 | University of Virginia record October 1, 1914 |  |
WOMAN AND THE COMMONWEALTH: OR A QUESTION
OF EXPEDIENCY.
By George Pellew.
Extract from a pamphlet published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Do a Woman's Physical Qualities Disqualify Her for Voting?
It is said that women ought not to vote because they are unable
to fight, to enforce laws, or to endure the fatigue and burden of voting
and of learning how to vote.
The first argument is answered by the fact that the tie between
voting and fighting ceased so soon as nations became civilized and
hired or raised armies to do their fighting for them; since that time,
indeed, it may be said that the only connection between bullets and
ballots has been the alliteration. As a general rule, in civilized
countries, the soldiers in the field are, practically, disqualified for
voting, and the local government of their country is, in time of war,
of necessity intrusted to those who are left at home as disabled or
as not needed for active service. In time of peace, on the other
hand, the soldier has, as a rule, no political privileges superior to
those of any other citizen, however much crippled or decrepit.
The argument is readily reduced to an absurdity, for it would, if
logically carried out, disfranchise the great mass of the most intellectual
and the best educated men in the community, since, according
to the statistics of the medical department during the civil war,
over ninety-five per cent of lawyers were found to be unfit for military
service.
A suggestion, often made, that if all the women were to vote one
way, and all the men another, the women, if they should pass a law,
would be unable to enforce it, and so would bring the law itself into
contempt, is an ingenious effort of imagination, but of no weight as
a practical argument. When it is remembered how great are the divergencies
of opinion among men, and that unanimity is no less rare
among women; how seldom a question involves only one consideration;
and how inextricably intermingled, although not identical always,
are the interest of men and women, it becomes obvious that
case, however, such an improbable, if not impossible thing, should
happen, the government and the law would yet survive. The American
people is a law-abiding people. When a law has once been enacted,
or an officer lawfully elected, those who opposed the bill enforce
the law, those who reviled the candidate obey the officer. Unless
a majority of the voters of today are at heart law-breakers, a
law will never be disregarded simply because it was passed to be
enacted by the votes of persons inferior in physical strength to their
opponents.
The third argument is no less fallacious. Women, it is said, suffer
from ill-health more frequently than men, they are also more nervous,
and more subject to general debility. Married women are often for
long periods disabled, and not infrequently break down, in consequence
of the natural consequences of maternity and special household
cares that in any condition of society are inevitable. Such being
the case, says Mr. Francis Parkman, woman suffrage would be a
cruelty.
It is, perhaps, unnecessary to suggest that the argument would
logically lead to establishing a health qualification for voters generally,
and that such a qualification would be ridiculous. Necessity
and self-preservation are laws sufficiently imperative to control conduct
without being counter-signed by the governor and the council.
A woman too sick to vote will not vote for the same reason that a
man too sick to vote does not vote. Some women may go to church
when they ought to stay at home, and may injure themselves or neglect
their children by so doing, but it is not desirable, therefore, that
the law should allow men only to go to church. From the point of
view of health, no rational distinction can be made between going to
church to pray and going to the ballot box to vote, except that the
churches are open every Sunday and the polls but once a year, and
that a woman can go to church two or three times on one day, but
is forbidden by law to vote more than once.
The objection is not only absurd, but has the additional misfortune
of being probably the reverse of the truth. The exercise of the suffrage
would presumably tend to improve, rather than to impair, the
health of the average women. There is nothing dangerous to health
in reading political articles in the daily papers, in discussing political
questions with relations or friends, or in walking the distance of a
few hundred yards and depositing a piece of paper in a box. Many
women now do all these things without any suffering in consequence.
On the contrary, the reasonable exercise of any faculty, and of all
the faculties, of mind and body, is positively beneficial to man or
woman. "Nervous energy run to waste" is the secret of so much of
the lassitude and sickness prevalent among American women. "For
my own part," says Sir Spencer Wells, one of the greatest living physicians,
"I think women capable of a great deal more than they have
been accustomed to in times past. If overwork sometimes leads to
disease, it is morally more wholesome to work into it than to lounge
into it, and if some medical practitioners have observed cases where
mental overstrain has led to disease, I cannot deny that I also have
at long intervals seen some such cases. But for every such example
I feel sure that I have seen at least twenty where evils equally to
be deplored are caused in young women by want of mental occupation,
by deficient exercise, too luxurious living, and too much amusement."
This is true of the unmarried and the young, but it is no less
true of the married and the middle-aged. Nervous diseases of every
thoughts and duties. A brisk conversation about politics is stimulating
and healthy in itself, but is especially valuable in distracting
the attention from the petty, harassing details of daily life. There
is no more certain cure for nervousness and its baleful attendants,
hypochondria and dyspepsia, than the excitement of interests broader
and more impersonal than the interests of the kitchen and the nursery,
than the brooking over one's own or one's husband's emotions,
ill temper, or wrong-doing. To enable women to be efficiently interested
in as many things as possible, is to give them a tonic better
than any medicine; to compel them to be interested in a few things
only, is to poison the whole atmosphere of their intellectual life.
Finally it must be observed that weakness, at least physical weakness,
so far from being a disqualification for voting, in a civilized
community is the greatest possible qualification for voting, since representative
governments have become established mainly for the protection
of the weak.
Do a Woman's Mental Qualities Disqualify Her for Voting?
That women's minds differ from men's minds is a theory it would
be difficult to establish. Whenever women have had the same opportunity
and inducement as men for study and investigation, in astronomy,
medicine, political economy, history, journalism, fiction,
ethics, they have shown no special inferiority to men. Queens and
princesses, when called to govern, have been no less successful than
the kings and princes of their family. Even in this Commonwealth
women on the school boards, in public societies, or in government offices,
as students of the condition of the poor, conductors of philanthropic
enterprises, or managers of a business or a fortune, after suitable
training for such work, have not generally been found deficient
in enterprise or sagacity.
It is not usually from the lips of the wisest men that sneers at
women's intelligence are apt to fall, but from the lips of boys unacquainted
with the world, or of men whose lack of wisdom has
been a fruitful source of amusement or profit to women or wiser men.
It is true that women are generally supposed to be impatient of argument,
to make a personal application of impersonal principles, and
to judge by a narrow standard of preference, prejudice, or morality;
but women, like men, adapt their conversation to their hearers, and,
while they are personal, or conventional with men, they are often
logical enough with other women, and the element of truth that remains
in the criticism may be accounted for by the influence of the
arbitrary restrictions which the opponents of woman suffrage would
perpetuate. If a man were proscribed by custom from the free exercise
of his faculties, if his duties were limited to managing a household,
engaging and discharging servants, ordering meals, and bearing
and tending children, he would infallibly become tightly bound
by narrow and conventional prejudices, and if he were able to gain
any practical ends, only by appeals to the emotions rather than to
the intelligence of women, and usually a single woman and that his
wife, he would be unable to argue long impersonally and soon lose
what freedom of thought and speech he once possessed. The intellectual
peculiarities of women may be caused by the narrowness of
the sphere within which their interests are habitually restricted; it is
then unscientific to suppose them to be inherent in the sex.
This conclusion is confirmed by the facts that similar peculiarities
are characteristic of races and classes living in servile or menial conditions,
that they are perceptible even in men anywhere of limited
characteristic of women who have had varied business or professional
experience, who have been educated without reference to marriage,
or who have been married to liberal-minded men. The typical New
England school-teacher is neither illogical nor absurdly sentimental,
and over eighty per cent of New England school teachers are women.
The average married woman, even, in questions that she has studied,
is not illogical; she is usually ingeniously economical, prudent in selecting
servants, far-seeing in advice to her husband. With such
qualities, women could not fail to exercise the suffrage in the main
with intelligence.
Again, mental operations of the same kind are involved in all actions
that require thought. Economy at home predisposes to public
economy: practical common sense is as necessary in politics as in
housekeeping, insight into character is as useful in choosing public
as domestic servants. In Massachusetts, indeed, the intellectual inferiority
of women to men cannot be seriously suggested or consistently
maintained. The welfare of this Commonwealth is truly admitted
to be based on the excellence of its public school system,
and women who are held to be sufficiently intelligent to vote for
members of school committees cannot be said to lack the intelligence
requisite to vote wisely for the mayor of a city or for the selectmen
of a town.
Instead of women being intellectually inferior to men, it would,
probably, be more nearly true in this Commonwealth that the
women are as a rule intellectually superior to the men of the same
class in society. Such, at least, is the reason commonly assigned for
the often noticed disinclination to marriage among the most carefully
educated women; and among our laboring, farming, manufacturing
and mercantile population it is the women rather than
the men who have the time and the inclination to attend lectures
and concerts, to read, study, and discuss questions not purely personal
and sordid, in a word, who strive the most zealously to maintain
and broaden their intellectual life. So much is admitted even
by many of the most vigorous opponents of woman suffrage. "The
ballot," says the President of Oberlin College, "cannot be denied to
woman on the ground that she has not the intelligence and discernment
to use it well. Many women unquestionably have such intelligence,
and there is scarcely room for doubt that women as a body
would vote as wisely as men."
If women are not disqualified for voting by the nature of their
intelligence, it is no objection to giving them the suffrage that
at the present time but few of them have studied political questions.
So long as women are unable to vote they cannot be expected
to inform themselves carefully about matters of politics, for
the same reason that a person who cannot be a shoemaker is not expected
to study the process of making shoes. It is a proof of common
sense, rather than an indication of folly, to confine one's efforts
to subjects in which one can do practical work. Few women
studied law before they were granted admission to the bar, now many
women have written law books; few women studied medicine before
they were allowed to practice it, now excellent essays on medical
subjects are written by women. If women have brains like those of
men, they will inform themselves about political questions as rapidly
and as correctly as men, so soon as those questions are presented to
them. Such questions, indeed, as usually arise in municipal elections
possess no special complexity, and after a few hours' talk, and by a
little attention, can be solved by any normally constituted person.
Finally, it may be said that the objection to women's intelligence
has been answered with far more completeness than was in any way
necessary. "What is wanted in politics is the suffrage of the great
mass of society, rather than that of exceptional genius, which can
always make its influence felt, that this great mass may be able, by
means of the suffrage, to make known its sufferings and its wants."
From this point of view, a voter need not be qualified by considerable
intelligence, but only by intelligence sufficient to understand her individual
wants and requirements and the probable effect of her vote,
if successful, upon herself and her neighbors. In the case of city
or town elections, very ordinary intelligence is sufficient for this purpose.
Whether taxes should be increased or lessened, whether the
sale of intoxicating liquors should be licensed or not, whether the
roads have been neglected, whether the poor-house is managed economically,
whether a new park is desirable, whether the conduct of
local officers has been efficient or the reverse, whether the candidates
are honest or dishonest, energetic or idle, able or incompetent,—
these are questions that need seriously confuse only persons unusually
unobservant or thickheaded, and that women in general far
exceed this minimum of intelligence can surely be denied by no one
who is qualified by the same standard.
| University of Virginia record October 1, 1914 | |