Many a man will advise, as secret lobbyist, what he would not do in open legislature. Many a man in private life asserts that "If I were judge or president," or what not, so and so should not be done. When the power and responsibility once rests upon him, his outlook is broadened, and he recognizes that he would endanger a far more sacred principle were he to adhere to his plan.
This holds true with woman. With her newly acquired intellectual and financial power she is seeking an outlet for her capacities. She sees certain municipal and governmental ills. Having no direct power of expression, no legal, political status in a country which claims to have no political classes, she does what all disqualified, irresponsible, dissatisfied classes of men have done before her when deprived of equal opportunity with their fellows; she seeks by subterfuge (indirection) or lawlessness to compass that which she may not attempt lawfully and which, had she the steadying influence and discipline of responsibility and power, she would not do.
Inexperience, coupled with irresponsibility and a lax sense of the rights of others, always did and always will produce tyrants.
Unite this naturally produced and inevitable social and political condition and outlook with the developed mental capacities and consequent restless, undirected, and unabsorbed ambition of the women of to-day, and we have a dangerous lobby—working in secret by indirection and without open responsibility for their words, deed, or influence—to handle in our Republic.
SEX IN BRAIN
Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in introducing the speaker said: "The first speaker of the evening is Helen Gardener, who is to give us an address on the Brain. You know the last stronghold of the enemy is scientific. Men have decided that we must not enter the colleges and study very hard; must not have the responsibility of government laid on our heads, because our brains weigh much less than the brains of men. Dr. Hammond, of New York, has published several very elaborate articles in the Popular Science Monthly to prove this fact. But Helen Gardener has spent about fourteen months in investigation, and has conferred with twenty able specialists upon the subject, and will give us to-night the result of her investigation. She will show to us that it is impossible to prove any of the positions that Dr. Hammond has maintained."
Read before the International Council of Women in Washington, 1888.
Ladies and Gentlemen:—The political conditions of woman are very greatly influenced to-day by what is taught to her and about her by those two conservative moulders of public opinion—clergymen and physicians. Our law-makers have long since ceased to merely sneer at the simple claim of human rights by one-half of humanity, and for refuge they have flown to priest and practitioner, who do not fail them in this their hour of great tribulation. It is true that men, most of whom never enter a church, have grown somewhat ashamed to press the theological arguments against the equality of the sexes, and to these the medical argument has become an ever-present help in their time of trouble.
In the early days woman was under the absolute sway of club and fist. Then came censer and gown, swinging hell in the perfumed depths of the one and hiding in the folds of the other, thumb-screw and fagot for the woman who dared to think. At last the theory of the primal curse upon her head has grown weaker. Mankind struggles to be less brutal and more just. Manly men are beginning to blush when they hear repeated the well-worn fable of the fall of man through woman's crime and her inferiority of position and opportunity, justified by priest and pleader, because of legends inherited from barbarians—mental deformities worthy of their parentage.