Women and the Alphabet Part 17

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

Were there no such thing as s.e.xual difference, the wrong done to woman by disfranchis.e.m.e.nt 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 disfranchis.e.m.e.nt 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 s.e.x.

Whether this s.e.x is more or less wise, more or less important, than the other s.e.x, does not affect the argument: it is a s.e.x, and, being such, is more absolutely distinct from the other than is any mere race from any other race. The more you emphasize the fact of s.e.x, the more you strengthen our argument. If the white man cannot justly represent the negro,-- although the two races are now so amalgamated that not even the microscope can always decide to which race one belongs,--how impossible that one s.e.x should stand in legislation for the other s.e.x!

This is so clear that, so soon as it is stated, there is a shifting of the ground. "But consider the danger of introducing the s.e.xual influence into legislation!" ... Then we are sure to be confronted with the case of Miss Vinnie Ream, the sculptor. See how that beguiling damsel cajoled all Congress into buying poor statues! they say. If one woman could do so much, how would it be with one hundred? Precisely the Irishman's argument against the use of pillows: he had put one feather on a rock, and found it a very uncomfortable support. Grant, for the sake of argument, that Miss Ream gave us poor art; but what gave her so much power? Plainly that she was but a single feather. Congress being composed exclusively of men, the mere fact of her s.e.x gave her an exceptional and dangerous influence. Fill a dozen of the seats in Congress with women, and that danger at least will be cancelled. The taste in art may be no better; but an artist will no more be selected for being a pretty girl than now for being a pretty boy. So in all such cases. Here, as everywhere, it is the advocate of woman suffrage who wishes to recognize the fact of s.e.x, and guard against its perils.

It is precisely so in education. Believing boys and girls to be unlike, and yet seeing them to be placed by the Creator on the same planet and in the same family, we hold it safer to follow his method. As they are born to interest each other, to stimulate each other, to excite each other, it seems better to let this impulse work itself off in a natural way,--to let in upon it the fresh air and the daylight, instead of attempting to suppress and destroy it. In a mixed school, as in a family, the fact of s.e.x presents itself as an unconscious, healthy, mutual stimulus. It is in the separate schools that the healthy relation vanishes, and the thought of s.e.x becomes a morbid and diseased thing. This observation first occurred to me when a pupil and a teacher in boys' boarding-schools years ago: there was such marked superiority as to s.e.xual refinement in the day-scholars, who saw their sisters and the friends of their sisters every day. All later experience of our public-school system has confirmed this opinion. It is because I believe the distinction of s.e.x to be momentous, that I dread to see the s.e.xes educated apart.

The truth of the whole matter is that Nature will have her rights-- innocently if she can, guiltily if she must; and it is a little amusing that the writer of an ingenious paper on the other side, called "s.e.x in Politics," in an able New York journal, puts our case better than I can put it, before he gets through, only that he is then speaking of wealth, not women: "Anybody who considers seriously what is meant by the conflict between labor and capital, of which we are only just witnessing the beginning, and what is to be done _to give money legitimately that influence on legislation which it now exercises illegitimately,_ must acknowledge at once that the next generation will have a th.o.r.n.y path to travel." The italics are my own. Precisely what this writer wishes to secure for money, we claim for the disfranchised half of the human race,-- open instead of secret influence; the English tradition instead of the French; women as rulers, not as kings' mistresses; women as legislators, not merely as lobbyists; women employing in legitimate form that power which they will otherwise illegitimately wield. This is all our demand.

HOW WILL IT RESULT?

"It would be a great convenience, my hearers," said old Parson Withington of Newbury, "if the moral of a fable could only be written at the beginning of it, instead of the end. But it never is." Commonly the only thing to be done is to get hold of a few general principles, hold to those, and trust that all will turn out well. No matter how thoroughly a reform may have been discussed,--negro emanc.i.p.ation or free-trade, for instance,--it is a step in the dark at last, and the detailed results never turn out to be precisely according to the programme.

An "esteemed correspondent," who has written some of the best things yet said in America in behalf of the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of woman, writes privately to express some solicitude, since, as she thinks, we are not ready for it yet. "I am convinced," she writes, "of the abstract right of women to vote; but all I see of the conduct of the existing women, into whose hands this change would throw the power, inclines me to hope that this power will not be conceded till education shall have prepared a cla.s.s of women fit to take the responsibilities."

Gradual emanc.i.p.ation, in short!--for fear of trusting truth and justice to take care of themselves. Who knew, when the negroes were set free, whether they would at first use their freedom well, or ill? Would they work? would they avoid crimes? would they justify their freedom? The theory of education and preparation seemed very plausible. Against that, there was only the plain theory which Elizabeth Heyrick first announced to England,--"Immediate, unconditional emanc.i.p.ation." "The best preparation for freedom is freedom." What was true of the negroes then is true of women now.

"The lovelier traits of womanhood," writes earnestly our correspondent, "simplicity, faith, guilelessness, unfit them to conduct public affairs, where one must deal with quacks and charlatans.... We are not all at once 'as G.o.ds, knowing good and evil;' and the very innocency of our lives, and the habits of pure homes, unfit us to manage a certain cla.s.s who will flock to this standard."

But the basis of all republican government is in the a.s.sumption that good is ultimately stronger than evil. If we once abandon this, our theory has gone to pieces, at any rate. If we hold to it, good women are no more helpless and useless than good men. The argument that would here disfranchise women has been used before now to disfranchise clergymen. I believe that in some States they are still disfranchised; and, if they are not, it is partly because good is found to be as strong as evil, after all, and partly because clergymen are not found to be so angelically good as to be useless. I am very confident that both these truths will be found to apply to women also.

Whatever else happens, we may be pretty sure that one thing will. The first step towards the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women will blow to the winds the tradition of the angelic superiority of women. Just so surely as women vote, we shall occasionally have women politicians, women corruptionists, and women demagogues. Conceding, for the sake of courtesy, that none such now exist, they will be born as inevitably, after enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, as the frogs begin to pipe in the spring. Those who doubt it ignore human nature; and, if they are not prepared for this fact, they had better consider it in season, and take sides accordingly. In these pages, at least, they have been warned.

What then? Suppose women are not "as G.o.ds, knowing good and evil:" they are not to be emanc.i.p.ated as G.o.ds, but as fallible human beings. They are to come out of an ignorant innocence, that may be only weakness, into a wise innocence that will be strength. It is too late to remand American women into a Turkish or Jewish tutelage: they have emerged too far not to come farther. In a certain sense, no doubt, the b.u.t.terfly is safest in the chrysalis. When the soft thing begins to emerge, the world certainly seems a dangerous place; and it is hard to say what will be the result of the emanc.i.p.ation. But when she is once half out, there is no safety for the pretty creature but to come the rest of the way, and use her wings.

I HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS I WANT

When Dr. Johnson had published his English Dictionary, and was asked by a lady how he chanced to make a certain mistake that she pointed out, he answered, "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance." I always feel disposed to make the same comment on the a.s.sertion of any woman that she has all the rights she wants. For every woman is, or may be, or might have been, a mother. And when she comes to know that even now, in many parts of the Union, a married mother has no legal right to her child, I should think her tongue would cleave to her mouth before she would utter those foolish words again.

All the things I ever heard or read against slavery did not fix in my soul such a hostility to it as a single scene in a Missouri slave-jail many years ago. As I sat there, a purchaser came in to buy a little girl to wait on his wife. Three little sisters were brought in, from eight to twelve years old: they were mulattoes, with sweet, gentle manners; they had evidently been taken good care of, and their pink calico frocks were clean and whole. The gentleman chose one of them, and then asked her, good-naturedly enough, if she did not wish to go with him. She burst into tears, and said, "I want to stay with my mother." But her tears were as powerless, of course, as so many salt drops from the ocean.

That was all. But all the horrors of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the stories told me by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs I afterwards saw by dozens among colored recruits, did not impress me as did that hour in the jail. The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking child pa.s.sed before me in fancy. It seemed to me that a man must be utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to overthrow such a system. It seemed to me that the woman who could tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be true, could not be pure, or must be fearfully and grossly ignorant.

You acquiesce, fair lady. You say it was horrible indeed, but, thank G.o.d!

it is past. Past? Is it so? Past, if you please, as to the law of slavery, but as to the legal position of woman still a fearful reality. It is not many years since a scene took place in a Boston court-room, before Chief Justice Chapman, which was worse, in this respect, than that scene in St.

Louis, inasmuch as the mother was present when the child was taken away, and the wrong was sanctioned by the highest judicial officer of the State.

Two little girls, who had been taken from their mother by their guardian, their father being dead, had taken refuge with her against his wishes; and he brought them into court under a writ of habeas corpus, and the court awarded them to him as against their mother. "The little ones were very much affected," says the "Boston Herald," "by the result of the decision which separated them from their mother; and force was required to remove them from the court-room. The distress of the mother was also very evident."

There must have been some special reason, you say, for such a seeming outrage: she was a bad woman. No: she was "a lady of the highest respectability." No charge was made against her; but, being left a widow, she had married again; and for that, and that only, so far as appears, the court took from her the guardianship of her own children,--bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh, the children for whom she had borne the deepest physical agony of womanhood,--and awarded them to somebody else.

You say, "But her second husband might have misused the children." Might?

So the guardian might, and that where they had no mother to protect them.

Had the father been left a widower, he might have made a half-dozen successive marriages, have brought stepmother after stepmother to control these children, and no court could have interfered. The father is recognized before the law as the natural guardian of the children. The mother, even though she be left a widow, is not. The consequence is a series of outrages of which only a few scattered instances come before the public; just as in slavery, out of a hundred little girls sold away from their parents, only one case might ever be mentioned in any newspaper.

This case led to an alteration of the law in Ma.s.sachusetts, but the same thing might yet happen in some States of the Union. The possibility of a single such occurrence shows that there is still a fundamental wrong in the legal position of woman. And the fact that most women do not know it only deepens the wrong--as Dr. Channing said of the contentment of the Southern slaves. The ma.s.s of men, even of lawyers, pa.s.s by such things, as they formerly pa.s.sed by the facts of slavery.

There is no lasting remedy for these wrongs, except to give woman the political power to protect herself. There never yet existed a race, nor a cla.s.s, nor a s.e.x, which was n.o.ble enough to be trusted with political power over another s.e.x, or cla.s.s, or race. It is for self-defence that woman needs the ballot. And in view of a single such occurrence as I have given, I charge that woman who professes to have "all the rights she wants,"

either with a want of all feeling of motherhood, or with "ignorance, madam, pure ignorance."

SENSE ENOUGH TO VOTE

There is one special point on which men seem to me rather insincere toward women. When they speak to women, the objection made to their voting is usually that they are too angelic. But when men talk to each other, the general a.s.sumption is, that women should not vote because they have not brains enough--or, as old Theophilus Parsons wrote a century ago, have not "a sufficient acquired discretion."

It is an important difference. Because, if women are too angelic to vote, they can only be fitted for it by becoming more wicked, which is not desirable. On the other hand, if there is no objection but the want of brains, then our public schools are equalizing that matter fast enough.

Still, there are plenty of people who have never got beyond this objection.

Listen to the first discussion that you encounter among men on this subject, wherever they may congregate. Does it turn upon the question of saintliness, or of brains? Let us see.

I travelled the other day upon the Boston and Providence Railroad with a party of mechanics, mostly English and Scotch. They were discussing this very question, and, with the true English habit, thought it was all a matter of property. Without it a woman certainly should not vote, they said; but they all favored, to my surprise, the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women of property. "As a general rule," said the chief speaker, "a woman that's got property has got sense enough to vote."

There it was! These foreigners, who had found their own manhood by coming to a land which not only the Pilgrim Fathers but the Pilgrim Mothers had settled, and subdued, and freed for them, were still ready to disfranchise most of the daughters of those mothers, on the ground that they had not "sense enough to vote." I thanked them for their blunt truthfulness, so much better than the flattery of most of the native-born.

My other instance shall be a conversation overheard in a railway station near Boston, between two intelligent citizens, who had lately listened to Anna d.i.c.kinson. "The best of it was," said one, "to see our minister introduce her." "Wonder what the Orthodox churches would have said to that ten years ago?" said the other. "Never mind," was the answer. "Things have changed. What I think is, it's all in the bringing up. If women were brought up just as men are, they'd have just as much brains." (Brains again!) "That's what Beecher says. Boys are brought up to do business, and take care of themselves: that's where it is. Girls are brought up to dress and get married. Start 'em alike! That's what Beecher says. Start 'em alike, and see if girls haven't got just as much brains."

"Still harping on my daughter," and on the condition of her brains! It is on this that the whole question turns, in the opinion of many men. Ask ten men their objections to woman suffrage. One will plead that women are angels. Another fears discord in families. Another points out that women cannot fight,--he himself being very likely a non-combatant. Another quotes St. Paul for this purpose,--not being, perhaps, in the habit of consulting that authority on any other point. But with the others, very likely, everything will turn on the question of brains. They believe, or think they believe, that women have not sense enough to vote. They may not say so to women, but they habitually say it to men. If you wish to meet the common point of view of masculine voters, you must find it here.

It is fortunate that it is so. Of all points, this is the easiest to settle; for every intelligent woman, even if she be opposed to woman suffrage, helps to settle it. Every good lecture by a woman, every good book written by one, every successful business enterprise carried on, helps to decide the question. Every cla.s.s of girls that graduates from every good school helps to pile up the argument on this point. And the vast army of women, const.i.tuting nine out of ten of the teachers in our American schools, may appeal as logically to their pupils, and settle the argument based on brains. "If we had sense enough to educate you," they may say to each graduating cla.s.s of boys, "we have sense enough to vote beside you."

"The ladies actively working to secure the cooperation of their s.e.x in caucuses and citizens' conventions are not actuated by love of notoriety, and are not, therefore, to be cla.s.sed with the absolute woman suffragists."--Boston Daily Transcript, Sept. 1, 1879.

AN INFELICITOUS EPITHET

When the eloquent colored abolitionist, Charles Remond, once said upon the platform that George Washington, having been a slaveholder, was a villain, Wendell Phillips remonstrated by saying, "Charles, the epithet is not felicitous." Reformers are apt to be pelted with epithets quite as ill-chosen. How often has the charge figured in history, that they were "actuated by love of notoriety"! The early Christians, it was generally believed, took a positive pleasure in being thrown to the lions, under the influence of this motive; and at a later period there was a firm conviction that the Huguenots consented readily to being broken on the wheel, or sawed in pieces between two boards, and felt amply rewarded by the pleasure of being talked about. During the whole anti-slavery movement, while the abolitionists were mobbed, fined, and imprisoned,--while they were tabooed by good society, depleted of their money, kept out of employment, by the mere fact of their abolitionism,--there never was a moment when their motive was not considered by many persons to be the love of notoriety. Why should the advocates of woman suffrage expect any different treatment now?

It is not necessary, in order to dispose of this charge, to claim that all reformers are heroes or saints. Even in the infancy of any reform, it takes along with it some poor material; and unpleasant traits are often developed by the incidents of the contest. Doubtless many reformers attain to a certain enjoyment of a fight, at last: it is one of the dangerous tendencies which those committed to this vocation must resist. But, so far as my observation goes, those who engage in reform for the sake of notoriety generally hurt the reform so much that they render it their chief service when they leave it; and this happy desertion usually comes pretty early in their career. The besetting sin of reformers is not, so far as I can judge, the love of notoriety, but the fate of power and of flattery within their own small circle,--a temptation quite different from the other, both in its origin and its results.

Notoriety comes so soon to a reformer that its charms, whatever they may be, soon pall upon the palate, just as they do in case of a popular poet or orator, who is so used to seeing himself in print that he hardly notices it. I suppose there is no young person so modest that he does not, on first seeing his name in a newspaper, cut out the pa.s.sage with a certain tender solicitude, and perhaps purchase a few extra copies of the fortunate journal. But when the same person has been battered by a score or two of years in successive unpopular reforms, I suppose that he not only would leave the paper uncut or unpurchased, but would hardly take the pains even to correct a misstatement, were it a.s.serted that he had inherited a fortune or murdered his grandmother. The moral is that the love of notoriety is soon amply filled, in a reformer's experience, and that he will not, as a rule, sacrifice home and comfort, money and friends, without some stronger inducement. This is certainly true of most of the men who have interested themselves in this particular movement, the "weak-minded men," as the reporters, with witty ant.i.thesis, still describe them; and it must be much the same with the "strong-minded women" who share their base career.

And it is to be remembered, above all, that, considered as an engine for obtaining notoriety, the woman-suffrage agitation is a great waste of energy. The same net result could have been won with far less expenditure in other ways. There is not a woman connected with it who could not have achieved far more real publicity as a manager of charity fairs or as a sensation letter-writer. She could have done this, too, with far less trouble, without the loss of a single genteel friend, without forfeiting a single social attention, without having a single ill-natured thing said about her--except perhaps that she bored people, a charge to which the highest and lowest forms of prominence are equally open. Nay, she might have done even more than this, if notoriety was her sole aim: for she might have become a "variety" minstrel or a female pedestrian; she might have written a scandalous novel; she might have got somebody to aim at her that harmless pistol, which has helped the fame of so many a wandering actress, while its bullet somehow never hits anything but the wall. All this she might have done, and obtained a notoriety beyond doubt. Instead of this, she has preferred to prowl about, picking up a precarious publicity by giving lectures to willing lyceums, writing books for eager publishers, organizing schools, setting up hospitals, and achieving for her s.e.x something like equal rights before the law. Either she has shown herself, as a seeker after notoriety, to be a most foolish or ill-judging person,-- or else, as was said of Washington's being a villain, "the epithet is not felicitous."