[SubMareener]

Here is the history of the US government spending:



So your statement "the first year this country spent more than it took in was the year after women gained the vote" is not factual. It appears that "wars" are the proximate causes of most of the deficit spending with Lindon Johnson's wars (in Vietnam and on Poverty) started the modern trend. It was the 16th and 17th Amendments, pushed by the Progressives of both parties that enabled the explosion in deficit spending by allowing the income tax and disconnecting the Senate from the State legislatures. Recognizing women as human beings endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights corrected an error in the Constitution as large as the one accepting the existence of human slavery.

[papertyger]

My apologies. I did indeed incorrectly comment. The study, by John R. Lott, Jr. and Larry Kenny, has rather to do with the size and scope of government at all levels.

From the abstract:

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870 to 1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.

The abstract can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=160530

And the full study at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Publications/Working/index.html

So while I concur with your rightly celebrating the extension of the franchise to women, I have to demur at that extension without similarly altering the Constitution to restrain those forms of tyranny and oppression peculiar to women with power as it did so effectively with regard to the men for which it was originally intended.

[the OlLine Rebel]

I concur with your conclusions, except this:

“corrected an error in the Constitution”

There is no error. Nowhere is sex mentioned in the Constitution, or anything else regarding who should vote. It was up to states who voted. We all learned that Wyoming was the 1st to let women vote - but that was untrue. New Jersey let women vote right away, but they were shut out some 20 years later.