However, unfortunately, this is a function of women being considered *lesser* than men in the first place.
No, that is not necessarily true. Unless you do research specifically seeking causation, you have no way of proving this statement.
1. Disenfranchisement, while it can mean deprivation of *any* legal right, is usually used to mean deprivation of legal *voting* rights, and that was the way in which I used it.
You cannot take something totally out of context and use it to deseribe the whole. You cannot look at voting rights without looking at what else went with it, good and bad.
2. I oppose gendered draft laws, and consider them to be sexist discrimination against men, just as the historical deprivation of legal voting rights was sexist discrimination against women.
What you think about it is irrelevant. You must look at this in its entirety. Men only could vote, and men only could die fighting in wars. (yes, women died as incidental casualties, as did boys, girls, and older men.)That you disagree with the past does not change the past.
3. Men didn't try to "protect" women from dying in childbirth, which they historically did with far greater regularity than men died in war. As a matter of fact, those in power did their damndest to "protect" women from legal contraceptive use, and even the legal ability to sometimes refuse sexual intercourse with their husbands to avoid constant pregnancy.
Men had no control over the safety of pregnancy. If you look at how many men died in just the battle of Gettysburgh of the civil war, which was 51,000 men, you will have a hard time convincing me that childbirth killed more women than war killed men. They may have had problems more consistantly (ie not in groups of time such as wartime), but men died in greater numbers in during the years people were at war, and overall died in greater numbers. Also, you are not looking at the jobs men went to which were deadly, such as mining, logging, fishing, farming, etc. I highly doubt that if you add up the numbers from both war casualties AND workplace deaths, that women dying in childbirth was even close.
There was a ban against women getting out of childbirth. Unfortunately, given high death rates from childhood deseases, dangerous work conditions, etc, having and raising children was manditory for the continuation of the nation, and the species. Was it nice, or even fair on a personal level? Not really. it was a necessary evil for women to bear children and men to work to support those children, both of which carried risks to their lives.
4. The ability to vote is what gives citizens of a government the ability to create, change and erase laws in their society. "Taxation without representation," etc. etc. It is not possible to use the word "protect" in conjunction with the concept of forcing an adult citizen to live by the laws of a society while forcibly depriving him or her of the right to have any legal say about those laws. It makes a mockery of the entire concept of "protection."
But you are saying that representation without taxation is fine? Today we think that women must have the vote, but if you look at accounts of those early days, you will see that women were not chomping at the bit to be men. When men created enough worksaving devices that women had more free time, that is when they demanded the vote. Even then, many, many women had no interest in it.
I am not saying that we should not be voting today.It is a different time today. But assuming that women were pining for representation, for political clout, is really inaccurate.