The following year Sir Robert Peel in opposing vote by ballot said:
The theoretical arguments in favor of woman suffrage were at least as strong as those in favor of vote by ballot. There were arguments in favor of extending the franchise to women to which it was no easy matter to find a logical answer. Other and more important duties were entrusted to women. Women were allowed to hold property, to vote on many occasions in right of that property; nay, a woman might inherit the throne and perform all the functions of the first office of the State. Why should they not vote for a member of parliament?
But Sir Robert Peel evidently had no idea that a time would come when women would ask this question in downright seriousness. Meanwhile the preference for the words "male person" in the new enactments still continued. It was employed in the Municipal Corporation Reform act, 1835; and in the Irish poor-law act of 1838, women, as well as clergymen, were expressly excluded from election as poor-law guardians. The repeal of the corn-laws brought the political work of women to the front; they formed local committees, collected funds and attended meetings. In a speech on free-trade, delivered in Covent Garden Theater January 15, 1845, Richard Cobden said:
There are many ladies present, I am happy to say; now, it is a very anomalous fact that they cannot vote themselves, and yet that they have a power of conferring votes upon other people. I wish they had the franchise, for they would often make much better use of it than their husbands.
Again in 1848, in supporting a motion of Mr. Joseph Hume in the House of Commons to the effect that the elective franchise should be extended to all householders, Mr. Cobden said:
A gentleman asked me to support universal suffrage on the ground of principle, and I said to him, if it is a principle that a man should have a vote because he pays taxes, why should not a widow who pays taxes and is liable to serve as church-warden and overseer, have a vote for members of parliament? The gentleman replied that he agreed with me.
In 1853, Mr. W. J. Fox, member for Oldham, in acknowledging the presentation to him by the ladies of Oldham of a signet-ring bearing the inscription, "Education, the birthright of all," spoke strongly in favor of women having a definite share in political life:
If women have nothing to do with politics, honest men ought to have nothing to do with politics. They keep us pure, simple, just, earnest, in our exertions in politics and public life. They have to do with it, because while the portion of man may be by the rougher labors of the head and hands to work out many of the great results of life, the peculiar function of woman is to spread grace and softness, truth, beauty, benignity over all. Nor is woman confined to this. In fact I wish that her direct as well as indirect influence were still larger than it is in the sphere of politics. Why, we trust a woman with the sceptre of the realm, consider her adequate to make peers in the State and bishops in the Church; surely she must be adequate to send her representatives to the lower House. I know the time may not have come for mooting a question of this sort; but I know the time will come, and that woman will be something more than a mere adjective to man in political matters. She will become a substantive also. And why not?
Other speakers and writers brought forward the same point. Jeremy Bentham declared he could find no reasons for the exclusion of women, though he laid no stress on the matter; Herbert Spencer in "Social Statics" (1851), Mr. Thomas Hare in his book on "Representation," and Mr. Mill in "Representative Government," all discussed it. In 1843 Mrs. Hugo Reid published an excellent volume, "A Plea for Woman," in which she maintained that "There is no good ground for the assumption that the possession and exercise of political privileges are incompatible with home duties." In 1841 a strong article appeared in the Westminster Review, written by Mrs. Margaret Mylne, a Scotch lady still living. Mrs. Stuart Mill's admirably comprehensive article appeared in the same review in 1851.[536] In 1846, also, Col. T. Perronet Thompson, the well-known anti-corn-law advocate, wrote:
Whenever the popular party can agree upon and bring forward any plan which shall include the equal voting of women, they will not only obtain an alliance of which most men know the importance, but they will relieve the theory of universal suffrage from the stigma its enemies never fail to draw upon it, of making its first step a wholesale disqualification of half the universe concerned.