Arnold Koch suggests that democracy is not well served by women’s suffrage because women, using the vote, have favored candidates and government programs that improve their own “safety net” (“More women means more liberalism,” Letters, Jan. 7). This presupposes that male voters never used their access to the franchise to promote programs that served their needs.

I would argue that men have always promoted their own values through the vote. It’s not subversive to democracy, but their exclusive hold on the franchise was, as Swanee Hunt argued in a Jan. 2 op-ed.