biases are in place, rural against social progress, urban for social progress.
This is anecdotal and on a different topic but highlights the mindset- My rural grandfather was a sharecropper with a family. After minorities were given the right to vote, local white landowners warned all minorities that if they voted, they would be booted out and lose their livelihood. My grandfather voted, and his landowner booted him and his family, including my mom in her childhood, out. Voting being LEGAL and when and where it became legal was irrelevant to that outcome and to the attitudes that led to it. Around the same time my urban grandfather was living and working in Chicago, and he voted as well as a minority there. No negative fallout there, and there typically wasn't in Chicago. That was a real world lesson in difference between attitudes toward social progress in urban versus rural that was LIVED by people I knew and that had significant consequences. And that attitude existed for both minority rights and women's rights, and exists TODAY, evidenced by the gay rights issue in the form of gay marriage and still women's rights in the form of equal pay.
That's just one example. Enough people have told me of their firsthand experience for me to put 2 and 2 together and notice the trend, and enough information is constantly flowing on the gay rights issue and the women's rights issue today for me to put 2 and 2 together and conclude that what those elderly people were talking about that they lived in terms of attitudes towards that day's social rights issues actually DOES MATCH to attitudes even today on today's social rights issues. The lives people have lived and my own time spent in rural vs. urban and what I see of today's issues informs me on attitudes in rural America versus in urban America.
The tendency for rural Americans on a national scope not to embrace progressive social rights as compared to urban Americans' embrace of the same is the reality in America, and has been for some time. Too many tendencies in attitudes on too many social subjects match to ignore the match.
Shhhhhhhhh ... Apparently this is news to some folks!
I figured that even when I explain something to some folks, that they still somehow won't be able to get it. You tell one person that you don't know why a thing is the way it is, they say you think you know exactly. You tell another person that the timing of legal promulgation is beside the point of your argument, they suggest you have no idea about when the timing of legal promulgation was. Amazing how people go out of their way to not understand the English one writes and rebut with things mentally distant from the point one makes in the written English. I suppose some folks just aren't meant to understand the difference between when a law is first promulgated and what attitudes there are nationally about what the law represents long after it is promulgated and being pushed everywhere or in activity everywhere. Apparently that distinction is Greek to some folks!
I figured that even when I explain something to some folks, that they still somehow won't be able to get it. You tell one person that you don't know why a thing is the way it is, they say you think you know exactly. You tell another person that the timing of legal promulgation is beside the point of your argument, they suggest you have no idea about when the timing of legal promulgation was. Amazing how people go out of their way to not understand the English one writes and rebut with things mentally distant from the point one makes in the written English. I suppose some folks just aren't meant to understand the difference between when a law is first promulgated and what attitudes there are nationally about what the law represents long after it is promulgated and being pushed everywhere or in activity everywhere. Apparently that distinction is Greek to some folks!
Now look, pal, YOU said:
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Maybe it WAS elitist for America at large to tell rural America to get with the program and let women vote.
This statement indicates you knew nothing about the women's suffrage issue when you posted that. Ohiogirl81 and I have tried to educate you. It was not "American at large" telling rural American to get with the program and let women vote. Women's suffrage was a small-town and rural phenomena. I personally have posted numerous posts about the rural nature of the first states to give women the vote. Just because you wish the women's suffrage movement came out of the cities that does not make it so. You can say it over and over, and it's still untrue. Tammany Hall apparently had no desire for women to vote. Sorry. As I learned in psychiatric nursing, learn to accept reality.
The current geographic pattern of American politics has been with us for about 40 years. Before that it was quite different on a number of dimensions, rural-urban being one. No one should read back the current back into the 19th Century, you'll be quite confused and misled.
But it sounds like your ancedotes about the south, or comparing a rural southern place to an urban non-southern place.
You are taking my one example and assuming that all the life stories I have heard are about the south. They are not. You seem to be looking for a reason to disbelieve the dichotomy of mindset. Even with the red/blue argument you sought to use exceptions as what seemed like an attempt to not believe the voting gradient exists. You seemed to use the differing degrees of gradient to negate that the gradient exists.
You are free to believe what you want, but the difference in mindset exists. Today's difference in mindset that is obvious with gay rights and with equal pay in rural vs urban didn't JUST POP UP when those social issues did in the past few years. The attitudes observed on those are remnants of the same divergence in social attitudes that existed decades ago.
Heck, I've seen people on city-data from the San Diego area who said that a certain more rural part of the area has a good deal of racial bigotry, as contrasted with the urban parts which have typically progressive social California attitudes. And this was 2 years ago. All life stories I have heard are not about the south. The social dichotomy is there, has evidence of being there in two big issues today, and has plenty of people from those areas who can vouch for attitudes (or their own on some gotcha journalist investigation pieces), and is reflected in the national voting gradient from urban to rural. You can choose not to believe it, but it is the reality.
The current geographic pattern of American politics has been with us for about 40 years. Before that it was quite different on a number of dimensions, rural-urban being one. No one should read back the current back into the 19th Century, you'll be quite confused and misled.
Thank you. I'm glad somebody said it. That is the same conclusion I have seen reached in all the political journalism pieces on the subject that I have seen.
Thank you. I'm glad somebody said it. That is the same conclusion I have seen reached in all the political journalism pieces on the subject that I have seen.
What does that have to do with women's suffrage? Did you think, until you were enlightened by a couple of us ladies, that women just got the vote in say, 2008?
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