The arguments for and against woman suffrage have all been discussed so often that it will hardly be possible to offer anything which will be new to the readers of the Christian Science Journal. But until the truth militant becomes the truth triumphant, it has to be restated again and again, however weary both friends and foes may grow of the repetition. Perhaps the friends are the wearier of the two. It has been well said, "To hammer away at the same old sins with the same old truths, and yet to strike fire,—that is work." At all events, if the opponents of the reform are weary of hearing about it, no one need pity them. They are simply in the position of the Unjust Judge in the parable.
The general argument for woman suffrage was stated when God said, "It is not good for man to be alone." The whole history of the race shows this. Every department of human affairs from which women have been excluded, has been left more or less barbarous, and the history of civilization is the history of their admission to one department after another, carrying with them always a softening and humanizing influence. Rev. Samuel J. May said: "The true family is the type of the State. It is the absence of the feminine from the conduct of the governments of the earth that makes them more or less savage. The State is now in a condition of half orphanage. There are Fathers of the State, but no Mothers." The good results we hope for, from the co-operation of men and women in government, are the same good results that have been already realized from their co-operation everywhere else. Twenty-seven years ago, Henry Ward Beecher said: "Since the world began, to refine society has been woman's function. You may be sure that she who has carried refinement to the household, to the church, to social life, to literature, to art, to every interest except government, will also carry it to legislation, and the whole of civil and public procedure, if it is to be carried there at all."
To say this is not to claim that women are superior to men. Personally, I believe that if women alone had been entrusted with the government, they would have erred as widely as men have done, though in an opposite direction. Each sex is superior to the other in some points, and inferior in others. The two are complementary. The ideal government is not one of men alone, nor of women alone, but of the two together. As it takes two eyes for correct vision, so it requires the union of the masculine and feminine points of view to get a true perspective, in looking at all social and public questions.
The objections that have been made are too many to enumerate, and many of them are too frivolous to be worth discussing before an intelligent audience. There is one, however, that underlies most of the others. "The really formidable difficulty," says Senator Hoar, "is the fear that the ballot will, in some way, change for the worse the character and the employment of woman." It is hardly likely that the ballot will change, in any marked degree, the employment of most women. A lady who visited Wyoming Territory, where women have had suffrage for eighteen years, reported that the women kept on at their usual avocations three-hundred-and-sixty-four days in the year without visible change, and on the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth they all sallied forth and voted.
As for the fear that voting would injure the character of women,—if done thoughtfully and conscientiously, in a spirit of duty,—it seems to me entirely idle. What is virtue good for, but to be used to relieve suffering, to vanquish wrong, to scatter darkness, to uphold the authority of good against evil, to fight, to shine? The world is outgrowing the old idea that womanly virtue is something which depends for its purity on being cloistered away from active life,—something wholly passive, whose mission it is to sit on a pedestal and smile, without ever coming down to work or to help. A braver and better ideal of womanliness is slowly shaping itself in the heart and mind of the world. "The mission of woman" is now at last seen to be something like what Owen Meredith has described in his most famous poem, and his noblest fictitious character:
The mission of woman: permitted to bruise
The head of the serpent, and sweetly infuse
Through the sorrow and sin of earth's registered curse,
The blessing which mitigates all; born to nurse
And to soothe and to solace, to help and to heal
The sick world that leans on her,—this was Lucile.
It is said that politics are too corrupt for women. The same objection has been made before the closed gate of each department of human affairs in turn, that it was too rough or too bad for women to enter. But when women have at last been let in, each previous department has been refined and humanized, and women have been none the worse. To quote again from Beecher: "Should a man having an exquisite lamp, burning perfumed oil, refuse to carry it into an unlighted room, lest the darkness should contaminate the flame? "
It has been well said that women with the ballot will be just what they are now, only more powerful. Those who have a poor opinion of women, believe that most of them would use this increased power to do mischief, and hence, dread to place it in their hands. Those of us who believe that most women desire what is good, have faith that in the future, as in the past, "the eternal womanly" will lead "upward and on."
Every kindness done to others in our daily walk, every attempt to make others happy, every prejudice overcome, every truth more clearly perceived, every difficulty subdued, every sin left behind, every temptation trampled under foot, every step forward in the cause of good, is a step nearer to the life of Christ.
