Common Sense About Women

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

But never governed well at second-hand.”

So wrote in the last century the bitter satirist Charles Churchill, and this verse will do something to keep alive his name. He touches the very kernel of the matter, and all history is on his side. The Salic Law excluded women from the throne of France,—“the kingdom of France being too noble to be governed by a woman,” as it said. Accordingly the history of France shows one long line of royal mistresses ruling in secret for mischief; while more liberal England points to the reigns of Elizabeth and Anne and Victoria, to show how usefully a woman may sit upon a throne.

It was one of the merits of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that she always pointed out this distinction. “Any woman can have influence,” she said, “in some way. She need only to be a good cook or a good scold, to secure that. Woman should not merely have a share in the power of man,—for of that omnipotent Nature will not suffer her to be defrauded,—but it should be a chartered power, too fully recognized to be abused.” We have got to meet, at any rate, this fact of feminine influence in the world. Demosthenes said that the measures which a statesman had meditated for a year might be overturned in a day by a woman. How infinitely more sensible, then, to train the woman herself in statesmanship, and give her open responsibility as well as concealed power!

The same principle of demoralizing subordination runs through the whole position of women. Many a husband makes of his wife a doll, dresses her in fine clothes, gives or withholds money according to his whims, and laughs or frowns if she asks any questions about his business. If only a petted slave, she naturally develops the vices of a slave; and when she wants more money for more fine clothes, and finds her husband out of humor, she coaxes, cheats, and lies. Many a woman half ruins her husband by her extravagance, simply because he has never told her frankly what his income is, or treated her, in money matters, like a rational being. Bankruptcy, perhaps, brings both to their senses; and thenceforward the husband discovers that his wife is a woman, not a child. But, for want of this, whole families and generations of women are trained to deception. I knew an instance where a fashionable dressmaker in New York urged an economical young girl, about to be married, to buy of her a costly trousseau or wedding outfit. “But I have not the money,” said the maiden. “No matter,” said the complaisant tempter: “I will wait four years, and send in the bill to your husband by degrees. Many ladies do it.” Fancy the position of a pure young girl, wishing innocently to make herself beautiful in the eyes of her husband, and persuaded to go into his house with a trick like this upon her conscience! Yet it grows directly out of the whole theory of life which is preached to many women,—that all they seek must be won by indirect manœuvres, and not by straightforward living.

It is a mistaken system. Once recognize woman as born to be the equal, not inferior, of man, and she accepts as a right her share of the family income, of political power, and of all else that is capable of distribution. As it is, we are in danger of forgetting that woman, in mind as in body, was born to be upright. The women of Charles Reade—never by any possibility moving in a straight line where it is possible to find a crooked one—are distorted women; and Nature is no more responsible for them than for the figures produced by tight lacing and by high-heeled boots. These physical deformities acquire a charm, when the taste adjusts itself to them; and so do those pretty tricks and those interminable lies. But after all, to make a noble woman, you must give a noble training.

LXXIX.
“TOO MANY VOTERS ALREADY.”

Curiously enough, the commonest argument against woman suffrage does not now take the form of an attack on women, but on men. Formerly we were told that women, as women, were incapable of voting; that they had not, as old Theophilus Parsons wrote in 1780, “a sufficient acquired discretion;” or that they had not physical strength enough; or that they were too delicate and angelic to vote. Now these remarks are waived, and the argument is: Women are certainly unfit for suffrage, since even men are unfit. It is something to have women at last recognized as politically equal to men, even if it be only in the fact of unfitness.

A spasm of re-action is just now passing over the minds of many men, especially among educated Americans, against universal suffrage. Possibly it is a re-action from that too great confidence in mere numbers which at one time prevailed. All human governments are as yet very imperfect; and, unless we view them reasonably, they are all worthless. We try them by unjust or whimsical tests. I do not see that anybody who objects to universal suffrage has any working theory to suggest as a substitute: the only plan he even implies is usually that he himself and his friends, and those whom he thinks worthy, should make the laws, or decide who should make them. From this I should utterly dissent: I should far rather be governed by the community, as a whole, than by my ablest friend and his ablest friends; for, if the whole community governs, I know it will not govern very much, and that the tendency will be towards personal freedom by common consent. But if my particular friend once begins to govern me, or I him, the love of power would be in danger of growing very much. It may be that he could be safely trusted with such authority, but I am very sure that I could not.

We shall never get much beyond that pithy question of Jefferson’s, “It is said that man cannot govern himself: how, then, can he govern another?” There is absolutely no test by which we can determine, on any large scale, who are fit to exercise suffrage, and who are not. John Brown would exclude John Smith; and John Smith would wish to keep out John Brown, especially if he had inconvenient views, like him of Harper’s Ferry. The safeguard of scientific legislation may be in the heads of a cultivated few, but the safeguard of personal freedom is commonly in the hands of the uncultivated many. The most moderate republican thinker might find himself under the supervision of Bismarck’s police at any moment, should he visit Berlin; and how easily he might himself fall into the Bismarck way of thinking, is apparent when we consider that the excellent Dr. Joseph P. Thompson, writing from Germany, is understood gravely to recommend the exclusion of German communists from the ports of the United States. When we consider how easily the first principles of liberty might thus be sacrificed by the wise few, let us be grateful that we are protected by the presence of the multitude.

Whenever the vote goes against us, we are apt to think that there must be something wrong in the moral nature of the voters. It would be better to see if their votes cannot teach us something,—if the fact of our defeat does not show that we left out something, or failed to see some fact which our opponents saw. There could not be a plainer case of this than in recent Massachusetts elections. Many good men regarded it as a hopeless proof of ignorance or depravity in the masses, that more than a hundred thousand voters sustained General Butler for governor. For one, I regard that candidate as a demagogue, no doubt; but can anybody in Massachusetts now help seeing that the instinct which led that large mass of men to his support was in great measure a true one? Every act of the Republican legislatures since assembled has been influenced by that vague protest in behalf of State reform and economy which General Butler represented. He complicated it with other issues, very likely, and swelled the number of his supporters by unscrupulous means. It may have been very fortunate that he did not succeed; but it is fortunate that he tried, and that he found supporters. In this remarkable instance we see how the very dangers and excesses of popular suffrage work for good.