Among the forces that are universally considered progressive are: the democratic idea in government, extinction of slavery, increase of educational and industrial opportunities for woman, improvement in the statute laws, and spread of religious freedom. The Woman-Suffrage movement professed to champion these causes. That movement is now nearly fifty years old, and has made a record by which its relation to them can be judged. What is the verdict?
CHAPTER II.
IS WOMAN SUFFRAGE DEMOCRATIC?
As the claim of woman to share the voting power is related to the fundamental principles of government, the progress of government must be studied in relation to that claim in order to learn its bearing upon them. It is possible to suggest in one brief chapter only the barest outline of such a far-reaching scrutiny, and wiser heads than mine must search to conclusion; but some beginnings looking toward an answer to the inquiry I have raised have occurred to me as not having entered into the newly- opened controversy on woman suffrage.
I say, the newly-opened controversy, for, through these fifty years, the Suffragists have done nearly all the talking. So persistently have they laid claim to being in the line of progress for woman, that many of their newly aroused opponents fancied that the anti-suffrage view might be the ultra conservative one, and that democratic principles, strictly and broadly applied, might at last lead to woman suffrage, though premature if pushed to a conclusion now.
The first step in finding out how far that position is true is, to ascertain what the Suffragists say about this noblest of democracies, our own Government. In referring to the "The History of Woman Suffrage" for the opinions of the leaders, I am not only using a book that on its publication was considered a strong and full presentment of their arguments, but one which they are today advertising and selling as "a perfect arsenal of the work done by and for women during the last half century." In it the editors say: "Woman's political equality with man is the legitimate outgrowth of the fundamental principles of our government." Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, writing in the New York Sun in April, 1894, says: "Never, until the establishment of universal [male] suffrage, did it happen that all the women in a community, no matter how well born, how intelligent, how well educated, how virtuous, how wealthy, were counted the political inferiors of all the men, no matter how base born, how stupid, how ignorant, how brutal, how poverty-stricken. This anomaly is the real innovation. Men have personally ruled the women of their families; the law has annihilated the separate existence of women; but women have never been subjected to the political sovereignty of all men simply in virtue of their sex. Never, that is, since the days of the ancient republics." Mrs. Ellen Battelle Dietrick, who, as Secretary of the New-England Suffrage Association, was put forward to meet all comers, writing in July, 1895, said: "Shall we, as a people, be true to our principles and enfranchise woman? or, shall we drift along in the meanest form of oligarchy known among men—an oligarchy which exalts every sort of a male into a ruler simply because he is a male, and debases every woman into a subject simply because she is a woman?" Mrs. Fanny B. Ames, speaking in Boston in 1896, said: "I believe woman suffrage to be the final result of the evolution of a true democracy." Not only has every woman speaker or writer in favor of suffrage presented this idea in some form, but the men also who have taken that side have done likewise. One among those who advocated the cause before the Committee in the Constitutional Convention of New York, said: "Woman Suffrage is the inevitable result of the logic of the situation of modern society. The despot who first yielded an inch of power gave up the field. We are standing in the light of the best interests of the State of New York when we stand in the way of this forward movement."
All these writers charge the American Republic with being false to democratic principles in excluding women from the franchise, while but one of them alludes to the fact that in the ancient republics the same "anomaly" was seen.
As I read political history, the facts go to show that the fundamental principles of our Government are more opposed to the exercise of suffrage by women than are those of monarchies. To me it seems that both despotism and anarchy are more friendly to woman's political aspirations than is any form of constitutional government, and that manhood suffrage, and not womanhood suffrage, is the final result of the evolution of democracy.
The Suffragists repeatedly call attention to the fact that in the early ages in Egypt, in Greece, and in Rome, women were of much greater political consequence than later during the republics; but the moral they have drawn has been that of the superiority of the ancient times. Mrs. Dietrick says: "The ideal woman of Greece was Athena, patroness of all household arts and industries, but equally patroness of all political interests. The greatest city of Greece was believed to have been founded by her, and Greek history recorded that, though the men citizens voted solidly to have the city named for Neptune, yet the women citizens voted solidly for Athena, beat them by one vote, and carried that political matter. If physical force had been a governing power in Greece, and men its manifestation, how could such a story have been published by Greek men down to the second century before our era?"
Mrs. Dietrick's remarkably realistic version of the old myth does not tell the tale as Greek men published it. Varro, who was educated at Athens, goes on to say: "Thereupon, Neptune became enraged, and immediately the sea flowed over all the land of Athens. To appease the god, the burgesses were compelled to impose a threefold punishment upon their wives—they were to lose their votes; the children were to receive no more the mother's name; and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenians, after the goddess." It seems to me this fable teaches that physical force was indeed the governing power in Athens at that day, and that men were its manifestation.
The legend is generally taken to indicate the time when the Greek gens progressed to the family. In the ruder time, the legitimacy of the chieftain might be traced, because the mother, though not always the father, could be known with certainty. When the father became the acknowledged head of the household, a distinct advance was made toward that heroic age in which the vague but towering figures of men and women move across the stage. Goddesses, queens, princesses, are powerful in love and war. Sibyls unfold the meaning of the book of fate. Vestals feed the fires upon the highest and lowest altars. Later, throughout most of the states of Greece, something like the following order of political life is seen: from kings to oligarchs, from oligarchs to tyrants or despots, from them to some form of restricted constitutional liberty. In Sparta, all change of government was controlled by the machinery of war, and the soldiers were made forever free. Athens, separated from the rest of Greece, was less agitated by outward conflict. In government she passed from king to archon; from hereditary archon to archons chosen for ten years, but always from one family, then to those elected for one year, nine being chosen. At the time of the Areopagus there were four classes of citizens. The first three paid taxes, had a right to share in the government, and formed the defence of the state. If women were of political importance in earlier times, and if a republic is more favorable to the exercise by them of the elective franchise, we should expect to find women reaching their highest power under the Areopagus. Exactly the contrary appears to be true. Native and honorable Greek women retired to domestic life as the liberty of their people grew. Grote, in his "History of Greece," referring to the legendary period, says: "We find the wife occupying a station of great dignity and influence, though it was the practice of the husband to purchase her by valuable presents to her parents. She even seems to live less secluded, and to enjoy a wider sphere of action, than was allotted to her in historic Greece."
Lecky, in his "European Morals," says: "It is one of the most remarkable and, to some writers, one of the most perplexing facts in the moral history of Greece, that in the former and ruder period women had undoubtedly the highest place, and their type exhibited the highest perfection." What the "highest