If it were anywhere the custom to disfranchise persons of superior virtue
because of their virtue, and to present others with the ballot, simply
because they had been in the state prison,--then the exclusion of women
from political rights would be a high compliment, no doubt. But I can find
no record in history of any such legislation, unless so far as it is
contained in the doubtful tradition of the Tuscan city of Pistoia, where
men are said to have been ennobled as a punishment for crime. Among us
crime may often be a covert means of political prominence, but it is not
the ostensible ground; nor are people habitually struck from the
voting-lists for performing some rare and eminent service, such as saving
human life, or reading every word of a presidential message. If a man has
been President of the United States, we do not disfranchise him
thenceforward; if he has been governor, we do not declare him thenceforth
ineligible to the office of United States senator. On the contrary, the
supposed reward of high merit is to give higher civic privileges. Sometimes
these are even forced on unwilling recipients, as when Plymouth Colony in
1633 imposed a fine of twenty pounds on any one who should refuse the
office of governor.
It is utterly contrary to all tradition and precedent, therefore, to
suppose that women have been hitherto disfranchised because of any supposed
superiority. Indeed, the theory is self-annihilating, and has always
involved all supporters in hopeless inconsistency. Thus the Southern
slaveholders were wont to argue that a negro was only blest when a slave,
and there was no such inhumanity as to free him. Then, if a slave happened
to save his master's life, he was rewarded by emancipation immediately,
amid general applause. The act refuted the theory. And so, every time we
have disfranchised a rebel, or presented some eminent foreigner with the
freedom of a city, we have recognized that enfranchisement, after all,
means honor, and disfranchisement implies disgrace.
I do not see how any woman can avoid a thrill of indignation when she first
opens her eyes to the fact that it is really contempt, not reverence, that
has so long kept her sex from an equal share of legal, political, and
educational rights. In spite of the duty paid to individual women as
mothers, in spite of the reverence paid by the Greeks and the Germanic
races to certain women as priestesses and sibyls, the fact remains that
this sex has been generally recognized, in past ages of the human race, as
stamped by hopeless inferiority, not by angelic superiority. This is
carried so far that a certain taint of actual inferiority is held to attach
to women, in barbarous nations. Among certain Indian tribes, the service of
the gods is defiled if a woman but touches the implements of sacrifice; and
a Turk apologizes to a Christian physician for the mention of the women of
his family, in the very phrases used to soften the mention of any degrading
creature. Mr. Leland tells us that among the English gypsies any object
that a woman treads upon, or sweeps with the skirts of her dress, is
destroyed or made away with in some way, as unfit for use. In reading the
history of manners, it is easy to trace the steps from this degradation up
to the point now attained, such as it is. Yet even the habit of
physiological contempt is not gone, and I do not see how any one can read
history without seeing, all around us, in society, education, and politics,
the tradition of inferiority. Many laws and usages which in themselves
might not strike all women as intrinsically worth striving for--as the
exclusion of women from colleges or from the ballot-box--assume great
importance to a woman's self-respect, when she sees in these the plain
survival of the same contempt that once took much grosser forms.
And it must be remembered that in civilized communities the cynics, who
still frankly express this utter contempt, are better friends to women than
the flatterers, who conceal it in the drawing-room, and only utter it
freely in the lecture-room, the club, and the "North American Review."
Contempt at least arouses pride and energy. To be sure, in the face of
history, the contemptuous tone in regard to women seems to me untrue,
unfair, and dastardly; but, like any other extreme injustice, it leads to
reaction. It helps to awaken women from that shallow dream of
self-complacency into which flattery lulls them. There is something tonic
in the manly arrogance of Fitzjames Stephen, who derides the thought that
the marriage contract can be treated as in any sense a contract between
equals; but there is something that debilitates in the dulcet counsel given
by an anonymous gentleman, in an old volume of the "Ladies' Magazine" that
lies before me,--"She ought to present herself as a being made to please,
to love, and to seek support; _a being inferior to man, and near to
angels_."