A notable condition of your society compared with ours is the tardy
advance of your women from that complete subjection to men which
existed in your primary state. It is not surprising that in your
present stage of progress the males of your race should continue to
usurp many of the privileges which came to them as an inheritance from
a savage and brutal ancestry of comparatively recent existence, and
your gradual awakening to a sense of justice in that direction is one
of the many evidences that you are moving along on the lines marked out
for you by the divine law of evolution in thought.
We have found certain active qualities of mind, predominating
everywhere in women, indispensable to a better progress in social
advancement, and great things have been wrought to us by our present
absolute equality of the sexes. The full value of women as factors
in social progress is not known, nor even suspected by you, because
you have never witnessed the experiment of a complete withdrawal of
those restrictions which hold them in subjection; yet, it is a fact
that in what are truly the noblest advances in humanity, they are your
superiors. They have left further behind them the brutalisms of the
past, are deeper touched with your inhumanities, and will go further to
banish them than your men.
Your estimate of the mental capacity of women is singularly erroneous.
The cropping out occasionally of their intellectual achievements, and
the marked increase of such with the multiplication of opportunities,
must have hinted to you that their silence, and apparent inferiority
in the higher mental efforts, were alone due to their long period of
subordination, during which the usages of your society have discouraged
any attempts to enter the field as competitors with men. In the full
swing of opportunity and encouragement allowed them by us, they have
raised themselves to a very high plane, especially in literature,
poetry and art. We owe to them many of our masterpieces in these
attainments, and their aptitude for study and investigation is shown
in the even place they hold with us in science and the professions.
Those feminine qualities of mind which are described by you as heart,
sympathy, sentiment and emotion, and which are generally considered by
you as out of place in affairs of state, are the very ones of which
you have the greatest need in legislation. It is principally through
the feelings mentioned that divine impulses are expressed, and yet
that part of yourselves where they most prevail are excluded from your
councils.
A model of all that is best in your governments is to be found no where
except within the family. The ready helpfulness and equal attention
to the welfare of one another within its precincts, extended into the
motives and aims of your public policies, embrace everything necessary
to a perfect government; yet, you have selected out of the family for
the sole direction of your public affairs its hardest and most selfish
part, its selfishness intensified in its dealings with society beyond
the confines of home, by those absorbing paternal responsibilities--in
great measure due to the subordination of women--which in many ways
interfere with efforts for the good of the whole.
From the nature of things your men are more easily overcome by evil
political forces than your women would be. The latter, being more
closely allied to the interests of the family, in its moral training,
and less willing to sacrifice the benefit of example, are consequently
less corruptible than men. Women have a greater natural affinity for
virtue than men, more unselfishness and a larger concern for the moral
welfare of mankind, exhibited in their more earnest support of religion.
With the enfranchisement of women the humanities of life would enter
more largely into your politics. You have proofs of this in the few
local instances where they have been granted suffrage rights. The
desirable family methods and sentiments, of which they are better
exponents than men, have never failed to come to the surface as
indications of their presence. They have invariably shown a greater
inclination than men to consider the welfare of persons in legislation
as against the welfare alone of property, which has to the present
so monopolized and corrupted your politics. Your legislation in the
hands of men alone has accomplished but little in alleviating the
distresses of humanity. The cold and calculating hand of speculation,
which invests only to call back its capital with high usury, has always
held your law making as a ready instrument for its purposes, and
without loftier views, your governments will continue to miss their
opportunities for benefitting mankind. By the admission of women the
higher sentiments would sooner find a place. It would be the first
step in bringing natural religion and politics together. The present
irrational state of your spiritual beliefs retards the adoption of a
moral code in your systems of government. With you, the State is led to
care for nothing in the interest of morality, except a punishment of
its infractions. It ignores, as no part of its duties, all incentives
to goodness, and in dealing with crime the service of its prevention,
in any other way than punishment, is not considered, principally
because other departments of society have assumed for ages the public
control and promotion of the virtues.
A wider range in the duties of government is opposed by many of you as
objectionable paternalism. Such of you overlook the fact that there can
be no paternalism in a republic. Such a system is co-operation pure
and simple, and neither good nor evil can permanently exist without
the consent of the whole. The nearer you get to complete co-operation,
the more perfect your government becomes. The greatest vices of
misgovernment among you are to be found in granting precedence of one
interest over others, that interest in most cases being a capitalistic
one, often antagonizing the welfare of many individuals. Among your
industrial class, less than one-tenth are employers, whose political
weight has so overcome the majority as to have excluded any direct
legislation in its behalf, and so far as these conditions exist, the
principle of co-operation which should be the corner stone of your
government has not been faithfully carried out. A greater, and in our
view, a more glaring violation of this principle is your exclusion of
women from the rights of representation in your government. You cannot
deny that they have separate interests to care for. You will find upon
examination of your assessment rolls that nearly one-fifth of all your
real and personal estate is owned by them, and of the greater part of
the balance they are interested by matrimonial partnerships with men.
Their property ownerships alone entitle them to the rights of suffrage,
in the denial of which you have no excuse whatever but the usage and
custom of barbaric ages extended to the present, and the prejudice of
a society grown familiar and blinded to its injustice. The struggles
of labor for better recognition, and the agitation for woman suffrage
are evolutionary movements in thought, and in your advanced government
indicate the coming of a more perfect co-operation.
The political subjection of women, and the subjection of labor
helplessly to the law of supply and demand, without legislative
assistance or attention, are at present your most prominent relics of
barbarism. They are both endured because the parties to be benefitted
have never yet enjoyed the privileges due them. Neither one or the
other are consequently aroused to action in their own behalf, and
when these rights are acquired by them it will be more owing to an
enlightened public opinion than to any concerted action by themselves.
It is well known that your slaves had little to do with the abolition
of slavery, and it is therefore not a proper argument against the
granting of these privileges that the persons to be benefitted are not
all clamoring for them; or that, in the case of woman suffrage, a large
majority of women are indifferent and a few opposed.
The subjection of women to men in all the political and business
affairs of life have greatly modified the characters of both. You have
confined the lives of your women to innumerable small details. Her
aspirations and powers have been confined within this narrow scope. The
absorption of their whole minds has been in a set of small ideas and
occupations, from one to the other in continuous exercise. In such a
life profound thought and loftier emotions are not encouraged. They
have but little incentive to the acquirement of general knowledge,
for it can be of no practical use to them, and being early impressed
with a sense of their dependence upon men, their lives are given up to
all the small devices for obtaining power over them in the sensuous
fields of personal adornment and display. Theirs, as well as other
human minds, must be shallowed under such conditions; yet of the two
sexes their duties are the most serious and responsible in shaping the
destinies of mankind. Theirs is the chief part in the forming of minds,
both by heredity and training, and with their limited opportunities
for broadened thought you can look for nothing more in them than those
narrow prejudices, which are in turn transmitted, and which are so
manifest in all your society. This narrowness is one of your most
unhappy traits; it is almost universal among you. Until quite recently
you have only had a man here and there capable and willing to fairly
examine a question which interferes with traditional beliefs and old
modes of thought. You have formed no conception of how much this state
of things is due to the limited mental horizon in which your women
have been confined. The intellects of your best men have not been
multiplied and reproduced as they should have been, owing to the loss
of their strength and fibre in the process of reproduction, through
your average non-high thought producing female minds.
The extended barbaric relations which your women hold to men, though
greatly modified by civilization, has carried with it enough of its
primary feelings and motives to influence a large majority of your
matrimonial engagements, where in truth, it may be said that the
attraction is sensual to a degree not willingly acknowledged, and this
being more and more the case as you descend in the social scale, you
will find here your women going through life helplessly subject to the
lingering brutalism which your customs and laws enforce. It is from
the animalism of these low life marriages that a large sum of your
miseries and crimes are produced. Your inferior men have but little
respect for those subject to their power, and in many cases use a
tyrannical authority over their defenseless wives in gratification of
a mean instinct of humanity. It is the only opportunity perhaps that
brutal husbands enjoy in their whole lives to command a grown person
who is under an obligation by law, custom and religion to obey. Such
a dangerous subjection of one human being to another could only be
excused by a certainty that the welfare of your society depended upon
it, when in fact the condition is one of the obstacles to a better
social state.
During your barbaric period, and for a long time thereafter, women made
no protest against her subordinate position in society. It has been her
place for ages to suffer more than her share of the pains and trials
of human replenishment. She has been taught to believe that this was
her only part in the world’s economy, and men have held her to it by
all the force of ecclesiastical and secular bonds. In all your glorious
modern achievements of science and general knowledge until lately
she has not even been an invited spectator. While the world in front
has been all astir in the movements of progress, she has only been
permitted to listen and wonder at the applause through the rear windows
of the nursery and kitchen; not knowing what it all meant and not
educated to approve, or even to understand, its glorious import. Having
never been accustomed to think on any great subject, she has held to
her traditions after they have been discredited and denied by the
knowledge of her times, and imparting them to childhood in all their
ancient mixture of error has assisted to keep alive those prejudices
among you which have so seriously blocked your advancement. This is
one of the penalties you have paid for your subjection of women. Those
traditions to which she so defiantly clings she will never be persuaded
to discard in her present dependent condition. It may be said to her
honor that they are mistakenly pursued as the only great method within
her reach to indulge her concern for human welfare. You must give her
new duties, and arouse in her new ambitions, before you can expect
her to take her proper place beside man in the march of progress. It
is only within the last two or three generations that a glint of the
outside enlightenment has penetrated her retired circle, and under its
revelation she is already in some quarters demanding her rights. She is
beginning to understand that procreation is not the chief purpose in
life, but only one of its incidentals; that its processes from first to
last are guided exclusively by animal instincts, among which men have
compelled her to sacrifice the best parts of her life; that although
nature has imposed upon her the larger share in these processes, and
all their pains, it has also bestowed upon her capabilities which are
clearly designed for more exalted stations than mere breeders of men
and gratifiers of their animal pleasures, so unduly stimulated on the
earth as the unintellectual and chief attraction of the sexes. You
have perhaps but little conception of how much that reckless sexual
impulse to matrimony, unrestrained by your laws, and encouraged by your
religion, has swollen your ranks of poverty, crime and imbecility. Your
women in their dependence and subjection have but one source of power
at their service, and they have used it for all it was worth. As a
consequence, even to the present period of your civilization, qualities
of mind cuts no figure against the voluptuous animalism of person in
securing husbands than it did in barbaric times.
It is the rarest thing among you to find an intellectually mated
husband and wife qualified by equal education and opportunities to
be in perfect accord and sympathy in the pursuit of high purposes.
Among your higher circles are to be found occasionally one of these
congenial matings, the happiest conditions of matrimonial existence,
where by good breeding and cultivation a man tacitly ignores his
superiority under your unjust usages; but although the wife may
be in sympathy with the ambition and purposes of her husband in
his intellectual labors she is seldom able to assist him owing to
educational differences. With us the wife has more than encouragement
to offer. Her mind becomes a part of her husband’s and increases his
capabilities. Many of our highest achievements in brain work are the
result of such collaboration of two minds working as one. The rare
cases instanced among you are only to be found in your cultivated
circles, below these, in all degrees to the bottom mental equality in
women is oftener the source of contention than happiness, and you must
expect to have this unhappy condition increased until you have granted
them their rightful position in society. So long as their subjection to
men was hopeless and they were taught by their theological superiors to
obey their husbands, and by the same advisors, their separation denied
or discouraged, they meekly submitted to abuse and suffering because
without a hope of relief; but as it is becoming more and more apparent
to you that the subjection of your women is one of the many ancient
fallacies, the gradual reasoning of them out of existence is paving the
way for woman’s liberty.
Nature has designed that women shall only devote a portion of her life
to maternity and its attendant duties. It has set her free of them at a
time when her mind and body are fully capable of most of the avocations
of life. Having fulfilled these great services to mankind, you have
ordained by custom and usage that she shall remain thereafter a mere
unconsidered supernumerary on the world’s stage. In your lower circles
she becomes a helpless drudge in the interests of her children, and
in the higher ones, either an unwelcome retainer in the household of
a daughter, or a more or less constrained member in the family of a
son; but in all of these her lot is a happy one when compared with her
utter desolation in the world when her children have departed from her
by immigration or death. You have given her no part in great affairs,
and she has but little knowledge of or interest in them. They afford
her no entertainment amid her loneliness, and by the narrow training
of her faculties, diverted only by the minor things of life,--its
personal episodes and gossiping incidents--she lives out her remaining
purposeless career. This mere lack of mind expansion has been cited
against her as a sex weakness, but it is safe to predict that if men
had been subject to such conditions, without her deep human sympathies
and her religion, they would have fallen into complete mental
imbecility, and if men for all the ages past had been confined as she
had been to duties requiring no high attainments, the present balance
of mind work could not be shown in their favor.
With us maternity is not allowed to absorb the whole of a woman’s life.
While we accord to her, in consideration of its responsibilities and
pains, an exemption from all the physically exhausting occupations,
she is encouraged in all others to which her capabilities are adapted;
accordingly with us she is an open competitor with men in many lines
of business, some of which are entirely given over to her by general
consent. By multiplying her opportunities in this way, she is not,
as with you in most cases, helpless and dependent. She moves around
among men as their equal, discussing matters of business and questions
of public policy like one of them. She joins them in out door sports
and athletics, in which she often excels, and these relations which
the sexes hold to each other, so differing from yours, entirely
changes their lines of attraction. In their closer association with
us it becomes possible for men and women to thoroughly understand
each other. They do not move in two separate worlds as with you,
artfully disguising their characters and feelings from each other,
wearing a different manner as occasions require for deception. Men
select matrimonial companions with us as they choose friends among
themselves, sympathy of feeling and sincerity being primary motives
of attraction. It is only the general untruthfulness of your society
carried into matrimony which makes it in so many cases unhappy. You
have so inculcated the arts of deception and falsehood into your lives
that they have come at last to be openly pursued as legitimate methods
of thrift. One could not find a better indication of the insincerity
of your society than this metropolitan journal on your table. Here is
a strong editorial commending truth, another a well written homily on
honesty, and on the connecting pages, authorized by the same hands,
hundreds of advertisements in all shades of deception to catch the
unwary. With the gradual decadence of force as a means of preying
upon one another, you have so cultivated falsehood to take its place
that the life of each individual among you is kept constantly on the
watch to protect his interests. Hypocrisy in religion, and deception
in matrimony, belong to those vices which at present disgrace your
civilization, and of which your women must always suffer most so long
as you keep them excluded from a free intercourse in the world’s
affairs.
The difference in our treatment of women has very materially changed
their points of attraction. While we can see no beauty in a woman
without enlightenment, and can find no full companionship in her
without her knowledge of our world and its affairs, these qualities
are not so much considered by you. The idea of a fitness to live
together, as equals in everything, is not entertained, by either the
one or the other of you, in these serious life contracts. Your women
submit their dependence as a virtue, and it is accepted, as well as
their gentleness,--so often assumed,--as a flattering offer to men’s
vanity of power. There is seldom a marriage among you without the
hidden satisfaction of a man with his new entrance into authority. Any
subsequent development of individuality or independence of character
in the women, must result in discord. We meet each other, in such
contracts, on the common ground of equality. There are no political or
domestic rights which both do not equally enjoy; consequently, women
are not tempted into blandishments, and deceptions, for the conquests
of men. Owing to their independence and helpfulness, the marriage
proposal is never accepted as an extreme opportunity, leading them to
take desperate chances, among conditions that are not promising to
happiness. This, you have forced them to do, by closing all other doors
against them.
You may suspect that the admission of women amongst us, in the affairs
of business and government, has coarsened them, and given them a
character of what is known among you as masculinity. That is not so.
Their amiability of manner, instead of being lost, is conveyed and
multiplied among our business methods. All men, among the civilized
nations of the earth, are softened by female association. Outside your
regions of degradation, this has been invariably the case, and you have
proofs of it already in the instances among you where women have taken
a hand in affairs outside the household. When, by superior intelligence
and force of character, they have made their way to success and fame
among the pursuits of men, they have carried with them, in every
case, that soft femininity of which they are naturally endowed. Your
often expressed fears of hardening, or in some injuring them, by an
admission to equal rights, is not entirely sincere. To keep on good
terms with them, and to retain their approbation, you have been led to
conceal from them many of your doubtful business and political methods,
and you hesitate to admit them into these fields with you, not more
from the dread of their contamination, than the exposure it would
bring about of ways, which you have heretofore so carefully concealed.
There is many a successful politician, or business man among you,
who poses before his wife and lady friends as a hero of finance, or
statesmanship, who could not do so, did they share with him a knowledge
of the incidents and manipulations which brought about his success.
Deference to women, and a regard for their esteem beyond that of men,
is a human attribute apparent in your whole history. It has been the
inspiration of your best poetry, and your most stirring romance. In
your middle ages, under what is known among you as chivalry, it has
led you to deeds of virtue in upholding the right, far beyond the
prevailing oppression. How much the conduct of men is modified, and
their evil tendencies checked, by a regard for the good opinion of
women, every man can judge by examination of himself. In how many
dangerous moments has temptation been cast aside, by the fear of evil
report to some fond wife, mother, sister, daughter, or lady friends,
when, to sacrifice the good opinion of men alone, would have been no
bar?
By our greater attention to the laws of health, and our governmental
restriction of unhealthful marriages, which I will describe to you
further on, we have developed a far greater average of physical
perfection in women that exists with you. In connection with this
there are other advantages which our women enjoy beyond yours, which
greatly enhance their personal attractiveness and beauty. Their equal
educational opportunities under our system, of which they are not slow
to avail themselves, the hopefulness and lack of austerity in our
religion, and the interest they are led to exhibit in great affairs,
are so marked in their demeanor and physiognomy as to render them very
different beings. As we estimate beauty, you have only a women here
and there who compares with them. Among your mass of women, the facial
expression of their long subjection, and its attendant conditions are
strikingly observable to us. Features, no matter how perfectly lined,
without the light of cultivation and knowledge, and which are destined
to become, in conjugal association, clouded with the cares of an
overwrought maternity, and dejected by a threatening and superstitious
religion, would have no charms to any member of our society. With us,
their faces reflect the consciousness of absolute equality, and are
illuminated with daily religious duties, which consist, in accordance
with our belief, in making the ways of life pleasant, and its paths
peaceful, and in assisting in all things toward the improvement of
ourselves and society, in the process of which it is our religion to
assist, and in the performance of which, they work with us as equals to
attain.