Common Sense About Women

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

This is so clear, that, so soon as it is stated, there is a shifting of the ground. “But consider the danger of introducing the sexual influence into legislation!” ... Then we are sure to be confronted with the case of Miss Vinnie Ream, the sculptor. See how that beguiling damsel cajoled all Congress into buying poor statues! they say. If one woman could do so much, how would it be with one hundred? Precisely the Irishman’s argument against the use of pillows: he had put one feather on a rock, and found it a very uncomfortable support. Grant, for the sake of argument, that Miss Ream gave us poor art; but what gave her so much power? Plainly, that she was but a single feather. Congress being composed exclusively of men, the mere fact of her sex gave her an exceptional and dangerous influence. Fill a dozen of the seats in Congress with women, and that danger at least will be cancelled. The taste in art may be no better; but an artist will no more be selected for being a pretty girl than now for being a pretty boy. So in all such cases. Here, as everywhere, it is the advocate of woman suffrage who wishes to recognize the fact of sex, and guard against its perils.

It is precisely so in education. Believing boys and girls to be unlike, and yet seeing them to be placed by the Creator on the same planet and in the same family, we hold it safer to follow his method. As they are born to interest each other, to stimulate each other, to excite each other, it seems better to let this impulse work itself off in a natural way,—to let in upon it the fresh air and the daylight, instead of attempting to suppress and destroy it. In a mixed school, as in a family, the fact of sex presents itself as an unconscious, healthy, mutual stimulus. It is in the separate schools that the healthy relation vanishes, and the thought of sex becomes a morbid and diseased thing. This observation first occurred to me when a pupil and a teacher in boys’ boarding-schools years ago: there was such marked superiority as to sexual refinement in the day-scholars, who saw their sisters and the friends of their sisters every day. All later experience of our public-school system has confirmed this opinion. It is because I believe the distinction of sex to be momentous, that I dread to see the sexes educated apart.

The truth of the whole matter is, that Nature will have her rights—innocently if she can, guiltily if she must; and it is a little amusing that the writer of an ingenious paper on the other side, called “Sex in Politics,” in an able New York journal, puts our case better than I can put it, before he gets through, only that he is then speaking of wealth, not women: “Anybody who considers seriously what is meant by the conflict between labor and capital, of which we are only just witnessing the beginning, and what is to be done to give money legitimately that influence on legislation which it now exercises illegitimately, must acknowledge at once that the next generation will have a thorny path to travel.” The Italics are my own. Precisely what this writer wishes to secure for money, we claim for the disfranchised half of the human race,—open instead of secret influence; the English tradition instead of the French; women as rulers, not as kings’ mistresses; women as legislators, not merely as lobbyists; women employing in legitimate form that power which they will otherwise illegitimately wield. This is all our demand.

XCI.
HOW WILL IT RESULT?

“It would be a great convenience, my hearers,” said old Parson Withington of Newbury, “if the moral of a fable could only be written at the beginning of it, instead of the end. But it never is.” Commonly the only thing to be done is to get hold of a few general principles, hold to those, and trust that all will turn out well. No matter how thoroughly a reform may have been discussed,—negro-emancipation or free-trade, for instance,—it is a step in the dark at last, and the detailed results never turn out to be precisely according to the programme.

An “esteemed correspondent,” who has written some of the best things yet said in America in behalf of the enfranchisement of woman, writes privately to express some solicitude, since, as she thinks, we are not ready for it yet. “I am convinced,” she writes, “of the abstract right of women to vote; but all I see of the conduct of the existing women, into whose hands this change would throw the power, inclines me to hope that this power will not be conceded till education shall have prepared a class of women fit to take the responsibilities.”

Gradual emancipation, in short!—for fear of trusting truth and justice to take care of themselves. Who knew, when the negroes were set free, whether they would at first use their freedom well, or ill? Would they work? would they avoid crimes? would they justify their freedom? The theory of education and preparation seemed very plausible. Against that, there was only the plain theory which Elizabeth Heyrick first announced to England,—“Immediate, unconditional emancipation.” “The best preparation for freedom is freedom.” What was true of the negroes then is true of women now.

“The lovelier traits of womanhood,” writes earnestly our correspondent, “simplicity, faith, guilelessness, unfit them to conduct public affairs, where one must deal with quacks and charlatans.... We are not all at once ‘as gods, knowing good and evil;’ and the very innocency of our lives, and the habits of pure homes, unfit us to manage a certain class who will flock to this standard.”

But the basis of all republican government is in the assumption that good is ultimately stronger than evil. If we once abandon this, our theory has gone to pieces, at any rate. If we hold to it, good women are no more helpless and useless than good men. The argument that would here disfranchise women has been used before now to disfranchise clergymen. I believe that in some States they are still disfranchised; and, if they are not, it is partly because good is found to be as strong as evil, after all, and partly because clergymen are not found to be so angelically good as to be useless. I am very confident that both these truths will be found to apply to women also.

Whatever else happens, we may be pretty sure that one thing will. The first step towards the enfranchisement of women will blow to the winds the tradition of the angelic superiority of women. Just as surely as women vote, we shall have occasionally women politicians, women corruptionists, and women demagogues. Conceding, for the sake of courtesy, that none such now exist, they will be born as instantaneously, after enfranchisement, as the frogs begin to pipe in the spring. Those who doubt it ignore human nature; and, if they are not prepared for this fact, they had better consider it in season, and take sides accordingly. In these pages, at least, they have been warned.