“Discontented Women,” North American Review 162 (February 1896), pages 201, 205-207, 209.
But with all its variations of influence and activity there has never been a time in the world’s history, when female discontent has assumed so much, and demanded so much, as at the present day; and both the satisfied and the dissatisfied woman may well pause to consider, whether the fierce fever of unrest which has possessed so large a number of the sex is not rather a delirium than a conviction; whether indeed they are not just as foolishly impatient to get out of their Eden, as was the woman Eve six thousand years ago. . . .
The discontent of working women is understandable, but it is a wide jump from the woman discontented about her work or wages to the woman discontented about her political position. Of all the shrill complainers that vex the ears of mortals there are none so foolish as the women who have discovered that the Founders of our Republic left their work half-finished, and that the better half remains for them to do. While more practical and sensible women are trying to put their kitchens, nurseries and drawing-rooms in order, and to clothe themselves rationally, this class of Discontents are dabbling in the gravest national and economic questions. Possessed by a restless discontent with their appointed sphere and its duties, and forcing themselves to the front in order to ventilate their theories and show the quality of their brains, they demand the right of suffrage as the symbol and guarantee of all other rights.
This is their cardinal point, though it naturally follows that the right to elect contains the right to be elected. If this result be gained, even women whose minds are not taken up with the things of the state, but who are simply housewives and mothers, may easily predicate a few of such results as are particularly plain to the feminine intellect and observation. The first of these would be an entirely new set of agitators, who would use means quite foreign to male intelligence. For instance, every favorite priest and preacher would gain enormously in influence and power; for the ecclesiastical zeal which now expends itself in fairs and testimonials would then expend itself in the securing of votes in whatever direction they were instructed to secure them. It might even end in the introduction of the clerical element in our great political Council Chambers--the Bishops in the House of Lords would be a sufficient precedent--and a great many women would really believe that the charming rhetoric of the pulpit would infuse a higher tone in legislative assemblies. . . .
Finally, women cannot get behind or beyond their nature, and their nature is to substitute sentiment for reason--a sweet and not unlovely characteristic in womanly ways and places; yet reason, on the whole, is considered a desirable necessity in politics. . . . Women may cease to be women, but they can never learn to be men, and feminine softness and grace can never do the work of the virile virtues of men. Very fortunately this class of discontented women have not yet been able to endanger existing conditions by combinations analogous to trades-unions; nor is it likely they ever will; because it is doubtful if women, under any circumstances, could combine at all. Certain qualities are necessary for combination, and these qualities are represented in women by their opposites.
“The Fitness of Women to Become Citizens from the Standpoint of Moral Development,” in Susan B. Anthony, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902), pages 308-309.
When the state took the place of family bonds and tribal relationships, and the social consciousness was born and began its long travel toward the doctrine of “equality of human rights” in government and the principle of human brotherhood in social organization, man, as the family and tribal organizer and ruler, of course took command of the march. It was inevitable, natural and beneficent so long as the State concerned itself with only the most external and mechanical of social interests. The instant, however, the State took upon itself any form of educative, charitable or personally helpful work, it entered the area of distinctive feminine training and power, and therefore became in need of the service of woman. Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives. If the service of women is not won to such governmental action (not only through “influence or the shaping of public opinion,” but through definite and authoritative exercise), the mother-office of the State, now so widely adopted, will be too often planned and administered as through it were an external, mechanical and abstract function, instead of the personal, organic and practical service which all right helping of individuals must be.
In so far as motherhood has given women a distinctive ethical development, it is that of sympathetic personal insight respecting the needs of the weak and helpless, and of quick-witted, flexible adjustment of means to ends in the physical, mental and moral training of the undeveloped. And thus far has motherhood fitted women to give a service to the modern State which men can not altogether duplicate.
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