University of Virginia Library

Argument.

First Objection.

The first of the foregoing objections to giving the ballot to women
is based on the ground that they are substantially, and so far as justice

requires, already represented through the practically universal
manhood suffrage which exists in Missouri and other states.

It should be understood that ours is not a pure Democracy, but a
government by representation, and that one may be represented in
every substantial and important sense, though he may take no part
or have no effect, in the government, or in the choice of the representatives
who conduct the affairs of state. For instance, I am
a Democrat, but live in a Republican ward and in a Republican Representative,
Senatorial and Congressional district. My vote for a
member of the Municipal Assembly, or for a State Representative,
or Senator, or for a Congressman, is futile, and I have no more influence
in the selection of those officials than if I were disfranchised.
And yet none of my rights are jeopardized by this condition. I
would not move across the street to get into a Democratic ward or
district. Unless I am seeking office I have all the rights of any Republican
in my ward, or in the Representative, Senatorial or Congressional
district in which I reside. And many Republicans live
safely, and prosper, in hopelessly Democratic communities, where
they are practically disfranchised. Why are the rights of the minority
so secure? Because not one of them can be wronged under
the law without inflicting a like injury on a member of the majority
in like situation. Where such manhood suffrage as we enjoy prevails,
every interest and class has an effective voice at the polls,
though the votes of certain individuals are futile and might as well,
for all practical purposes, remain uncast. Do children, or foreigners
before being naturalized, suffer because denied the right to vote?
Why then should women suffer because of their disfranchisement?
They are the mothers, sisters or wives of voters; or if here and
there one of them is without near kin amongst the enfranchised, her
community of interest with the women with near kin amongst the
voters protects her. Of course, I could, in support of by present
contention, also point to the concrete fact that the women of this
state, though without votes, do not suffer from any material legal
discrimination against them. But I speak of that phase of the question
when I discuss the third of the above objections to giving votes
to women. This much, however, I will now say: I am quite certain
that every one who has followed me is so far convinced of the truth
of my present contention that neither he or she would be surprised
to learn that there is practically no discrimination against women in
the laws of Missouri, and that such discrimination as there may be
is found in provisions of the law, which though proper enough, it
may be, at one time in the history of civilization, have become derelicts
in the march of progress. As I have just said, in effect, if not
in so many words, the voters of Missouri cannot legislate against
any woman or class of women in the State, however lonely and unprotected,
without legislating against their own mothers, sisters and
wives; and in this fact lies the sufficient protection of all women
against governmental injustice. Most people think that the elective
franchise is a right; but such is not the case. No man has any more
natural right to vote than he has to exercise any other political function.
Qualifications for voting are just as necessary as qualifications
for holding office; otherwise the boy, to say nothing of the girl, who
has reached the age of discretion, which at common law was not more
then fourteen, would have a natural right to vote. But there are
and always have been in this country, qualifications to the right to
vote, though they are few and more or less trivial; while in all the
countries of Europe the right of suffrage is far more limited. When
the American Colonies arraigned England in the Declaration of Independence,

and denounced taxation without representation, they
did not mean to declare against the injustice of taxing a person who
was not entitled to vote, for not one of them but had a restricted
manhood suffrage, and taxed many who had no vote. What the
Colonies did mean to complain of was that they in their public capacities
as members of the British Empire were taxed, but not represented.
And if England had granted to them a right to seats in
Parliament, those seats would have been filled through a restricted
suffrage, just as the English seats in Parliament were filled at that
time, through the votes of a minority of English men, because of a
great restriction in the franchise. It is a mistake to look on the
elective franchise as a right. It should be considered as a privilege,
subject to expediency, and in the nature of an office, which should
be forfeited for many causes not now deemed worthy of more than
passing condemnation.

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.

Third Objection.

My third objection to giving women the ballot is that the legal
discriminations against women in this country, generally, and especially
in Missouri, are but few in number and unimportant in character;
and the enfranchisement of women is unnecessary for their
correction. The only discrimination against women that I recall in
the laws of Missouri are a few which relate to the administration of
estates, or to wills, and none of which are of much practical importance.

If the women of this state or city, or any respectable number of
them, would like these distinctions, slight and immaterial as they
are, to be abolished—and I see no reason why they should not be—
I am quite sure a number of members of our General Assembly will
take pleasure in introducing a bill to that effect. One of our State
Senators lives within a few hundred feet of the president of the St.
Louis Woman's Equal Suffrage League, and I believe that he will
be delighted to lend his aid in amending these sections so as to remove
all cause of complaint against them by the suffragists.

I have been told that the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League has not
gotten out a pamphlet reciting the wrongs of women in Missouri
because there were not enough wrongs to make a respectable catalogue.
But nevertheless at the Suffrage meetings you hear much
complaint about under-paid women, equal pay for equal work, minimum
wage boards, and other panaceas for poverty that we are to
secure through the votes of women. I attended a meeting of the
kind I refer to—it was called a "Symposium"—with a young woman
who was much impressed with the plea for "Equal pay for equal
work." "All right," I said to her, "go and tell your cook that you
will raise her wages from $20 to $40, because you know you could
not get a man to do her work for less than $40 a month." "Oh!"
she replied, "this gives the matter a personal interest that I had not

realized before." The advocates of equal pay for equal work think
of a boost of pay in this connection, and not of a reduction, and
they are generally people who pay but little, if anything, in wages.
But suppose a minimum wage board should effect this equality by
averaging the pay of the men and women, and direct that $30 only
should be paid a man cook, and no less to a woman cook. What could
the man have to say to this, and what would a woman have to say if
willing to work for $20 when told she would not be permitted to do
so, though unable to obtain work at $30 a month? This minimum
wage board proposition violates what is now regarded as a sacred
constitutional right, namely, the right of private contract. Of course,
you can regulate by law the wages of public servants, such as state,
county or city officers, or employees, and school teachers; and in
Missouri I believe there is equal pay for equal work in public employment.
In the St. Louis public schools, at least, that rule prevails.
The principal of an 18-room school gets the same pay, whether a
man or a woman; and the same is true of the other positions. A
salary is fixed for the position, and paid whether filled by a man or
a woman. At this "Symposium" one of the speakers exclaimed:
"I will not stand for the chivalry of the sweatshop. A pedestal is
all right for a statue, but a poor place to put a person on." This
was nothing more than clever oratorical clap-trap, and received its
due applause from those in the audience who did not understand that
the speaker, who is one of the best read publicists in the city, immediately
repudiated the only meaning his declaration had, by adding:
"I do not, however, advocate the elimination of sentiment between
the sexes, for that would give us a foretaste of hell." The
sweatshop and chivalry have nothing to do with each other. The
sweatshop is the result of the laws of demand and supply, and
competition which it is the present fashion to so much laud. If the
St. Louis Manufacturer of Women's shirt waists should pay 35 cents
for a waist that only cost his Chicago and New York competitors 25
cents, the St. Louis factory would soon close its doors; and the last
condition of the women employed in the St. Louis factory would
be worse than their first. Neither chivalry nor minimum wage boards
can eliminate the sweatshop, until both have almost a world-wide
sway; and the sooner the advocates of women suffrage realize this,
and stop claiming what they can do for wages by their votes the
better it will be for their cause. If the women by their votes can
regulate wages, and do all the things they started out to claim, or
some people claimed for them, they should not only be enfranchised,
but the men should be disfranchised for monumental stupidity in
not doing these things before, and stopping the bloody murders
that are so often resorted to for the purpose of maintaining or increasing
wages. The law of supply and demand and competition is,
for practical purposes, almost as inexorable as the law of gravity on
which the gallows depends for its efficacy, and which at the same
time may dash to death an innocent baby from an open window.

Fourth Objection.

A few years since I was unexpectedly called on to make a few
remarks to some two hundred women, teachers in our public schools.
I began by quoting the lines:

I added: "You observe that Browning calls man the meanest of
God's creatures." Immediately one of my auditors, in a stage whisper
that was heard all over the room, snapped out: "That's true;
that's just what he is." Now I admit that a man without a soul side
to show a woman when he loves her is a powerfully mean creature;
and to preserve this soul side I would deny women the right to vote,
for the soul side which a man shows a woman when he loves her
makes him more Godlike than any other faculty he possesses; and
the greater his resemblance to his maker the better for women. To
give women votes will mar this soul side, and tend to destroy sentiment
between the sexes; and you will remember that even the
equal suffrage advocate who would not "stand for the chivalry of the
sweatshop," declared that to eliminate sentiment between the sexes
would give us a "foretaste of hell." I would save my countrymen
and countrywomen from this foretaste in the hope, amongst other
things, that thereby they may escape the full draught.

Am I urging an ideal? I am and I should; for conditions are the
outgrowth of ideals, and the higher the one the better the other.
This is a materialistic age. The world and his wife are shop keepers,
and the many inevitable tendencies of the times are against the
higher ideals! and there is therefore so much the more need to
guard those ideals in every possible way. I have always advocated
enlarging woman's bread and butter sphere, for often a woman's
needs may require her to engage in work not most suitable for
women; and by engaging in such work she should not suffer in the
esteem of any, for most women so employed can, and do, retain in
great, if not always in perfect, degree those qualities which pleasantly
distinguish them from men. Unfortunately, however, these
occupations, for one reason or another, too often cause men to
display to women the soul side with which the men face the world;
and to inject women into politics will intensify this disposition and
multiply the opportunities for its exhibition. A father and his sons
are more apt to agree as to matters political than a father and his
daughters; the occasions for differences as to politics are perennial,
and the whole atmosphere during a political campaign is so full of
charges and countercharges of all kinds of bad faith, selfishness, and
wrong purposes, to say nothing of the wisdom or unwisdom of the
policies at issue, that every one taking part in the campaign, or especially
interested in it, is likely to be affected by its spirit; and
many political battles will resolve themselves into contests between
the sexes. The influences of a political contest will more intensely
affect the women than the men of a community because of the
greater emotionalism of women. We should not forget that women,
even those of normal health and strength, are often subject to hysteria,
a condition that men are seldom subject to, except when on
the verge of madness. A man of wealth who had spent years in
travel and visited all parts of Europe and other portions of the world
once said to me that the women of our country should thank God
daily that they are Americans. Undoubtedly the American women
are the most fortunate women in the world; then why destroy, or
endanger even, a condition for which daily thanks should be given?