The Woman Question.
[Footnote 49]
[Footnote 49: 1. The Revolution: New York. Weekly. Vol. III.
2. Equal Rights for Women. A Speech by George William Curtis, in the Constitutional Convention at Albany, July 19, 1868.
3. Ought Women to learn the Alphabet? By Thomas Wentworth Higginson.]
The Woman Question, though not yet an all-engrossing question in our own or in any other country, is exciting so much attention, and is so vigorously agitated, that no periodical can very well refuse to consider it. As yet, though entering into politics, it has not become a party question, and we think we may discuss it without overstepping the line we have marked out for ourselves—that of studiously avoiding all party politics; not because we have not the courage to discuss them, but because we have aims and purposes which appeal to all parties alike, and which can best be effected by letting party politics alone.
In what follows we shall take up the question seriously, and treat it candidly, without indulging in any sneers, jeers, or ridicule. A certain number of women have become, in some way or other, very thoroughly convinced that women are deeply wronged, deprived of their just rights by men, and especially in not being allowed political suffrage and eligibility. They claim to be in all things man's equal, and in many things his superior, and contend that society should make no distinction of sex in any of its civil and political arrangements. It will not, indeed, be easy for us to forget this distinction so long as we honor our mothers, and love our wives and daughters; but we will endeavor in this discussion to forget it—so far, at least, as to treat the question on its merits, and make no allowance for any real or supposed difference of intellect between men and women. We shall neither roughen nor soften our tones because our opponents are women, or men who encourage them. The women in question claim for women all the prerogatives of men; we shall, therefore, take the liberty to disregard their privileges as women. They may expect from us civility, not gallantry.
We say frankly in the outset that we are decidedly opposed to female suffrage and eligibility. The woman's rights women demand them both as a right, and complain that men, in refusing to concede them, withhold a natural right, and violate the equal rights on which the American republic professes to be based. We deny that women have a natural right to suffrage and eligibility; for neither is a natural right at all, for either men or women. Either is a trust from civil society, not a natural and indefeasible right; and civil society confers either on whom it judges trustworthy, and on such conditions as it deems it expedient to annex. As the trust has never been conferred by civil society with us on women, they are deprived of no right by not being enfranchised.
We know that the theory has been broached latterly, and defended by several political journals, and even by representatives and senators in Congress, as well as by The Revolution, the organ of the woman's rights movement, that suffrage and eligibility are not trusts conferred by civil society on whom it will, but natural and indefeasible rights, held directly from God or nature, and which civil society is bound by its very constitution to recognize, protect, and defend for all men and women, and which they can be deprived of only by crimes which forfeit one's natural life or liberty. It is on this ground that many have defended the extension of the elective franchise and eligibility to negroes and the colored races in the United States, and hold that Congress, under that clause of the Constitution authorizing it to guarantee to the several States a republican form of government, is bound to enfranchise them. It may or may not be wise and expedient to extend suffrage and eligibility to negroes and the colored races hitherto, in most of the States, excluded from the sovereign people of the country; on that question we express no opinion, one way or the other; but we deny that the negroes and colored men can claim admission on the ground either of natural right or of American republicanism; for white men themselves cannot claim it on that ground.
Indeed, the assumption that either suffrage or eligibility is a natural right is anti-republican. The fundamental principle, the very essence of republicanism is, that power is a trust to be exercised for the public good or common weal, and is forfeited when not so exercised, or when exercised for private and personal ends. Suffrage and eligibility confer power to govern, which, if a natural right, would imply that power is the natural and indefeasible right of the governors—the essential principle of all absolutism, whether autocratic, aristocratic, monarchical, or democratic. It would imply that the American government is a pure, centralized, absolute, unmitigated democracy, which may be regarded either as tantamount to no government, or as the absolute despotism of the majority for the time, or its right to govern as it pleases in all things whatsoever, spiritual as well as secular, regardless of vested rights or constitutional limitations. This certainly is not American republicanism, which has always aimed to restrain the absolute power of majorities, and to protect minorities by constitutional provisions. It has never recognized suffrage as a personal right which a man carries with him whithersoever he goes, but has always made it a territorial right, which a man can exercise only in his own State, his own county, his own town or city, and his own ward or precinct. If American republicanism recognized suffrage as a right, not as simply a trust, why does it place restrictions on its exercise, or treat bribery as a crime? If suffrage is my natural right, my vote is my property, and I may do what I please with it; dispose of it in the market for the highest price I can get for it, as I may of any other species of property.