A notable condition of your society compared with ours is the tardy advance of your women from that complete subjection to men which existed in your primary state. It is not surprising that in your present stage of progress the males of your race should continue to usurp many of the privileges which came to them as an inheritance from a savage and brutal ancestry of comparatively recent existence, and your gradual awakening to a sense of justice in that direction is one of the many evidences that you are moving along on the lines marked out for you by the divine law of evolution in thought.
We have found certain active qualities of mind, predominating everywhere in women, indispensable to a better progress in social advancement, and great things have been wrought to us by our present absolute equality of the sexes. The full value of women as factors in social progress is not known, nor even suspected by you, because you have never witnessed the experiment of a complete withdrawal of those restrictions which hold[Pg 214] them in subjection; yet, it is a fact that in what are truly the noblest advances in humanity, they are your superiors. They have left further behind them the brutalisms of the past, are deeper touched with your inhumanities, and will go further to banish them than your men.
Your estimate of the mental capacity of women is singularly erroneous. The cropping out occasionally of their intellectual achievements, and the marked increase of such with the multiplication of opportunities, must have hinted to you that their silence, and apparent inferiority in the higher mental efforts, were alone due to their long period of subordination, during which the usages of your society have discouraged any attempts to enter the field as competitors with men. In the full swing of opportunity and encouragement allowed them by us, they have raised themselves to a very high plane, especially in literature, poetry and art. We owe to them many of our masterpieces in these attainments, and their aptitude for study and investigation is shown in the even place they hold with us in science and the professions. Those feminine qualities of mind which are described by you as heart, sympathy, sentiment and emotion, and which are generally considered by you as out of place in affairs of[Pg 215] state, are the very ones of which you have the greatest need in legislation. It is principally through the feelings mentioned that divine impulses are expressed, and yet that part of yourselves where they most prevail are excluded from your councils.
A model of all that is best in your governments is to be found no where except within the family. The ready helpfulness and equal attention to the welfare of one another within its precincts, extended into the motives and aims of your public policies, embrace everything necessary to a perfect government; yet, you have selected out of the family for the sole direction of your public affairs its hardest and most selfish part, its selfishness intensified in its dealings with society beyond the confines of home, by those absorbing paternal responsibilities—in great measure due to the subordination of women—which in many ways interfere with efforts for the good of the whole.
From the nature of things your men are more easily overcome by evil political forces than your women would be. The latter, being more closely allied to the interests of the family, in its moral training, and less willing to sacrifice the benefit of example, are consequently less[Pg 216] corruptible than men. Women have a greater natural affinity for virtue than men, more unselfishness and a larger concern for the moral welfare of mankind, exhibited in their more earnest support of religion.
With the enfranchisement of women the humanities of life would enter more largely into your politics. You have proofs of this in the few local instances where they have been granted suffrage rights. The desirable family methods and sentiments, of which they are better exponents than men, have never failed to come to the surface as indications of their presence. They have invariably shown a greater inclination than men to consider the welfare of persons in legislation as against the welfare alone of property, which has to the present so monopolized and corrupted your politics. Your legislation in the hands of men alone has accomplished but little in alleviating the distresses of humanity. The cold and calculating hand of speculation, which invests only to call back its capital with high usury, has always held your law making as a ready instrument for its purposes, and without loftier views, your governments will continue to miss their opportunities for benefitting mankind. By the admission of women the higher sentiments would sooner[Pg 217] find a place. It would be the first step in bringing natural religion and politics together. The present irrational state of your spiritual beliefs retards the adoption of a moral code in your systems of government. With you, the State is led to care for nothing in the interest of morality, except a punishment of its infractions. It ignores, as no part of its duties, all incentives to goodness, and in dealing with crime the service of its prevention, in any other way than punishment, is not considered, principally because other departments of society have assumed for ages the public control and promotion of the virtues.
A wider range in the duties of government is opposed by many of you as objectionable paternalism. Such of you overlook the fact that there can be no paternalism in a republic. Such a system is co-operation pure and simple, and neither good nor evil can permanently exist without the consent of the whole. The nearer you get to complete co-operation, the more perfect your government becomes. The greatest vices of misgovernment among you are to be found in granting precedence of one interest over others, that interest in most cases being a capitalistic one, often antagonizing the welfare of many[Pg 218] individuals. Among your industrial class, less than one-tenth are employers, whose political weight has so overcome the majority as to have excluded any direct legislation in its behalf, and so far as these conditions exist, the principle of co-operation which should be the corner stone of your government has not been faithfully carried out. A greater, and in our view, a more glaring violation of this principle is your exclusion of women from the rights of representation in your government. You cannot deny that they have separate interests to care for. You will find upon examination of your assessment rolls that nearly one-fifth of all your real and personal estate is owned by them, and of the greater part of the balance they are interested by matrimonial partnerships with men. Their property ownerships alone entitle them to the rights of suffrage, in the denial of which you have no excuse whatever but the usage and custom of barbaric ages extended to the present, and the prejudice of a society grown familiar and blinded to its injustice. The struggles of labor for better recognition, and the agitation for woman suffrage are evolutionary movements in thought, and in your advanced government indicate the coming of a more perfect co-operation.
[Pg 219]The political subjection of women, and the subjection of labor helplessly to the law of supply and demand, without legislative assistance or attention, are at present your most prominent relics of barbarism. They are both endured because the parties to be benefitted have never yet enjoyed the privileges due them. Neither one or the other are consequently aroused to action in their own behalf, and when these rights are acquired by them it will be more owing to an enlightened public opinion than to any concerted action by themselves. It is well known that your slaves had little to do with the abolition of slavery, and it is therefore not a proper argument against the granting of these privileges that the persons to be benefitted are not all clamoring for them; or that, in the case of woman suffrage, a large majority of women are indifferent and a few opposed.
The subjection of women to men in all the political and business affairs of life have greatly modified the characters of both. You have confined the lives of your women to innumerable small details. Her aspirations and powers have been confined within this narrow scope. The absorption of their whole minds has been in a set of small ideas and occupations, from one to the other in[Pg 220] continuous exercise. In such a life profound thought and loftier emotions are not encouraged. They have but little incentive to the acquirement of general knowledge, for it can be of no practical use to them, and being early impressed with a sense of their dependence upon men, their lives are given up to all the small devices for obtaining power over them in the sensuous fields of personal adornment and display. Theirs, as well as other human minds, must be shallowed under such conditions; yet of the two sexes their duties are the most serious and responsible in shaping the destinies of mankind. Theirs is the chief part in the forming of minds, both by heredity and training, and with their limited opportunities for broadened thought you can look for nothing more in them than those narrow prejudices, which are in turn transmitted, and which are so manifest in all your society. This narrowness is one of your most unhappy traits; it is almost universal among you. Until quite recently you have only had a man here and there capable and willing to fairly examine a question which interferes with traditional beliefs and old modes of thought. You have formed no conception of how much this state of things is due to the limited mental horizon in which your women[Pg 221] have been confined. The intellects of your best men have not been multiplied and reproduced as they should have been, owing to the loss of their strength and fibre in the process of reproduction, through your average non-high thought producing female minds.
The extended barbaric relations which your women hold to men, though greatly modified by civilization, has carried with it enough of its primary feelings and motives to influence a large majority of your matrimonial engagements, where in truth, it may be said that the attraction is sensual to a degree not willingly acknowledged, and this being more and more the case as you descend in the social scale, you will find here your women going through life helplessly subject to the lingering brutalism which your customs and laws enforce. It is from the animalism of these low life marriages that a large sum of your miseries and crimes are produced. Your inferior men have but little respect for those subject to their power, and in many cases use a tyrannical authority over their defenseless wives in gratification of a mean instinct of humanity. It is the only opportunity perhaps that brutal husbands enjoy in their whole lives to command a grown person who is under an obligation by law, custom and[Pg 222] religion to obey. Such a dangerous subjection of one human being to another could only be excused by a certainty that the welfare of your society depended upon it, when in fact the condition is one of the obstacles to a better social state.
During your barbaric period, and for a long time thereafter, women made no protest against her subordinate position in society. It has been her place for ages to suffer more than her share of the pains and trials of human replenishment. She has been taught to believe that this was her only part in the world’s economy, and men have held her to it by all the force of ecclesiastical and secular bonds. In all your glorious modern achievements of science and general knowledge until lately she has not even been an invited spectator. While the world in front has been all astir in the movements of progress, she has only been permitted to listen and wonder at the applause through the rear windows of the nursery and kitchen; not knowing what it all meant and not educated to approve, or even to understand, its glorious import. Having never been accustomed to think on any great subject, she has held to her traditions after they have been discredited and denied by the knowledge of her[Pg 223] times, and imparting them to childhood in all their ancient mixture of error has assisted to keep alive those prejudices among you which have so seriously blocked your advancement. This is one of the penalties you have paid for your subjection of women. Those traditions to which she so defiantly clings she will never be persuaded to discard in her present dependent condition. It may be said to her honor............