Part 7 (1/2)
Nor can it be possible for people to enter political life fully prepared for its duties. Even when a young man approaches a business career we do not ask that he shall possess a knowledge of the business before beginning. If he has general preparation, and a desire to learn, he is admitted to share in its responsibilities, and then learns as he goes along. It is the same in political life; few young men at twenty-one or foreigners at the time of naturalization, have the knowledge indicated in the preceding pages. If they have general preparation and a desire to learn, we admit them to partic.i.p.ation, and they learn through doing.
Years ago, while discussing education with an English statesman, he asked whom I considered the leaders of education in his country. Knowing his Tory instincts, I replied, ”Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, William T.
Stead, John Burns and Keir Hardie.” He laughed contemptuously: ”Why those people,” he said, ”are merely educating themselves in public.” The statement was true and far-reaching; that is what we are all doing in our modern democracies; and that is at the same time our weakness and our glory.
VIII
Woman's Relation to Political Life
In discussing woman's right to vote it is well to remember that the right to rule, which is implicit in the right to vote, has always been limited by conditions of birth, residence, wealth, morality or intelligence. Universal manhood suffrage has never yet been achieved, and probably never will be. Under the best Greek conditions, it was only the free-born citizen, residing in his native city state, who voted. In both Greece and Rome, the suffrage was limited to cla.s.ses defined by social position, wealth or military service. In our modern democracies there have always been limitations of birth, which might be overcome by naturalization; of residence, which could be overcome by living for a certain time in a locality; of wealth, which was supposed to insure a stake in the communal well-being; and of morals and intelligence, which at least shut out criminals, the insane and the imbeciles.
Thus the right to vote is not the same thing as the right to live; and even in a commonwealth founded on ideal justice only those having a stake in the community life, and possessing normal intelligence and morality, will be allowed to rule. In a word, equal suffrage is possible, while universal man or woman suffrage is not.
All through our colonial period women had a large influence in determining community questions, and in Ma.s.sachusetts, under the old Providence Charter, they voted for all elective officers for nearly a hundred years. Here and there women--like Margaret Brent, of Maryland; Abigail Adams, of Ma.s.sachusetts; or Mrs. Corbin, of Virginia--put forward their right to partic.i.p.ate in the public life around them. But, in 1776, women were not voting, and the Federal Const.i.tution left the matter of determining electoral rights to the several States. They all decided for male suffrage.
The initial impulse to secure suffrage for American women came from Europe. After the Revolution, Frances Wright, a young Scotchwoman, came to America to lecture and write, claiming equal political rights with men. In 1836, Ernestine L. Rose came from Poland and also advocated equal political rights. All the teachings of the American Revolution had favored the idea of human equality; and, as has been pointed out, when, with established peace after the War of 1812, women engaged in anti-slavery, temperance and allied movements, they were driven by the logic of events to demand the suffrage.
In 1848, the women of the country began to organize. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Martha C. Wright called together at Seneca Falls, New York, the first convention in America to further equal suffrage. No permanent organization was founded, but in 1850 a convention was held in Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, and in 1852 a Woman's Rights Convention was called in Syracuse, New York, with delegates present from eight States and Canada. Miss Susan B. Anthony had meantime joined the movement; and from this time on conventions and appeals became common.
The Civil War distracted attention from all social and political issues but one. The Equal Rights a.s.sociation turned its attention mainly to the rights of negroes; and in 1869 the National Woman's Suffrage a.s.sociation was organized to work exclusively for woman's rights. Backed by such women as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, and aided by men like Henry Ward Beecher, the a.s.sociation became a national power. In 1890, the two organizations were united under the name of The National American Woman's Suffrage a.s.sociation. This organization still leads the movement in America.[45]
[45] _The History of Woman Suffrage_, by ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, SUSAN B. ANTHONY, and IDA HUSTED HARPER, 4 vols. Rochester, N.Y.
In 1902, an international meeting was called in Was.h.i.+ngton; and in 1904 the International Suffrage Alliance was formed in Berlin with Mrs.
Carrie Chapman Catt as president. Thirteen nations are now affiliated with the Alliance; and the women of the world are highly organized to further equal suffrage.
Two generations of women have given themselves to this movement, and a third still faces it. To the first group belong those leaders we have already named: Emma Willard, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, Susan B. Anthony and their a.s.sociates. It was their problem to secure woman's control of her own body and property, some share in the direction of her children, and some opportunity to train her own mind and earn an independent living. These women bore the heat and burden of a conflict in which all the blind prejudices of a fixed regime were strongly ma.s.sed, presenting few promising points of attack. It is small wonder that some of these leaders gained a reputation for being hard, dogmatic, aggressive, and sometimes careless of popular sensibilities.
The first generation of reformers in any field must be made of stern stuff; and their beneficiaries are apt to forget the conditions that justified means no longer necessary.
The lives of these women could not be expected to fully ill.u.s.trate the type of life they hoped to see their sisters living when opportunity was finally won. Only women who partic.i.p.ated in this struggle could fully appreciate the splendid devotion of these lives to the service of a group many of whom, being personally comfortable, were insensible to the needs of less fortunate women; and were sometimes even willing to fight back any advanced ideas which might disturb their own comfort. The feeling within this group of leaders, and the failure of oncoming generations of American women to recognize the debt of obligation they owe to its efforts, was ill.u.s.trated by an incident that came up in connection with the Third International Congress of Women which met in London in 1899. The session was opened in Westminster Town Hall, with seven hundred delegates present, representing the most thoughtful women of the world. Lady Aberdeen was in the chair, and Mrs. Creighton, wife of the late Bishop of London, was reading a paper. In the midst of deep attention, a door at the rear of the platform was gently opened, and Miss Susan B. Anthony stepped onto the stage. She had just arrived from America. Her strong figure was bent with the weight of years; her face was squared by the conflict and partial ostracism she had met; but her glance had lost none of its stern kindliness, and her bearing none of its indomitable courage. As she appeared, this most representative audience of women in the world sprang to its feet and burst into wild cheering. In vain did Lady Aberdeen rap for order and beg the audience to let Mrs. Creighton proceed. Not until Miss Anthony came to the front and urged the women to sit down was quiet restored. These women knew the price of a life which their champion had paid for their opportunities.
A few months after this the school children of the prosperous city of Rochester, N.Y., where Miss Anthony had been a leading citizen for many years, were asked to write school compositions in which they named the person they would most wish to be like. Over three thousand girls, in the elementary grades, wrote these papers, but not one chose Miss Anthony. This first generation of women reformers could not establish the type of womanhood for the modern world; they had not the leisure, nor the freedom, nor could they see all that lay in the future. But all the more, because their lives were hard, should they be held in grateful remembrance.
To the second generation of leaders belong women like Alice Freeman Palmer, Mary Sheldon Barnes and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They came on the scene when the first campaign had been won; they could command their own bodies and property; college doors were swinging open where they could secure the training that should fit them for the struggle to win educational, industrial, social and political opportunity for all their sisters. They were still looked upon as blue-stockings and queer; they had often to serve as the b.u.t.t of ridicule; but they had education, income, a certain degree of leisure, and a social recognition which, if grudging in some quarters, was all the more generous in others.
With the rapid development of higher education, these women found themselves a.s.sociated with large groups of independent women who could create a society of their own in advanced centers of population. There was still much to be done in securing opportunity for women; but they could go on establis.h.i.+ng the type of life that free women were to live.
Their problems were, however, even more complex than those which confronted their predecessors. What line of education should women pursue? What lines of work could they best undertake? How could they combine an independent professional or industrial career with the life of a home and the responsibilities of a mother? How far must older social restraints be modified in the interest of intellectual and industrial freedom? It was a time for constructive statesmans.h.i.+p, rather than for revolution; and each woman knew she was under criticism, and that her success or failure was vastly more than her own personal concern. In her all free women were being judged.
To the third generation belongs the host of women who are to-day filling our college halls, managing the women's clubs, teaching the state schools, and competing with men in every industrial calling. Theirs is the task of completing woman's social and political emanc.i.p.ation, and of educating them to meet their newfound liberties. It is possible that this present generation has a keener sense of rights than of duties; and the young women of to-day must be led to realize that the delicate adjustments still to be worked out require devotion equal to that of the earlier generations, if the toll of wasted life is not to be excessive.
What now is the relation of women to the range of political activity described in the last chapter? Have they need of the protection which government gives? Are they able to form political judgments? Have they knowledge of the working of political machinery; or, lacking it, are they prepared to obtain it? Are they able to make a wise selection of people to represent them in political action? Have they need of the training which partic.i.p.ation in political life gives? Have they the preliminary preparation to take up that training to advantage, and can they undertake these duties without serious loss of qualities desirable in women?
Women certainly have need of protection; each has a life dear to her, and honor which is dearer to her than life. In this respect she has a greater need than men. Most women, also, have property of some kind, and we are increasingly recognizing their right to control this for themselves; hence they need property protection the same as men. We do not need to think of Mrs. Sage, Mrs. Harriman, Miss Gould or Mrs.
Green, in this connection, for in every community we now have many women who are immediately responsible for large property interests which new legislation might affect most seriously.
In matters of inst.i.tutional regulation by government, women are at least as vitally interested as men. In all that touches the family, marriage, or divorce, women have more at stake than men; and there are as many wives as husbands involved. The schools are also nearer to women than to men; more girls than boys attend them; more women are teachers; and more women than men are interested parents of school children. The church is also more vital to women to-day than to men. On the side of industries, it is clear that our 8,000,000 independent wage-earning women have a desperate stake in all governmental action touching the regulation of working conditions. In whatever concerns general sanitation, safe water, and pure foods, all are equally interested who must breathe and eat to live. Surely the need of women for political protection is quite as great as that of men.