But men ought to do more. That is just the point. That is just why corrupt government has been fastened on our cities. The Tammany leaders do more. They give all their time to politics; but the "reform" vote cannot, except occasionally, be got to the polls in sufficient numbers; and too few of the best men will run for office. If women are simply going to aggravate these conditions, if the "normal," representative woman isn't going to vote and hold office, and the non-representative, exceptional woman is, where is the advantage to the state of adding women to the electorate? Probably, however, rather than have this happen, the representative woman would feel that she must enter the lists. In competition with "abnormal" or unscrupulous women, she would be forced to vote and to hold office. More than just going to the polls, she would have to think, read, and talk politics, as men do, or ought to do. The whole question here is: Is it better for her to do this, or to do the things which men don't do? For one person can't do it all well. A good mother of three or four children already has more than she can do well. If she takes up this whole new department of life and thought, I am convinced she will have to let something else go, and already under the influence of the feminist movement, that "something else" seems to be her home. So, this is what the anti-suffragists feel most keenly—that once the franchise is imposed as a duty, they would have to do the things which men already are doing (and doing as well as the women could do them); that they would no longer be free to do what they think is the higher work for them, as women. Therefore, when a suffragist tells me she has a "right" to vote, I say that, in the name of the best interests of the community, I have the right not to vote.
Another thing which the anti-suffragists feel is not recognized sufficiently by their opponents, is the essential and valuable difference between men and women in their manner of approach to any given human problem. "Law" to the antis seems a man's word. Man thinks of people in masses. He makes laws for the whole. He generalizes better than women. On the other hand, where woman is stronger than he is in her feeling for the individual person, and her use of love rather than of law, neither the masculine nor the feminine gift is better, the one than the other, but the two work together as necessary parts of one whole. As Ida Tarbell puts it: "Human society may be likened to two great circles, one revolving within the other. In the inner circle rules the woman. Here she breeds and trains the material for the outer circle, which exists only by and for her. That accident may throw her into this outer circle is, of course, true, but it is not her natural habitat. Nor is she fitted by Nature to live and circulate freely there. What it all amounts to is that the labor of the world is naturally divided between the two different beings that people the world. It is unfair to the woman that she be asked to do the work of the outer circle. The man can do that satisfactorily if she does her part, that is, if she prepares him the material. Certainly, he can never come into the inner circle and do her work."
So, in claiming for women the right to take a part in the man's half of life, the suffragists, I think, lose sight of what the woman's half is. In urging that they must have a hand in law-making and government and public life generally, they do not see that woman's peculiar work is pretty independent of laws and of government, is rather in private life. For it is just where the law cannot reach that woman is supreme. It is just in the finer, more personal and intimate relationships of life, which government cannot include, that woman finds her work waiting for her, which she alone can do—what Octavia Hill calls "the out-of-sight, silent work."
That woman is today neglecting this, her own part of the world's work, I think is everywhere apparent. Surely we do not need more laws; what we do need is more of the spirit which shall make people want to obey the laws which we have. What else does it mean when we say we cannot enforce the laws? The suffragists are clamoring for more laws, for more of the man-element in society; the anti-suffragists feel that it is the inner life and character, the mother's work, which everywhere needs strengthening. Settlement workers, doctors, ministers, and police commissioners, are beginning to feel this, too. They are telling us that in their work they find that no laws and no institutions can take the place of home teaching and influence with young people. The outer restraint and penalty are little effective unless they are met by the inner desire to do right.
On points like these I believe the accent should be laid today. The pendulum is swinging too far away from the things which our mothers and grandmothers made their chief concern. What is called "the rise of woman," her new feeling of influence and power, are blessings only as they help her to do better and of freer choice the things which are in tune with Nature and with the need of the world.
XV
THE IMPERATIVE DEMAND UPON WOMEN IN THE HOME
MRS. CHARLES BURTON GULICK