If women are serious in wanting to vote in politics, why do they not apply to the body politic the same methods they use with the one man which an all-wise Destiny has committed to their keeping?
If all the women in the world should make up their minds that they wanted to vote worse than anything else on earth—worse even than they want their husbands to go to church with them—and each woman would put on her prettiest clothes, and cuddle up to her own particular man in her softest and most womanish way, when she was begging him to get suffrage for her—why, you all know they would do it. Men would get it for us exactly as they would buy us a pair of horses.
Have you men ever thought about practising for suffrage in politics by giving women suffrage in love? Surely you do not doubt that, should you do this, it would not occur to us to stuff the ballot-boxes, or to put up a ticket with any but honorable candidates for our hands. We do not ask nor wish to indicate who shall run for office. Let the men announce themselves candidates. We would not take the initiative there if it were offered to us for a thousand years. All we ask is to be given plenty of time to canvass the honor of the candidates, thoroughly to understand and investigate the platform (with an eye to how near he will come to sticking to his promises after election), and to be allowed to cast a free and untrammelled vote.
Now, men seem to think that if they allowed woman equal suffrage, the bright white light of our honesty would be too strong a glare for their weak eyes—so long accustomed to darkness—to bear. Um—possibly in politics. Hardly in love.
For myself, I consider absolute honesty most unpleasant. I never knew any really nice, lovable women who were unflinchingly honest. But I have known a few iron-visaged, square-jawed women who were so brutally honest that I have most ingloriously fled at the mention of their approach, and solaced myself with a congenial spirit who is in the habit of skirting delicately around painful truth, and a cozy corner in which to abuse the aforesaid iron-visaged carver of helpless humanity, who loves to draw blood with her truth. Such an one will get a vote in politics long before she gets it in love.
No; men need not fear to give us equal suffrage in love. Our honesty will not be disconcerting. (I would even address a private query, at just this point, to the women, begging that the men will skip it, asking women where in the world we would find ourselves if we were unflinchingly honest with the men who love us?) No one will deny that we would even countenance a certain amount of corruption. We fully agree with those men who tell us weakly questioning women that campaign funds are a necessity. We never have been able to discover just where the money in politics went to, but the expenses of a campaign in our line are more in evidence. I doubt if the most straitlaced Puritan will gainsay me when I declare that bribery from the candidates, in the form of theatres, opera-boxes, flowers, bonbons, and books, would not only be tolerated, but even, in a modest manner, encouraged—having, of course, a keen eye as to the elasticity of the campaign fund. But, of course, just as vulgar bribery, per se, only catches the easy and unthinking voter in politics, so, in like manner, would these evidences of generosity only capture the less desirable voter in love. When you men are trying for a woman's vote you need give yourselves no uneasiness. If she is worth having, character wins every time. You don't believe that. That is why you trust to bribery to do it all. And it is also why so many of you get the girl you try for—which is about the richest punishment you could receive.
I adore Hamlet. Not because he was so noble as to give up his life to avenge his father's most foul murder. Not because he was a chivalrous King Arthur, to protect Ophelia's womanly pride from the jeers of a coarse court by openly declaring that he had loved her when he hadn't. Not for any of Shakespeare's reasons for painting him a hero. But for two much more reasonable reasons. One that he said, "I myself am indifferent honest"—oh, the humanity of Hamlet!—and the other that, when under the spell of her beauty and in the tentative, interested stage when he cared for her all but enough to ask her to marry him, he had the wit to discover that she was a fool. Imagine the calamity of Hamlet married to Ophelia! That would have been a tragedy. Think of a man clever enough to discover that his idol was made of putty—that his sweetheart was a Rosamond Vincy! Hamlet was a wise man. He withdrew in time. Most men have to be married ten years to discover that they have married an Ophelia or a Rosamond.
It is a trite saying that the whole world is behind a woman urging her to marry. But I find much to interest me in trite sayings. I like to get hold of them, and look them through, and turn them wrong side out, and pull them to pieces to find how much life there is in them. Psychological vivisection is not a subject for the humane society. A trite saying has my sympathy. It generally is stupid and shop-worn, and consequently is banished to polite society and hated by the clever. And only because it possessed a soul of truth and a wonderful vitality has it been kept from dying long ago of a broken heart.
Books could be written of the truth of this particular trite saying. The urging, of course, among people whom we know, is neither vulgar nor intentional. It takes the form of jests, of pseudo-humorous questions if a man sends flowers two or three times. But it takes its worst and most common form in the sudden melting away of the family if the man calls and finds them all together. If a man has no specific intentions towards a girl, and has not determined in his own mind that he wants to marry her; if he is only liking her a great deal, with but an occasional wonder in the depths of his own heart whether this girl is the wife for him; to call upon her casually and see the family scatter, and other callers hastily leave, is enough to scare him to death. And the girl herself has a right to be furiously indignant. When eligible young people are in that tentative stage, it is death to a love to make them self-conscious.
I myself am so afraid of brushing the down from the butterfly wings at this point that, occasionally, when I have been calling, and the girl's possible lover has caught me before I could escape in a natural manner, I have doggedly remained, even knowing that perhaps he wished me well away among the angels, rather than to run the risk of making him conscious that I understood his state of mind. Imagine my feelings of anguish, however, at holding on against my will and against theirs, wanting somebody to help me let go! Much better, I solace myself afterwards, that he should wish me away than to look after my retreating form and wish, in Heaven's name, that I had stayed! Better for the girl, I mean. For my own feelings—but I do not count. I am only giving a girl one of her rights in love. A few judicious obstacles but whet a man's appetite—if he is worth having. And I do not mind being a judicious obstacle once in a while—if I like the girl.