University of Virginia Library

Second Objection.

The second of my objections to giving votes to women is that
substantially universal womanhood suffrage would add nothing to
the voting wisdom of the present electorate of this country. A Mrs.
Brown once met a Mrs. Jones and inquired: "How is Lawyer
Smith?" "Oh," replied Mrs. Jones, "he is lying at death's door."
"How like a lawyer," said Mrs. Brown. When I heard Miss Pankhurst
tell of the utterly silly rioting and misconduct of so many
London Suffragettes, I said to myself: "How like women," some
women, and too many, I fear, to justify entrusting them generally
with the ballot. If young men had acted after the manner of these
London women, would it not be said with one voice they were unfit
for the privilege they were demanding? I may remark in passing
that there seemed such a reciprocating connection between the Pankhurst
London riots and the Pankhurst American lecture tours, that
I concluded to contribute my mite to the peace of the English capital
by not attending the third, and, let us hope, last Pankhurst lecture
in this city. Another, "how like a woman" thought occurred to
me when I read of that young heiress in an eastern state who married
a man considerably her senior, a widower, with children, and
her social and otherwise inferior, whom she left in a few years because,
it was said, of his treatment of her, taking her two or three
children with her, and then returned in a year or so to her husband
after he had become paralyzed. All honor to the love, devotion and
unmanlike conduct of this young woman, but nevertheless do you
not feel that while she would carry to the polls any amount of sentiment
that is worshipful in itself, she would not add to the aggregate
practical wisdom of the voters? We cannot get away from the
fact that woman is hysterical, and for that reason unsuited for some
things, one of which I conceive to be the wise exercise of the privilege
of voting.

How often have we been shocked and distressed at the utterly
unaccountable exhibitions of sympathy which women frequently give
by sending flowers and delicacies to criminals, and even to brutal,
and often black and utterly lothsome, murderers.

Exhibitions of this kind have occurred so often through such long
periods, beginning historically as far back at least as the days of
Claude Duvall, the chivalrous highwayman of England, in the seventeenth
century, and over such a wide area, that we cannot but feel
that it evidences an unbalanced and weak emotionalism that is characteristic
of the sex. The latest exhibition of the kind referred to
concerns that doctor in Illinois, a confessed bigamist and wife murderer,

who has lately been the object of these maudlin attentions
while in jail awaiting trial. No doubt men who are not murderers,
that is, men generally, profit by the emotionalism which displays itself
to our distress in the manner referred to; but we can better
afford to be distressed by these exhibitions than to so change women
as to make these exhibitions impossible.

George Eliot, herself so full of sympathy, says in Middlemarch:
"To have in general but little feeling seems to be the only security
against feeling too much on any particular occasion." For my part,
therefore, I prefer that women should have on some particular occasions
too much feeling, for fear that in general they otherwise
would have but little—too little, it may be, for the happiness of life,
and consequently the well being of the race.

If there is any place in the world where you would expect to find
well balanced women, it is in the smaller Massachusetts towns,
where they have had for some time, I believe, the right to vote at
school elections, and possibly on some other questions; and yet, at
an election of five school trustees in one of those towns not long
since, it is said that twenty-four women voted for nineteen different
persons. How whimsical these women must have been in their
voting? I should judge that neither platform nor policy of any kind
governed them; for each of these considerations implies something in
the nature of a union, or common purpose, while the votes of these
women seems to indicate that nothing was further from their intention
than a common purpose.