Women and Politics | Page 6

have
they, of which the State can take cognisance, save their duty to those to
whom they may owe money, and their duty to keep the peace? Their
other and nobler duties are voluntary and self-imposed; and, most
usually, are fulfilled as secretly as possible. The State commits an
injustice in debarring a woman from the rights of a citizen because she
chooses, over and above them, to perform the good works of a saint.
And, after all, will it be the worse for these women, or for the society in
which they live, if they do interest themselves in politics? Might not (as
Mr. Boyd Kinnear urges in an article as sober and rational as it is
earnest and chivalrous) their purity and earnestness help to make what

is now called politics somewhat more pure, somewhat more earnest?
Might not the presence of the voting power of a few virtuous,
experienced, well- educated women, keep candidates, for very shame,
from saying and doing things from which they do not shrink, before a
crowd of men who are, on the average, neither virtuous, experienced, or
well-educated, by wholesome dread of that most terrible of all earthly
punishments--at least in the eyes of a manly man--the fine scorn of a
noble woman? Might not the intervention of a few women who are
living according to the eternal laws of God, help to infuse some slightly
stronger tincture of those eternal laws into our legislators and their
legislation? What women have done for the social reforms of the last
forty years is known, or ought to be known, to all. Might not they have
done far more, and might not they do far more hereafter, if they, who
generally know far more than men do of human suffering, and of the
consequences of human folly, were able to ask for further social
reforms, not merely as a boon to be begged from the physically
stronger sex, but as their will, which they, as citizens, have a right to
see fulfilled, if just and possible? Woman has played for too many
centuries the part which Lady Godiva plays in the old legend. It is time
that she should not be content with mitigating by her entreaties or her
charities the cruelty and greed of men, but exercise her right, as a
member of the State, and (as I believe) a member of Christ and a child
of God, to forbid them.
As for any specific difference between the intellect of women and that
of men, which should preclude the former meddling in politics, I must
confess that the subtle distinctions drawn, even by those who uphold
the intellectual equality of women, have almost, if not altogether,
escaped me. The only important difference, I think, is, that men are
generally duller and more conceited than women. The dulness is natural
enough, on the broad ground that the males of all animals (being more
sensual and selfish) are duller than the females. The conceit is easily
accounted for. The English boy is told from childhood, as the negro
boy is, that men are superior to women. The negro boy shows his
assent to the proposition by beating his mother, the English one by
talking down his sisters. That is all.

But if there be no specific intellectual difference (as there is actually
none), is there any practical and moral difference? I use the two
epithets as synonymous; for practical power may exist without
acuteness of intellect: but it cannot exist without sobriety, patience, and
courage, and sundry other virtues, which are 'moral' in every sense of
that word.
I know of no such difference. There are, doubtless, fields of political
action more fitted for men than for women; but are there not again
fields more fitted for women than for men?--fields in which certain
women, at least, have already shown such practical capacity, that they
have established not only their own right, but a general right for the
able and educated of their sex, to advise officially about that which they
themselves have unofficially mastered. Who will say that Mrs. Fry, or
Miss Nightingale, or Miss Burdett Coutts, is not as fit to demand
pledges of a candidate at the hustings on important social questions as
any male elector; or to give her deliberate opinion thereon in either
House of Parliament, as any average M.P. or peer of the realm? And if
it be said that these are only brilliant exceptions, the rejoinder is, What
proof have you of that? You cannot pronounce on the powers of the
average till you have tried them. These exceptions rather prove the
existence of unsuspected and unemployed strength below. If a few
persons of genius, in any class, succeed in breaking through the barriers
of routine and prejudice, their success