"It would be a great convenience, my hearers," said old Parson Withington
of Newbury, "if the moral of a fable could only be written at the beginning
of it, instead of the end. But it never is." Commonly the only thing to be
done is to get hold of a few general principles, hold to those, and trust
that all will turn out well. No matter how thoroughly a reform may have
been discussed,--negro emancipation or free-trade, for instance,--it is a
step in the dark at last, and the detailed results never turn out to be
precisely according to the programme.
An "esteemed correspondent," who has written some of the best things yet
said in America in behalf of the enfranchisement of woman, writes privately
to express some solicitude, since, as she thinks, we are not ready for it
yet. "I am convinced," she writes, "of the abstract right of women to vote;
but all I see of the conduct of the existing women, into whose hands this
change would throw the power, inclines me to hope that this power will not
be conceded till education shall have prepared a class of women fit to take
the responsibilities."
Gradual emancipation, in short!--for fear of trusting truth and justice to
take care of themselves. Who knew, when the negroes were set free, whether
they would at first use their freedom well, or ill? Would they work? would
they avoid crimes? would they justify their freedom? The theory of
education and preparation seemed very plausible. Against that, there was
only the plain theory which Elizabeth Heyrick first announced to
England,--"Immediate, unconditional emancipation." "The best preparation
for freedom is freedom." What was true of the negroes then is true of women
now.
"The lovelier traits of womanhood," writes earnestly our correspondent,
"simplicity, faith, guilelessness, unfit them to conduct public affairs,
where one must deal with quacks and charlatans.... We are not all at once
'as gods, knowing good and evil;' and the very innocency of our lives, and
the habits of pure homes, unfit us to manage a certain class who will flock
to this standard."
But the basis of all republican government is in the assumption that good
is ultimately stronger than evil. If we once abandon this, our theory has
gone to pieces, at any rate. If we hold to it, good women are no more
helpless and useless than good men. The argument that would here
disfranchise women has been used before now to disfranchise clergymen. I
believe that in some States they are still disfranchised; and, if they are
not, it is partly because good is found to be as strong as evil, after all,
and partly because clergymen are not found to be so angelically good as to
be useless. I am very confident that both these truths will be found to
apply to women also.
Whatever else happens, we may be pretty sure that one thing will. The first
step towards the enfranchisement of women will blow to the winds the
tradition of the angelic superiority of women. Just so surely as women
vote, we shall occasionally have women politicians, women corruptionists,
and women demagogues. Conceding, for the sake of courtesy, that none such
now exist, they will be born as inevitably, after enfranchisement, as the
frogs begin to pipe in the spring. Those who doubt it ignore human nature;
and, if they are not prepared for this fact, they had better consider it in
season, and take sides accordingly. In these pages, at least, they have
been warned.
What then? Suppose women are not "as gods, knowing good and evil:" they are
not to be emancipated as gods, but as fallible human beings. They are to
come out of an ignorant innocence, that may be only weakness, into a wise
innocence that will be strength. It is too late to remand American women
into a Turkish or Jewish tutelage: they have emerged too far not to come
farther. In a certain sense, no doubt, the butterfly is safest in the
chrysalis. When the soft thing begins to emerge, the world certainly seems
a dangerous place; and it is hard to say what will be the result of the
emancipation. But when she is once half out, there is no safety for the
pretty creature but to come the rest of the way, and use her wings.