the ground. “But consider the danger of introducing the sexual influence
into legislation!” ... Then we are sure to be confronted with the case
of Miss Vinnie Ream, the sculptor. See how that beguiling damsel cajoled
all Congress into buying poor statues! they say. If one woman could do
so much, how would it be with one hundred? Precisely the Irishman’s
argument against the use of pillows: he had put one feather on a rock,
and found it a very uncomfortable support. Grant, for the sake of
argument, that Miss Ream gave us poor art; but what gave her so much
power? Plainly, that she was but a single feather. Congress being
composed exclusively of men, the mere fact of her sex gave her an
exceptional and dangerous influence. Fill a dozen of the seats in
Congress with women, and that danger at least will be cancelled. The
taste in art may be no better; but an artist will no more be selected
for being a pretty girl than now for being a pretty boy. So in all such
cases. Here, as everywhere, it is the advocate of woman suffrage who
wishes to recognize the fact of sex, and guard against its perils.
It is precisely so in education. Believing boys and girls to be unlike,
and yet seeing them to be placed by the Creator on the same planet and
in the same family, we hold it safer to follow his method. As they are
born to interest each other, to stimulate each other, to excite each
other, it seems better to let this impulse work itself off in a natural
way,—to let in upon it the fresh air and the daylight, instead of
attempting to suppress and destroy it. In a mixed school, as in a
family, the fact of sex presents itself as an unconscious, healthy,
mutual stimulus. It is in the separate schools that the healthy relation
vanishes, and the thought of sex becomes a morbid and diseased thing.
This observation first occurred to me when a pupil and a teacher in
boys’ boarding-schools years ago: there was such marked superiority as
to sexual refinement in the day-scholars, who saw their sisters and the
friends of their sisters every day. All later experience of our
public-school system has confirmed this opinion. It is because I believe
the distinction of sex to be momentous, that I dread to see the sexes
educated apart.
The truth of the whole matter is, that Nature will have her
rights—innocently if she can, guiltily if she must; and it is a little
amusing that the writer of an ingenious paper on the other side, called
“Sex in Politics,” in an able New York journal, puts our case better
than I can put it, before he gets through, only that he is then speaking
of wealth, not women: “Anybody who considers seriously what is meant by
the conflict between labor and capital, of which we are only just
witnessing the beginning, and what is to be done _to give money
legitimately that influence on legislation which it now exercises
illegitimately_, must acknowledge at once that the next generation will
have a thorny path to travel.” The Italics are my own. Precisely what
this writer wishes to secure for money, we claim for the disfranchised
half of the human race,—open instead of secret influence; the English
tradition instead of the French; women as rulers, not as kings’
mistresses; women as legislators, not merely as lobbyists; women
employing in legitimate form that power which they will otherwise
illegitimately wield. This is all our demand.
XCI.
HOW WILL IT RESULT?
“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 as surely as
women vote, we shall have occasionally women politicians, women
corruptionists, and women demagogues. Conceding, for the sake of
courtesy, that none such now exist, they will be born as
instantaneously, 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.
XCII.
“I HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS I WANT.”
When Dr. Johnson had published his English Dictionary, and was asked by
a lady how he chanced to make a certain mistake that she pointed out, he
answered, “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.” I always feel disposed to
make the same comment on the assertion of any woman that she has all the
rights she wants. For every woman is, or may be, or might have been, a
mother. And when she comes to know that even now, in many parts of the
Union, a married mother has no legal right to her child, I should think
her tongue would cleave to her mouth before she would utter those
foolish words again.
All the things I ever heard or read against slavery did not fix in my
soul such a hostility to it as a single scene in a Missouri slave-market
some twenty-five years ago. As I sat there, a purchaser came in to buy a
little girl to wait on his wife. Three little sisters were brought in,
from eight to twelve years old: they were mulattoes, with sweet, gentle
manners; they had evidently been taken good care of, and their
pink-calico frocks were clean and whole. The gentleman chose one of
them, and then asked her, good-naturedly enough, if she did not wish to
go with him. She burst into tears, and said, “I would rather stay with
my mother.” But her tears were as powerless, of course, as so many salt
drops from the ocean.
That was all. But all the horrors of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the stories
told me by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs I afterwards saw by dozens
among colored recruits, did not impress me as did that hour in the jail.
The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking
child passed before me in fancy. It seemed to me that a man must be
utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to
overthrow such a system. It seemed to me that the woman who could
tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be true, could not be
pure, or must be fearfully and grossly ignorant.
You acquiesce, fair lady. You say it was horrible indeed, but, thank
God! it is past. Past? Is it so? Past, if you please, as to the law of
slavery, but, as to the legal position of woman, still a fearful
reality. It is not twelve years since a scene took place in a Boston
court-room, before Chief-Justice Chapman, which was worse, in this
respect, than that scene in St. Louis, inasmuch as the mother was
present when the child was taken away, and the wrong was sanctioned by
the highest judicial officer of the State. Two little girls, who had
been taken from their mother by their guardian, their father being dead,
had taken refuge with her against his wishes; and he brought them into
court under a writ of _habeas corpus_, and the court awarded them to him
as against their mother. “The little ones were very much affected,” says
the Boston Herald, “by the result of the decision which separated them
from their mother; and force was required to remove them from the
court-room. The distress of the mother was also very evident.”
There must have been some special reason, you say, for such a seeming
outrage: she was a bad woman. No: she was “a lady of the highest
respectability.” No charge was made against her: but, being left a
widow, she had married again; and for that, and that only, so far as
appears, the court took from her the guardianship of her own
children,—bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh, the children for
whom she had borne the deepest physical agony of womanhood,—and awarded
them to somebody else.
You say, “But her second husband might have misused the children.”
Might? So the guardian might, and that where they had no mother to
protect them. Had the father been left a widower, he might have made a
half-dozen successive marriages, have brought stepmother after
stepmother to control these children, and no court could have
interfered. The father is recognized before the law as the natural
guardian of the children. The mother, even though she be left a widow,
is not. The consequence is a series of outrages of which only a few
scattered instances come before the public; just as in slavery, out of a
hundred little girls sold away from their parents, only one case might
ever be mentioned in any newspaper.
This case led to an alteration of the law in Massachusetts, but the same
thing might yet happen in some States of the Union. The possibility of a
single such occurrence shows that there is still a fundamental wrong in
the legal position of woman. And the fact that most women do not know
it, only deepens the wrong—as Dr. Channing said of the contentment of
the Southern slaves. The mass of men, even of lawyers, pass by such
things, as they formerly passed by the facts of slavery.
There is no lasting remedy for these wrongs, except to give woman the
political power to protect herself. There never yet existed a race, nor
a class, nor a sex, which was noble enough to be trusted with political
power over another sex, or class, or race. It is for self-defence that
woman needs the ballot. And, in view of a single such occurrence as I
have given, I charge that woman who professes to have “all the rights
she wants,” either with a want of all feeling of motherhood, or with
“ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.”
XCIII.
“SENSE ENOUGH TO VOTE.”
There is one special point on which men seem to me rather insincere
toward women. When they speak to women, the objection made to their
voting is usually that they are too angelic. But when men talk to each
other, the general assumption is, that women should not vote because
they have not brains enough—or, as old Theophilus Parsons wrote a
century ago, have not “a sufficient acquired discretion.”
It is an important distinction. Because, if women are too angelic to
vote, they can only be fitted for it by becoming more wicked, which is
not desirable. On the other hand, if there is no objection but the want
of brains, then our public schools are equalizing that matter fast
enough. Still, there are plenty of people who have never got beyond this
objection. Listen to the first discussion that you encounter among men
on this subject, wherever they may congregate. Does it turn upon the
question of saintliness, or of brains? Let us see.
I travelled the other day upon the Boston and Providence Railroad with a
party of mechanics, mostly English and Scotch. They were discussing this
very question, and, with the true English habit, thought it was all a
matter of property. Without it a woman certainly should not vote, they
said; but they all favored, to my surprise, the enfranchisement of women
of property. “As a general rule,” said the chief speaker, “a woman
that’s got property has got sense enough to vote.”
There it was! These foreigners, who had found their own manhood by
coming to a land which not only the Pilgrim Fathers but the Pilgrim
Mothers had settled, and subdued, and freed for them, were still ready
to disfranchise most of the daughters of those mothers, on the ground
that they had not “sense enough to vote.” I thanked them for their blunt
truthfulness, so much better than the flattery of most of the
native-born.
My other instance shall be a conversation overheard in a railway-station
near Boston, between two intelligent citizens, who had lately listened
to Anna Dickinson. “The best of it was,” said one, “to see our minister
introduce her.”—“Wonder what the Orthodox churches would have said to
that ten years ago?” said the other. “Never mind,” was the answer.
“Things have changed. What I think is, it’s all in the bringing up. If
women were brought up just as men are, they’d have just as much brains.”
(Brains again!) “That’s what Beecher says. Boys are brought up to do
business, and take care of themselves: that’s where it is. Girls are
brought up to dress and get married. Start ’em alike! That’s what
Beecher says. Start ’em alike, and see if girls haven’t got just as much
brains.”
“Still harping on my daughter,” and on the condition of her brains! It
is on this that the whole question turns, in the opinion of many men.
Ask ten men their objections to woman suffrage. One will plead that
women are angels. Another fears discord in families. Another points out
that women cannot fight,—he himself being very likely a non-combatant.
Another quotes St. Paul for this purpose,—not being, perhaps, in the
habit of consulting that authority on any other point. But with the
others, very likely, every thing will turn on the question of brains.
They believe, or think they believe, that women have not sense enough to
vote. They may not say so to women, but they habitually say it to men.
If you wish to meet the common point of view of masculine voters, you
must find it here.
It is fortunate that it is so. Of all points, this is the easiest to
settle; for every intelligent woman, even if she be opposed to woman
suffrage, helps to settle it. Every good lecture by a woman, every good
book written by one, every successful business enterprise carried on,
helps to decide the question. Every class of girls that graduates from
every good school helps to pile up the argument on this point. And the
vast army of women, constituting nine out of ten of the teachers in our
American schools, may appeal as logically to their pupils, and settle
the argument based on brains. “If we had sense enough to educate you,”
they may say to each graduating class of boys, “we have sense enough to
vote beside you.”
XCIV.
AN INFELICITOUS EPITHET.
“The ladies actively working to secure the co-operation of their sex
in caucuses and citizens’ conventions are not actuated by love of
notoriety, and are not, therefore, to be classed with the absolute
woman suffragists.”—_Boston Daily Transcript_, Sept. 1, 1879.
When the eloquent colored abolitionist, Charles Remond, once said upon
the platform that George Washington, having been a slaveholder, was a
villain, Wendell Phillips remonstrated by saying, “Charles, the epithet
is not felicitous.” Reformers are apt to be pelted with epithets quite
as ill-chosen. How often has the charge figured in history, that they
were “actuated by love of notoriety”! The early Christians, it was
generally believed, took a positive pleasure in being thrown to the
lions, under the influence of this motive; and at a later period there
was a firm conviction that the Huguenots consented readily to being
broken on the wheel, or sawed in pieces between two boards, feeling
amply rewarded by the pleasure of being talked about. During the whole
anti-slavery movement, while the abolitionists were mobbed, fined, and
imprisoned,—while they were tabooed by good society, depleted of their
money, kept out of employment, checked in their advancement, by the mere
fact of their abolitionism,—there never was a moment when their sole
motive was not considered by many persons to be the love of notoriety.
Why should the advocates of woman suffrage expect any different
treatment now?
It is not necessary, in order to dispose of this charge, to claim that
all reformers are heroes or saints. Even in the infancy of any reform,
it takes along with it some poor material; and unpleasant traits are
often developed by the incidents of the contest. Doubtless many
reformers attain to a certain enjoyment of a fight, at last: it is one
of the dangerous tendencies which those committed to this vocation must
resist. But, so far as my observation goes, those who engage in reform
for the sake of notoriety generally hurt the reform so much that they
render it their chief service when they leave it; and this happy
desertion usually comes pretty early in their career. The besetting sin
of reformers is not, so far as I can judge, the love of notoriety, but
the love of power and of flattery within their own small circle,—a
temptation quite different from the other, both in its origin and its
results.
Notoriety comes so soon to a reformer, that its charms, whatever they
may be, soon pall upon the palate, just as they do in case of a popular
poet or orator, who is so used to seeing his name in print that he
hardly notices it. I suppose there is no young person so modest that he
does not, on first seeing his name in a newspaper, cut out the passage
with a certain tender solicitude, and perhaps purchase a few extra
copies of the fortunate journal. But when the same person has been
battered by a score or two of years in successive unpopular reforms, I
suppose that he not only would leave the paper uncut or unpurchased, but
would hardly take the pains even to correct a misstatement, were it
asserted that he had inherited a fortune or murdered his grandmother.
The moral is, that the love of notoriety is soon amply filled, in a
reformer’s experience, and that he will not, as a rule, sacrifice home
and comfort, money and friends, without some stronger inducement. This
is certainly true of most of the men who have interested themselves in
this particular movement, the “weak-minded men,” as the reporters, with
witty antithesis, still describe them; and it must be much the same with
the “strong-minded women” who share their base career.
And it is to be remembered, above all, that, considered as an engine for
obtaining notoriety, the woman suffrage agitation is a great waste of
energy. The same net result could have been won with far less
expenditure in other ways. There is not a woman connected with it who
could not have achieved far more real publicity as a manager of charity
fairs or as a sensation letter-writer. She could have done this, too,
with far less trouble, without the loss of a single “genteel” friend,
without forfeiting a single social attention, without having a single
ill-natured thing said about her—except perhaps that she bored people, a
charge to which the highest and lowest forms of prominence are equally
open. Nay, she might have done even more than this, if notoriety was her
sole aim: for she might have become a “variety” minstrel or a female
pedestrian; she might have written a scandalous novel; she might have
got somebody to aim at her that harmless pistol, which has helped the
fame of so many a wandering actress, while its bullet somehow never hits
any thing but the wall. All this she might have done, and obtained a
notoriety beyond doubt. Instead of this, she has preferred to prowl
about, picking up a precarious publicity by giving lectures to willing
lyceums, writing books for eager publishers, organizing schools, setting
up hospitals, and achieving for her sex something like equal rights
before the law. Either she has shown herself, as a seeker after
notoriety, to be a most foolish or ill-judging person,—or else, as was
said of Washington’s being a villain, “the epithet is not felicitous.”
XCV.
THE ROB ROY THEORY.
The Saturday Review, in an article which denounces all equality in
marriage-laws and all plans of woman-suffrage, admits frankly the
practical obstacles in the way of the process of voting. “Possibly the
presence of women as voters would tend still further to promote order
than has been done by the ballot.” It plants itself wholly on one
objection, which goes far deeper, thus:—
“If men choose to say that women are not their equals, women have
nothing to do but to give in. Physical force, the ultimate basis of
all society and all government, must be on the side of the men; and
those who have the key of the position will not consent permanently
to abandon it.”
It is a great pleasure when an opponent of justice is willing to fall
back thus frankly upon the Rob Roy theory:—
“The good old rule
Sufficeth him, the simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.”
It is easy, I think, to show that the theory is utterly false, and that
the basis of civilized society is not physical force, but, on the
contrary, brains.