There is in Boswell's "Life of Johnson" a correspondence which is well
worth reading by both advocates and opponents of woman suffrage. Boswell,
who was of an old Scotch family, had a difference of opinion with his
father about an entailed estate which had descended to them. Boswell wished
the title so adjusted as to cut off all possibility of female heirship. His
father, on the other hand, wished to recognize such a contingency. Boswell
wrote to Johnson in 1776 for advice, urging a series of objections,
physiological and moral, to the inheritance of a family estate by a woman;
though, as he magnanimously admits, "they should be treated with great
affection and tenderness, and always participate of the prosperity of the
family."
Dr. Johnson, for a wonder, took the other side, defended female heirship,
and finally summed up thus: "It cannot but occur that women have natural
and equitable claims as well as men, and these claims are not to be
capriciously or lightly superseded or infringed. When fiefs inspired
military service, it is easily discerned why females could not inherit
them; but the reason is at an end. _As manners make laws, so manners
likewise repeal them_."
This admirable statement should be carefully pondered by those who hold
that suffrage should be only coextensive with military duty. The position
that woman cannot properly vote because she cannot fight for her vote
efficiently is precisely like the position of feudalism and of Boswell,
that she could not properly hold real estate because she could not fight
for it. Each position may have had some plausibility in its day, but the
same current of events has made each obsolete. Those who in these days
believe in giving woman the ballot argue precisely as Dr. Johnson did in
1776. Times have changed, manners have softened, education has advanced,
public opinion now acts more forcibly; and the reference to physical force,
though still implied, is implied more and more remotely. The political
event of the age, the overthrow of American slavery, would not have been
accomplished without the "secular arm" of Grant and Sherman, let us agree:
but neither would it have been accomplished without the moral power of
Garrison the non-resistant, and Harriet Beecher Stowe the woman. When the
work is done, it is unfair to disfranchise any of the participants. Dr.
Johnson was right: "When fiefs [or votes] implied military service, it is
easily discerned why women should not inherit [or possess] them; but the
reason is at an end. As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal
them."
Under the feudal system it would have been absurd that women should hold
real estate, for the next armed warrior could dispossess her. By Gail
Hamilton's reasoning, it is equally absurd now: "One man is stronger than
one woman, and ten men are stronger than ten women; and the nineteen
millions of men in this country will subdue, capture, and execute or expel
the nineteen millions of women just as soon as they set about it." Very
well: why, then, do not all the landless men in a town unite, and take away
the landed property of all the women? Simply because we now live in
civilized society and under a reign of law; because those men's respect for
law is greater than their appetite for property; or, if you prefer, because
even those landless men know that their own interest lies, in the long-run,
on the side of law. It will be precisely the same with voting. When any
community is civilized up to the point of enfranchising women, it will be
civilized up to the point of sustaining their vote, as it now sustains
their property rights, by the whole material force of the community. When
the thing is once established, it will no more occur to anybody that a
woman's vote is powerless because she cannot fight, than it now occurs to
anybody that her title to real estate is invalidated by the same
circumstance.
Woman is in the world; she cannot be got rid of: she must be a serf or an
equal; there is no middle ground. We have outgrown the theory of serfdom in
a thousand ways, and may as well abandon the whole. Women have now a place
in society: their influence will be exerted, at any rate, in war and in
peace, legally or illegally; and it had better be exerted in direct,
legitimate, and responsible methods, than in ways that are dark, and by
tricks that have not even the merit of being plain.