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The publisher's advertisement following p. 18 has been
omitted.
The last Reform Bill, by lowering the franchise for men, has affected
the claims of women in several indirect ways. In the first place, by
admitting to the exercise of political judgment a class whose education is
confessedly of the narrowest, and whose leisure to study politics extremely
small, it has virtually silenced for all future time the two favourite
arguments against the claims of women; that their understandings are weak,
and their time too fully occupied by domestic cares. The most strenuous
asserter of the mental and moral inferiority of women cannot urge that the
majority of the new voters have more power to understand, or more leisure
to attend to, public affairs than even the inferior class of female
householders; not to speak of such women as Miss Nightingale and Mrs.
Somerville, Miss Martineau and Lady Coutts. Rather, on the contrary, may it
be maintained that the picked class of women who would be admitted by Mr.
Bright's Bill to the franchise are needed to restore the just balance
in favour of an educated constituency against the weight of the illiterate
male voters now entrusted with the suffrage.
Again, by the introduction of the ballot the threat of a supposed
practical difficulty to be found in the recording of female votes has been
permanently set at rest; while the triumphant success of female candidates
at the School Board elections has demonstrated how warmly the general
feeling of the nation welcomes the accession of women to a share in the
guidance of important public affairs.
Lastly, by identifying the duty of ratepaying with the right of voting
in the case of men, the Reform Bill has made more glaring than before the
inconsistency of enforcing rates upon women while refusing to them the
avowedly corresponding right.
At the present moment our proper course appears to be this: to
form committees in every town in England for the purpose of directing
attention to the
subject, and affording information and aid to all friends of the cause. Local petitions, as numerous as possible, will afford the best machinery for carrying on such a plan; not because of their direct influence on the Legislature, (which is notoriously incommensurate with the labour of their preparation), but from their convenience as tangible methods of enrolling allies and interesting new associates. Already, in this last session, some 843 petitions, with the signatures of 355,801 men and women, were presented. The parable of the unjust Judge will probably not be found inapplicable to a masculine Legislature, when "poor widows" (and also rich ones, and other single women), by their "continued coming," become wearisome. Women are not prepared to break any pailings, material or metaphorical, albeit they have been taunted with the indifference they thus betray for their rights; but it is just possible that keeping the peace and signing petitions to Parliament may eventually be thought almost as well to prove their fitness for a voice in the Legislature of their country.
Women are often asked, Why they desire the franchise? Have they not
everything already which they can possibly desire: personal liberty,
the right to hold property, and an amount of courtesy and chivalrous regard
which (it is broadly hinted) they would bitterly regret were they to
exchange them for equality of political rights? Why should those epicurean
gods, who dwell in the serene empyrean of drawing-rooms descend to
meddle with the sordid affairs of humanity? What a pity and a loss it would
be to the toiling world could it never look up and behold afar such a
spectacle of repose as a true lady now presents! We can easily dispense
with more legislators; but what is the world to do without those mild
Belgravian mothers, those innocent young "Girls of the Period,"
those magnificent grandes dames who are the
glory of our social life?
Let us briefly answer these questions, once for all. We do not believe
that one particle of womanly gentleness and dignity, nay, not even the
finest flavour of high-bred grace, will be lost when women are
permitted to record their votes for representatives in Parliament. We
consider the fear that it might be so among the idlest of chimeras. What
will be lost, we are persuaded, will be a little of the
frivolity, a little of the habit of expressing opinions without having
conscienciously weighed them, a little of the practice of underhand and
unworthy persuasion, which have been hitherto faults fostered in women by
their position. Women can lose nothing, and have much to gain by entering a
field of nobler interests than has hitherto been open to them. It was
deemed well said of the old Roman, that nothing human was alien to him. It
will be well when all women learn to feel that none of the wrongs and sins
and sufferings of other women can be alien to them. The
condition of women of the lower orders is beset with hardships; and it is
for the very reason that a lady is freed from those heavy trials, that she
should exert every power she possesses or can acquire, first to understand,
and then, if possible, to remedy them. How these evils are to lightened;
how the burdens of the poor toilers are to be made less intolerable; how
wives are to be protected from brutal husbands; how, above all, the ruin of
the hapless thousands of lost ones is to be stopped:--how these
things are to be done, may need more wisdom than all the men and women in
England together may possess. But it is quite certain that if women had
heretofore been represented in Parliament, such evils and wrongs would
never have reached, unchecked, their present height, and that whenever
women are at last represented, some more earnest efforts will be made to
arrest them.
But it is not only for the sake of women of the suffering classes that
we seek for female influence on politics; nor for that of happier women
whose sphere of usefulness might thereby be enlarged, and their lives
supplied with nobler interests. We believe that the recognition of the
political rights of women, as it will be a signal act of justice on the
part of men, so it will also prove an act beneficial to them no less than
to us; and that when a generation has passed after the change, it will be
said, by all alike, "What did our fathers mean by forbidding women to
have a voice in politics? If it were nothing more, their influence must
always be the safest ballast to keep steady the Ship of
State."
Finally, to sum up our meaning in the most concise terms we can find, we
desire that the political franchise be extended to women of full age,
possessed of the requisite property qualification, for the following eight
reasons:--