Those who maintain that when women are independent and self-asserting, they will lose their influence over men, assume that we view things to-day as they did a century ago and that the thoughts of men are not widened with the progress of the suns. The woman who can share the aspirations, the thoughts, the complete life of a man, who can understand his work thoroughly and support him with the sympathy born of perfect comprehension, will exert a far vaster influence over him than the milk-and-water ideal who was advised "to smile when her husband smiled, to frown when he frowned, and to be discreetly silent when the conversation turned on subjects of importance." It is a good thing for women to be self-asserting and independent. There is and always has been a class of men who, like Mr. Murdstone, are amenable to justice and reason only when they know that their proposed victim can at any time break the chains with which they would bind her.
This brings us to the last of the social or political arguments, viz., "Most women do not want to vote."[[420]] Precisely the same argument has been used by slave owners from time immemorial—the slaves do not wish to be free. As Professor Thomas writes[[421]]: "Certainly the negroes of Virginia did not greatly desire freedom before the idea was developed by agitation from the outside, and many of them resented this outside interference. 'In general, in the whole western Sahara desert, slaves are as much astonished to be told that their relation to their owners is wrong and that they ought to break it, as boys amongst us would be to be told that their relation to their fathers was wrong and ought to be broken.' And it is reported from eastern Borneo that a white man could hire no natives for wages. 'They thought it degrading to work for wages, but if he would buy them, they would work for him.'" It is akin to the old contention of despots that when their subjects are fit for freedom, they will make them free; but nobody has ever seen such a time.
Reform of evil conditions does not come from below; leaders with visions of the future must point the way. I once heard of a very respectable lady of Boston who exclaimed indignantly against certain proposed changes in child labour laws in North Carolina, where she owned shares in a cotton mill. She maintained that the children who worked at the looms ten hours a day expressed no discontent; it kept them off the streets; and the operators, in the kindness of their hearts, had actually had the looms made especially to accommodate conveniently the diminutive size of the little workers. Some people might, with great profit to themselves, read Plato's superb allegory of the men in the cave.
The fact that various women's associations have been instituted in opposition to the extension of woman suffrage—as in Boston and New York—is no argument for depriving all women of the franchise. If the women who compose these societies do not care to vote, they do not need to; but they have no right to deprive of their rights those who do so desire. It is said that good women will not go to the polls; yet there are in every large city hundreds of respectable males who disdain to vote. A woman is more likely to have a sense of duty to vote than a man. It is the old cry, "Don't disturb the old order of things.
If you make us think for ourselves, we shall be so unhappy." So Galileo was brought to trial, so Anne Hutchinson was banished; and so persecuted they the prophets before them.
IV. Another argument that is made much of is the intellectual inferiority of woman. For ages women were allowed nor higher education than reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, often not even these; yet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sand, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Jane Austen, and some scores of others did work which showed them to be the peers of any minds of their day. And if no woman can justly claim to have attained an eminence such as that of Shakespeare in letters or of Darwin in science, we may question whether Shakespeare would have been Shakespeare or Darwin Darwin if the society which surrounded them had insisted that it was a sin for them to use their minds and that they should not presume to meddle with knowledge. When a girl for the first time in America took a public examination in geometry, in 1829, men wagged their heads gravely and prophesied the speedy dissolution of family and state.
To the list of women whose service for their fellows would have been lost if the old-time barriers had been maintained, may be added the name of the late Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi. Mary Putnam secured her preliminary medical education in the early '60's, and found herself keenly troubled and dissatisfied at the inadequacy of the facilities extended to women for the study of medicine. She insisted that if women practitioners were to be, as she expressed it, "turned loose" upon the community with license to practise, they should, not only as a matter of justice to themselves but of protection for the women and children whose lives they would have in their hands, be properly qualified.
At the time in question, the medical profession took the ground that women might enjoy the benefit of a little medical education but they were denied the facilities for any thorough training or for any research work. Mary Putnam secured her graduate degree from the great medical school of the University of Paris, being the first woman who had been admitted to the school since the fourteenth century. Returning after six years of thorough training, she did much during the remaining years of her life to secure and to maintain for women physicians the highest possible standard of training and of practice. It was natural that with this experience of the requirement of equal facilities for women in her own work, she should always have been a believer in the extension of equal facilities for any citizen's work for which, after experience, women might be found qualified. She was, therefore, an ardent advocate of equal suffrage.
One needs but recall the admirable intellectual work of women to-day to wonder at the imbecility of those who assert that women are intellectually the inferiors of men. Madame Curie in science, Miss Tarbell in political and economic history, Miss Jane Addams in sociological writings and practice, the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw in the ministry, Mrs. Hetty Green in business, are a few examples of women whose mental ability ought to bring a blush to the Old Guard. Mrs. Harriman and Mrs. Sage, who manage properties of many millions, are denied the privilege of voting in regard to the expenditure of their taxes; but every ignorant immigrant can cast a vote, thanks to the doctrine that the political acumen of a man, however degraded, is superior to that of a woman, however great her genius—an admirable obedience to the saw in Ecclesiasticus that the badness of men is better than the goodness of women. Let me quote again from Professor Thomas: "The men have said that women are not intelligent enough to vote, but the women have replied that more of honesty than of intelligence is needed in politics at present, and that women certainly do not represent the most ignorant portion of the population. They claim that voting is a relatively simple matter anyway, that political freedom 'is nothing but the control of those who do make politics their business by those who do not,' and that they have enough intelligence 'to decide whether they are properly governed, and whom they will be governed by.' They point out also that already, without the ballot, they are instructing men how to vote and teaching them how to run a city; that women have to journey to the legislature at every session to instruct members and committees at legislative hearings, and that it is absurd that women who are capable of instructing men how to vote should not be allowed to vote themselves. To the suggestion that they would vote like their husbands and that so there would be no change in the political situation, women admit that they would sometimes vote like their husbands, because their husbands sometimes vote right; but ex-Chief-Justice Fisher of Wyoming says: 'When the Republicans nominate a bad man and the Democrats a good one, the Republican women do not hesitate a moment to "scratch" the bad and substitute the good. It is just so with the Democrats; hence we almost always have a mixture of office-holders. I have seen the effects of female suffrage, and, instead of being a means of encouragement to fraud and corruption, it tends greatly to purify elections and to promote better government.' Now, 'scratching' is the most difficult feature of the art of voting, and if women have mastered this, they are doing very well. Furthermore, the English suffragettes have completely outgeneralled the professional politicians. They discovered that no cause can get recognition in politics unless it is brought to the attention, and that John Bull in particular will not begin to pay attention 'until, you stand on your head to talk to him.' They regretted to do this, but in doing it they secured the attention and interest of all England. They then followed a relentless policy of opposing the election of any candidate of the party in power. The Liberal men had been playing with the Liberal women, promising support and then laughing the matter off. But they are now reduced to an appeal to the maternal instinct of the women. They say it is unloving of them to oppose their own kind. Politics is a poor game, but this is politics."
V. The last objection I would call the moral. It embraces such arguments as, that woman is too impulsive, too easily swayed by her emotions to hold responsible positions, that the world is very evil and slippery, and that she must therefore constantly have man to protect her—a pious duty, which he avows solemnly it has ever been his special delight to perform. The preceding pages are a commentary on the manner in which man has discharged this duty. In Delaware, for instance, the age of legal consent was until 1889 seven years. The institution of Chivalry, to take another example, is usually praised for the high estimation and protection it secured for women; yet any one who has read its literature knows that, in practice, it did nothing of the sort. The noble lord who was so gallant to his lady love—who, by the way, was frequently the wife of another man—had very little scruple about seducing a maid of low degree. The same gallantry is conspicuous in the Letters of Lord Chesterfield, beneath whose unctuous courtesy the beast of sensuality is always leering.