Common Sense About Women

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

It always helps a good cause when its opponents are in the position of the famous Kilkenny cats, and mutually eat each other up. In the anti-slavery movement, it was justly urged that the slaves might possibly be (as slaveholders alleged) a race of petted children, whose hearts could not possibly be alienated from their masters; or they might be (as was also alleged by slaveholders) a race of fiends, whom a whisper could madden: but they could not well be both. Every claim that the negro was happy was stultified by that other claim, that the South was dwelling on a barrel of gunpowder, and that the mildest anti-slavery tract meant fire and explosion. The twin arguments saved abolitionists a great deal of trouble. Either by itself would have required an answer; but the two answered each other,—devoured each other, in fact, like the Kilkenny cats.

So, whenever the advocates of woman suffrage are assailed on the ground that women are too superstitious, and will, if enfranchised, be governed by religion and the Church alone, there is always sure to come in some obliging advocate with his “Besides, the tendency of the movement is to utter lawlessness, to the destruction of religion, the marriage-vows, the home”—and all the rest of it. The boy in the story is hardly more selfcontradictory, when, in answer to his friend’s appeal for his jack-knife, he replies, “I haven’t any. Besides, I want to use it.”

Here, for instance, is Mr. Nathan N. Withington of Newbury, Mass., who in an address on woman suffrage, while waiving many arguments against it, plants himself strongly on the ground that it must be fatal to the family. “No one whose opinion is worth reckoning, with whom I have talked on the matter, ever denied entirely that the logical result of the movement was what is called free love.” My inference would be, in passing, that my old neighbor Mr. Withington must confine himself to a very narrow circle, in the way of conversation; or, that he must find nobody’s opinion “worth reckoning” if it differs from his own. Certainly I have talked with hardly an advocate of woman suffrage in New England who would not deny entirely—and with a good deal of emphasis—any such assumptions as he here makes. But let that go: the subject has already been discussed far more than its intrinsic importance required; and convention after convention has taken unnecessary pains to refute a charge more baseless than the slaveholders’ fears of insurrection. What I wish to point out is, that such charges have, in one way, great value: they precisely neutralize and utterly annihilate the equally baseless terror of “Too superstitious.”

If it is true, as is sometimes alleged, that women are constitutionally under the dominion of religion and the Church, then it is pretty sure, that, under these auspices, the moral restraints of the community, as marriage and the home, will be maintained. If it is true on the other hand, as Mr. Withington honestly thinks, that the tendency of woman suffrage is to create a deluge that shall sweep away the home, then it is certain that all vestiges of churchly superstition will be swamped in the process. The logical outcome of the movement may be, if you please, to establish the Spanish Inquisition or to bring back the horrors of the French Revolution, but it seems clear that it cannot simultaneously bring both. The advocates of both theories are equally sincere, doubtless, in their predictions of alarm; but one set of alarmists or the other set of alarmists must be wofully disappointed when the time comes. And, if either, why not both?

The simple fact is, that whosoever draws upon his imagination, for possible disasters from any particular measure, has a great fund at his disposal, whether he looks right or left. He has always this advantage over the practical reformer, that whereas the claims of the reformer are, or should be, definite, coherent, practical, the opponent can, if he wishes, have the whole cloudy domain of possibility to draw upon: he can marshal an army in the atmosphere, while the practical reformer must stay on earth. It is a comfort when two of these nebulous armies of imaginary obstacles fight in the air, as in the present case, like the shadowy hosts in Kaulbach’s great cartoon; and so destroy one another, bringing back clear sky.

Woman needs the ballot for self-respect and self-protection, and to do her share for the education and moral safety of the children she bears. This is enough to begin with. In seeking after this we have firm foothold. The old Eastern fable describes a certain man as finding a horse-shoe. His neighbor soon begins to weep and wail, because, as he justly points out, the man who has found a horse-shoe may some day find a horse, and may shoe him; and the neighbor’s child may some day go so near the horse’s heels as to be kicked, and die; and then the two families may quarrel and fight, and several valuable lives be lost through that finding of a horse-shoe. The gradual advancement of women must meet many fancies as far-fetched as this, and must see them presented as arguments; and we must be very grateful if they prove Kilkenny arguments, and destroy one another.

XCIX.
WOMEN AND PRIESTS.

The chief reason given by the Italian radicals for not supporting woman suffrage was the alleged readiness of women to accept the control of the priests. The same objection has, before now, been heard in other countries,—in France, England, and America. John Bright, especially, made it the ground of his opposition to a movement in which several members of his family have been much engaged. The same point of view was presented, in this country, several years ago, by Mr. Abbot of the Index. But to how much, after all, does this objection amount?

No one doubts that the religious sentiment seems stronger in women than in men; but it must be remembered that this sentiment has been laboriously encouraged by men, while the field of action allowed to women has been sedulously circumscribed, and her intellectual education every way restricted. It is no wonder if, under these circumstances, she has gone where she has been welcomed, and not where she has been snubbed. Priests were glad to hail her as a saint, while legislators and professors joined in repelling her as a student or a reformer. What wonder that she turned from the study or the law-making of the world to its religion? But in all this, whose was the fault,—hers, or those who took charge of her? If she did not trust the clergy, who alone befriended her, whom should she trust?

But observe that the clergy of all ages, in concentrating the strength of woman on her religious nature, have summoned up a power that they could not control. When they had once lost the confidence of those ruled by this mighty religious sentiment, it was turned against them. In the Greek and Roman worship, women were the most faithful to the altars of the gods; yet, when Christianity arose, the foremost martyrs were women. In the Middle Ages women were the best Catholics, but they were afterwards the best Huguenots. It was a woman, not a man, who threw her stool at the offending minister’s head in a Scotch kirk; it was a woman who made the best Quaker martyr on Boston Common. And, from vixenish Jenny Geddes to high-minded Mary Dyer, the whole range of womanly temperament responds as well to the appeal of religious freedom as of religious slavery. It is religion that woman needs, men say; but they omit to see that the strength of her religious sentiment is seen when she resists her clerical advisers as well as when she adores them or pets them. Frances Wright and Lucretia Mott are facts to be considered, quite as much as the matrons and maids who work ecclesiastical slippers, and hold fancy fairs to send their favorite clergymen to Europe.