Woman and the Republic Part 1

Woman and the Republic.

by Helen Kendrick Johnson.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

The introduction to the "History of Woman Suffrage," published in 1881-85, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, contains the following statement: "It is often a.s.serted that, as woman has always been man's slave, subject, inferior, dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition; but that her condition is abnormal is proved by the marvellous change in her character, from a toy in the Turkish harem, or a drudge in the German fields, to a leader of thought in the literary circles of France, England, and America."

I have made this quotation partly on account of its direct application to the subject to be discussed, and partly to ill.u.s.trate the contradictions that seem to inhere in the arguments on which the claim to Woman Suffrage is founded. If woman has become a leader of thought in the literary circles of the most cultivated lands, she has not always been man's slave, subject, inferior, dependent, under all forms of government and religion; and, furthermore, it is not true that there has been such a marvellous change in her character as is implied in this statement. Where man is a bigot and a barbarian, there, alas! woman is still a harem toy; where man is little more than a human clod, woman is to-day a drudge in the field; where man has hewn the way to governmental and religious freedom, there woman has become a leader of thought. The unity of race progress is strikingly suggested by this fact. The method through which that unity is maintained should unfold itself as we study the story of the s.e.x advancement of our time.

Progress is a magic word, and the Suffrage party has been fortunate in its attempt to invoke the sorcery of the thought that it enfolds, and to blend it with the claim of woman to share in the public duty of voting.

Possession of the elective franchise is a symbol of power in man's hand; why should it not bear the same relation to woman's upward impulse and action? Modern adherents ask, "Is not the next new force at hand in our social evolution to come from the entrance of woman upon the political arena?" The roots of these questions, and consequently of their answers, lie as deep as the roots of being, and they cannot be laid bare by superficial digging. But the laying bare of roots is not the only way, or even the best way, to judge of the strength and beauty of a growth. We look at the leaves, the flowers, and the fruit. "Movement" and "Progress"

are not synonymous terms. In evolution there is degeneration as well as regeneration. Only the work that has been in accord with the highest ideals of woman's nature is fitted to the environment of its advance, and thus to survival and development. In order to learn whether Woman Suffrage is in the line of advance, we must know whether the movement to obtain it has thus far blended itself with those that have proved to be for woman's progress and for the progress of government.

I am sure I need not emphasize the fact that, in studying some of the principles that underlie the Suffrage movement, I am not impugning the motives of the leaders. Nor need I dwell upon the fact that it is from the good comradeship of men and women that has come to prevail under our free conditions, that some women have hastily espoused a cause with which they never have affiliated, because they supposed it to be fighting against odds for the freedom of their s.e.x.

The past fifty years have wrought more change in the conditions of life than could many a Cathayan cycle. The growth of religious liberty, enlargement of foreign and home missions, the Temperance movement, the giant war waged for principle, are among the causes of this change. The settlement of the great West, the opening of professions and trades to woman consequent upon the loss of more than a half million of the nation's most stalwart men, the mechanical inventions that have changed home and trade conditions, the sudden advance of science, the expansion of mind and of work that are fostered by the play of a free government,--all these have tended to place man and woman, but especially woman, where something like a new heaven and a new earth are in the distant vision.

To this change the Suffragists call attention, and say, "This is, in great part, our work." In this little book I shall recount a few of the facts that, in my opinion, go to prove that the Suffrage movement has had but little part or lot in this matter. And because of these facts I believe the principles on which the claim to suffrage is founded are those that turn individuals and nations backward and not forward.

The first proof I shall mention is the latest one in time--it is the fact of an Anti-Suffrage movement. In the political field alone are we being formed into separate camps whose watchwords become more unlike as they become more clearly understood. The fact that for the first time in our history representatives of two great organizations of women are appealing to courts and legislatures, each begging them to refuse the prayer of the other, shows, as conclusively as a long argument could do, that this matter of suffrage is something essentially distinct from the great series of movements in which women thus far have advanced side by side. It is an instinctive announcement of a belief that the demand for suffrage is not progress; that it does array s.e.x against s.e.x; that woman, like man, can advance only as the race advances; and that here lies the dividing line.

How absolute is that dividing line between woman's progress and woman suffrage, we may realize when we consider what the result would be if we could know to-morrow, beyond a peradventure, that woman never would vote in the United States. Not one of her charities, great or small, would be crippled. Not a woman's college would close its doors. Not a profession would withhold its diploma from her; not a trade its recompense. Not a single just law would be repealed, or a bad one framed, as a consequence.

Not a good book would be forfeited. Not a family would be less secure of domestic happiness. Not a single hope would die which points to a time when our cities will all be like those of the prophet's vision, "first pure and then peaceable."

Among the forces that are universally considered progressive are: the democratic idea in government, extinction of slavery, increase of educational and industrial opportunities for woman, improvement in the statute laws, and spread of religious freedom. The Woman-Suffrage movement professed to champion these causes. That movement is now nearly fifty years old, and has made a record by which its relation to them can be judged. What is the verdict?

CHAPTER II.

IS WOMAN SUFFRAGE DEMOCRATIC?

As the claim of woman to share the voting power is related to the fundamental principles of government, the progress of government must be studied in relation to that claim in order to learn its bearing upon them.

It is possible to suggest in one brief chapter only the barest outline of such a far-reaching scrutiny, and wiser heads than mine must search to conclusion; but some beginnings looking toward an answer to the inquiry I have raised have occurred to me as not having entered into the newly- opened controversy on woman suffrage.

I say, the newly-opened controversy, for, through these fifty years, the Suffragists have done nearly all the talking. So persistently have they laid claim to being in the line of progress for woman, that many of their newly aroused opponents fancied that the anti-suffrage view might be the ultra conservative one, and that democratic principles, strictly and broadly applied, might at last lead to woman suffrage, though premature if pushed to a conclusion now.

The first step in finding out how far that position is true is, to ascertain what the Suffragists say about this n.o.blest of democracies, our own Government. In referring to the "The History of Woman Suffrage" for the opinions of the leaders, I am not only using a book that on its publication was considered a strong and full presentment of their arguments, but one which they are today advertising and selling as "a perfect a.r.s.enal of the work done by and for women during the last half century." In it the editors say: "Woman's political equality with man is the legitimate outgrowth of the fundamental principles of our government."

Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, writing in the New York Sun in April, 1894, says: "Never, until the establishment of universal [male] suffrage, did it happen that all the women in a community, no matter how well born, how intelligent, how well educated, how virtuous, how wealthy, were counted the political inferiors of all the men, no matter how base born, how stupid, how ignorant, how brutal, how poverty-stricken. This anomaly is the real innovation. Men have personally ruled the women of their families; the law has annihilated the separate existence of women; but women have never been subjected to the political sovereignty of all men simply in virtue of their s.e.x. Never, that is, since the days of the ancient republics." Mrs. Ellen Battelle Dietrick, who, as Secretary of the New-England Suffrage a.s.sociation, was put forward to meet all comers, writing in July, 1895, said: "Shall we, as a people, be true to our principles and enfranchise woman? or, shall we drift along in the meanest form of oligarchy known among men--an oligarchy which exalts every sort of a male into a ruler simply because he is a male, and debases every woman into a subject simply because she is a woman?" Mrs. f.a.n.n.y B. Ames, speaking in Boston in 1896, said: "I believe woman suffrage to be the final result of the evolution of a true democracy." Not only has every woman speaker or writer in favor of suffrage presented this idea in some form, but the men also who have taken that side have done likewise. One among those who advocated the cause before the Committee in the Const.i.tutional Convention of New York, said: "Woman Suffrage is the inevitable result of the logic of the situation of modern society. The despot who first yielded an inch of power gave up the field. We are standing in the light of the best interests of the State of New York when we stand in the way of this forward movement."

All these writers charge the American Republic with being false to democratic principles in excluding women from the franchise, while but one of them alludes to the fact that in the ancient republics the same "anomaly" was seen.

As I read political history, the facts go to show that the fundamental principles of our Government are more opposed to the exercise of suffrage by women than are those of monarchies. To me it seems that both despotism and anarchy are more friendly to woman's political aspirations than is any form of const.i.tutional government, and that manhood suffrage, and not womanhood suffrage, is the final result of the evolution of democracy.

The Suffragists repeatedly call attention to the fact that in the early ages in Egypt, in Greece, and in Rome, women were of much greater political consequence than later during the republics; but the moral they have drawn has been that of the superiority of the ancient times. Mrs.

Dietrick says: "The ideal woman of Greece was Athena, patroness of all household arts and industries, but equally patroness of all political interests. The greatest city of Greece was believed to have been founded by her, and Greek history recorded that, though the men citizens voted solidly to have the city named for Neptune, yet the women citizens voted solidly for Athena, beat them by one vote, and carried that political matter. If physical force had been a governing power in Greece, and men its manifestation, how could such a story have been published by Greek men down to the second century before our era?"

Mrs. Dietrick's remarkably realistic version of the old myth does not tell the tale as Greek men published it. Varro, who was educated at Athens, goes on to say: "Thereupon, Neptune became enraged, and immediately the sea flowed over all the land of Athens. To appease the G.o.d, the burgesses were compelled to impose a threefold punishment upon their wives--they were to lose their votes; the children were to receive no more the mother's name; and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenians, after the G.o.ddess." It seems to me this fable teaches that physical force was indeed the governing power in Athens at that day, and that men were its manifestation.

The legend is generally taken to indicate the time when the Greek gens progressed to the family. In the ruder time, the legitimacy of the chieftain might be traced, because the mother, though not always the father, could be known with certainty. When the father became the acknowledged head of the household, a distinct advance was made toward that heroic age in which the vague but towering figures of men and women move across the stage. G.o.ddesses, queens, princesses, are powerful in love and war. Sibyls unfold the meaning of the book of fate. Vestals feed the fires upon the highest and lowest altars. Later, throughout most of the states of Greece, something like the following order of political life is seen: from kings to oligarchs, from oligarchs to tyrants or despots, from them to some form of restricted const.i.tutional liberty. In Sparta, all change of government was controlled by the machinery of war, and the soldiers were made forever free. Athens, separated from the rest of Greece, was less agitated by outward conflict. In government she pa.s.sed from king to archon; from hereditary archon to archons chosen for ten years, but always from one family, then to those elected for one year, nine being chosen. At the time of the Areopagus there were four cla.s.ses of citizens. The first three paid taxes, had a right to share in the government, and formed the defence of the state. If women were of political importance in earlier times, and if a republic is more favorable to the exercise by them of the elective franchise, we should expect to find women reaching their highest power under the Areopagus. Exactly the contrary appears to be true. Native and honorable Greek women retired to domestic life as the liberty of their people grew. Grote, in his "History of Greece," referring to the legendary period, says: "We find the wife occupying a station of great dignity and influence, though it was the practice of the husband to purchase her by valuable presents to her parents. She even seems to live less secluded, and to enjoy a wider sphere of action, than was allotted to her in historic Greece."

Lecky, in his "European Morals," says: "It is one of the most remarkable and, to some writers, one of the most perplexing facts in the moral history of Greece, that in the former and ruder period women had undoubtedly the highest place, and their type exhibited the highest perfection." What the "highest perfection" is, for her type, or for man's type, is not here under discussion; but it is not out of place to say in pa.s.sing that if the final conquest of the spiritual over the material forces of humanity is really the aim of civilization, these "facts in the moral history of Greece" become less "perplexing."

The heroines of Homer's tales were all of n.o.ble birth--they were G.o.ddesses, princesses, hereditary gentlewomen. In early historic times, also, it was only royal or gentle blood that secured for woman political power. Athena was, in gentle Athens, patroness of household arts; but in Sparta, as Minerva, the same divinity was G.o.ddess, not of political interests, as Mrs. Dietrick puts it, but of war. She sprang full-armed from the head of Jove--rather a masculine origin, it must be owned. In Sparta women became soldiers as the democratic idea advanced. Princess Archidamia, marching at the head of her female troop to rebuke the senators for the decree that the women and children be removed from the city before the antic.i.p.ated attack could come, is an example. In Etolia, in Argos, and in other states, the same was true. Maria and Telesilla led the women in battle and disciplined them in peace. But the world does not turn to Sparta for its ideal of a pre-Christian republic, and the Suffragists of our day do not propose to emulate the Spartan Amazon and hew their way to political power with the sword.

In Athens, which does present the model, matters were far otherwise. In the year 700 B. C., the Spartans called upon Athens for a commander to lead them to the second Messenian war, and the Athenians sent them Tyrtaeus, their martial poet. The Spartans were displeased at his youth and gentle bearing; but when the battle was joined, his chanting of his own war-songs so animated the troops that they won against heavy odds. The following is a fragment translated from one of his lyrics:

"But be it ours to guard the hallowed spot, To shield the tender offspring and the wife; Here steadily await our destined lot, And, for their sakes, resign the gift of life."

Aeschylus, poet and soldier, writing a hundred and fifty years later, in his "Seven Against Thebes," puts into the mouth of the chieftain Eteocles this address to the women:

"It is not to be borne, ye wayward race; Is this your best, is this the aid you lend The state, the fort.i.tude with which you steel The souls of the besieged, thus falling down Before the images to wail, and shriek With lamentations loud? Wisdom abhors you.

Nor in misfortune, nor in dear success, Be woman my a.s.sociate. If her power Bears sway, her insolence exceeds all bounds; But if she fears, woe to that house and city.

And now by holding counsel with weak fear, You magnify the foe, and turn our men To flight. Thus are we ruined by ourselves.

This ever will arise from suffering women To intermix with men. But mark me well, Whoe'er henceforth dares disobey my orders-- Be it man or woman, old or young-- Vengeance shall burst upon him, the decree Stands irreversible, and he shall die.

War is no female province, but the scene For men. Hence, home! nor spread your mischiefs here.

Hear you, or not? Or speak I to the deaf?"

Pericles, in his famous funeral oration over those who fell in the Peloponnesian war, thus addresses the Athenian women: "To the wives who will henceforth live in widowhood, I will speak, in one short sentence only, of womanly virtue. She is the best woman who is most truly a woman, and her reputation is the highest whose name is never in the mouths of men for good or for evil."

Seclusion was the best thing that the most intellectual pre-Christian republic could give to its honorable women. The freedom with which the hetairse, who were foreigners or daughters of slaves, mingled with statesmen and philosophers, brought them open political influence, but not a hint of voting power or of office-holding.

For the sake of brevity, I will confine my reference to Roman custom to a single pregnant sentence from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Empire."

He says: "In every age and country the wiser, or at least the stronger of the two s.e.xes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life. In hereditary monarchies, however, and especially in those of modern Europe, the gallant spirit of chivalry, and the law of succession, have accustomed us to allow a singular exception, and a woman is often acknowledged the absolute sovereign of a great kingdom, in which she would be deemed incapable of exercising the smallest employment, civil or military. But, as the Roman Emperors were still considered as the generals and magistrates of the Republic, their wives and mothers, although dignified by the name of Augusta, were never a.s.sociated to their personal honors; and a female reign would have appeared an inexplicable prodigy in the eyes of those primitive Romans, who married without love, or loved without delicacy or respect."

The warlike states named republics in the Middle Ages had no woman Doge, or Duke, although women rose to the semblance of political power with empires and kingdoms, in Italy and Spain as well as in Germany and France, Austria and Russia.

Let us turn to modern Europe, in which thrones have been occupied now and again by queens. The progress of woman here, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, has been steady, true and inspiring. In the earliest recorded councils of the race from which we sprang, we see freemen in full armor casting equal votes. During the ages of feudalism, women who were land- owners had the same rights as other n.o.bles. They could raise soldiery, coin money, and administer justice in both civil and criminal proceedings.

In proportion as the aristocratic power lost its hold, women were exempted from these services and gained in moral influence. The Germanic races were renowned for their respect for woman, and their love for home. As const.i.tutional liberty grew, and each Englishman's house became his castle for defence against arbitrary power, the protection was not for himself but for his family. A figure-head ruler in feminine attire sits on England's throne to-day--the England that still unites its church and state, and in which feudal customs still prevail to some extent. Widows and spinsters who are property-owners can vote for all offices except the one charged under the Const.i.tution with the framing and execution of the laws of the land. Aristocracy decrees that in the House of Lords the Bishops shall have a voice; but in the House of Commons no clergyman can hold a seat, and for members of Parliament no woman votes. Would any Suffragist hold that a clergyman was the inferior of men who do sit in the House of Commons? They are excluded for the same reason that woman has not the parliamentary vote--they are looked upon as non-combatants.

The Greek and Roman republics appear to have followed an instinct that was unerring in the condition of society when they removed women from the seats of power as the commonwealth gathered strength. Gibbon, in the sentences quoted, attributes the fact that queens as well as kings have occupied the thrones of modern Europe to the chivalry of men toward those who would yet be incapable of exercising actual power except for the backing of a standing army, or an hereditary n.o.bility sworn to their support, both of which are composed solely of men. If this be true, it should be visible in the workings of the const.i.tutional restrictions upon monarchies that have developed in the past fifty years, during which the principle of democratic government has advanced with enormous strides over a great portion of the globe.

In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy there is restricted woman suffrage. The kingdom of Italy has restricted munic.i.p.al woman suffrage. The little republic that separates those countries, the land of Tell and the Vaudois, has direct manhood suffrage only.

Sweden and Norway are apparently parting company. Sweden chooses to keep its king and its aristocracy, and it has restricted woman suffrage; but Norway, which is working toward free inst.i.tutions, and last year voted to remove the insignia of union from the Norwegian flag, has no woman suffrage. [Footnote: In the city of Berne, Switzerland, in 1852, a proxy vote was given to independent women who paid a commercial tax, but they made no effort to use it until 1885, when contending political factions compelled them to do so in a measure. Norway's women have a local school vote. Both these cases of exception serve to prove the rule that I am trying to set forth.]

Autocratic Russia and its Asiatic colonies have more woman suffrage than England. Finland, a const.i.tutional monarchy, was ceded to the Emperor of Russia in 1809. Women there have all except the parliamentary suffrage.

The Governor-General of the Senate is nominated by the Emperor, and is chief of the military force. The National a.s.sembly is convoked by the Emperor whenever he sees fit. The duties of that a.s.sembly are to consider laws proposed by the Emperor and elaborated by the Committee of Affairs and four members nominated by the Emperor, who sit in St. Petersburg. The Emperor has the veto power over any act of theirs. That National a.s.sembly consists of representatives of the n.o.bility, the clergy, the burghers, and the peasantry, the consent of all of whom must be obtained to any measure that makes a change in the const.i.tution or imposes taxes. But the royal veto can set aside any decision.

Iceland, a dependency of Denmark, has munic.i.p.al woman suffrage, and women are eligible to munic.i.p.al office. It has its own legislature, which governs jointly with the King, the executive power being in the hands of the King alone.