CHAPTER V.
Womanhood Suffrage a Moral Influence only, not a Controlling Force.
IN a preceding chapter I surmised that co-operative housekeeping would so accustom women to act together, and so bring them into direct relations with the eager and powerful world of men, that they would find it necessary, for their protection and advancement, to maintain representative assemblies of their own sex, who could fulfil in the state the same persuasive office that every woman does now in the family for herself and her daughters,—plead for the feminine interests and happiness against the involuntary but engrossing selfishness of men. I have said that the feminine vote could express, by its very nature, opinion only, not power, and therefore that its real strength (as well as, in my judgment, its glory) would be in its coming before the world simply in its true character of the Collective Woman's Voice. For then, perhaps, while men were ruling the nations, this still, small voice might often be heard instructing them how; but were its soft tones, its delicate accents, to be mingled with their fierce shouts in war or their hoarse political cries in peace, surely they would be utterly lost. There is no weakness so fatally weak as pretension. If men not only voted us the vote,—if they voted every vote of ours to count five of theirs,—what would it avail us if some day they voted to take it away again? So I am against this making of treaties and defining
