Just as the wife of the millionaire has her place arranged to suit herself, so the modest townswoman does in her small home, and so also the wife of the day labourer, in her still narrower surroundings. The man pushes the baby carriage, builds the kitchen fire, and takes care of the furnace, so that his wife can attend to getting fashionable clothing; he denies himself cigars in order to send her into the country for the summer. And she takes this as a matter of course. She has seen this done from her childhood by all men, and she would be offended if her husband were to do anything less. The American woman’s spirit of self-assertion would be aroused directly if social equality were to be interpreted in such a ridiculous way as to make the man anything but the social inferior.
The outward noise would make one believe that the self-assertion of the feminine soul were most energetically concerned with political rights; woman’s suffrage is the great watchword. But the general noise is deceptive; the demands for equal school and college education for young women, for admission to industrial positions on the same footing with men, for an independent existence and life career for every woman who wants it, and for social domination—all these are impulses which really pervade the national consciousness. But the demand for equal suffrage is not nearly so universal. In the nature of things, it is often put forth by radical lecturers on woman’s rights; and it is natural that some large societies support the efforts, and that even masculine logic should offer no objections in many cases. The familiar arguments known to all the world have hardly been augmented by a single new reason on the woman’s side. But the old arguments appear on the surface to be such sound deductions from all the fundamental political, social, and economic principles of America that they come here to have new force. If in spite of this their practical success is still exceedingly small, and the most energetic opposition is not from the stronger sex but from the women themselves, it shows clearly that there is some strong opposing impulse in the American public mind. The social self-assertion of women, in which every American believes with all his heart, is just as little likely ever to lead to universal political suffrage for women as American industrial self-assertion will ever lead to socialism.
But the irony of world history has brought it about that women began with just those rights which to-day some of them are demanding. When English law was brought across the ocean by the colonists in the seventeenth century, the women had the constitutional right to vote, and in exceptional cases made use of it; not one of the constitutions of the thirteen states limited the suffrage to men. The State of New York was the first to improve or to injure its constitution by adding the qualification “male,” in the year 1778. One state followed after another, and New Jersey was the last, in 1844. But just as the last door was closed, the hue and cry was raised that they all ought to be opened. The first woman’s convention to make an urgent appeal for the restoring of these rights was held in New York in 1848. There was a violent opposition; but the movement extended to a great many states, and finally, in 1866, a national organization was formed which asked for a national law. This was just after the Civil War, when the amendment giving the suffrage to the negroes was the chief subject of political discussion. A petition with eighty thousand signatures was gotten up urging that the Constitution should be interpreted so as to give women the right to vote. Two women brought legal action, which went up through all the courts to the Supreme Court, but was there decided against the women, and therefore the sex has not the suffrage.
No national movements have, therefore, to-day any practical significance unless three-quarters of all state legislatures can be induced to vote for an amendment to the Constitution in favour of woman’s suffrage—that is, to vote that no state be allowed to exclude women from the ballot. This is hardly more likely to happen than a Constitutional amendment to introduce hereditary monarchy. Meanwhile, the agitation in the various states has by no means entirely stopped. Time after time attempts have been made to alter the constitution of a single state, but unsuccessfully. The only states to introduce complete woman’s suffrage have been Wyoming in 1869, Colorado in 1893, and Utah in 1895. Kansas allows women to vote in municipal elections. The agitation has been really successful in only one direction; it has succeeded in getting from a majority of the states the right to vote for the local school committees.
Such experience as the country has had with woman’s suffrage has not been specially favourable to the movement. A good deal goes to show that, even if full privileges were granted, they would remain a dead letter for the overwhelming majority of women. The average woman does not wish to go into politics. It has been affirmed that in the modern way of living, with servants to do all the house-work, factories to do the spinning and weaving and every sort of economic convenience, the married woman has too little to do, and needs the political field in which to give her energies free play. But so long as statistics show that four-fifths of the married women in the country do all their house-work, and so long as such a great variety of ethical, intellectual, æsthetic and social duties lie before every woman, it is no wonder that very few are eager to take on new responsibilities at the ballot-box. Those, however, who would make most use of the suffrage would be, as the women who oppose the movement say, the worst female element of the large cities, and they would bring in all the worst evils of a low class of voters led by demagogues. Political corruption at the ballot would receive a new and specially dangerous impetus; the political machines would win new and disgusting strength from the feebleness of these women to resist political pressure, and instead of women’s ennobling and refining political ethics, as their partisans hope, they would be more apt to drag politics down to the very depths. Those who oppose the movement see a decided prejudice to political soundness even in the mere numerical doubling of the voting class.
Most of all, the conservative element can assert, with an excellent array of facts, that the healthy progress of woman’s self-assertion best proceeds by keeping away from politics and turning directly toward the improvement of the conditions of living and of instruction, toward the opening up of professions, the framing of industrial laws, and-other reforms. The radical political demands of women in all other fields, and most especially in the socialistic direction, inclining as they naturally do to be extreme, have worked rather to hinder than to aid the social progress of women. Even where the social independence of women is properly contested, there works the deterring consideration that politics might bring about differences between husband and wife. Taken all in all, the self-assertion of women in political matters is hardly a practical question. One who looks into their tracts and propaganda feels for a long while that the last one he has read, on which ever side it is, is wrong; but when he has come to a point where he meets only the old arguments revamped, he feels that on the whole the radical side has still less justice than the other. And the nation has come to the same conclusion. We may thus leave politics quite out of account in turning finally to the main question which relates to women; this is, How has this remarkable self-assertion of woman affected the life of the nation, both on the whole and in special spheres?
Let us look first at the sphere of the family. The situation here is often decidedly misinterpreted; the frequent divorces in America are cited very often in order to put American family life in an unfavourable light. According to the census report of 1900, the ratio of divorced to married men was 0.6 per cent., and of women 0.8 per cent.; while in 1890 the respective figures were only 0.4 per cent. and 0.6 per cent. Nevertheless, the total number of divorced persons is only 0.3 per cent. of the whole population, as compared with 5.1 per cent. who are widows, 36.5 per cent. who are married, and 57.9 per cent. of bachelors—with a small remainder unaccounted for. It is true that divorced persons who have remarried are here included among the married persons; but even if the number of dissolved marriages is somewhat greater than it appears in the statistics, that fact shows nothing as to the moral status of marriage in America.
Anybody familiar with the country knows that, much more often than in Europe, the real grounds which lead to divorce—not the mere legal pretexts given—are highly ethical ones. We have hinted at this when we analyzed the religious life; the main reason is the ethical objection to continuing externally in a marriage which has ceased to be spiritually congenial. It is the women especially, and generally the very best women, who prefer to take the step, with all the hardships which it involves, to prolonging a marriage which is spiritually hypocritical and immoral. Infidelity of the woman is the ground of divorce in only a vanishingly small number of cases, and the sexual purity of marriage is on a high plane throughout the people. The pure atmosphere of this somewhat unemotional people, which makes it possible for any woman to wend her way without escort through the streets of a large city in the evening and to travel alone across the Continent, and which protects the girl on the street from being stared at or rudely accosted, protects even more the married woman. Although French society dramas are presented on the American stage, one feels from the general attitude of the public that it really fails to understand the psychology of what is being performed, because all the ethical presuppositions are so entirely different. What the Parisian finds piquant, the New Englander finds shameless; and the woman over whom the Frenchman smiles disgusts the American.
And in still another sense American marriage is purer than the European; it lacks the commercial element. As characteristic as this fact is in economic life, it is even more significant in social life. This does not mean that the man who pays court to the daughter of a millionaire is entirely unconscious of the economic advantages which such a marriage would bring. But the systematic searching around for a dowry, with some woman attached to it, is unknown in the New World, and is thoroughly un-American. This may be seen in American plays; the familiar German comedies, in which the search for a rich bride is a favourite motive, strike the American public as entirely vapid and humourless. Americans either do not understand or else look down with pity on the marital depravity of the Old World, and such stage scenes are as intrinsically foreign as those others, so familiar to Europe, in which the rich young nobleman who after all marries the poor governess, is held up as a remarkable example of magnanimity.
The purely human elements are the only ones which count in marriage. It is a congenial affiliation of two persons, without regard to social advantage or disadvantage, if only the persons care for each other. And this idea is common to the whole nation, and gives marriage a high moral status. Moreover, the surpassing education of the young American woman, her college life, works in one way to exalt marriage. If she has learned anything in her college atmosphere, it is moral seriousness. She has gone there to face duties squarely and energetically, to account small things small, and large things large; and so, when she approaches the new duty of making a home, she overcomes all obstacles there with profound moral determination.