Woman and the Republic | Page 3

mine must
search to conclusion; but some beginnings looking toward an answer to
the inquiry I have raised have occurred to me as not having entered into
the newly- opened controversy on woman suffrage.
I say, the newly-opened controversy, for, through these fifty years, the
Suffragists have done nearly all the talking. So persistently have they
laid claim to being in the line of progress for woman, that many of their
newly aroused opponents fancied that the anti-suffrage view might be
the ultra conservative one, and that democratic principles, strictly and
broadly applied, might at last lead to woman suffrage, though
premature if pushed to a conclusion now.
The first step in finding out how far that position is true is, to ascertain
what the Suffragists say about this noblest of democracies, our own
Government. In referring to the "The History of Woman Suffrage" for
the opinions of the leaders, I am not only using a book that on its
publication was considered a strong and full presentment of their
arguments, but one which they are today advertising and selling as "a
perfect arsenal of the work done by and for women during the last half
century." In it the editors say: "Woman's political equality with man is
the legitimate outgrowth of the fundamental principles of our
government." Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, writing in the New York Sun in
April, 1894, says: "Never, until the establishment of universal [male]
suffrage, did it happen that all the women in a community, no matter

how well born, how intelligent, how well educated, how virtuous, how
wealthy, were counted the political inferiors of all the men, no matter
how base born, how stupid, how ignorant, how brutal, how
poverty-stricken. This anomaly is the real innovation. Men have
personally ruled the women of their families; the law has annihilated
the separate existence of women; but women have never been subjected
to the political sovereignty of all men simply in virtue of their sex.
Never, that is, since the days of the ancient republics." Mrs. Ellen
Battelle Dietrick, who, as Secretary of the New-England Suffrage
Association, was put forward to meet all comers, writing in July, 1895,
said: "Shall we, as a people, be true to our principles and enfranchise
woman? or, shall we drift along in the meanest form of oligarchy
known among men--an oligarchy which exalts every sort of a male into
a ruler simply because he is a male, and debases every woman into a
subject simply because she is a woman?" Mrs. Fanny B. Ames,
speaking in Boston in 1896, said: "I believe woman suffrage to be the
final result of the evolution of a true democracy." Not only has every
woman speaker or writer in favor of suffrage presented this idea in
some form, but the men also who have taken that side have done
likewise. One among those who advocated the cause before the
Committee in the Constitutional Convention of New York, said:
"Woman Suffrage is the inevitable result of the logic of the situation of
modern society. The despot who first yielded an inch of power gave up
the field. We are standing in the light of the best interests of the State of
New York when we stand in the way of this forward movement."
All these writers charge the American Republic with being false to
democratic principles in excluding women from the franchise, while
but one of them alludes to the fact that in the ancient republics the same
"anomaly" was seen.
As I read political history, the facts go to show that the fundamental
principles of our Government are more opposed to the exercise of
suffrage by women than are those of monarchies. To me it seems that
both despotism and anarchy are more friendly to woman's political
aspirations than is any form of constitutional government, and that
manhood suffrage, and not womanhood suffrage, is the final result of

the evolution of democracy.
The Suffragists repeatedly call attention to the fact that in the early ages
in Egypt, in Greece, and in Rome, women were of much greater
political consequence than later during the republics; but the moral they
have drawn has been that of the superiority of the ancient times. Mrs.
Dietrick says: "The ideal woman of Greece was Athena, patroness of
all household arts and industries, but equally patroness of all political
interests. The greatest city of Greece was believed to have been
founded by her, and Greek history recorded that, though the men
citizens voted solidly to have the city named for Neptune, yet the
women citizens voted solidly for Athena, beat them by one vote, and
carried that political matter. If physical force had been a governing
power in Greece, and men its manifestation, how could such a story
have been published by