Woman and the Republic | Page 3

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 Greek men down to the second century before our era?"
Mrs. Dietrick's remarkably realistic version of the old myth does not tell the tale as Greek men published it. Varro, who was educated at Athens, goes on to say: "Thereupon, Neptune became enraged, and immediately the sea flowed over all the land of Athens. To appease the god,