Part 19

These things being so, it indicates feebleness or dyspepsia when an educated man is heard whining, about election-time, with his fears of ignorant voting. It is his business to enlighten and control that ignorance. With a voice and a pen at his command, with a town-hall in every town for the one, and a newspaper in every village for the other, he has such advantages over his ignorant neighbors that the only doubt is whether his privileges are not greater than he deserves. For one, in writing for the press, I am impressed by the undue greatness, not by the littleness, of the power I wield. And what is true of men will be true of women. If the educated women of America have not brains or energy enough to control, in the long-run, the votes of the ignorant women around them, they will deserve a severe lesson, and will be sure, like the men in New York, to receive it. And thenceforward they will educate and guide that ignorance, instead of evading or cringing before it.

But I have no fear about the matter. It is a libel on American women to say that they will not go anywhere or do any thing which is for the good of their children and their husbands. Travel West on any of our great lines of railroad, and see what women undergo in transporting their households to their new homes. See the watching and the feeding, and the endless answers to the endless questions, and the toil to keep little Sarah warm, and little Johnny cool, and the baby comfortable. What a hungry, tired, jaded, forlorn mass of humanity it is, as the sun rises on it each morning, in the soiled and breathless railway-car! Yet that household group is America in the making; those are the future kings and queens, the little princes and princesses, of this land. Now, is the mother who has undergone for the transportation of these children all this enormous labor, to shrink at her journey’s end from the slight additional labor of going to the polls to vote whether those little ones shall have schools or rumshops? The thought is an absurdity. A few fine ladies in cities will fear to spoil their silk dresses, as a few foppish gentlemen now fear for their broadcloth. But the mass of intelligent American women will vote, as do the mass of men.

LXXXVI. “OFF WITH HER HEAD!”

In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” the Queen of Hearts settles all disputes at croquet by ordering somebody’s head to be taken off. It is the old royal remedy. The Roman Tarquin, when his son sent to ask him the best way of reducing a discontented city, merely slashed off the heads of the tallest poppies, as he walked in the garden. The young man took the hint, and performed a similar process upon the leading citizens.

Every year makes it plainer that the community must imitate Tarquinius Superbus and the Queen of Hearts if it wishes to get rid of the woman suffrage movement. So long as every woman favors it whenever she gets her head above a certain point, so long those conspicuous heads must be recognized. You must either put them on the voting-list, or on the list ordered for immediate execution: there is no middle ground.

There are the women who write books, for instance. When authorship first came up among the women of America, they not only claimed nothing more than the mere privilege of having brains, but they almost apologized for that. Their early authors, as Mrs. Child and Mrs. Leslie, had a way of preparing a cookery-book apiece, as a propitiation to the tyrant man, before proceeding to what is called “the intellectual feast.” They held, with Miss Bremer, that you can get any thing you like from a man if you will only have something nice to pop into his mouth. Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, in her “Woman’s Record,” published twenty years ago, adopted a different form of submission. She seemed very anxious to prove that women had taken a prominent part in the world; but also to show, that, if they were only forgiven for this, they would never, never, never make themselves any more prominent. It is but within a few years that literary women have dared to go beyond literature, and ask for a vote besides.

But now, with what a terrible confidence they come to the demand for suffrage when they acquire voice enough to make themselves heard! Mrs. Stowe helps to free Uncle Tom in his cabin, and then strikes for the freedom of women in her own “Hearth and Home.” Mrs. Howe writes the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and keeps on writing more battle-hymns in behalf of her own sex. Miss Alcott not only delineates “Little Women,” but wishes to emancipate them. Miss Phelps desires to see the “Gates Ajar” for her sex, both in heaven and on earth. Mrs. Child, who risked her literary popularity in early life by her “Appeal for that Class of Americans called Africans,” was as ready to risk it again for that class of Americans called women.

Of course, there are social circles in America where all desire for leadership on the part of literary women would be repudiated; nay, where the fact that a woman had written a book would imply a loss of caste. When Karl von Beethoven signed himself “_Gutsbesitzer_,” or “land proprietor,” his brother Ludwig signed himself “_Hirnbesitzer_,” or “proprietor of a brain.” Posterity remembers only the great musical composer; yet, doubtless, to the society of that period, the stupid elder brother was by far the greater man. Such perversities cannot be helped; but I write for reasonable people. Among the women who dance the German, woman suffrage may be just now unpopular; but the women who translate German will in the long-run have most influence, and their verdict seems to tend the other way. It is said that the leading dancer among the young men of one of our cities was transformed into an equally prominent lawyer by a single suggestion from an elder sister, that it was “better to be a man of books than a man of toes.” It is likely that America will be more influenced at last by the women of heads than by the women of heels.

LXXXVII. FOLLOW YOUR LEADERS.

“There go thirty thousand men,” shouted the Portuguese, as Wellington, with a few staff-officers, rode along the mountain-side. The action of the leaders’ minds, in any direction, has a value out of all proportion to their numbers. In a campaign, there is a council of officers,—Grant and Sherman and Sheridan perhaps. They are but a trifling minority, yet what they plan the whole army will do; and such is the faith in a real leader, that, were all the restraints of discipline for the moment relaxed, the rank and file would still follow his judgment. What a few general officers see to be the best to-day, the sergeants and corporals and private soldiers will usually see to be best to-morrow.

In peace, also, there is a silent leadership; only that in peace, as there is more time to spare, the leaders are expected to persuade the rank and file, instead of commanding them. Yet it comes to the same thing in the end. The movement begins with certain guides, and, if you wish to know the future, keep your eye on them. If you wish to know what is already decided, ask the majority; but, if you wish to find out what is likely to be done next, ask the leaders.

It is constantly said that the majority of women do not yet desire to vote, and it is true. But, to find out whether they are likely to wish for it, we must keep our eyes on the women who lead their sex. The representative women,—those who naturally stand for the rest, those most eminent for knowledge and self-devotion,—how do they view the thing? The rank and file do not yet demand the ballot, you say; but how is it with the general officers?

Now, it is a remarkable fact, about which those who have watched this movement for twenty years can hardly be mistaken, that almost any woman who reaches a certain point of intellectual or moral development will presently be found desiring the ballot for her sex. If this be so, it predicts the future. It is the judgment of Grant and Sherman and Sheridan as against that of the average private soldier of the Two Hundredth Infantry. Set aside, if you please, the specialists of this particular agitation,—those who were first known to the public through its advocacy. There is no just reason why they should be set aside, yet concede that for a moment. The fact remains that the ablest women in the land—those who were recognized as ablest in other spheres, before they took this particular duty upon them—are extremely apt to assume this cross when they reach a certain stage of development.

When Margaret Fuller first came forward into literature, she supposed that literature was all she wanted. It was not till she came to write upon woman’s position that she discovered what woman needed. Clara Barton, driving her ambulance or her supply-wagon at the battle’s edge, did not foresee, perhaps, that she should make that touching appeal, when the battle was over, imploring her own enfranchisement from the soldiers she had befriended. Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa Alcott, came to the claim for the ballot earlier than a million others, because they were the intellectual leaders of American womanhood. They saw farthest, because they were in the highest place. They were the recognized representatives of their sex before they gave in their adhesion to the new demand. Their judgment is as the judgment of the council of officers; while Flora McFlimsey’s opinion is as the opinion of John Smith, unassigned recruit. But, if the generals make arrangements for a battle, the chance is that John Smith will have to take a hand in it, or else run away.

It is a rare thing for the petition for suffrage from any town to comprise the majority of women in that town. It makes no difference: if there are few women in the town who want to vote, there is as much propriety in their voting as if there were ten millions, so long as the majority are equally protected in their right to stay at home. But, when the names of petitioners come to be weighed as well as counted, the character, the purity, the intelligence, the social and domestic value, of the petitioners, is seldom denied. The women who wish to vote are not the idle, the ignorant, the narrow-minded, or the vicious; they are not “the dangerous classes:” they represent the best class in the community, when tried by the highest standard. They are the natural leaders. What they now see to be right, will also be perceived even by the foolish and the ignorant by and by.

In a poultry-yard in spring, when the first brood of ducklings go toddling to the water-side, no doubt all the younger or feebler broods, just hatched out of similar eggs, think these innovators dreadfully mistaken. “You are out of place,” they feebly pipe. “See how happy we are in our safe nests. Perhaps, by and by, when properly introduced into society, we may run about a little on land, but to swim!—never!” Meanwhile their elder kindred are splashing and diving in ecstasy; and, so surely as they are born ducklings, all the rest will swim in their turn. The instinct of the first duck solves the problem for all the rest. It is a mere question of time. Sooner or later, all the broods in the most conservative yard will follow their leaders.

LXXXVIII. HOW TO MAKE WOMEN UNDERSTAND POLITICS.

An English member of Parliament said in a speech, some years ago, that the stupidest man had a clearer understanding of political questions than the brightest woman. He did not find it convenient to say what must be the condition of a nation which for many years has had a woman for its sovereign; but he certainly said bluntly what many men feel. It is not indeed very hard to find the source of this feeling. It is not merely that women are inexperienced in questions of finance or administrative practice, for many men are equally ignorant of these. But it is undoubtedly true of a large class of more fundamental questions,—as, for instance, of some now pending at Washington,—which even many clear-headed women find it hard to understand, while men of far less general training comprehend them entirely. Questions of the distribution of power, for instance, between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government,—or between the United States government and those of the separate States,—belong to the class I mean. Many women of great intelligence show a hazy indistinctness of views when the question arises whether it is the business of the General Government to preserve order at the voting-places at a congressional election, for instance, as the Republicans hold; or whether it should be left absolutely in the hands of the State officials, as the Democrats maintain. Most women would probably say that so long as order was preserved, it made very little difference who did it. Yet, if one goes into a shoe-shop or a blacksmith’s shop, one may hear just these questions discussed in all their bearings by uneducated men, and it will be seen that they involve a principle. Why is this difference? Does it show some constitutional inferiority in women, as to this particular faculty?

The question is best solved by considering a case somewhat parallel. The South Carolina negroes were considered very stupid, even by many who knew them; and they certainly were densely ignorant on many subjects. Put face to face with a difficult point of finance legislation, I think they would have been found to know even less about it than I do. Yet the abolition of slavery was held in those days by many great statesmen to be a subject so difficult that they shrank from discussing it; and nevertheless I used to find that these ignorant men understood it quite clearly in all its bearings. Offer a bit of sophistry to them, try to blind them with false logic on this subject, and they would detect it as promptly, and answer it as keenly, as Garrison or Phillips would have done; and, indeed, they would give very much the same answers. What was the reason? Not that they were half wise and half stupid; but that they were dull where their own interests had not trained them, and they were sharp and keen where their own interests were concerned.

I have no doubt that it will be so with women when they vote. About some things they will be slow to learn; but, about all that immediately concerns themselves, they will know more at the very beginning than many wise men have learned since the world began. How long it took for English-speaking men to correct, even partially, the iniquities of the old common law!—but a parliament of women would have set aside at a single sitting the alleged right of the husband to correct his wife with a stick no bigger than his thumb. It took the men of a certain State of this Union a good many years to see that it was an outrage to confiscate to the State one-half the property of a man who died childless, leaving his widow only the other half; but a legislature of women would have annihilated that enormity by a single day’s work. I have never seen reason to believe that women on general questions would act more wisely or more conscientiously, as a rule, than men: but self-preservation is a wonderful quickener of the brain; and, in all questions bearing on their own rights and opportunities as women, it is they who will prove shrewd and keen, and men who will prove obtuse, as indeed they have usually been.

Another point that adds force to this is the fact that wherever women, by their special position, have more at stake than usual in public affairs, even as now organized, they are apt to be equal to the occasion. When the men of South Carolina were ready to go to war for the “States-Rights” doctrines of Calhoun, the women of that State had also those doctrines at their fingers’-ends. At Washington, where politics make the breath of life, you will often find the wives of members of Congress following the debates, and noting every point gained or lost, because these are matters in which they and their families are personally concerned; and, as for that army of women employed in the “departments” of the government, they are politicians every one, because their bread depends upon it.

The inference is, that, if women as a class are now unfitted for politics, it is because they have not that pressure of personal interest and responsibility by which men are unconsciously trained. Give this, and self-interest will do the rest; aided by that power of conscience and affection which is certainly not less in them than in men, even if we claim no more. A young lady of my acquaintance opposed woman suffrage in conversation on various grounds, one of which was that it would, if enacted, compel her to read the newspapers, which she greatly disliked. I pleaded that this was not a fatal objection; since many men voted “early and often” without reading them, and in fact without knowing how to read at all. She said, in reply, that this might do for men, but that women were far more conscientious, and, if they were once compelled to vote, they would wish to know what they were voting for. This seemed to me to contain the whole philosophy of the matter; and I respected the keenness of her suggestion, though it led me to an opposite conclusion.

LXXXIX. “INFERIOR TO MAN, AND NEAR TO ANGELS.”

If it were anywhere the custom to disfranchise persons of superior virtue because of their virtue, and to present others with the ballot, simply because they had been in the State Prison,—then the exclusion of women from political rights would be a high compliment, no doubt. But I can find no record in history of any such legislation, unless so far as it is contained in the doubtful tradition of the Tuscan city of Pistoia, where men are said to have been ennobled as a punishment for crime. Among us crime may often be a covert means of political prominence, but it is not the ostensible ground; nor are people habitually struck from the voting-lists for performing some rare and eminent service, such as saving human life, or reading every word of a Presidential message. If a man has been President of the United States, we do not disfranchise him thenceforward; if he has been governor, we do not declare him thenceforth ineligible to the office of United States senator. On the contrary, the supposed reward of high merit is to give higher civic privileges. Sometimes these are even forced on unwilling recipients, as when Plymouth Colony in 1633 imposed a fine of twenty pounds on any one who should refuse the office of governor.

It is utterly contrary to all tradition and precedent, therefore, to suppose that women have been hitherto disfranchised because of any supposed superiority. Indeed, the theory is self-annihilating, and involves all supporters in hopeless inconsistency. Thus the Southern slaveholders were wont to argue that a negro was only blest when a slave, and there was no such inhumanity as to free him. Then, if a slave happened to save his master’s life, he was rewarded by emancipation immediately, amid general applause. The act refuted the theory. And so, every time we have disfranchised a rebel, or presented some eminent foreigner with the freedom of a city, we have recognized that enfranchisement, after all, means honor, and disfranchisement implies disgrace.

I do not see how any woman can help a thrill of indignation, when she first opens her eyes to the fact that it is really contempt, not reverence, that has so long kept her sex from an equal share of legal, political, and educational rights. In spite of the duty paid to individual women as mothers, in spite of the reverence paid by the Greeks and the Germanic races to certain women as priestesses and sibyls, the fact remains that this sex has been generally recognized, in past ages of the human race, as stamped by hopeless inferiority, not by angelic superiority. This is carried so far, that a certain taint of actual inferiority is held to attach to women, in barbarous nations. Among certain Indian tribes, the service of the gods is defiled if a woman but touches the implements of sacrifice; and a Turk apologizes to a Christian physician for the mention of the women of his family, in the phrases used to soften the mention of any degrading creature. Mr. Leland tells us, that, among the English gypsies, any object that a woman treads upon, or sweeps with the skirts of her dress, is destroyed or made away with in some way, as unfit for use. In reading the history of manners, it is easy to trace the steps from this degradation up to the point now attained, such as it is. Yet even the habit of physiological contempt is not gone, as readers of late controversies on “Sex in Education” know full well; and I do not see how any one can read history without seeing, all around us, in society, education, and politics, the tradition of inferiority. Many laws and usages which in themselves might not strike all women as intrinsically worth striving for—as the exclusion of women from colleges or from the ballot-box—assume great importance to a woman’s self-respect, when she sees in these the plain survival of the same contempt that once took much grosser forms.

And it must be remembered that in civilized communities the cynics, who still frankly express this utter contempt, are better friends to women than the flatterers, who conceal it in the drawing-room, and only utter it freely in the lecture-room, the club, and the North American Review. Contempt at least arouses pride and energy. To be sure, in the face of history, the contemptuous tone in regard to women seems to me untrue, unfair, and dastardly; but, like any other extreme injustice, it leads to re-action. It helps to awaken women from that shallow dream of self-complacency into which flattery lulls them. There is something tonic in the manly arrogance of Fitzjames Stephen, who derides the thought that the marriage-contract can be treated as in any sense a contract between equals; but there is something that debilitates in the dulcet counsel given by an anonymous gentleman, in an old volume of the Ladies’ Magazine that lies before me, “She ought to present herself as a being made to please, to love, and to seek support; _a being inferior to man, and near to angels._”

OBJECTIONS TO SUFFRAGE.

“When you were weak and I was strong, I toiled for you. Now you are strong and I am weak. Because of my work for you, I ask your aid. I ask the ballot for myself and my sex. As I stood by you, I pray you stand by me and mine.”—CLARA BARTON.

[Appeal to the returned soldiers of the United States, written from Geneva, Switzerland, by Clara Barton, invalided by long service in the hospitals and on the field during the civil war.]

XC. THE FACT OF SEX.

It is constantly said that the advocates of woman suffrage ignore the fact of sex. On the contrary, they seem to me to be the only people who do not ignore it.

Were there no such thing as sexual difference, the wrong done to woman by disfranchisement would be far less. It is precisely because her traits, habits, needs, and probable demands are distinct from those of man, that she is not, never was, never can, and never will be, justly represented by him. It is not merely that a vast number of human individuals are disfranchised; it is not even because in many of our States the disfranchisement extends to a majority, that the evil is so great; it is not merely that we disfranchise so many units and tens: but we exclude a special element, a peculiar power, a distinct interest,—in a word, a sex.