WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE PROFESSIONS.
The sixth count in the Declaration of Sentiments reads: "He closes against
her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most
honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is
not known."
That statement contains another evidence of the untruthfulness of a half
truth. First, it is an unwarrantable assumption, of which no proof is
offered, that man had closed against woman any avenue to wealth and
distinction, or that he felt toward woman the selfish and monopolizing
spirit implied in such accusation. Second, but three of the avenues, all
of which he was said to have closed against her, are mentioned. Whatever
may be the truth about those three, the no less honorable, although less
arduous, avenues to wealth and distinction were as open to her as to him.
As educator, author, artist, in painting, music, and sculpture, she could
freely attain to the same coveted end. The Suffragists did not decry man's
"monopoly" of the honorable and profitable but severe professions of civil
engineering, seamanship, mining engineering, lighthouse keeping and
inspecting, signal service, military and naval duty, and the like. These,
and the drudgery of the world's business and commerce, man was welcome to
keep.
But, most of all, this Suffrage indictment contains, as do all the rest,
another tacit untruth when it assumes that woman's work has not in the
past been as honorable to herself and as profitable to the world as has
that of man. By setting up a false standard for achievement, and
attempting to make everything conform to it, the Suffrage movement has
done incalculable harm. It is not progressing to push into an unwonted
place merely because it is unwonted, and because you can push in. It is
progress to enter it in response both to an inward and an outward need.
When the first Suffrage convention had adopted the Declaration of
Sentiments, Lucretia Mott offered a resolution, which was also adopted,
declaring that "the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous
and untiring efforts of men and women for the overthrow of the monopoly of
the pulpit, and for the securing to woman an equal participation with men
in the various trades, professions, and commerce."
The most remarkable thing about this resolution is, that it was
promulgated by a woman who was at that very time a gifted and eloquent
preacher, so that to her, who cared for it so highly, man had not closed
that avenue to wealth and distinction. As she had a husband to support her
and her children, she was much more free to attain those desirable ends
than most of the ministers who were preaching for humanity's sake and the
gospel's, at salaries ranging from five hundred to two thousand dollars a
year, and who had families to support out of their slender pittance. If
any woman was in a position to "overthrow the monopoly of the pulpit,"
surely she was. Stately and beautiful of mien, fervent in spirit, eloquent
in language, one who had learned the Hebrew and Greek that she might read
the Scriptures in the original tongues, what did she lack? Not only was no
pulpit of another faith than hers ever opened to her, but more than half
those of her own form of worship were closed against hearing the inner
voice as interpreted by her. In that schism that rent the Society of
Friends as no other religious body has ever been rent, she threw in her
fortunes, or led others to throw in their fortunes (for she had been
preaching nine years when the division occurred), with that portion that
placed the "inner light" above all Scripture. When the Friends came from
the London meeting to testify against the teachings of the schismatics,
they besought Lucretia Mott to return to the faith of her childhood, but
she resisted from conviction that she was right. Elias Hicks, her leader,
had instigated the members of his congregation to refuse to pay their
taxes to the Government during and following the war of 1812, on the
ground that they represented an encroachment of the secular power on
Christian liberty, and were used to support war, which was sin. Lucretia
Mott preached that "no Christian can consistently uphold a government
based on the sword, or relying on that as an ultimate resort." The country
has always suffered from this doctrine. The Tory Quakers of the Revolution
called publicly upon Friends "to withstand and refuse to submit" "to
instructions and ordinances" not warranted by "that happy Constitution
under which we have long enjoyed tranquillity and peace." Thomas Paine,
whose parents were Friends, in "The Crisis," says: "The common phrase of
these people is, 'Our principles are peace.' To which it may be replied,
'and your practices are the reverse.'" Another striking instance of this
disagreement between principle and practice is seen in Lucretia Mott's
behavior. From the platform where she demanded the ballot for woman, she
proclaimed that all voting was sinful. That bodies of people who so held
should continue to enjoy the Government's protection of themselves and
their property, through the sacrifices made by those who carried on
government by giving willingly their money and their strength, is a proof
of our wonderful freedom.
Elizabeth Fry and most of the English Friends would not mention the name
of Mrs. Mott. Mrs. Stanton once asked her what she would have done after
the Hicksite faction had been voted out of meeting at the World's
Conventicle of Friends in London, if the spirit had moved her to speak
when the chairman and members had moved that she be silent, and she
answered, "Where the spirit of God is, there is liberty." This is the
liberty of anarchy, and it had its due weight in the Suffrage movement.
Mrs. Stanton, in the course of a eulogy pronounced at Mrs. Mott's funeral,
said: "The 'vagaries' of the Anti-slavery struggle, in which Lucretia Mott
took a leading part, have been coined into law; and the 'wild fantasies'
of the Abolitionists are now the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
amendments to the National Constitution.... The 'infidel' Hicksite
principles that shocked Christendom are now the cornerstones of the
liberal religious movement in this country." The vagaries of the Anti-
slavery struggle are exactly those that were _not_ coined into law. The
wild fantasies of the Abolitionists were rejected by those whose sober
judgment and steady courage made possible the last constitutional
amendments. And no truer is it that the "infidel" Hicksite principles are
the corner-stones of any genuine movement of Christian liberality. While
the Friends mourn that infidelity and Roman Catholicism have made inroads
upon their progress in some places, they have steadily advanced in the
other direction from that pointed out by Lucretia Mott. Their educated and
paid ministry, their First-day schools, their missions, home and foreign,
their music, and simple but set forms, their reports to London of
"conversion and profession of faith," and their rapid growth where these
things have taken place, all indicate the truth of this. The large meeting
at Swartmore College, in the summer of 1896, is another evidence.
The proportion of woman preachers to the different denominations is as
follows: The Hicksite-Quakers (as against the orthodox) have the most. So
have the German Methodists (United Brethren) as against the orthodox
Methodists. The Free-Will Baptists, as against the orthodox Baptists,
ordain more woman preachers. The Universalist preceded the Unitarian
church in so doing. The Presbyterian and Congregational churches, as a
body, have taken no steps in that direction. In the Congregational
denomination any separate body of worshippers can ordain whom it sees fit.
The Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches have orders which band women as
religious workers and remove them more or less from the ordinary life of
the world, but they have taken no steps toward ordaining women for the
ministry.
We may note that the denominations that have been foremost in building
colleges for woman, and in promoting her general advancement in
professions and trades, as well as in social and philanthropic matters,
are the ones whose pulpits she has not entered. They are also those by
which she is most cordially welcomed to speak on all Christian and
philanthropic themes. Where her influence is most broadly felt, she has
not been taken out of the ordinary life that she was meant to share and to
sway. It was from the great denominations that she first crossed the
threshold of home to carry home love and principle to foreign countries.
In missions she has served in every conceivable form of public
benevolence, side by side with man. Real reforms work from within. If the
time comes when the other branches of the Christian Church feel as do a
few at present, that the exercise of the ministerial office is consistent
and appropriate for woman, one that compels no sacrifice of the life and
work that are, and must be, peculiarly her own, the ballot will not be
needed to place her or to keep her in their pulpits. Whatever may be
thought of the profession of the ministry for woman, it must certainly be
acknowledged that it is the one farthest removed from political thought
and action. If any class of women should be glad to be exempted from the
vote, it is the woman preachers.
In her book, "Common Sense," Dr. Jacobi says: "The profession of medicine
was thrown open to women when, in 1849, the year following the Revolution,
and the passage of the Married Woman's Property Rights Bill, New York
State for the first time, at Geneva, conferred a medical diploma on a
woman, Elizabeth Blackwell. She was, or rather she became, the sister-in-
law of Lucy Stone; and the work of these two women, the one in medicine,
the other for equal suffrage, constituted the two necessary halves of one
idea."
In 1848, when the first Suffrage convention was held, twelve women were
studying medicine in different parts of the country. Dr. Elizabeth
Blackwell was studying that year in Geneva, and when members of the
convention wrote to congratulate her, she said, in the course of her
reply: "Much has been said of the oppression that woman suffers; man is
reproached with being unjust, tyrannical, jealous. I do not so read human
life." Dr. Blackwell estimates that within ten years of that time three
hundred women had been graduated in medicine. In an address delivered in
1889 before the London Medical School for women in London, Dr. Blackwell
said: "I believe that the department of medicine in which the great and
beneficent influence of women may be specially exerted is that of the
family physician. Not as specialists, but as the trusted guides and wise
counsellors in all that concerns the physical welfare of the family, they
will find their most congenial field of labor." All this was the exact
opposite of the spirit that prevailed in the Association with which Lucy
Stone was identified. She declaimed against man's injustice; and when it
was proposed, after the civil war had taught the power of organization, to
have a constitution and by-laws for the Suffrage movement, Lucy Stone said
that she had felt the "thumb-screws and the soul-screws," and did not wish
to be placed under them again. "Our duty is merely agitation." After a
stormy quarrel, she left to form a new association in New England.
Elizabeth Blackwell's name is conspicuous for its absence from Suffrage
annals. In the letter referred to she wrote: "The exclusion and constraint
woman suffers is not the result of purposed injury or premeditated insult.
It has arisen naturally, without violence, because woman has desired
nothing more, has not felt the soul too large for the body. But when
woman, with matured strength, with steady purpose, presents her lofty
claim, all barriers will give way, and man will welcome, with a thrill of
joy, the new birth of his sister spirit."
The way in which barriers have fallen, and have been removed by men, in
order that woman may enter the noble profession of medicine, is one of the
strange stories of this half century. The Civil War, which taught us so
much, helped greatly in this. There were some genuine obstacles in the way
of woman's education in medicine, and that they were genuine is proved by
the fact that, as rapidly as arrangements can be made so that woman can
have thorough training by and with her own sex, this is being done. This
trend is in opposition to Suffrage action. Dr. Clemence Lozier, who was so
long at the head of the Suffrage association in New York City, was the
most persistent urger of mixed clinics, and marched in to them at
Bellevue, at the head of her classes, defying the delicate instincts of
both men and women.
The struggle of the "new" school, which was really as old as Hippocrates,
who said four hundred years before Christ that some remedies acted by the
rule of "contraries," and some by the rule of "similarity," was long and
hard compared with that of the entrance of woman upon the practice of
medicine, although the latter involved sex questions and the former only
forms, and professional prejudice did not die with woman's adoption of it.
Dr. Jacobi says: "We are perfectly well aware that industrial and
professional competition are entirely different matters from popular
sovereignty. But when we find the same instincts aroused, the same
opposition excited, the same arguments advanced, and the same
determination manifested, by trades unions, to exclude women from trades,
by learned societies to exclude them from professions, by universities to
exclude them from learning, and by voters to exclude them from the polls,
we cannot avoid asking whether the difference in the cases is not balanced
by the identity in the mental attitude of the opponents." The best trades
unions have admitted women to their protective and wage associations, or,
better still, have helped them to form their own; the worst trades unions,
the socialistic and anarchistic, have claimed for them the right to vote.
The learned societies are admitting them professionally as fast as they
make themselves worthy. The men who hold out against their admission to
men's universities are precisely the class of men who have been most
active in assisting to found for them equal colleges of their own, and
they are also the men who are most strenuous against their admission to
the polls. In medicine, while co-education is deemed better than
ignorance, the tendency is to separate the sexes in study as fast as
facilities can be made equal. The opponents of woman's progress and those
of woman suffrage are of opposite classes, and their mental attitudes are
entirely different. How much harm the struggle for "popular sovereignty"
for women has done in hindering the progress of industrial and
professional competition, can be judged somewhat by the success of the
latter and the failure of the former in the highest fields. It is a
significant fact that women do not avail themselves of opportunities open
to them in the professions to the extent that it has been claimed they
would. The medical examination advertised in January, 1896, by the New
York State Civil Service Commission for woman candidates, failed for lack
of applicants, although the salaries of women in the State hospitals range
from $1,000 to $1,500 a year.
The entrance of woman upon the legal profession raised constitutional
questions as to the enactment of law; and so here, as in the matter of the
school suffrage, we see how carefully republicanism guarded the post at
which must stand the sentinels of liberty. If it might involve law-
enforcement, woman could not practise law or vote on the school question;
but the Supreme Court of the United States decided that "the practising of
any profession violates no law of the Federal Constitution."
The study of law must prove of great benefit to woman, though here again
it has already been shown that it is possible that the greatest practical
advantage she will derive from entrance into this noble profession will be
from acquiring knowledge of her country's laws, and how to take care of
her own property. Widows and unmarried women have almost invariably placed
their moneyed interests in the hands of a man, when it would have been
better for all concerned that they should have spent some patient thought
on the details of their own affairs. The first woman who was admitted to
the bar in this State (New York) was a teacher in the Albany Normal
College, and she still remains there, and the women's classes for legal
study in New York City have been largely composed of those who had no
intention of claiming admittance to the bar. That women can and do enter
all these professions with credit to themselves, and that they thus
enhance the feeling of pride in their sex, which is a strong impulse with
women, is matter for profound congratulation, and is evidence that the
animus of the Suffrage movement is not that which stirs society.