Part 17 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+fting 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 guardians.h.i.+p 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.