Aristippus. In this I am with you. I have always thought it absurd that the ignorant Irishman who drives the carriage of a rich widow should have a voice in the government of the country, and that the employer, whose money enables him to live, should have none. In Austria, women who hold real property in their own right have the right to vote. I would go a step further, and give the suffrage to every independent, self-supporting widow or single woman. Wives I would exclude,—not from the fear of adding to the stock subjects of domestic disputation,—the usual reason given,—but because they are not independent. The same reason should apply to daughters residing under the paternal roof. And, in all fairness, I would extend my rule to men. I would make, not a property, but an independence qualification. A man who lives on a dollar a day, if he owns it or earns it, should vote; but the son who depends upon a rich father for support, and the pauper who lives upon public charity, should not vote. Socially, both are minors. We might even say, that, financially, both are unweaned. Why should they not be minors politically? This plan would really be manhood suffrage.
Hipparchia. Justice and wisdom are both upon our side. We must eventually succeed; and then the emancipation of woman will be complete, and her equality with man established. The resolution passed in our Convention, "that a just government and a true church are alike opposed to class and caste, whether the privileged order be feudal baron, British lord, or American white male," ought to be true, and will be true at a future day.
Diogenes. Vigorously expressed! The feudal baron, indeed, is an extinct species, and was hardly worth mentioning, unless to adorn your rhetoric and point your resolution. But let me tell you that the white male can show an older and a better patent of nobility than the British lord with whom you associate him. Is it not recorded in Genesis, that Adam was created first, and Eve from him?—a copy only, you observe; and a copy never comes up to the original. As Dryden has it:—
"He to God's image, she to his, was made;
So farther from the fount the stream at random strayed."
And in the same inspired history we read: "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
Hipparchia. Nonsense! I thought that the argument from Scripture had died out with slavery polemics. You forget that every Eve has not an Adam. On what ground do you ask a single woman to occupy an inferior position? I admit that the married may sometimes do so with propriety.
Aristippus. On the ground of an inferiority, and of infirmities absolutely incurable. Between the female man of your theories and the real male man there is a great gulf you cannot pass over. A negro is a man,—we can imagine him a brother; but no effort of philanthropic self-abnegation can work the same miracle for a woman. When you preach the natural equality of the sexes, you injure your cause. The facts are too strong and too visible for you. A man can rest his claim to superiority on brute force, if on nothing else; and force is, after all, the ultimate basis of all government. I do not mean to underrate the cleverness of women. The first man was overreached by Eve; and the last woman will probably turn the head of the laggard who brings up the rear of the human race. If a wife is only half of the scissors, as Franklin suggests, she is often the half with the point. But feminine ability is not of the ruling kind. You dance, for instance, better than men, if the gymnastic capers of acrobats and tumblers can be called dancing at all; but you cannot wield a sledge-hammer as vigorously, and your excellent performances, numerous in literature, rarer in art, and still more rare in science, seem to me to be mostly of the dancing rather than of the sledge-hammer order.
But success would be your ruin. If you could establish the complete equality you long for, your relative inferiority would become so manifest as to be humiliating. In most of the vocations of men, women would be as ridiculous, morally, as they are physically in men's clothes. If a woman is nothing but a smaller man, the savage contempt for the sex is logical. Place two races together, of which the one is weaker, less energetic, less pugnacious than the other; and the result will inevitably be that the strong and the fierce will make the mild and the feeble do all their hard work. The barbarous ages would return again. We should sit by, like the Indian, smoking the pipe of laziness, while you were furnishing us with board, lodging, clothes, and tobacco. The Amazons, the earliest known advocates of women's rights, saw this point clearly; and consequently excluded men altogether from their communities, except at their yearly camp-meetings. Men worship women for their gentleness, affection, imagination, refinement,—for the fond, cosey, nestling way they have with them,—for their femininity (in one awkward word), the contrast and complement to the masculine character. There is a sex in soul quite as much as in body. In the mythology, no god falls in love with Minerva. A mannish woman only attracts a feminine man. A woman's power lies in her petticoats, as Samson's strength lay in his hair. Cut them off, and you leave her at the mercy of every brutal Philistine, who now dares not be rude to her because she is sacred. Do you not see that, instead of gaining something, you will lose all?—sink into fifth-rate mannikins, with fewer opportunities,—boys in petticoats?
Diogenes. And we be obliged to set our amorous eclogues to the tune of Formosus Pastor Corydon?
Aristippus. I might quote a suggestive remark from Pepys's Diary, namely, that the only female animal which gives a name to both sexes is the goose. But, seriously, your chances of success are not brilliant,—at least for the present. There are two kinds of women, both of them excellent; but almost as distinct as diamonds and black lead, which are both pure carbon;—one is made to be admired, the other to be useful. The girl who wakes the poet's sigh is a very different creature from the girl who makes his soup. You have read of the loves of the Angels with the daughters of the Antediluvians. I sometimes think that the diamonds can claim descent from the high-bred race that sprang from those aristocratic relations. The late Monsieur Balzac, who handled this subject with ingenuity, was struck by this difference. He divided woman into two classes: woman, and the female of the order Mammalia, genus Bimanis, species Homo. In his essays he overlooks altogether the second class. But in it you must seek your disciples. The heaven-descended sisters will not go with you. You may try to make them useful and self-supporting; but you will lose your pains. They have only to show themselves, to receive the attention and applause that a man of genius must work a lifetime to earn. Their world is at their feet. Wealth, power, gratified vanity, are theirs without an effort. Madame de Staël said she would willingly give all her fame for one season of the reign of a youthful beauty. She, it is true, was a woman; but David Hume, a keen observer, and moderate in his statements, noticed that even a "little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives as complete enjoyment as the greatest orator who triumphs in the splendor of his eloquence, while he governs the passions and resolutions of a numerous assembly." You ask them to give up these pleasures and these triumphs, and to abdicate their thrones,—to become implements instead of ornaments, and to help to bring down the high price of labor in the present scarcity of laborers; and you offer them in exchange the right to wear trousers, to drive an omnibus, or to wear a policeman's uniform! Do you think that they will listen to you? No,—not even the respectable members of the second class. The Cinderellas with no glass slippers and no protecting fairy might join with you, if they did not look up to the first class as their rulers and models. They feel instinctively that the glory of the Angelidæ illuminates even them; and they all, or almost all, have a faint yet abiding and comforting hope that some unheard-of miracle, or yet undiscovered cosmetic, may place them among the blessed.