The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV

by Unknown

Mrs. May Wright Sewall (Ind.) discussed the Fitness of Women to Become Citizens from the Standpoint of Education and Mental Development.

From the close of the Revolution, we find all the distinguished American patriots expressing the conviction that a self-governing people must be an educated people. Hancock, Jay, Franklin, Morris, Paine, Quincy Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, all urge the same argument in support of education. It is no longer to produce an educated ministry, but to insure educated citizens, that schools are maintained and colleges multiplied....

In this year of 1897-98 not less than 20,000,000 pupils and students of all ages, from the toddlers in the kindergartens to the full-grown candidates for post-graduate honors, are registered in the schools, academies, colleges and universities of the United States. The average length of time which girls spend in school exceeds by nearly three years the average length of time which boys stay there; while the number of girls graduating from high-school courses, those which include United States history and civil government, is almost double the number of boys. Thus, at the present time, largely more than one-half of the moneys spent by the governments, local and national, in support of free schools, is used in the education of girls. By what authority does the Government tax its citizens to support schools for the education of millions of women to whom, after they have received the education declared necessary to citizenship, this is denied?

Is it urged that the Government gets its return upon its investment in the education of women through the increased intelligence with which women rear their children, manage their homes and conduct the larger social affairs outside the boundary of their home life? I have no disposition to diminish the Government's recognition of such return, but I wish to remind you that no one has ever justified the maintenance of public schools, and an enforced attendance upon them, on the theory that the Government has a right to compel men to be agreeable husbands and wise fathers, or that it is responsible for teaching men how to conduct their own business with discretion and judgment. Quite in another tone is it urged that the schools are the fountains of the nation's liberties and that a government whose policy is decided by a majority of the votes cast by its men is not safe in the hands of uneducated voters. ....It is the political life of our nation which stands in the sorest need; yet this is the only department of our national life which rejects the aid of women.

If intelligence is vital to good citizenship in a republic, it would seem that, to justify the exclusion of the present generation of American women, whose intelligence is bought at so high a price and at the expense of the whole people, there must be some proof that they have qualities which so vitiate it as to render it unserviceable. Such proof has never yet been presented.

At the present moment the education and the intellectual culture of American women has reached a plane where its further development is a menace, unless it is to be accompanied by the direct responsibility of its possessors—a responsibility which in a republic can be felt only by those who participate directly in the election of public officers and in the shaping of public policies.

The Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer (R. I.) considered the Fitness of Women to Become Citizens from the Standpoint of Moral Development.

Government is not now merely the coarse and clumsy instrument by which military and police forces are directed; it is the flexible, changing and delicately adjusted instrument of many and varied educative, charitable and supervisory functions, and the tendency to increase the functions of government is a growing one. Prof. Lester F. Ward says: "Government is becoming more and more the organ of the social consciousness and more and more the servant of the social will." The truth of this is shown in the modern public school system; in the humane and educative care of dependent, defective and wayward children; in the increasingly discriminating and wise treatment of the insane, the pauper, the tramp and the poverty-bound; in the provisions for public parks, baths and amusement places; in the bureaus of investigation and control and the appointment of officers of inspection to secure better sanitary and moral conditions; in the board of arbitration for the settlement of political and labor difficulties; and in the almost innumerable committees and bills, national, State and local, to secure higher social welfare for all classes, especially for the weaker and more ignorant. Government can never again shrink and harden into a mere mechanism of military and penal control.

It is, moreover, increasingly apparent that for these wider and more delicate functions a higher order of electorate, ethically as well as intellectually advanced, is necessary. Democracy can succeed only by securing for its public service, through the rule of the majority, the best leadership and administration the State affords. Only a wise electorate will know how to select such leadership, and only a highly moral one will authoritatively choose such....

When the State took the place of family bonds and tribal relationships, and the social consciousness was born and began its long travel toward the doctrine of "equality of human rights" in government and the principle of human brotherhood in social organization, man, as the family and tribal organizer and ruler, of course took command of the march. It was inevitable, natural and beneficent so long as the State concerned itself with only the most external and mechanical of social interests. The instant, however, the State took upon itself any form of educative, charitable or personally helpful work, it entered the area of distinctive feminine training and power, and therefore became in need of the service of woman. Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters "woman's peculiar sphere," her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives. If the service of women is not won to such governmental action (not only through "influence or the shaping of public opinion," but through definite and authoritative exercise), the mother-office of the State, now so widely adopted, will be too often planned and administered as though it were an external, mechanical and abstract function, instead of the personal, organic and practical service which all right helping of individuals must be.

In so far as motherhood has given to women a distinctive ethical development, it is that of sympathetic personal insight respecting the needs of the weak and helpless, and of quick-witted, flexible adjustment of means to ends in the physical, mental and moral training of the undeveloped. And thus far has motherhood fitted women to give a service to the modern State which men can not altogether duplicate....

Whatever problems might have been involved in the question of woman's place in the State when government was purely military, legal and punitive have long since been antedated. Whatever problems might have inhered in that question when women were personally subject to their families or their husbands are well-nigh outgrown in all civilized countries, and entirely so in the most advanced. Woman's nonentity in the political department of the State is now an anachronism and inconsistent with the prevailing tendencies of social growth....

The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consciousness which is slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order.

Miss Laura Clay (Ky.) illustrated the Fitness of Women to Become Citizens from the Standpoint of Physical Development.

Among the objections brought against the extension of suffrage to women, that of their physical unfitness to perform military duties is the most plausible, because in the popular mind there is an idea that the right of casting a ballot is in its final analysis dependent upon the ability to defend it with a bullet....

It is by no means self-evident that women are naturally unfitted for fighting or are unwarlike in disposition. The traditions of Amazons and the conduct of savage women give room to believe that the instinct for war was primitively very much the same in both sexes. Though the earliest division of labor among savages known to us is that of assigning war and the chase to men, yet we have no reason to believe that this was done by way of privilege to women; but in the struggle for tribal supremacy that tribe must have ultimately survived and succeeded best which exposed its women the least. Polygamy, universal among primitive races, could in a degree sustain population against the ravages among men of continual warfare, but any large destruction of women must extinguish a tribe that suffered it. So those tribes which earliest engrafted among their customs the exclusion of women from war were the ones that finally survived....

Military genius among women has appeared in all ages and people, as in Deborah, Zenobia, Joan of Arc and our own Anna Ella Carroll. The prowess of women has often been conspicuous in besieged cities. Our early history of Indian warfare recounts many of their valiant deeds. It is well known that in the late war many women on both sides eluded the vigilance of recruiting officers, enlisted and fought bravely. Who knows how many of such women there might have been if their enlistment had been desired and stimulated by beat of drum and blare of trumpet and "all the pomp and circumstance of glorious war?" But no State can afford to accept military service from its women, for while a nation may live for ages without soldiers, it could exist but for a span without mothers. Since woman's exemption from war is not an un-bought privilege, it is evident that in justice men have no superior rights as citizens on that account.

It is an equally fallacious idea that sound expediency demands that every ballot shall be defended by a bullet. The theory of representative government does not admit of any connection between military service and the right and duty of suffrage, even among men. It is trite to point out that the age required for military service begins at eighteen years, when a man is too young to vote, and ends at forty-five years, when he is usually in the prime of his usefulness as a citizen. Some very slight physical defects will incapacitate a man under the usual recruiting rules. Many lawyers, judges, physicians, ministers, merchants, editors, authors, legislators and Congressmen are exempt on the ground of physical incapacity. A citizen's ability to help govern by voting is in no manner proportioned to ability to bear arms....

In the finest conception of government not only is there room for women to take part, but it can not be realized without help from them. Men alone possess only a half of human wisdom; women possess the other half of it, and a half that must always be somewhat different from men's, because women must always see from a somewhat different point of view. The wisdom of men must be supplemented by that of women to discover the whole of governmental truth. Women's help is equally indispensable in persuading society to love and obey law. This help is very largely given now, or civilization as we know it would be impossible. But the best interests of society demand that women's present indirect and half-conscious influence shall be strengthened by the right of suffrage, so that their sense of duty to government may be stimulated by a clear perception of the connection which exists between power and responsibility.

Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch (Eng.) treated of Woman as an Economic Factor.

It is often urged that women stand greatly in need of training in citizenship before being finally received into the body politic.... As a matter of fact women are the first class who have asked the right of citizenship after their ability for political life has been proved. I have seen in my time two enormous extensions of the suffrage to men—one in America and one in England. But neither the negroes in the South nor the agricultural laborers in Great Britain had shown before they got the ballot any capacity for government; for they had never had the opportunity to take the first steps in political action. Very different has been the history of the march of women toward a recognized position in the State. We have had to prove our ability at each stage of progress, and have gained nothing without having satisfied a test of capacity....

The public demand for "proved worth" suggests what appears to me the chief and most convincing argument upon which our future claims must rest—the growing recognition of the economic value of the work of women.... There has been a marked change in the estimate of our position as wealth producers. We have never been "supported" by men; for if all men labored hard every hour of the twenty-four, they could not do all the work of the world. A few worthless women there are, but even they are not so much supported by the men of their family as by the overwork of the "sweated" women at the other end of the social ladder. From creation's dawn our sex has done its full share of the world's work; sometimes we have been paid for it, but oftener not.

Unpaid work never commands respect; it is the paid worker who has brought to the public mind conviction of woman's worth. The spinning and weaving done by our great-grandmothers in their own homes was not reckoned as national wealth until the work was carried to the factory and organized there; and the women who followed their work were paid according to its commercial value. It is the women of the industrial class, the wage-earners, reckoned by the hundreds of thousands, and not by units, the women whose work has been submitted to a money test, who have been the means of bringing about the altered attitude of public opinion toward woman's work in every sphere of life.

If we would recognize the democratic side of our cause, and make an organized appeal to industrial women on the ground of their need of citizenship, and to the nation on the ground of its need that all wealth producers should form part of its body politic, the close of the century might witness the building up of a true republic in the United States.

Mrs. Florence Kelley, State Factory Inspector of Illinois, showed the Working Woman's Need of the Ballot.