University of Virginia Library

WHY WOMEN DO NOT WISH THE SUFFRAGE.

By Rev. Lyman Abbott, D. D.

Extract from article in Atlantic Monthly for October, 1903.

Historically, the family is the first organization; biologically it is
the origin of all other organizations. Abraham arms and organizes
his servants, pursues the robber bands, conquers and disperses them,
and recovers the captive: the family is the first army. Moreover,
it is out of the family that society grows. As the cell duplicates
itself, and by reduplication the living organism grows, so the family
duplicates itself, and by the reduplication of the family the social
organism grows. The children of the family come to manhood, and
marry the children of other families. Blood unites them; the necessities
of warfare, offensive and defensive, unite them; and so the
tribe comes into existence. For the united action of this tribe some
rule, some authority is necessary; thus tribal, state, national government
comes into existence. These families find it for their mutual
advantage to engage in separate industries, and exchange the
product of their labor: thus barter and trade and the whole industrial
organization come into existence. These families thus united
by marriage into one tribe, cemented by war in one army, bound
together by the necessity of united action in one government, cooperating
in one varied industry, find in themselves a common faith
and common aspirations, in a word, a common religion, and so
the church comes into existence.

Such, very briefly stated, is the development of society as we read
it in the complicated history of the past. The first and most patent
fact in the family is the difference in the sexes. Out of this
difference the family is created; in this difference the family finds
its sweet and sacred bond. This difference is not merely physical
and incidental. It is also psychical and essential. It inheres in the
temperament; it is inbred in the very fibre of the soul; it differentiates
the functions; it determines the relation between man and
woman; it fixes their mutual service and their mutual obligations.
Man is not woman in a different case. Woman is not man inhabiting
temporarily a different kind of body. Man is not a roughand-tumble
woman. Woman is not a feeble and pliable man.

This difference in the sexes is the first and fundamental fact in
the family; it is therefore the first and fundamental fact in society,
which is but a large family, growing out of and produced by the
duplication and interrelationship of innumerable families. For it
must ever be remembered that as the nature of the cell determines
the nature of the organism which grows out of the cell, so the nature
of the family determines the nature of society which grows
out of the family. And the fundamental fact, without which there
could be no family, is the temperamental, inherent, and therefore
functional difference between the sexes.

Speaking broadly, it may be said that the work of battle in all
its forms, and all the work that is cognate thereto, belongs to man.
Physically and psychically his is the sterner and the stronger sex.
His muscles are more steel-like; his heart and his flesh are alike
harder; he can give knocks without compunction and receive them
without shrinking. In the family, therefore, his it is to go forth and
fight the battle with Nature; to compel the reluctant ground to

give her riches to his use. It is not for woman to hold the plough,
or handle the hoe, or dig in the mine, or fell the forest. The war
with Nature is not for her to wage. It is true that savage tribes
impose this unfeminine task upon her; true that modern nations
which have not yet fully emerged from barbarism continue to do
so; true, also, that in the cruel industrial competition of modern
times there is, in some communities, a relapse into this barbarism.
But whether it is the Indian squaw digging in the corn patch, or
the German Frau holding the plough, or the American wife working
the loom in her husband's place,—wherever man puts the toil
that is battle and the battle that is toil upon the woman, the law
of Nature, that is, the law of God, written in her constitution and
in the constitution of the family, is set at naught. This is not to
say that her toil is less than man's but it is different. It may be
easier to be the man with the hoe than the woman with the needle;
it may be easier to handle the plough than to broil over the cook
stove; but these tasks are not the same. The careless toil of the
field requires exhaustless energy; the continuous toil of the household
requires exhaustless patience. Being a man, the exhaustless patience
seems to me at once more difficult and more admirable than the
exhaustless energy. But they are not the same.

For like reason it is not woman's function to fight against human
foes who threaten the home. She is not called to be a soldier. She
is not to be welcomed with the volunteers nor coerced into the military
service by the draft. It is in vain to recite the story of Joan
of Arc; it is in vain to narrate the efforts of the Amazons. The
instinct of humanity revolts against the employment of woman as
a soldier on the battlefield. No civilized man would wish to lay
this duty upon her; no civilized woman would wish to assume it.
This is not to say that her courage is not as great as his. Greater
is it in some sense,—but it is different. For the Spartan mother to
arm her son and send him forth with the injunction to come home
bringing his shield or body borne upon it, and then wait during the
long and weary days to know which way he is to come,—this requires,
surely, a heroism not less than his: but it is not the same heroism;
higher in some sense it is—but it is not the same. In his courage
are pride and combativeness and animal passion, sometimes wellnigh
devilish passion; a strange joy in giving and receiving wounds,
a music that grows inspiring in the singing of the bullets, an almost
brutal indifference to the wounded and the dying all about
him, which she could never get and remain woman. True to her
woman's nature is Lady Macbeth's prayer,—

For until she had been unsexed, until she had ceased to be woman,
she could not play the part which her destiny and her ambition assigned
to her.

For like reason society exempts woman from police functions.
She is not called to be sheriff or constable or night watchman. She
bears no truncheon and wears no revolver. She answers not to
the summons when peace officers call for the posse comitatus. She
is not received into the National Guard when bloody riot fills the
city with peril and alarms. Why not? Is she not the equal of man?
Is she not as loyal? as law abiding? as patriotic? as brave? Surely.
All of these is she. But it is not her function to protect the state
when foreign foes attack it; it is the function of the state to protect

her. It is not her function to protect the persons and property
of the community against riot; it is man's function to protect
her. Here at least the functional difference between the sexes is
too plain to be denied, doubted, or ignored. Here at least no man
or woman from the claim of equality of character jumps to the illogical
conclusion that there is an identity of function.

This much then seems clear to me, and I hope it is clear to the
reader also:—

First, that the family is the basis of society, from which it grows.

Second, that the basis of the family, and therefore of society, is
the difference between the sexes,—a difference which is inherent,
temperamental, functional.

Third, that the military function, in all its forms and phases, belongs
to man; that he has no right to thrust it upon woman or to
ask her to share it with him; that it is his duty, and his exclusively,
to do that battling with the elements which wrests livelihood from
a reluctant or resisting Nature, and which is therefore the pre-requisite
to all productive industry; and that battling with the enemies
of society which compels them to respect its rights, and which is
therefore the primary conditions of government.

For the object of government is the protection of person, property,
and reputation from the foes which assail them. Government
may do other things: it may carry the mails, run the express, own
and operate the railroads; but its fundamental function is to furnish
protection from open violence or secret fraud. If it adequately
protects person, property, and reputation, it is a just government,
though it do nothing else; if it fails to protect these primary rights,
if the person is left to defend himself, his property, his reputation
by his own strong arm, there is no government. The question,
"Shall woman vote?" is really, in the last analysis, the question,
"Ought woman to assume the responsibility for protecting person
and property which has in the past been assumed by man as his
duty alone?" It is because women see, what some so-called reformers
have not seen, that the first and fundamental function of
government is the protection of person and property, and because
women do not think that they ought to assume this duty any more
than they ought to assume that police and militia service which is
involved in every act of legislature, that they do not wish to have
the ballot thrust upon them.

Let us not here make any mistake. Nothing is law which has
not authority behind it; and there is no real authority where there
is not power to compel obedience. It is this power to compel which
distinguishes law from advice. Behind every law stands the sheriff,
and behind the sheriff the militia, and behind the militia the whole
military power of the Federal government. No legislature ever ought
to enact a statute unless it is ready to pledge all the power of government—local,
state, and Federal—to its enforcement, if the statute
is disregarded. A ballot is not a mere expression of opinion;
it is an act of the will; and behind this act of the will must be
power to compel obedience. Women do not wish authority to compel
the obedience of their husbands, sons, and brothers to their will.

And yet this is just what suffrage always may and sometimes must
involve. The question, Shall woman vote, if translated into actual
and practical form, reads thus: Shall woman decide what are the
rights of the citizen to be protected and what are the duties of the
citizen to be enforced, and then are her son and her brother and
her husband to go forth, armed, if need be, to enforce her decision?

Are women to decree, and men to execute? Is woman never to
act as a private, but only as a commander-in-chief? Is this right?
Is it right that one sex shall alone enforce authority, but the other
sex determine when and how it shall be exercised? Is this expedient?
Will it promote peace, order, prosperity? Is it practicable?
Will it in fact be done? Suppose that in New York City the women
should vote for prohibition and the men should vote against it; is
it to be expected that the men would arm themselves to enforce
against their fellow men a law which they themselves condemned
as neither wise nor just? To ask these questions is to answer them.
The functions of government cannot be thus divided. In a democratic
community the duty of enforcing the law must devolve on
those who determine what the law shall be that is to be enforced.
It cannot be decreed by one class and enforced by another. It is
inconceivable that it should be decreed by one sex and enforced by
the other.