Women and Politics | Page 4

women have to dictate to men? All they demand--all, at least, that is demanded in the volumes noticed in this review--is fair play for women; 'A clear stage and no favour.' Let 'natural selection,' as Miss Wedgwood well says, decide which is the superior, and in what. Let it, by the laws of supply and demand, draught women as well as men into the employments and positions for which they are most fitted by nature. To those who believe that the laws of nature are the laws of God, the Vox Dei in rebus revelata; that to obey them is to prove our real faith in God, to interfere with them (as we did in social relations throughout the Middle Ages, and as we did till lately in commercial relations likewise) by arbitrary restrictions is to show that we have no faith in God, and consider ourselves wise enough to set right an ill-made universe--to them at least this demand must seem both just and modest.
Meanwhile, many women, and some men also, think the social status of women is just now in special peril. The late extension of the franchise has admitted to a share in framing our laws many thousands of men of that class which--whatever be their other virtues, and they are many--is most given to spending their wives' earnings in drink, and personally maltreating them; and least likely--to judge from the actions of certain trades--to admit women to free competition for employment. Further extension of the suffrage will, perhaps, in a very few years, admit many thousands more. And it is no wonder if refined and educated women, in an age which is disposed to see in the possession of a vote the best means of self-defence, should ask for votes, for the defence, not merely of themselves, but of their lowlier sisters, from the tyranny of men who are as yet--to the shame of the State--most of them altogether uneducated.
As for the reasonableness of such a demand, I can only say--what has been said elsewhere--that the present state of things, 'in which the franchise is considered as something so important and so sacred that the most virtuous, the most pious, the most learned, the most wealthy, the most benevolent, the most justly powerful woman, is refused it, as something too precious for her; and yet it is entrusted, freely and hopefully, to any illiterate, drunken, wife-beating ruffian who can contrive to keep a home over his head,' is equally unjust and absurd.
There may be some sufficient answer to the conclusion which conscience and common sense, left to themselves, would draw from this statement of the case as it now stands: but none has occurred to me which is not contrary to the first principle of a free government.
This I presume to be: that every citizen has a right to share in choosing those who make the laws; in order to prevent, as far as he can, laws being made which are unjust and injurious to him, to his family, or to his class; and that all are to be considered as 'active' citizens, save the criminal, the insane, or those unable to support themselves. The best rough test of a man's being able to support himself is, I doubt not, his being able to keep a house over his head, or, at least, a permanent lodging; and that, I presume, will be in a few years the one and universal test of active citizenship, unless we should meanwhile obtain the boon of a compulsory Government education, and an educational franchise founded thereon. But, it must be asked--and answered also--What is there in such a test, even as it stands now, only partially applied, which is not as fair for women as it is for men? 'Is it just that an educated man, who is able independently to earn his own livelihood, should have a vote: but that an equally educated woman, equally able independently to earn her own livelihood, should not? Is it just that a man owning a certain quantity of property should have a vote in respect of that property: but that a woman owning the same quantity of property, and perhaps a hundred or a thousand times more, should have no vote?' What difference, founded on Nature and Fact, exists between the two cases?
If it be said that Nature and Fact (arguments grounded on aught else are to be left to monks and mediaeval jurists) prove that women are less able than men to keep a house over their head, or to manage their property, the answer is that Fact is the other way. Women are just as capable as men of managing a large estate, a vast wealth. Mr. Mill gives a fact which surprised even him--that the best administered Indian States