Women and Politics | Page 8

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 have a far larger share than their brothers of that best of
all practical and moral educations, that of family life. Any one who has
had experience of the families of farmers and small tradesmen, knows
how boorish the lads are, beside the intelligence, and often the
refinement, of their sisters. The same rule holds (I am told) in the
manufacturing districts. Even in the families of employers, the young
ladies are, and have been for a generation or two, far more highly
cultivated than their brothers, whose intellects are always early
absorbed in business, and too often injured by pleasure. The same, I
believe, in spite of all that has been written about the frivolity of the

girl of the period, holds true of that class which is, by a strange irony,
called 'the ruling class.' I suspect that the average young lady already
learns more worth knowing at home than her brother does at the public
school. Those, moreover, who complain that girls are trained now too
often merely as articles for the so-called 'marriage market,' must
remember this--that the great majority of those who will have votes
will be either widows, who have long passed all that, have had
experience, bitter and wholesome, of the realities of life, and have most
of them given many pledges to the State in the form of children; or
women who, by various circumstances, have been early withdrawn
from the competition of this same marriage-market, and have settled
down into pure and honourable celibacy, with full time, and generally
full inclination, to cultivate and employ their own powers. I know not
what society those men may have lived in who are in the habit of
sneering at 'old maids.' My experience has led me to regard them with
deep respect, from the servant retired on her little savings to the
unmarried sisters of the rich and the powerful, as a class pure, unselfish,
thoughtful, useful, often experienced and able; more fit for the
franchise, when they are once awakened to their duties as citizens, than
the average men of the corresponding class. I am aware that such a
statement will be met with 'laughter, the unripe fruit of wisdom.' But
that will not affect its truth.
Let me say a few words more on this point. There are those who, while
they pity the two millions and a half, or more, of unmarried women
earning their own bread, are tempted to do no more than pity them,
from the mistaken notion that after all it is their own fault, or at least
the fault of nature. They ought (it is fancied) to have been married: or at
least they ought to have been good-looking enough and clever enough
to be married. They are the exceptions, and for exceptions we cannot
legislate. We must take care of the average article, and let the refuse
take care of itself. I have put plainly, it may be somewhat coarsely, a
belief which I believe many men hold, though they are too manly to
express it. But the belief itself is false. It is false even of the lower
classes. Among them, the cleverest, the most prudent, the most
thoughtful, are those who, either in domestic service or a few--very few,
alas!--other callings, attain comfortable and responsible posts which

they do not care to leave for any marriage, especially when that
marriage puts the savings of their life at the mercy of the husband--and
they see but too many miserable instances of what that implies. The
very refinement which they have acquired in domestic service often
keeps them from wedlock. 'I shall never marry,' said an admirable nurse,
the daughter of a common agricultural labourer. 'After being so many
years among gentlefolk, I could not live with a man who was not a
scholar, and did not bathe every day.'
And if this be true of the lower class, it is still more true of some, at
least, of the classes above them. Many a 'lady' who remains unmarried
does so, not for want of suitors, but simply from nobleness of mind;
because others are dependent on her for support; or because she will
not degrade herself by marrying for marrying's sake. How often does
one see all that can make a woman attractive--talent, wit, education,
health, beauty,--possessed by one who never will enter holy wedlock.
'What a loss,' one says, 'that such a woman should not have married, if
it were but for the sake of the children she might have borne to the
State.' 'Perhaps,' answer wise