University of Virginia Library

ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS AND WAR
BY ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
NEW YORK CITY

ONE of the most curious of those misstatements of fact and confusions of thought the conservative seems even more prone to make than the radical has to do with a certain suppositiously historical relation between women and war. It is assumed[1] that early society is ever militant and that because of its militarism it excludes women, women not being fighters, not only from its government, but from all its privileges, even making of them its drudges and its beasts of burden. And so, argues the conservative, women are for the same reasons disfranchised, and properly disfranchised, to-day. Whether more or less militant than it was, society is still founded on force, and because women are not as strong as men, men will not give them the vote. Besides it is only right, since they can not fight, they should not vote. It has always been so, and so it should continue to be, at any rate until war becomes a thing of the past, and that will never be, you can't change human nature, etc., etc.

There are of course various answers to this militarist anti-suffrage argument, answers which in spite of the logic of current events are still likely to be satisfactory or not according to previous convictions, but the only point I wish to challenge is the appeal in this connection to the past. Let the militarist anti-suffragist assert his belief in government by force if he likes, but let him not try to justify it by the precedents of primitive life. Nor may he—or she—explain the exclusion of women to-day as a survival of their subjection in primitive society to brute force. The government of primitive society is not based on physical prowess, and although modern woman is excluded from men's activities for the same reason as primitive woman was excluded, the reason is not muscular inferiority.

It is a pity in the feminist controversies of the last hundred years or so that the "exclusion of women'' did not become a more popular phrase than the "subjection of women.'' That term gave a fallacious twist both to observation and analysis. Primitive and modern men

alike commonly exclude women, they seldom subject them. Similarly, in some societies, children and young people, all in fact but the elderly, are treated to methods of exclusion rather than of subjection.

Early society is dominated by the elders; its practices and customs have been determined by them and, in the most primitive society, government is nothing but a gerontocracy, a government of old men. Even with chieftaincy the council of the elders is weighty and the heads of households have considerable influence. Are the elders the fighters or raiders of the tribe? No, they are its judges, its legislators and, most important of all, its magicians. Nor is the chief or king the fighter par excellence of the tribe. But he too may be and often is the tribal magician. Through their powers of magic elders and chiefs are responsible for the weather, for the reproduction of plants and animals, for the success of the crops, of hunts and catches, for the health and general welfare of the people. And in war? In war they are the most important personages too. Because they fight? No, because in war too they make magic; they charm the approaches to the village, they "doctor'' the trails or the weapons or the canoes, they make war medicine, they invoke and propitiate the war gods. The warriors are the younger men, men whose efforts would be vain without the backing of their magic-working seniors or chiefs. The elders make peace and declare war. And it is at their dictate that the young men take to head-hunting or to raiding or even to stealing women.

As to the subjection of women, what exists of it the elders are responsible for. It is they who scare a girl or shame her into being docile. It is they who marry her off aganst her will, it is they who set her unending tasks or shut her up in idleness. It is they who make her undergo the discomforts or miseries of what we call conventional life or bully her into exile or death.

With this control of girls or women the warriors, the "standing army,'' have little or nothing to do, even less in primitive life than in modern. It is the old people, the old women at times as well as the old men. Again it is the old men who are leaders in the exclusion of the women. In control of the initiation of the youths, they separate them from their mothers or sisters and often decree for the initiates a ceremonial avoidance of all women for a set time. The penalties they threaten—sickness, decrepitude, effeminacy—are too dire to pass unheeded. This "avoidance'' has been explained as due to the monopolistic spirit of the elders. With their women they want no interference by the youths. But a far more plausible explanation, I think, takes the avoidance as a concentration rite, so to speak, a symbol, if you like, of the life ahead, the life in which the boys, "made'' men, are going to have little to do in public with women. For even after the special avoidance of the initiation period ends, the segregation of the sexes

continues. Men keep together and away from women in their club-houses, and in all the places of assembly which are differentiated from the primitive club-house—the church, the council, the workshop, the gymnasium, the university, the play-house. And from all the interests which center in these places men have from time to time excluded women, they have excluded them from magic and religion, from arts and letters, from games, from politics and, let me add, from war.

Why are men so exclusive? Because—the reason will seem almost too simple, I fear, for acceptance—because now and always men do not want to be bothered by women. Women get in our way, they say, women are a nuisance. Almost anywhere away from home women are a nuisance —in church organization, in the university, in business, etc. Of course if women can be kept apart from us in these activities and will stay in their place, if they join an order of nuns or deaconesses, if they go to a separate college in the university, if they will become good stenographers, we don't mind having their cooperation, we welcome it. Women may even go to war—as an absolutely separate division of the army, said the men of Dahomi, as non-combatant pahia women or workers of magic, said the Roro-speaking tribesmen of New Guinea, or as Red (dross nurses, say the men of Europe and America. If we men can be sure women will not interfere with us, we really do not mind. Women have only to give us that assurance of non-interference to make us doubt the assertion we sometimes make that in going to war they are interfering with the order of nature.