Women and Politics | Page 7

shows that they have left behind
them many more who would follow in their steps if those barriers were
but removed. This has been the case in every forward movement,
religious, scientific, or social. 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