Try to keep up here. I've made all my points -and the reasons for them - very clearly already. Most Medium stories are about 7 minutes long. This one ran to 10. Of course it’s oversimplified. I’ve just put a topic that entire books are written about into a short essay. I can't fit every nuance about every single thing in to a short piece that wasn't a voting rights story. I've written other stories that discuss how for the first hundred years or so of US History, only white men who owned land could vote. This isn’t that piece.

Even though I didn't present the full history of voting rights in America in this short essay, I did nonetheless repeatedly note, patriarchy is the maintenance of traditional power. Did you miss that part? I said it at least twice.

And in America, a significant part of that has meant keeping women as second class citizens - intentionally, purposefully, and with malice. This speaks to the assertion made by another defensive man that because the dominance hierarchy is the social system we've all grown up with, there has been no "conspiracy" by men to keep women as second class citizens. Although conspiracy is probably not the correct word, there was intentional malice.

Yes, those in power do whatever they have to in order to keep it, and that is not restricted to men marginalizing women - but that part also is a major component of patriarchy, which is literally the main point of this piece.