The newspapers periodically express a desire to know whether women have
given evidence, on the whole, of superior statesmanship to men. There are
constant requests that they will define their position as to the tariff and
the fisheries and the civil-service question. If they do not speak, it is
naturally assumed that they will forever after hold their peace. Let us see
how that matter stands.
It is said that the greatest mechanical skill in America is to be found
among professional burglars who come here from England. Suppose one of
these men were in prison, and we were to stand outside and taunt him
through the window: "Here is a locomotive engine: why do you not mend or
manage it? Here is a steam printing-press: if you know anything, set it up
for me! You a mechanic, when you have not proved that you understand any of
these things? Nonsense!"
But Jack Sheppard, if he condescended to answer us at all, would coolly
say, "Wait a while, till I have finished my present job. Being in prison,
my first business is to get out of prison. Wait till I have picked this
lock, and mined this wall; wait till I have made a saw out of a
watch-spring, and a ladder out of a pair of blankets. Let me do my first
task, and get out of limbo, and then see if your little printing-presses
and locomotives are too puzzling for my fingers."
Politically speaking, woman is in jail, and her first act of skill must be
in getting through the wall. For her there is no tariff question, no
problem of the fisheries. She will come to that by and by, if you please;
but for the present her statesmanship must be employed nearer home. The
"civil-service reform" in which she is most concerned is a reform which
shall bring her in contact with the civil service. Her political creed, for
the present, is limited to that of Sterne's starling in the cage,--"I can't
get out." If she is supposed to have any common-sense at all, she will best
show it by beginning at the point where she is, instead of at the point
where somebody else is. She would indeed be as foolish as these editors
think her if she now spent her brains upon the tariff question, which she
cannot reach, instead of upon her own enfranchisement, which she is
gradually reaching.
The woman-suffrage movement in America, in all its stages and subdivisions,
has been the work of woman. No doubt men have helped in it: much of the
talking has been done by them, and they have furnished many of the printed
documents. But the energy, the methods, the unwearied purpose, of the
movement, have come from women: they have led in all councils; they have
established the newspapers, got up the conventions, addressed the
legislatures, and raised the money. Thirty years have shown, with whatever
temporary variations, one vast wave of progress toward success, both in
this country and in Europe. Now success is statesmanship.
I remember well the shouts of laughter that used to greet the anti-slavery
orators when they claimed that the real statesmen of the country were not
the Clays and Calhouns, who spent their strength in trying to sustain
slavery, and failed, but the Garrisons, who devoted their lives to its
overthrow, and were succeeding. Yet who now doubts this? Tried by the same
standard, the statesmanship of to-day does not lie in the men who can find
no larger questions before them than those which concern the fisheries, but
in the women whose far-reaching efforts will one day make every existing
voting-list so much waste paper.
Of course, when the voting-lists with the women's names are ready to be
printed, it will be interesting to speculate as to how these new monarchs
of our destiny will use their power. For myself, a long course of
observation in the anti-slavery and woman-suffrage movements has satisfied
me that women are not idiots, and that, on the whole, when they give their
minds to a question, whether moral or practical, they understand it quite
as readily as men. In the anti-slavery movement it is certain that a woman,
Elizabeth Heyrick, gave the first impulse to its direct and simple solution
in England; and that another woman, Mrs. Stowe, did more than any man,
except perhaps Garrison and John Brown, to secure its right solution here.
There was never a moment, I am confident, when any great political question
growing out of the anti-slavery struggle might not have been put to vote
more safely among the women of New England than among the clergy, or the
lawyers, or the college professors. If they did so well in that great
issue, it is fair to assume that, after they have a sufficient inducement
to study out future issues, they at least will not be very much behind the
men.
But we cannot keep it too clearly in view, that the whole question, whether
women would vote better or worse than men on general questions, is a minor
matter. It was equally a minor matter in case of the negroes. We gave the
negroes the ballot, simply because they needed it for their own protection;
and we shall by and by give it to women for the same reason. Tried by that
test, we shall find that their statesmanship will be genuine. When they
come into power, drunken husbands will no longer control their wives'
earnings, and a chief justice will no longer order a child to be removed
from its mother, amid its tears and outcries, merely because that mother
has married again. And if, as we are constantly assured, woman's first duty
is to her home and her children, she may count it a good beginning in
statesmanship to secure to herself the means of protecting both. That once
settled, it will be time enough to "interview" her in respect to the proper
rate of duty on pig-iron.