An English member of Parliament said in a speech, some years ago, that the
stupidest man had a clearer understanding of political questions than the
brightest woman. He did not find it convenient to say what must be the
condition of a nation which for many years has had a woman for its
sovereign; but he certainly said bluntly what many men feel. It is not
indeed very hard to find the source of this feeling. It is not merely that
women are inexperienced in questions of finance or administrative practice,
for many men are equally ignorant of these. But it is undoubtedly true of a
large class of more fundamental questions,--as, for instance, of some now
pending at Washington,--which even many clear-headed women find it hard to
understand, while men of far less general training comprehend them
entirely.
Questions of the distribution of power, for instance, between the
executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government,--or between
the United States government and those of the separate States,--belong to
the class I mean. Many women of great intelligence show a hazy
indistinctness of views when the question arises whether it is the business
of the general government to preserve order at the voting-places at a
congressional election, for instance, as the Republicans hold; or whether
it should be left absolutely in the hands of the state officials, as the
Democrats maintain. Most women would probably say that so long as order was
preserved, it made very little difference who did it. Yet, if one goes into
a shoe-shop or a blacksmith's shop, one may hear just these questions
discussed in all their bearings by uneducated men, and it will be seen that
they involve a principle. Why is this difference? Does it show some
constitutional inferiority in women, as to this particular faculty?
The question is best solved by considering a case somewhat parallel. The
South Carolina negroes were considered very stupid, even by many who knew
than; and they certainly were densely ignorant on many subjects. Put face
to face with a difficult point of finance legislation, I think they would
have been found to know even less about it than I do. Yet the abolition of
slavery was held in those days by many great statesmen to be a subject so
difficult that they shrank from discussing it; and nevertheless I used to
find that these ignorant men understood it quite clearly in all its
bearings. Offer a bit of sophistry to them, try to blind them with false
logic on this subject, and they would detect it as promptly, and answer it
as keenly, as Garrison or Phillips would have done; and, indeed, they would
give very much the same answers. What was the reason? Not that they were
half wise and half stupid; but that they were dull where their own
interests had not trained them, and they were sharp and keen where their
own interests were concerned.
I have no doubt that it will be so with women when they vote. About some
things they will be slow to learn; but about all that immediately concerns
themselves they will know more at the very beginning than many wise men
have learned since the world began. How long it took for English-speaking
men to correct, even partially, the iniquities of the old common law!--but
a parliament of women would have set aside at a single sitting the alleged
right of the husband to correct his wife with a stick no bigger than his
thumb. It took the men of a certain State of this Union a good many years
to see that it was an outrage to confiscate to the State one half the
property of a man who died childless, leaving his widow only the other
half; but a legislature of women would have annihilated that enormity by a
single day's work. I have never seen reason to believe that women on
general questions would act more wisely or more conscientiously, as a rule,
than men: but self-preservation is a wonderful quickener of the brain; and
in all questions bearing on their own rights and opportunities as women, it
is they who will prove shrewd and keen, and men who will prove obtuse, as
indeed they have usually been.
Another point that adds force to this is the fact that wherever women, by
their special position, have more at stake than usual in public affairs,
even as now organized, they are apt to be equal to the occasion. When the
men of South Carolina were ready to go to war for the "State-Rights"
doctrines of Calhoun, the women of that State had also those doctrines at
their fingers'-ends. At Washington, where politics make the breath of life,
you will often find the wives of members of Congress following the debates,
and noting every point gained or lost, because these are matters in which
they and their families are personally concerned; and as for that army of
women employed in the "departments" of the government, they are politicians
every one, because their bread depends upon it.
The inference is, that if women as a class are now unfitted for politics it
is because they have not that pressure of personal interest and
responsibility by which men are unconsciously trained. Give this, and
self-interest will do the rest, aided by that power of conscience and
affection which is certainly not less in them than in men, even if we claim
no more. A young lady of my acquaintance opposed woman suffrage in
conversation on various grounds, one of which was that it would, if
enacted, compel her to read the newspapers, which she greatly disliked.
I pleaded that this was not a fatal objection; since many men voted
"early and often" without reading them, and in fact without knowing
how to read at all. She said, in reply, that this might do for men,
but that women were far more conscientious, and, if they were once
compelled to vote, they would wish to know what they were voting for.
This seemed to me to contain the whole philosophy of the matter; and
I respected the keenness of her suggestion, though it led me to an
opposite conclusion.