Views and Opinions

by Ouida

With all deference to him, I do not think that Mme. de Sévigné would have cared a straw to rival Paul, the gardener, in going to the electoral urn. Mme. de Sévigné, like every woman of wit and mind, had means of exercising her influence so incomparably superior to the paltry one of recording a vote in a herd that she would, I am sure, have had the most profound contempt for the latter. Indeed, her contempt would have probably extended to the whole electoral system and ‘government by representation.’ Women of wit and genius must always be indifferent to the opportunity of going up to the ballot booth in company with their own footman and coachman. To those who have a sense of humour the position is not one of dignity. Hypatia, when she feels herself the equal of Julian, will not readily admit that Dadus, however affranchised, is her equal.

Absurdities are not cured by adding greater absurdities to them; discrepancies are not remedied by greater discrepancies being united to them. Whether women voted or not would not change by a hair’s breadth the existing, and to many thinkers the deplorable fact, that under the present electoral system throughout the world, the sage has no more electoral power than the dunce, that Plato’s voice counts for no more than a fool’s. The admission of women could do nothing to remedy this evil. It would only bring into the science of politics what it has too much of already—inferior intelligence and hysterical action. No: reply both the French essayist and the conservative advocates of female suffrage. Not so; because we should only admit women qualified to use it by the possession of property. But it would be impossible to sustain this limitation in the teeth of all the levelling tendencies of modern legislation; it would speedily be declared unjust, intolerable, aristocratic, iniquitous, and it would soon become impossible to deny to Demos’s wife or mistress, mother or sister, what you award to Demos himself. If women be admitted at all to the exercise of the franchise they must be admitted wholesale down to the lowest dregs of humanity as men are now admitted. The apple-woman will naturally argue that she has as much right to it as the heiress; how can you say she has not when you have given the apple-man as much electoral voice as the scholar? It is idle to talk of awarding the female suffrage on any basis of property when property has been deliberately rejected as a basis for male suffrage.

The project often insisted on by the advocates of the system, to give votes only to unmarried women, may be dismissed without discussion, as it would be found to be wholly untenable. It would give votes to the old maids of Cranford village, and the enriched cocottes of great cities, and would deny them to a Mme. Roland or a Mme. de Staël, to Lady Burdett Coutts or to Mme. Adam. The impossibility of any such limitation being sustained if female suffrage be ever granted, renders it unnecessary to dwell longer on its self-evident defects.

Again, are women prepared to purchase electoral rights by their willingness to fulfil military obligations? If not, how can they expect political privileges unless they are prepared to renounce for them the peculiar privileges which have been awarded to them in view of the physical weakness of their sex? Dumas does, indeed, distinctly refuse to let them be soldiers, on the plea that they are better occupied in child-bearing, but in the same moment he asserts that they ought to be judges and civil servants. It is difficult to see why to postpone an assault to a beleaguered city because Mme. la Générale est accouchée would be more absurd than to adjourn the hearing of a pressing lawsuit because Mme. la Jugesse would be sur la paille. The much graver and truer objection lies less in the physical than in the mental and moral inferiority of women. I use moral in its broadest sense. Women on an average have little sense of justice, and hardly any sense whatever of awarding to others a freedom for which they do not care themselves. The course of all modern legislation is its tendency to make by-laws, fretting and vexatious laws trenching unjustifiably on the personal liberty of the individual. If women were admitted to political power these laws would be multiplied indefinitely and incessantly. The infiniment petit would be the dominate factor in politics. Such meddling legislation as the Sunday Closing Act in England, and the Maine Liquor Laws and Carolina Permissive Bill in the United States would be the joy and aim of the mass of female voters. Women cannot understand that you can make no nation virtuous by act of parliament; they would construct their acts of parliament on purpose to make people virtuous whether they chose or not, and would not see that this would be a form of tyranny as bad as any other. A few years ago a State in America (I think it was Maine or Massachusetts) decreed that because a few Pomeranian dogs were given to biting people, all Pomeranian dogs within the State, ill and well, young and old, should on a certain date be killed; and they were killed, two thousand odd in number. Now, this is precisely the kind of legislation which women would establish in their moments of panic; the disregard of individual rights, the injustice to innocent animals and their owners, the invasion of private property under the doctrinaire’s plea of the general good, would all commend themselves to women in their hysterical hours, for women are more tyrannical and more self-absorbed than men.

Renan in his ‘Marc-Aurèle’ observes that the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened, and even, in much, primarily brought about by the elements of feebleness, introduced into it by the Christian sects’ admission of women into the active and religious life of men. The woman-worship springing from the adoration of the virgin-mother was at the root of the emasculation and indifference to political and martial duties, which it brought into the lives of men who ceased to be either bold soldiers or devoted citizens.

I do not think the moral and mental qualities of the average woman so inferior to those of the average man as is conventionally supposed. The average man is not an intellectual nor a noble being; neither is the average woman. But there are certain solid qualities in the male creature which are lacking from the female; such qualities as patience and calmness in judgment, which are of infinite value, and in which the female character is almost invariably deficient; a lack in her which makes the prophecy of Dumas, that she will one day fill judicial and forensic duties, a most alarming prospect, as alarming as the prediction of Goldwin Smith that the negro population will eventually outnumber and extinguish the Aryan race in the United States.

There are men with women’s minds, women with men’s minds; masculine genius may exist in a female farm; feminine inconsistency in a male farm; but these are exceptions to the rule, and such exceptions are exceedingly rare.

The Conservative or patrician party in England advocates the admission of women into politics for much the same motives as influenced the early Christians; they believe that her influence will be universally exercised to preserve the moral excellences of the body politic, the sanctity of the home, the supremacy of religion, the cautiousness of timid and wary legislators. The class of which the Conservatives are always thinking as the recipients of female suffrage would possibly in the main part do so. They would be persons of property and education, and as such might be trusted to do nothing rash. But they would be closely wedded to their prejudices. They would be narrow in all their views. Their church would hold a large place in their affections, and their legislation would be of the character which they now give to their county society. Moreover, as I have said, the suffrage once given to women, it could not be restricted to persons of property. The female factory hand in her garret would assert that she has as much right to and need of a voice as the female landowner, and in face of the fact that the male factory hand and the male landowner have been placed on the same footing in political equality, the country would be unable to refute the argument.

The most intelligent and most eloquent of all the advocates of female suffrage is, as I have said, undoubtedly Dumas fils. No man can argue a case more persuasively; nor is any man more completely wedded to one side of an argument than he. Yet even he, her special pleader, in his famous Appel aux Femmes, admits that she would bring to science the scorn of reason, and the indifference to suffering which she has shown in so many centuries in the hallucinations and martyrdoms of religion; that she would throw herself into it with audace et frénésie; that she would hold all torture of no account if it solved an enigma, and would give herself to the beasts of the field, ‘not to prove that Jesus lived, but to know if Darwin was right;’ and he passes on to the triumphant prediction that in sixty years’ time the world will see the offspring of men and female monkeys, of women and apes; though wherein this prospect for the future is glorious it were hard to say.

Stripped of that exaggeration which characterises all the arguments of a writer famous for anomaly, antithesis and audacity, his prediction that his favourite client Woman will bring into her pursuit of the mysteries of science, the same sort of folie furieuse, which Blandina and Agatha, and all the feminine devotees of the early years of Christianity brought into religion, is a prophecy undoubtedly correct. She will bring the same into politics, into legislation, if she ever obtain a preponderant power in them.