Letters to a friend on votes for women/Arguments in favour of votes for women
LETTER III
Arguments in favour of woman suffrage
My dear C,
I am afraid that my legal mind (as E. calls it) has perhaps made me rather wearisome to you. When I was examining the most solid of the arguments in favour of the revolution demanded by suffragists, I insisted on distinctions really important in themselves, but which are likely to tell more with lawyers than with laymen or with women. Please, however, listen to two remaining arguments which, though in my judgment little better than fallacies, are intelligible to all persons. The one—namely, the Fourth Argument—will be received with special favour by hardworked and often underpaid women of the labouring classes; the other—namely, the Fifth Argument—is certain to impress benevolent ladies engaged in good works, and inclined to advocate every measure which, on the face of it, tends towards the moral and religious amelioration of mankind.
Fourth Argument.—The possession of votes, it is asserted, will increase the earnings of women. This prophecy is of itself enough to enlist every underpaid and underfed seamstress or maid-of-all-work in the ranks of the fighting suffragists. The plain answer to it is that the prediction, if it means (as every working woman does understand it to mean) that a vote will in itself raise the market value of a woman's work, is false. The ordinary current price of labour depends on economical causes. They are some of them obscure. The lowness of a woman's wages is due in part to her weakness compared with the strength of men, in part to her necessary exclusion from all careers, such as employment in the army and navy, labour in the docks, and the like, for which she is physically unfitted, and in part it may be in England to the excess in the number of women over men, or to the fact that many women do not depend upon their wages for a livelihood. I have always admitted that woman suffrage will increase the chance of Parliament turning its attention towards the special wants of women, and thus opening to them some few careers from which they are excluded simply by law. Whether, indeed, this, desirable as it may be, will greatly increase the resources of working women is open to doubt. Some economists will suggest that the free admission of women to every function which they can possibly fulfil might do more to depress the whole standard of wages earned by the working classes than to raise the earnings of women. One thing is certain; the current price of labour is not immediately and directly affected by a man's or a woman's possession of the Parliamentary franchise. No master raises his footman's wages because the manservant happens to be a voter; he will assuredly not raise the wages of his housemaid simply because he finds that under some Woman's Enfranchisement Act she has got her name placed on the Parliamentary register. Why in the name of common sense should a vote confer upon a woman a benefit which it has not conferred upon a man? In any case it argues recklessness, not to say unscrupulosity, to tell working women, ignorant both of politics and economics, that Parliamentary votes will raise their wages. The relation, indeed, between votes and earnings has for the last few months been actively discussed in the newspapers. I observe, however, that as the controversy progresses suffragists grow less and less confident about the closeness of the connection between the possession of a vote and the rise in the rate of a woman's earnings. There is another sense in which a vote or political power may, I admit, have its pecuniary value. It may be used by women, and still more by a body of women, to wring money, or money's worth, from the State. A Ministry in want of support may bid high for the votes of women. But such traffic in votes is nothing better than sheer bribery, and, in the eyes of honest men and of honest women, bribery is none the more respectable because it is the corruption, not of an individual, but of a class, or because the bribe comes neither out of the pocket of a member of Parliament, nor out of the funds of a party, but out of the public revenue. The possibility that newly enfranchised women may be specially open to such corruption affords, if true, a cogent argument against woman suffrage.
Fifth Argument.—The acquisition of votes by women will, it is constantly asserted, work the moral and social regeneration of England. This belief on the part of suffragists is natural. There are virtues, such as modesty, ready sympathy with, and compassion for poverty and suffering, which, though possessed in some degree by most human beings, are deemed, whether rightly or not, to be specially feminine. There are other virtues, such as warlike courage, love of justice, or a passion for truth, which, though happily not the monopoly of either sex, are, whether rightly or not, deemed to be specially masculine. What can be more apparently reasonable than the expectation that when women are given a new share in the government of the nation the private virtues belonging more peculiarly to women may become blended with the public virtues which specially distinguish men, and thus produce in the public life of England such a combination of justice and compassion, of mercy and of truthfulness, as the world has never before witnessed? It is this dream of a millennium of public righteousness, this passion for a crusade against private vice and in favour of universal peace, which induces some among the best and the most highly educated of English women, as also some women who are not quite the wisest of human beings, to raise, in season and out of season, the cry of 'Votes for women!'
This hope of national regeneration, I confidently assert, is doomed to disappointment, and this for the following reasons:
1. The moral improvement of men or of nations is effected far less by the force of law than by the power of opinion. Law, when unsupported by public opinion, may fail to punish notorious crimes. A duellist who has caused the death of his opponent has for centuries, according to the law of England, been deemed a murderer. But a duellist who fought fairly might, till quite recent days, kill his man without the least fear of punishment. The high morality of Sir Walter Scott, the strictly religious education of Macaulay, left each of them ready to accept a challenge. The philosophic intellect of Sir William Molesworth did not prevent his fighting a duel. A duellist might be put on trial for murder, but the jury would not convict him, and the Judge's charge would suggest reasons or fallacies in acquittal. By about the middle of the century opinion had begun to change. Lord Cardigan was all but convicted of murder for killing Captain Tuckett in a duel. His lordship, unfortunately for the nation, escaped conviction through a purely technical error in the indictment. It is public opinion, not law, which has to a great extent put down gambling; it is public opinion, not change in the law, which has led English gentlemen to adopt habits of habitual sobriety. It is to public opinion we must mainly trust for the diminution of that love of drink which is the curse of the English wage-earners. But women can, and do, influence public opinion as much as do men. Does anyone seriously suppose that 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' which directed the indignation of the civilized world against the maintenance of negro slavery in the United States, produced the less effect because it was written by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, and not by her brother? I have no wish to exaggerate. There is no need to deny that the possession of votes would in some instances increase the moral authority of women; what I do deny is that the increase in their moral power would be anything like as great as suffragists expect. If on any point of ethics the vast majority of English women were agreed, their agreement would certainly tell on English opinion; but in estimating the moral effect likely to be produced by woman suffrage, we must remember that it is a sure sign either of ignorance or of fanaticism to expect from legislation effects produced not by law, but by changes in the beliefs or the convictions of the public.
2. It is constantly assumed that the votes of women would assuredly tell against everything which many—let me say which most—good women hold to be evils, more or less suppressible by law or by national policy.
Of the good effect of women's votes in the suppression of what is popularly called vice I have the gravest doubts. This is a subject of which it is impossible and hardly desirable to write with absolute freedom. Three remarks, however, I may be allowed to make. The first is that the effort to put down by law breaches of the moral rules which ought to govern the relation between the sexes has been made again and again, and has—at any rate where man and woman alike were consenting parties—ended in failure, and frequently been the parent of evils more disastrous than the wrong-doing which it was meant to cure. No one in modem times would wish to reproduce in any town the legislation of Calvin in Geneva. The inhabitants of New England would to-day refuse to bear, and would rightly refuse to bear, the stem laws of their Puritan forefathers. The second remark is that the belief in the cure of moral evils by the force of law arises from the constant confusion between the spheres, which often overlap, of morality and law. The forgetfulness of this distinction has, as the history of every age bears witness, given birth on the one hand to the Pharisaism which teaches that the fulfilment of the law is the same thing as the performance of every moral and religious duty, and, on the other hand, to the sentimentality which teaches, and never taught with greater audacity and with worse effects than to-day, that a man's acts, however lawless, may receive pardon or eulogy if only they can by any possibility be attributed to an innocent—e.g., a religious or a political—motive. We condemn the law which hangs a murderer, we applaud the murderer who arrogates the name of an assassin. It is, let me lastly remark, certain that if in the England of to-day respectable women united in condemning severely what is generally termed 'immorality,' they could produce an effect greater by far than anything which could result from any sort of Parliament. If, to take one example, the seducer of any girl found that, as a rule, his sin excluded him from marriage with any woman of character, the penalty would be sufficient to work a transformation in general opinion as to the heinousness of his offence. But everybody knows that in this matter, and in others respecting the relation of the sexes, the judgment and the conduct of even the best women is not always uniform. They occasionally, at least, condemn the seducer less severely than his victim. It is common knowledge that respectable women do not err on the side of leniency in judging the errors of their own sex. Nor for this are they wholly to blame. They dimly perceive that it is not always easy to decide which of two guilty parties is the wrong-doer and which is the victim. They catch in practice a glimpse of the consideration, which is often overlooked in theoretical discussions, that sexual errors, which may be covered by one and the same name, differ almost indefinitely in the degree of moral culpability attaching to those who have violated a social law which it is assuredly necessary to keep in force.
It is usually assumed that the votes of women will always make for peace. Now, some forty years ago I dined at the house of an eminent Liberal whose wife was a clever talker. After dinner I stupidly fell half-asleep. I was roused from slumber by hearing my hostess say: 'Women would always be in favour of peace.' I exclaimed, though then an ardent advocate of woman suffrage: 'What is your reason for saying that?' My abruptness was inexcusable, but the lady could not find a single reason to give me in support of what to her was a moral axiom. Nor have I ever myself been able to find any sound reason in its favour. A friend, whose sound and impartial judgment we both respect, fully agrees with me. 'I can't,' he writes, 'feel at all sure that women's influence would make for peace. Where wars excite popular feeling it seems to me that women's influence tends to fan the flame. Surely it was not the women, as such, who wanted peace in the Southern States of America, or in France, or in Germany.' In 1870 a Marylander told me that Maryland would have stood out for peace had it not been for the young women of his State, who clamoured for secession and war. Women are more emotional than men, and liability to emotion is no guarantee against warlike passion.
3. I admit, however, though it is not certain, that woman suffrage may give greater weight in public life to the feminine virtues than they now obtain. It is then a duty on a serious matter to speak plainly. At the risk of being misunderstood, I must confess to a grave doubt whether a general increase of tenderness, charity, and humanity in the conduct of public affairs would not be bought at too high a price if it diminished the reasonableness, the justice, the courage, the sense of responsibility to the State, or the love of truth which are the greatest of civil virtues. The State has been built up by men; its welfare depends upon the encouragement of manly qualities. There are two ways in which the authority of women might work evil. It might lead statesmen or stateswomen to judge public conduct by the rules properly applicable to domestic life. Is it inconceivable that a condition of feeling might arise under which, had it existed in 1805, Nelson might have been cashiered because of his relations with Lady Hamilton? Yet 'Trafalgar saved England.' It is possible, again, that women, rightly careful of private morality, might, as things now stand, not recognize fully the duty, to which men of irregular lives have sometimes subordinated all selfish objects, of placing the welfare of the State far above the personal interests of family life. This suspicion, I shall be told, has no fair foundation. I appeal, then, to John Mill. He is a judge whom no suffragist can challenge. He draws a splendid picture of what women will become in some future age and in some undiscovered society which places them on a political equality with men; but he expresses a most unfavourable opinion of English women as he actually knew them in real life from, say, 1830 to 1873. He believes that 'disinterestedness in the general conduct of life, the devotion of the energies to purposes which hold out no promise of private advantage to the family, is very seldom encouraged or supported by women's influence.'[1] He credits women with aversion to war and addiction to philanthropy, but to these excellent characteristics the influence of women more often than not, in his opinion, gives a direction which is as often mischievous as useful. In philanthropy, the two provinces chiefly cultivated by women are religious proselytism and charity. But then proselytism at home is a name for the embittering religious animosities, whilst abroad it is usually a blind running at an object without either knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs, even as regards the propagation of religion itself, which may be produced by the means employed. As regards charity, women, he conceives, are in the present state of the world both unable to see and unwilling to admit the ultimate evil tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy which commends itself to their sympathetic feelings. To the contributions and the influence of women is, he conceives, due the continually increasing mass of unenlightened and short-sighted benevolence which, relieving people from the disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps the foundations of self-respect, self-help, and self-control which are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of social virtue. Few, indeed, are the women who can appreciate the value of self-dependence; noxious, therefore, he holds, is often the influence of a wife upon her husband: it tends to prevent him from falling below the common standard of ordinary respectability, it tends as strongly to prevent him from rising above it. 'Whoever has a wife and children has given hostages to Mrs. Grundy.' The approbation of that potentate may be a matter of indifference to him, but it is of great importance to his wife. Her almost invariable tendency is to place her influence in the same scale with social considerations. 'With such an influence in every house, either exerted actively or operating all the more powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder that people in general are kept down in that mediocrity of respectability which is becoming a marked characteristic of modem times?'[2]
You know well that this is not my view of the condition or the influence of women. My words summarize the judgment of Mill. He himself might have drawn a brighter picture had he been able to watch the effect of improved education since 1869. Even at that date the darkness of the sketch was, you will say, overcharged. So be it; but Mill's unjust disparagement is assuredly not wholly devoid of truth. It suggests two reflections which ought not to be hastily rejected. The one is that the domestic virtues may obtain too much rather than too little influence in the transaction of public affairs. Our politicians have by the Old Age Pensions Act re-established a gigantic system of outdoor relief without waiting to hear the judgment of a Commission appointed to inquire into the working of the Poor Law. They have committed this act of supreme rashness, as we now know for certain, without having taken the trouble to ascertain the cost of a most dubious experiment. This our political guides have done, if we judge them with the very utmost charity possible, out of compassion for the miseries of the poor, without thinking for a moment of the burden they might impose on ratepayers whose efforts just kept them out of pauperism. Such leaders will not become wiser or more prudent when they find that their seats depend on the approval of new constituents whose tender-heartedness forbids them to see the evil of any form of charity which, at whatever cost to the State, gives immediate relief to individual distress which excites their sympathies. The other reflection is that, even if education strengthens, as I believe fully it will, the intellectual powers of women, yet the fruits of education come to ripeness only after long years, and therefore that to thrust political power or—in theory at least—political supremacy upon a body of women who have not as yet acquired as a class the civic virtues which the experience and the labours of centuries have even now developed but imperfectly among ordinary men is, on the very face of the matter, an act of portentous recklessness. But here I pass to another subject—the direct objections to the bestowal of Parliamentary votes upon women. This I reserve for another letter.
- ↑ 'Subjection of Women' pp. 161, 162.
- ↑ See Mill's 'Subjection of Women,' pp. 160-169. The passages which I have attempted to summarize should be read as a whole.