It was a logical position that besieged the ballot as the first agency of deliverance in our land. The suffrage is, under our form of government and constitutional rights, the badge of equality.
Everywhere, in Church and State, woman was discriminated against, and the distinguishing disability imposed upon her by law and custom was her suppressed opinion and will in the administration of affairs.
In the church she might contribute her labor, carry forward enterprises to pay the minister’s salary, furnish the edifice, support social movements that would tend to increase membership, and sustain the religious services; but, were she a machine, minus brains, choice, or will, she could be no more completely a nonentity when the pastor was to be chosen, the amount of his salary fixed, or any matters of finance or administration decided upon.
The acceptance of her work for its support was the only recognition of her individuality, or her common share in the institution. She was cudgelled with Paul in the Church and with her inability to fight by the State.
Muscular force having been, and still widely held to be, the bulwark of civilization, and submission to the authority of man socially and ecclesiastically the measure of her religious excellence, at least of the excellence of the wifely portion of womanhood, woman has been a cipher at the left-hand side of the unit man in both civil and religious institutions.
But the evolution of brains, which is nature’s method of human development, has unsettled this standard of civilization and the relation of the sexes. The woman who thinks has come, and the struggle is no longer one of muscle, nor can it ever again become so.
The woman of the future can no more be remanded to the merely patient plodder in kitchen and nursery, with no horizon but the cook-stove and cradle illuminated by the weekly church service, than the lightning printing-press of to-day can be remanded to the clumsy instrument of a century ago, or the electric light to the tallow dip.
If the demand of woman for equal opportunity to win all the prizes of life, and to control her special function, involving the most serious and sacred responsibilities to the race, and the necessity of her own growth and advancement,—if this new demand is one that is not worthy the consent and co-operation of men and institutions, the mistake was fatal which permitted her to learn the alphabet.
This mistake, if mistake it was, has extended its mighty influence in widening circles through the past three centuries. Francois Saintonge, a young widow of France, toward the close of the sixteenth century, obtained the consent of her father to teach some girls to read if she would give her lessons at five o’clock in the morning. Without bed, bread, or fire, she and her five pupils stayed the first night in the house for which the only fifty pounds she possessed were paid. Simultaneously a young girl in Italy made an effort to set in motion the brain cells of the girls of her country by giving them a chance to learn the alphabet.
The heroic courage of women in striving to attain the weapons of intelligence affords evidence of the invincible proceeding of evolution inherent in the constitution of humanity.