a notable condition of your society compared with ours is the tardy advance of your women from that complete subjection to men which existed in your primary state. it is not surprising that in your present stage of progress the males of your race should continue to usurp many of the privileges which came to them as an inheritance from a savage and brutal ancestry of comparatively recent existence, and your gradual awakening to a sense of justice in that direction is one of the many evidences that you are moving along on the lines marked out for you by the divine law of evolution in thought.
we have found certain active qualities of mind, predominating everywhere in women, indispensable to a better progress in social advancement, and great things have been wrought to us by our present absolute equality of the sexes. the full value of women as factors in social progress is not known, nor even suspected by you, because you have never witnessed the experiment of a complete withdrawal of those restrictions which hold[pg 214] them in subjection; yet, it is a fact that in what are truly the noblest advances in humanity, they are your superiors. they have left further behind them the brutalisms of the past, are deeper touched with your inhumanities, and will go further to banish them than your men.
your estimate of the mental capacity of women is singularly erroneous. the cropping out occasionally of their intellectual achievements, and the marked increase of such with the multiplication of opportunities, must have hinted to you that their silence, and apparent inferiority in the higher mental efforts, were alone due to their long period of subordination, during which the usages of your society have discouraged any attempts to enter the field as competitors with men. in the full swing of opportunity and encouragement allowed them by us, they have raised themselves to a very high plane, especially in literature, poetry and art. we owe to them many of our masterpieces in these attainments, and their aptitude for study and investigation is shown in the even place they hold with us in science and the professions. those feminine qualities of mind which are described by you as heart, sympathy, sentiment and emotion, and which are generally considered by you as out of place in affairs of[pg 215] state, are the very ones of which you have the greatest need in legislation. it is principally through the feelings mentioned that divine impulses are expressed, and yet that part of yourselves where they most prevail are excluded from your councils.
a model of all that is best in your governments is to be found no where except within the family. the ready helpfulness and equal attention to the welfare of one another within its precincts, extended into the motives and aims of your public policies, embrace everything necessary to a perfect government; yet, you have selected out of the family for the sole direction of your public affairs its hardest and most selfish part, its selfishness intensified in its dealings with society beyond the confines of home, by those absorbing paternal responsibilities—in great measure due to the subordination of women—which in many ways interfere with efforts for the good of the whole.
from the nature of things your men are more easily overcome by evil political forces than your women would be. the latter, being more closely allied to the interests of the family, in its moral training, and less willing to sacrifice the benefit of example, are consequently less[pg 216] corruptible than men. women have a greater natural affinity for virtue than men, more unselfishness and a larger concern for the moral welfare of mankind, exhibited in their more earnest support of religion.
with the enfranchisement of women the humanities of life would enter more largely into your politics. you have proofs of this in the few local instances where they have been granted suffrage rights. the desirable family methods and sentiments, of which they are better exponents than men, have never failed to come to the surface as indications of their presence. they have invariably shown a greater inclination than men to consider the welfare of persons in legislation as against the welfare alone of property, which has to the present so monopolized and corrupted your politics. your legislation in the hands of men alone has accomplished but little in alleviating the distresses of humanity. the cold and calculating hand of speculation, which invests only to call back its capital with high usury, has always held your law making as a ready instrument for its purposes, and without loftier views, your governments will continue to miss their opportunities for benefitting mankind. by the admission of women the higher sentiments would sooner[pg 217] find a place. it would be the first step in bringing natural religion and politics together. the present irrational state of your spiritual beliefs retards the adoption of a moral code in your systems of government. with you, the state is led to care for nothing in the interest of morality, except a punishment of its infractions. it ignores, as no part of its duties, all incentives to goodness, and in dealing with crime the service of its prevention, in any other way than punishment, is not considered, principally because other departments of society have assumed for ages the public control and promotion of the virtues.
a wider range in the duties of government is opposed by many of you as objectionable paternalism. such of you overlook the fact that there can be no paternalism in a republic. such a system is co-operation pure and simple, and neither good nor evil can permanently exist without the consent of the whole. the nearer you get to complete co-operation, the more perfect your government becomes. the greatest vices of misgovernment among you are to be found in granting precedence of one interest over others, that interest in most cases being a capitalistic one, often antagonizing the welfare of many[pg 218] individuals. among your industrial class, less than one-tenth are employers, whose political weight has so overcome the majority as to have excluded any direct legislation in its behalf, and so far as these conditions exist, the principle of co-operation which should be the corner stone of your government has not been faithfully carried out. a greater, and in our view, a more glaring violation of this principle is your exclusion of women from the rights of representation in your government. you cannot deny that they have separate interests to care for. you will find upon examination of your assessment rolls that nearly one-fifth of all your real and personal estate is owned by them, and of the greater part of the balance they are interested by matrimonial partnerships with men. their property ownerships alone entitle them to the rights of suffrage, in the denial of which you have no excuse whatever but the usage and custom of barbaric ages extended to the present, and the prejudice of a society grown familiar and blinded to its injustice. the struggles of labor for better recognition, and the agitation for woman suffrage are evolutionary movements in thought, and in your advanced government indicate the coming of a more perfect co-operation.
[pg 219]the political subjection of women, and the subjection of labor helplessly to the law of supply and demand, without legislative assistance or attention, are at present your most prominent relics of barbarism. they are both endured because the parties to be benefitted have never yet enjoyed the privileges due them. neither one or the other are consequently aroused to action in their own behalf, and when these rights are acquired by them it will be more owing to an enlightened public opinion than to any concerted action by themselves. it is well known that your slaves had little to do with the abolition of slavery, and it is therefore not a proper argument against the granting of these privileges that the persons to be benefitted are not all clamoring for them; or that, in the case of woman suffrage, a large majority of women are indifferent and a few opposed.
the subjection of women to men in all the political and business affairs of life have greatly modified the characters of both. you have confined the lives of your women to innumerable small details. her aspirations and powers have been confined within this narrow scope. the absorption of their whole minds has been in a set of small ideas and occupations, from one to the other in[pg 220] continuous exercise. in such a life profound thought and loftier emotions are not encouraged. they have but little incentive to the acquirement of general knowledge, for it can be of no practical use to them, and being early impressed with a sense of their dependence upon men, their lives are given up to all the small devices for obtaining power over them in the sensuous fields of personal adornment and display. theirs, as well as other human minds, must be shallowed under such conditions; yet of the two sexes their duties are the most serious and responsible in shaping the destinies of mankind. theirs is the chief part in the forming of minds, both by heredity and training, and with their limited opportunities for broadened thought you can look for nothing more in them than those narrow prejudices, which are in turn transmitted, and which are so manifest in all your society. this narrowness is one of your most unhappy traits; it is almost universal among you. until quite recently you have only had a man here and there capable and willing to fairly examine a question which interferes with traditional beliefs and old modes of thought. you have formed no conception of how much this state of things is due to the limited mental horizon in which your women[pg 221] have been confined. the intellects of your best men have not been multiplied and reproduced as they should have been, owing to the loss of their strength and fibre in the process of reproduction, through your average non-high thought producing female minds.
the extended barbaric relations which your women hold to men, though greatly modified by civilization, has carried with it enough of its primary feelings and motives to influence a large majority of your matrimonial engagements, where in truth, it may be said that the attraction is sensual to a degree not willingly acknowledged, and this being more and more the case as you descend in the social scale, you will find here your women going through life helplessly subject to the lingering brutalism which your customs and laws enforce. it is from the animalism of these low life marriages that a large sum of your miseries and crimes are produced. your inferior men have but little respect for those subject to their power, and in many cases use a tyrannical authority over their defenseless wives in gratification of a mean instinct of humanity. it is the only opportunity perhaps that brutal husbands enjoy in their whole lives to command a grown person who is under an obligation by law, custom and[pg 222] religion to obey. such a dangerous subjection of one human being to another could only be excused by a certainty that the welfare of your society depended upon it, when in fact the condition is one of the obstacles to a better social state.
during your barbaric period, and for a long time thereafter, women made no protest against her subordinate position in society. it has been her place for ages to suffer more than her share of the pains and trials of human replenishment. she has been taught to believe that this was her only part in the world’s economy, and men have held her to it by all the force of ecclesiastical and secular bonds. in all your glorious modern achievements of science and general knowledge until lately she has not even been an invited spectator. while the world in front has been all astir in the movements of progress, she has only been permitted to listen and wonder at the applause through the rear windows of the nursery and kitchen; not knowing what it all meant and not educated to approve, or even to understand, its glorious import. having never been accustomed to think on any great subject, she has held to her traditions after they have been discredited and denied by the knowledge of her[pg 223] times, and imparting them to childhood in all their ancient mixture of error has assisted to keep alive those prejudices among you which have so seriously blocked your advancement. this is one of the penalties you have paid for your subjection of women. those traditions to which she so defiantly clings she will never be persuaded to discard in her present dependent condition. it may be said to her honor that they are mistakenly pursued as the only great method within her reach to indulge her concern for human welfare. you must give her new duties, and arouse in her new ambitions, before you can expect her to take her proper place beside man in the march of progress. it is only within the last two or three generations that a glint of the outside enlightenment has penetrated her retired circle, and under its revelation she is already in some quarters demanding her rights. she is beginning to understand that procreation is not the chief purpose in life, but only one of its incidentals; that its processes from first to last are guided exclusively by animal instincts, among which men have compelled her to sacrifice the best parts of her life; that although nature has imposed upon her the larger share in these processes, and all their pains, it has also bestowed upon[pg 224] her capabilities which are clearly designed for more exalted stations than mere breeders of men and gratifiers of their animal pleasures, so unduly stimulated on the earth as the unintellectual and chief attraction of the sexes. you have perhaps but little conception of how much that reckless sexual impulse to matrimony, unrestrained by your laws, and encouraged by your religion, has swollen your ranks of poverty, crime and imbecility. your women in their dependence and subjection have but one source of power at their service, and they have used it for all it was worth. as a consequence, even to the present period of your civilization, qualities of mind cuts no figure against the voluptuous animalism of person in securing husbands than it did in barbaric times.
it is the rarest thing among you to find an intellectually mated husband and wife qualified by equal education and opportunities to be in perfect accord and sympathy in the pursuit of high purposes. among your higher circles are to be found occasionally one of these congenial matings, the happiest conditions of matrimonial existence, where by good breeding and cultivation a man tacitly ignores his superiority under your unjust usages; but[pg 225] although the wife may be in sympathy with the ambition and purposes of her husband in his intellectual labors she is seldom able to assist him owing to educational differences. with us the wife has more than encouragement to offer. her mind becomes a part of her husband’s and increases his capabilities. many of our highest achievements in brain work are the result of such collaboration of two minds working as one. the rare cases instanced among you are only to be found in your cultivated circles, below these, in all degrees to the bottom mental equality in women is oftener the source of contention than happiness, and you must expect to have this unhappy condition increased until you have granted them their rightful position in society. so long as their subjection to men was hopeless and they were taught by their theological superiors to obey their husbands, and by the same advisors, their separation denied or discouraged, they meekly submitted to abuse and suffering because without a hope of relief; but as it is becoming more and more apparent to you that the subjection of your women is one of the many ancient fallacies, the gradual reasoning of them out of existence is paving the way for woman’s liberty.
[pg 226]nature has designed that women shall only devote a portion of her life to maternity and its attendant duties. it has set her free of them at a time when her mind and body are fully capable of most of the avocations of life. having fulfilled these great services to mankind, you have ordained by custom and usage that she shall remain thereafter a mere unconsidered supernumerary on the world’s stage. in your lower circles she becomes a helpless drudge in the interests of her children, and in the higher ones, either an unwelcome retainer in the household of a daughter, or a more or less constrained member in the family of a son; but in all of these her lot is a happy one when compared with her utter desolation in the world when her children have departed from her by immigration or death. you have given her no part in great affairs, and she has but little knowledge of or interest in them. they afford her no entertainment amid her loneliness, and by the narrow training of her faculties, diverted only by the minor things of life,—its personal episodes and gossiping incidents—she lives out her remaining purposeless career. this mere lack of mind expansion has been cited against her as a sex weakness, but it is safe to predict that if men had been subject to[pg 227] such conditions, without her deep human sympathies and her religion, they would have fallen into complete mental imbecility, and if men for all the ages past had been confined as she had been to duties requiring no high attainments, the present balance of mind work could not be shown in their favor.
with us maternity is not allowed to absorb the whole of a woman’s life. while we accord to her, in consideration of its responsibilities and pains, an exemption from all the physically exhausting occupations, she is encouraged in all others to which her capabilities are adapted; accordingly with us she is an open competitor with men in many lines of business, some of which are entirely given over to her by general consent. by multiplying her opportunities in this way, she is not, as with you in most cases, helpless and dependent. she moves around among men as their equal, discussing matters of business and questions of public policy like one of them. she joins them in out door sports and athletics, in which she often excels, and these relations which the sexes hold to each other, so differing from yours, entirely changes their lines of attraction. in their closer association with us it becomes possible for men and women to thoroughly[pg 228] understand each other. they do not move in two separate worlds as with you, artfully disguising their characters and feelings from each other, wearing a different manner as occasions require for deception. men select matrimonial companions with us as they choose friends among themselves, sympathy of feeling and sincerity being primary motives of attraction. it is only the general untruthfulness of your society carried into matrimony which makes it in so many cases unhappy. you have so inculcated the arts of deception and falsehood into your lives that they have come at last to be openly pursued as legitimate methods of thrift. one could not find a better indication of the insincerity of your society than this metropolitan journal on your table. here is a strong editorial commending truth, another a well written homily on honesty, and on the connecting pages, authorized by the same hands, hundreds of advertisements in all shades of deception to catch the unwary. with the gradual decadence of force as a means of preying upon one another, you have so cultivated falsehood to take its place that the life of each individual among you is kept constantly on the watch to protect his interests. hypocrisy in religion, and deception in[pg 229] matrimony, belong to those vices which at present disgrace your civilization, and of which your women must always suffer most so long as you keep them excluded from a free intercourse in the world’s affairs.
the difference in our treatment of women has very materially changed their points of attraction. while we can see no beauty in a woman without enlightenment, and can find no full companionship in her without her knowledge of our world and its affairs, these qualities are not so much considered by you. the idea of a fitness to live together, as equals in everything, is not entertained, by either the one or the other of you, in these serious life contracts. your women submit their dependence as a virtue, and it is accepted, as well as their gentleness,—so often assumed,—as a flattering offer to men’s vanity of power. there is seldom a marriage among you without the hidden satisfaction of a man with his new entrance into authority. any subsequent development of individuality or independence of character in the women, must result in discord. we meet each other, in such contracts, on the common ground of equality. there are no political or domestic rights which both do not equally enjoy; consequently, women are not[pg 230] tempted into blandishments, and deceptions, for the conquests of men. owing to their independence and helpfulness, the marriage proposal is never accepted as an extreme opportunity, leading them to take desperate chances, among conditions that are not promising to happiness. this, you have forced them to do, by closing all other doors against them.
you may suspect that the admission of women amongst us, in the affairs of business and government, has coarsened them, and given them a character of what is known among you as masculinity. that is not so. their amiability of manner, instead of being lost, is conveyed and multiplied among our business methods. all men, among the civilized nations of the earth, are softened by female association. outside your regions of degradation, this has been invariably the case, and you have proofs of it already in the instances among you where women have taken a hand in affairs outside the household. when, by superior intelligence and force of character, they have made their way to success and fame among the pursuits of men, they have carried with them, in every case, that soft femininity of which they are naturally endowed. your often expressed fears of[pg 231] hardening, or in some injuring them, by an admission to equal rights, is not entirely sincere. to keep on good terms with them, and to retain their approbation, you have been led to conceal from them many of your doubtful business and political methods, and you hesitate to admit them into these fields with you, not more from the dread of their contamination, than the exposure it would bring about of ways, which you have heretofore so carefully concealed. there is many a successful politician, or business man among you, who poses before his wife and lady friends as a hero of finance, or statesmanship, who could not do so, did they share with him a knowledge of the incidents and manipulations which brought about his success. deference to women, and a regard for their esteem beyond that of men, is a human attribute apparent in your whole history. it has been the inspiration of your best poetry, and your most stirring romance. in your middle ages, under what is known among you as chivalry, it has led you to deeds of virtue in upholding the right, far beyond the prevailing oppression. how much the conduct of men is modified, and their evil tendencies checked, by a regard for the good opinion of women, every man can judge by examination[pg 232] of himself. in how many dangerous moments has temptation been cast aside, by the fear of evil report to some fond wife, mother, sister, daughter, or lady friends, when, to sacrifice the good opinion of men alone, would have been no bar?
by our greater attention to the laws of health, and our governmental restriction of unhealthful marriages, which i will describe to you further on, we have developed a far greater average of physical perfection in women that exists with you. in connection with this there are other advantages which our women enjoy beyond yours, which greatly enhance their personal attractiveness and beauty. their equal educational opportunities under our system, of which they are not slow to avail themselves, the hopefulness and lack of austerity in our religion, and the interest they are led to exhibit in great affairs, are so marked in their demeanor and physiognomy as to render them very different beings. as we estimate beauty, you have only a women here and there who compares with them. among your mass of women, the facial expression of their long subjection, and its attendant conditions are strikingly observable to us. features, no matter how perfectly lined, without the light of cultivation and[pg 233] knowledge, and which are destined to become, in conjugal association, clouded with the cares of an overwrought maternity, and dejected by a threatening and superstitious religion, would have no charms to any member of our society. with us, their faces reflect the consciousness of absolute equality, and are illuminated with daily religious duties, which consist, in accordance with our belief, in making the ways of life pleasant, and its paths peaceful, and in assisting in all things toward the improvement of ourselves and society, in the process of which it is our religion to assist, and in the performance of which, they work with us as equals to attain.
