And yet you continue to think men have more power?
In many respects, yes. Not in all respects and not in every circumstance. Power is not binary and is not absolute.
Do you think men were given the opportunity to decline military combat? I can tell you now that they weren't.
Many women were not given the opportunity to decline, but they certainly made efforts to stop women from serving because their conceptions of what was proper for men and women was skewed.
Who taught men they were "made for war"; sounds like a shitty thing to teach someone. And then enforce on pain of death.
That male power fantasy you keep mentioning, actually :P That and feeling duty bound to protect the weaker sex.
Minorities also had to fight for the right to serve; in fact they fought for the right prior to getting the right to vote.
Indeed; it was a case of maleness trumping race in perceptions of propriety. Men fight, even black men, and women don't: period.
Actually, relative to what minorities and poor men had to do to get the vote, that's sort of how it went down. The antics of the Suffragettes may have actually delayed the Suffragists getting the vote for women.
We've been reading different history books I see. Ah well.
It's more offensive to erase the greater struggle of minority and poor men.
I'm erasing it how?
Who despite not actually being part of the systems they were breaking into apparently didn't have the "subversive" power that women had to get their demands met.
Are you asserting they don't have the power to vote? Sounds like they had the subversive power to get their demands met after all.
What exactly are you arguing now?
Once again. Enforced primarily by men? So men are actors and women acted upon.
Both were acted upon. Stop dropping my words to your advantage.
Yes, that's what oppression means. When men oppressed women, by laws and traditions that disallowed them from getting and education or voting, women who wanted to break those laws and traditions were acted upon, until they gathered power and began to act back and achieve equality.
I fail utterly to see how this is such a contentious point, and why you keep insisting that women lacking political and legal power at any point in history is a controversial statement, or that it makes them perpetual victims.
By promoting the notion that women are "oppressed" by men, therefore splitting the sexes into "actor" and "acted upon", reducing women into receivers of men's actions, etc.
Most men were fine with it. Some were not, and were outvoted and ignored and shunned. For a long time, many women were fine with it. Some were not, and were ignored and shunned. As the generations passed, more and more women became less and less fine with it and began to act too.
False dichotomies are problematic for a number of reasons, least of all because they inhibit seeing an idea from a third perspective. I do not know how you constructed your worldview so firmly on the idea that "actor" and "acted upon" and "victim" are absolute and irrevocable labels, or why you'd put quotes around "oppressed" as if laws restricting women's freedoms is some controversial part of history, but it doesn't reflect the reality of the fluid and complex shifts in power between genders over the centuries.