Women and Politics

But if there be no specific intellectual difference (as there is actually none), is there any practical and moral difference?  I use the two epithets as synonymous; for practical power may exist without acuteness of intellect: but it cannot exist without sobriety, patience, and courage, and sundry other virtues, which are ‘moral’ in every sense of that word.

I know of no such difference.  There are, doubtless, fields of political action more fitted for men than for women; but are there not again fields more fitted for women than for men?—fields in which certain women, at least, have already shown such practical capacity, that they have established not only their own right, but a general right for the able and educated of their sex, to advise officially about that which they themselves have unofficially mastered.  Who will say that Mrs. Fry, or Miss Nightingale, or Miss Burdett Coutts, is not as fit to demand pledges of a candidate at the hustings on important social questions as any male elector; or to give her deliberate opinion thereon in either House of Parliament, as any average M.P. or peer of the realm?  And if it be said that these are only brilliant exceptions, the rejoinder is, What proof have you of that?  You cannot pronounce on the powers of the average till you have tried them.  These exceptions rather prove the existence of unsuspected and unemployed strength below.  If a few persons of genius, in any class, succeed in breaking through the barriers of routine and prejudice, their success shows that they have left behind them many more who would follow in their steps if those barriers were but removed.  This has been the case in every forward movement, religious, scientific, or social.  A daring spirit here and there has shown his fellow-men what could be known, what could be done; and behold, when once awakened to a sense of their own powers, multitudes have proved themselves as capable, though not as daring, as the leaders of their forlorn hope.  Dozens of geologists can now work out problems which would have puzzled Hutton or Werner; dozens of surgeons can perform operations from which John Hunter would have shrunk appalled; and dozens of women, were they allowed, would, I believe, fulfil in political and official posts the hopes which Miss Wedgwood and Mr. Boyd Kinnear entertain.

But, after all, it is hard to say anything on this matter, which has not been said in other words by Mr. Mill himself, in pp. 98-104 of his ‘Subjection of Women;’ or give us more sound and palpable proof of women’s political capacity, than the paragraph with which he ends his argument:—

‘Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater functions of politics are incapable of qualifying themselves for the less?  Is there any reason, in the nature of things, that the wives and sisters of princes should, whenever called on, be found as competent as the princes themselves to their business, but that the wives and sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and directors of companies, and managers of public institutions, should be unable to do what is done by their brothers and husbands?  The real reason is plain enough; it is that princesses, being more raised above the generality of men by their rank than placed below them by their sex, have never been taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves with politics; but have been allowed to feel the liberal interest natural to any cultivated human being, in the great transactions which took place around them, and in which they might be called on to take a part.  The ladies of reigning families are the only women who are allowed the same range of interests and freedom of development as men; and it is precisely in their case that there is not found to be any inferiority.  Exactly where and in proportion as women’s capacities for government have been tried, in that proportion have they been found adequate.’

Though the demands of women just now are generally urged in the order of—first, employment, then education, and lastly, the franchise, I have dealt principally with the latter, because I sincerely believe that it, and it only, will lead to their obtaining a just measure of the two former.  Had I been treating of an ideal, or even a truly civilised polity, I should have spoken of education first; for education ought to be the necessary and sole qualification for the franchise.  But we have not so ordered it in England in the case of men; and in all fairness we ought not to do so in the case of women.  We have not so ordered it, and we had no right to order it otherwise than we have done.  If we have neglected to give the masses due education, we have no right to withhold the franchise on the strength of that neglect.  Like Frankenstein, we may have made our man ill: but we cannot help his being alive; and if he destroys us, it is our own fault.

If any reply, that to add a number of uneducated women-voters to the number of uneducated men-voters will be only to make the danger worse, the answer is:—That women will be always less brutal than men, and will exercise on them (unless they are maddened, as in the first French Revolution, by the hunger and misery of their children) the same softening influence in public life which they now exercise in private; and, moreover, that as things stand now, the average woman is more educated, in every sense of the word, than the average man; and that to admit women would be to admit a class of voters superior, not inferior, to the average.

Startling as this may sound to some, I assert that it is true.

We must recollect that the just complaints of the insufficient education of girls proceed almost entirely from that ‘lower-upper’ class which stocks the professions, including the Press; that this class furnishes only a small portion of the whole number of voters; that the vast majority belong (and will belong still more hereafter) to other classes, of whom we may say, that in all of them the girls are better educated than the boys.  They stay longer at school—sometimes twice as long.  They are more open to the purifying and elevating influences of religion.  Their brains are neither muddled away with drink and profligacy, or narrowed by the one absorbing aim of turning a penny into five farthings.  They have a far larger share than their brothers of that best of all practical and moral educations, that of family life.  Any one who has had experience of the families of farmers and small tradesmen, knows how boorish the lads are, beside the intelligence, and often the refinement, of their sisters.  The same rule holds (I am told) in the manufacturing districts.  Even in the families of employers, the young ladies are, and have been for a generation or two, far more highly cultivated than their brothers, whose intellects are always early absorbed in business, and too often injured by pleasure.  The same, I believe, in spite of all that has been written about the frivolity of the girl of the period, holds true of that class which is, by a strange irony, called ‘the ruling class.’  I suspect that the average young lady already learns more worth knowing at home than her brother does at the public school.  Those, moreover, who complain that girls are trained now too often merely as articles for the so-called ‘marriage market,’ must remember this—that the great majority of those who will have votes will be either widows, who have long passed all that, have had experience, bitter and wholesome, of the realities of life, and have most of them given many pledges to the State in the form of children; or women who, by various circumstances, have been early withdrawn from the competition of this same marriage-market, and have settled down into pure and honourable celibacy, with full time, and generally full inclination, to cultivate and employ their own powers.  I know not what society those men may have lived in who are in the habit of sneering at ‘old maids.’  My experience has led me to regard them with deep respect, from the servant retired on her little savings to the unmarried sisters of the rich and the powerful, as a class pure, unselfish, thoughtful, useful, often experienced and able; more fit for the franchise, when they are once awakened to their duties as citizens, than the average men of the corresponding class.  I am aware that such a statement will be met with ‘laughter, the unripe fruit of wisdom.’  But that will not affect its truth.

Let me say a few words more on this point.  There are those who, while they pity the two millions and a half, or more, of unmarried women earning their own bread, are tempted to do no more than pity them, from the mistaken notion that after all it is their own fault, or at least the fault of nature.  They ought (it is fancied) to have been married: or at least they ought to have been good-looking enough and clever enough to be married.  They are the exceptions, and for exceptions we cannot legislate.  We must take care of the average article, and let the refuse take care of itself.  I have put plainly, it may be somewhat coarsely, a belief which I believe many men hold, though they are too manly to express it.  But the belief itself is false.  It is false even of the lower classes.  Among them, the cleverest, the most prudent, the most thoughtful, are those who, either in domestic service or a few—very few, alas!—other callings, attain comfortable and responsible posts which they do not care to leave for any marriage, especially when that marriage puts the savings of their life at the mercy of the husband—and they see but too many miserable instances of what that implies.  The very refinement which they have acquired in domestic service often keeps them from wedlock.  ‘I shall never marry,’ said an admirable nurse, the daughter of a common agricultural labourer.  ‘After being so many years among gentlefolk, I could not live with a man who was not a scholar, and did not bathe every day.’

And if this be true of the lower class, it is still more true of some, at least, of the classes above them.  Many a ‘lady’ who remains unmarried does so, not for want of suitors, but simply from nobleness of mind; because others are dependent on her for support; or because she will not degrade herself by marrying for marrying’s sake.  How often does one see all that can make a woman attractive—talent, wit, education, health, beauty,—possessed by one who never will enter holy wedlock.  ‘What a loss,’ one says, ‘that such a woman should not have married, if it were but for the sake of the children she might have borne to the State.’  ‘Perhaps,’ answer wise women of the world, ‘she did not see any one whom she could condescend to many.’

And thus it is that a very large proportion of the spinsters of England, so far from being, as silly boys and wicked old men fancy, the refuse of their sex, are the very élite thereof; those who have either sacrificed themselves for their kindred, or have refused to sacrifice themselves to that longing to marry at all risks of which women are so often and so unmanly accused.

Be all this as it may, every man is bound to bear in mind, that over this increasing multitude of ‘spinsters,’ of women who are either self-supporting or desirous of so being, men have, by mere virtue of their sex, absolutely no rights at all.  No human being has such a right over them as the husband has (justly or unjustly) over the wife, or the father over the daughter living in his house.  They are independent and self-supporting units of the State, owing to it exactly the same allegiance as, and neither more nor less than, men who have attained their majority.  They are favoured by no privilege, indulgence, or exceptional legislation from the State, and they ask none.  They expect no protection from the State save that protection for life and property which every man, even the most valiant, expects, since the carrying of side-arms has gone out of fashion.  They prove themselves daily, whenever they have simple fair play, just as capable as men of not being a burden to the State.  They are in fact in exactly the same relation to the State as men.  Why are similar relations, similar powers, and similar duties not to carry with them similar rights?  To this question the common sense and justice of England will have soon to find an answer.  I have sufficient faith in that common sense and justice, when once awakened, to face any question fairly, to anticipate what that answer will be.

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‘The Subjection of Women.’  By John Stuart Mill.—‘Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture.’  Edited by Josephine Butler.—‘Education of Girls, and Employment of Women.’  By W. B. Hodgson, LD.D.—‘On the Study of Science by Women.’  By Lydia Ernestine Becker.  (Contemporary Review, March 1869.)