Is there anything more pitiful than such a stifled life with its crushed hopes? Is there anything sadder than to go through life conscious of talents and powers which we can not possibly develop; to feel that the best thing in us must be strangled for the want of opportunity, for the lack of appreciation even by those who love us best; to know that we can never by any possibility reach our highest expression, but must live a sordid life when under different conditions a higher would be possible?
A large part of the marital infelicity about which we hear so much comes from the husband's attempt to cramp his wife's ambition and to suppress her normal expression. A perversion of native instinct, a constant stifling of ambition, and the longing to express oneself naturally, gradually undermine the character and lead to discontentment and unhappiness. A mother who is cramped and repressed transmits the seeds of discontent and one-sided tendencies to her children.
The happiest marriages are those in which the right of husband and wife to develop broadly and naturally along individual lines has been recognized by each. The noblest and most helpful wives and mothers are those who develop their powers to their fullest capacity.
Woman is made to admire power, and she likes to put herself under the domination of a masterful man and rest in his protection. But it must be a voluntary obedience which comes from admiration of original force, of sturdy, rugged, masculine qualities.
The average man can not get away from the idea of his wife's service to him personally; that she is a sort of running mate, not supposed to win the race, but to help to pull him along so that he will win it. He can not understand why she should have an ambition which bears no direct relation to his comfort, his well-being, his getting on in the world.
The very suggestion of woman's inferiority, that she must stand in the man's shadow and not get ahead of him, that she does not have quite the same rights in anything that he has, the same property rights, the same suffrage rights; in other words, the whole suggestion of woman's inferiority, has been a criminal wrong to her. Many women who are advocating woman's suffrage perhaps would not use the ballot if they had it. Their fight is one for freedom to do as they please, to live their own lives in their own way. The greatest argument in the woman's suffrage movement is woman's protest against unfair, unjust treatment by men. Man's opposition to woman suffrage is merely a relic of the old-time domestic barbarism. It is but another expression of his determination to "boss" everybody and everything about him.
The time will come when men will be ashamed that they ever opposed woman's suffrage. Think of a man considering it right and just for his most ignorant workman to have an equal vote with himself on public matters and yet denying the right to his educated wife and daughters!