When a society is in demographic decline, men outnumber the women they are most likely to marry or pair off with. As a consequence, mores will be more “female.” James Q. Wilson offered the example of female suffrage in the turn-of-the-century United States. All the movement’s prominent theorists and agitators were in the northeast, but all eleven of the states that had given women the vote before World War I were in the west, where the male-female ratio (and therefore male deference to women) was highest.
