Is Steven Crowder correct?

No.

Now keep in mind his video here is idiotic and rage-inducing in its stupidity, but he is distorting the historical record and engaging with people not trained in the historical method to prove his point.

This is pretty obvious when you examine his first point, that white men were the ones who fought for women's suffrage. One the most basic superficial level, he is correct. White men were the ones that granted American and other European women the right to vote. This was because expanding suffrage was a civil procedure and in pretty much all cases accomplished through existing political structures. For example, the Nineteenth Amendment passed through a Congress that was composed entirely of white men. So of course this amendment came to pass because of white men. Now what Crowder omits to mention in his gish-gallop was that the 66th Congress could have in theory been more diverse. African-American American men had the right to vote and there was not a single member in Congress and there was no major legal obstacles preventing women from running for Congress. There had been a single woman who ran for office and won in 1917, Jeanette Rankin, but she was a massive outlier with extensive contacts in the Montana GOP. Rankin did a lot of the committee groundwork for the Nineteenth Amendment but she was redistricted out of power prior to the congressional debates on the amendment. So sure, white men did give American women the vote, but that does not really mean what Crowder claims it means. Congress itself was rigged in favor of white men and it was not an institution predicated on equality before the law. This was a congress that stood during the acme of Jim Crow.

Now there is a historiographic debate about the importance of the more militant American suffragettes such as Alice Paul and company versus some of the more conventional activists that worked through traditional power structures and networks. Popular memory holds Paul's NWP as the face of the movement but often sidelines some of these women. Of course, this binary between radical-traditional is a false one; there were many activists that straddled both sides of street activism and backroom dealings like Rankin. And women's suffrage was an incredibly diverse movement with substantial regional variations. This /u/sunagainstgold 's answer gives a good summary of some of American regional variations, including why some elite women would have been anti-suffrage. /u/hillsonghood 's answer also underscores some of the less savory means Australian women used to get the vote. Now while there were some men involved in women's suffrage organization, the issue though was one that was pushed and largely carried through because of the pressure exerted by various women.

As for the connection with the right to vote with conscription, well, this is frakking stupid. For one thing, in American history (which I suspect is the only thing Crowder even cares about), conscription was exceptional. There was no connection between citizenship and military service in the Constitution and the long and tortured definitions of what constituted American citizenship in the nineteenth century. State militias were not mandatory groups American men had to join in peace and while the Constitution and law expected men to join militias in times of emergency, in practice most men did not participate. US state militias were notorious in the antebellum period for being disorganized and understrength which was one of many reasons both sides in the Civil War turned to conscription. Militias were not the same thing as conscription. The latter's terms of service were more disruptive to men's lives. Now while there were some Enlightenment thinkers that linked conscription with citizenship, but the evolution of conscription in the Americas and Europe did not really follow this model. Europe's oldest form of conscription was not the French Revolution's Levée en masse, but tsarist Russia's so-called "blood tax" from the peasantry. Napoleon took the French Revolutionary system of conscription and turned it into one of the least popular instruments of French rule. The post-1815 continental experience with conscription saw that it was typically a tool of repressive and anti-liberal states. Some liberals championed the old Enlightenment principles of a nation in arms, but this rhetoric often became co-opted by nationalist conservatives. This happened in Germany in which Bismarck after unification used the nation in arms arguments of his liberal enemies as a tool for the authoritarian German state.

The expansion of German military service was one of the factors that pushed emigration out of the country. Universal military service where it was applied was often one of the most unpopular state institutions throughout the nineteenth century. Crowder presents military service as a civil compact for citizenship, but this would have come as a surprise to the many men of the nineteenth century. In the UK, which had no conscription, there was a strong association between tyranny and conscription. The 1915 debates over Military Service Act of 1916, which established conscription, were quite sharp with more than a few partisans claiming that mandatory military service was against the democratic British tradition.

There was a largely European movement after the First World War connecting universal military service to the rights of citizenship. This was an argument various socialist and other left-wing parties made in the wake of the conflict such as Sweden's Social Democrats which argued prewar for conscription under the slogan "one man, one vote, one rifle." This might at first seem to validate Crowder's position, but it really does not. For one thing, the championship of national conscription was often predicted as a means of breaking the back of politically regressive institutions such as the traditional militaries. The architects of West Germany's conscription and alternative national service predicated the reintroduction of conscription as a rupture from past militarism and that the FRG's conscription was subordinate to civil virtues of the constitution, not service to state as it was under the Hohenzollerns and Hitler. So the conceptualization of military service as a prerequisite of democratic citizenship is a relatively new phenomenon. Second, the development of democratic citizen conscription is something that by and large came after the waves of female suffrage of the first quarter of the twentieth century. And it bears mentioning most contemporary democracies do not link military service with citizenship. Refusing military service outside of established channels can lead to penalties which restrict citizenship rights. But the calculus that citizenship comes with military responsibilities will come as a shock to most people.

Now the issue of most women not wanting the vote, well Crowder provides no real evidence of this. As sunagaisntgold's linked answer shows, some women had deliberate reasons for not wanting suffrage. And like many men in this period, nonvoting was endemic in American society. Some of this was due to institutional limits like Jim Crow restrictions, but apathy and disinterest in politics transected the gender line.

Suffrage was a complex historical issue with multiple historical actors with competing agendas. Crowder ignores this in favor of a history that places white men at the center of historical changes and relegates those who are not white men to the position of ungrateful supplicants. In short, he is wrong.