Women certainly have need of protection; each has a life dear to her, and honor which is dearer to her than life. In this respect she has a greater need than men. Most women, also, have property of some kind, and we are increasingly recognizing their right to control this for themselves; hence they need property protection the same as men. We do not need to think of Mrs. Sage, Mrs. Harriman, Miss Gould or Mrs. Green, in this connection, for in every community we now have many women who are immediately responsible for large property interests which new legislation might affect most seriously.
In matters of institutional regulation by government, women are at least as vitally interested as men. In all that touches the family, marriage, or divorce, women have more at stake than men; and there are as many wives as husbands involved. The schools are also nearer to women than to men; more girls than boys attend them; more women are teachers; and more women than men are interested parents of school children. The church is also more vital to women to-day than to men. On the side of industries, it is clear that our 8,000,000 independent wage-earning women have a desperate stake in all governmental action touching the regulation of working conditions. In whatever concerns general sanitation, safe water, and pure foods, all are equally interested who must breathe and eat to live. Surely the need of women for political protection is quite as great as that of men.
In the matter of forming political judgments, not even the wisest men are beyond improvement. International affairs, monetary systems, the best way of raising taxes, and similar problems, often divide the male electorate pretty evenly into rival parties. Since both cannot be right, a great deal of poor political thinking must be done by the present body of voters. Meantime, women are showing their ability to deal intelligently with all sorts of subjects in our educational institutions, in business and in social life. Their judgments command respect in every other field; and it is hard to see why they could not apply their powers to political questions.
We must remember, too, that during these last years the field of political life has been rapidly broadening, through the awakening of social consciousness among the people. To concern one's self with politics now is to be interested in good market facilities, in rapid transit for cities, in recreation centers for children, in honest labelling of food products, in reformation of criminals, in preventing marriage among the unfit, and in a hundred similar matters. Here women will doubtless bring us a strong addition to our political efficiency. They have long been considered the natural directors of social life and, in spite of being disfranchised, they mainly handle such matters at present. Now that these subjects are being brought into the political field, women should follow them there, as they have followed their industries from the homes into the factories. There is no reason to believe that their judgments will be less sound than those of their brothers and husbands.
Of course, women's knowledge of means and methods is much less than that of men in their own class. Not only have they not participated in political life, but they have been steadily warned away from that particular tree of knowledge. Yet the present generation of women has gone through the same preliminary education in schools with its brothers; and many women in high schools and colleges have made a more extended study of political institutionalism. Still more important, more than a million women have been educating themselves for some years in this direction through voluntary associations of some kind; while in most States they have had some political practice through limited suffrage, and in a few States full experience.
In selecting representatives to carry out their will, women have certain obvious defects of temperament and training. Having been brought up for generations to judge men only as providers of sustenance and fathers of children, they must at first find it difficult to consider candidates impersonally. Still, their general morality and their standards of right are probably superior to those of men, and they are more intolerant of faults, and they find it harder to compromise on matters of character than do men. One can hardly believe that 1,700 women could be found among the respectable, church-going, American-born residents in any county of America, who would sell their votes, year after year, as that number of men voters has recently confessed to doing in Adams County, Ohio. In fact, Judge Blair says: "There was one class of the population which rebelled against the practice. It was the womanhood of Adams County, which had never become reconciled to the custom, and whose continual hostility has resulted finally, I hope, in its abolishment."[46]
[46] Seventeen Hundred Rural Vote-Sellers, by A.Z. Blair, McClure's Magazine, November, 1911.
Of the need of women for the training which participation in political life gives there can be no doubt. Their lives have always been directly dependent upon other individuals, and they are prone to think in small details. Any training which extends the horizon of their interests and enables them to deal more largely with these details will fit them better for living in a world where industrial, business and social changes are so rapidly merging details in larger wholes. Experience in selecting candidates for public office would also do much to broaden women's judgments of life, and would help to break down the pettiness which sometimes characterizes their personal relations.
In the case of women, the community has a double reason for desiring that they shall develop political judgments and become acquainted with political methods. It is not only that they may share in the general intelligence and carry their fair part of the political burdens; but they have become the teachers, both in homes and schools, of the oncoming generation of male voters. We no longer live in small communities where children can see the simple processes of government operating around them, but in a complex civilization where it must all be interpreted to them, and mainly by women. Many boys who complete our elementary schools never work a day under the direction of a man. In the homes, busy fathers increasingly turn over the training of children to their wives. How can these women train safe citizens for the future if they do not understand the processes involved well enough to use them themselves?
Meantime the old arguments against woman suffrage are too outworn to need serious attention. In the past decades our civilization has become so complex, with so many groups carrying on differentiated functions, that even if we had not the millions of educated, property-owning, wage-earning, voting women that now fill our public life, the old arguments would still be obsolete. The issues of life are no longer primarily military, and but a fraction of men voters is capable of meeting modern requirements as policemen and soldiers; in time of crisis, all men would be called into the reserves; but in such periods women have always fought in the breach, from Carthage to Paris. Still, in modern warfare, those who guard the rear and furnish supplies are as necessary as those who go to the front.