Women and Politics | Page 7

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