Women's Suffrage: the Reform Against Nature

Horace Bushnell (1802-1876)

New York: Scribner's, 1869.

This text was copy-edited against the 1978 Zenger Publishing Company reprint.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT.

For once I will dare to break open one of the customary seals of silence, by inscribing this little book to the woman I know best and most thoroughly; having been overlapped, as it were, and curtained in the same consciousness for the last thirty-six years. If she is offended that I do it without her consent, I hope she may get over the offense shortly, as she has a great many others that were worse. She has been with me in many weaknesses and some storms, giving strength alike in both; sharp enough to see my faults, faithful enough to expose them, and considerate enough to do it wisely; shrinking never from loss, or blame, or shame to be encountered in any thing right to be done; adding great and high instigations -- instigations always to good, and never to evil mistaken for good; forecasting always things bravest and best to be done, and supplying inspirations enough to have made a hero, if they had not lacked the timber. If I have done any thing well, she has been the more really in it that she did not know it, and the more willingly also that having her part in it known has not even occurred to her; compelling me thus to honor not less, but more, the covert glory of the womanly nature; even as I obtain a distincter, and more wondering apprehension of the divine meanings, and moistenings, and countless, unbought ministries, it contributes to this otherwise very dry world.
 

H. B.
 

TO THE PUBLIC.
 

     It is not to be supposed that this little volume has finished the argument of a subject so large, and, in former times, so entirely unattempted. If it brings the question to some fixed issue, taking it away from the mere chance-working it has had hitherto, it will have done the service proposed. And if the projected reform is totally different from all other reforms, in the times gone by, in the fact that it is a reform against nature -- an attempt to make trumpets out of flutes, and sun-flowers out of violets, the discovery can not be difficult, and it will save us much trouble if it is made soon.

     I take pleasure in acknowledging my obligations to Rev. Mr. Alger, in his book on the Friendships of Women, for a good many historic facts and references that would otherwise have cost me much labor. Also, to Rev. George B. Bacon, of Orange, New Jersey, for the history of Women's Suffrage in that State.

     I do not propose to continue this discussion, but to abide the criticisms laid upon me with what of patience I am able.
 
 

CONTENTS.
 

I. Preliminary -- Question Stated

II. No Right of Suffrage Absolute in Man or Woman

III. Women Not Created or Called to Govern

IV. Scripture Doctrine Coincides

V. Subtle Mistakes of Feeling and Argument

VI. The Report of History

VII. Probable Effects

VIII. Prospects And Possibilities of Women
 
 
 
 

WOMEN' SUFFRAGE.

I
 

PRELIMINARY. -- QUESTION STATED.
 

     IF we do not know how it is, or why, we do at least know the fact, that power somehow naturally runs to oppression. We oppress the animals; we oppress the wild untutored species of our own race; rulers take it for long ages as their divine right to oppress their subjects; even the church of God has been a mighty hunter of its people in the name of love; and in much the same manner it will be seen that the whole male half of the race, having power to do it, have been piling weights of disability and depression on the female half. Probably it can not be said that man has undertaken purposely to be the oppressor of woman -- he would scorn the impeachment; protesting, on the contrary, his natural admirations, his zeal to serve and protect, the profuseness of his attentions, and the unstinted tribute of respect and deference he is always wont to render. And yet, little as he means it, he is nevertheless gravitating steadily toward some practice of wrong against the sex; laying up usages that are oppressive, maxims unjust, laws of really despotic mastership; all, it would seem, because the wrong is in him and, having the power, must needs be somehow issued in the deed; even though he disavows it and protests he would not have it.

     In this manner it results that the lot of woman comes to be a lot of abridgment and suppression, much more commonly than we have been observing ourselves. As our attention is called to the matter, and we become more completely awake to it, we are surprised to find how many disadvantages are laid upon the condition of woman that no principle of equity permits, and no pretense of reason or necessity justifies. It does not surprise us that, in the savage and barbarous forms of society, she is reduced to the lot of a menial or drudge and well nigh to a beast of burden; or that she is bought and sold for marriage, apart from any right of consent, and consigned in this manner to a husband whose power is a power of life and death. All such monstrous kinds of wrong we expect to encounter in the barbaric conditions of society. But the real wonder now forcing itself upon our discovery, is that our own deliberately adjusted laws and institutions are so often unequal, as regards the property rights of men and women and the redress of their personal wrongs; that women are so often excluded, whether by law or public usage, from modes of employment and productive industry that are equally appropriate or even more appropriate to them; that having thus only about one-third the number of employments that men have, they are penned, as it were, before that third, and create a competition that reduces their wages to the smallest pittance -- penned of course for unrighteous prey, in whatever manner the terrible stringency of their lot, may be said in a sense to compel. Looking over this whole chapter of our civil and social state, we are mortified to find how largely it is a chapter of wrongs, or of only half vindicated rights. At one time we get angry, at another we can do nothing but take our doses of shame in silence. But the anger and the shame are both salutary; for they are stirring us up to a more and more determined purpose of redress. The true basis of relationship between the sexes, is going now to be thoroughly investigated, and we shall not rest again till it is cleared and established.

     Of course there is nothing to be gained by any overstatement of the wrongs of woman, or by any demands that exceed the proportion of their powers and conditions. It is nothing that they can not get as high wages as men, when they can not do as much, or do it as well. It is nothing that they can not get the wages of rugged and dangerous employments, in such as are gentle and delicate. It is nothing that in great poverty, single women or women having families are brought into conditions of unspeakable severity; the same is true of men, and we do not expect them to sink mournfully or moaningly under their lot, but to bravely bear, and dig, and climb till they are free. No better chance for poor women can ever be asked; or if it is they will never get it; and it will always be possible, both for poor discouraged men to justify rushing into the very worst and vilest trades to get their bread, and for poor discouraged women to justify their imbrutement in a specially disgusting livelihood permitted by their sex. The only way, in all such unfavoring conditions and straits of peril, both for women and for men, and for one as truly as for the other, is to suffer patiently and fight bravely; and thank God women are at least equal in this kind of capacity. Again, it is nothing that women, sewing women for example, are not helped directly in the matter of their wages by legal enactment, any more than that men are not -- there is no such possibility as a legally appointed rate of wages; market price is the only scale of earning possible for women as for men. The only help that can be given them is a wider range of employments, and personal additions of character and capacity, that will put their services in a higher rate of estimation. Education more advanced will give a more advanced capacity, and the educated eye and hand will do a better and more valuable service. Besides, the rate of wages depends in a considerable degree, on the amount of personality in the workers and the estimate had of their quality. If women have sometimes been depressed by sex legislation, they will not have the damage repaired by any beneficiary sex legislation that gives them artificial and really forced advantages.

     We have made a good and right beginning already in the matter of education, and the beneficent results that come along with our new codes of training are even a surprise to us; compelling us to rectify a great many foolish prejudices that we supposed to be sanctioned as inevitable wisdom, by long ages of experience. The joining, for example, of the two sexes in common studies and a common college life -- what could be more un-university-like, and, morally speaking, more absurd! And, as far as the young women are concerned, what could be more unwomanly and really more improper! I confess, with some mortification, that when the thing was first done, I was not a little shocked even by the rumor of it. But when, by and by, some fifteen years ago, I drifted into Oberlin and spent a Sunday there, I had a new chapter opened that has cost me the loss of a considerable cargo of wise opinions, all scattered in loose wreck never again to be gathered. I found that the old church idea of a college (collegium), where youths of the male sex were gathered to the cloisters of their male teachers, the monks, and where any sight and thought of a woman approaching the place was conceived to be a profanation, was itself a dismal imposture, and a kind of total lie against every thing most beneficent in the bisexual order of our existence. I learned, for the first time, what it means that the sexes, not merely as by two-and-two, but as a large open scale of society, have a complementary relation, existing as helps to each other, and that humanity is a disjointed creature running only to waste and disorder, where they are put so far asunder as to leave either one or the other, in a properly monastic and separate state. Here were gathered for instruction large numbers of pupils, male and female, pursuing their studies together in the same classes and lessons, under the same teachers; the young women deriving a more pronounced and more positive character in their mental training from association with young men in their studies, and the young men a closer and more receptive refinement and a more delicate habitual respect to what is in personal life, from their associations with young women. The discipline of the institution, watchful as it properly should be, was yet a kind of silence, and was practically null -- being carried on virtually by the mutually qualifying and restraining powers of the sexes over each other. There was scarcely a single case of discipline, or almost never more than one, occurring in a year.

     In particular there was no such thing known as an esprit du corps in deeds of mischief, no conspiracies against order and the faculty, no bold prominence in evil aspired to, no lying proudly done for the safety of the clan, no barbarities of hazing perpetrated. And so the ancient, traditional, hell-state of college life, and all the immense ruin of character propagated by the club-law of a stringently male or monastic association, was totally escaped and put away. What we see occurring always, where males are gathered in a society by themselves, whether in the prison, or the shop, or the school, or the army -- every beginning of the esprit du corps in evil is kept under, shamed away, made impossible by the association of the gentler sex, who can not cooperate in it, and can not think of it with respect.

     And what so long ago was proved by this earliest experiment, has since been proved a dozen or twenty times over by other experiments under other forms of religion, as well as under all varieties of literary culture and social atmosphere. Thus if any one should imagine that the success of this first trial at Oberlin was due to the particular, very strongly pronounced type of religious influence there established, he may hear President Mann, of the Unitarian College at Antioch, where also the two sexes were combined in the same studies, uniting in the testimony -- "We have the most orderly, sober, diligent, exemplary institution in the country. We passed through the last term and are more than half through the present; and I have not had occasion to make a single entry of any misdemeanor in our record book -- not a case for any serious discipline. There is no rowdyism in the village, no nocturnal rampages making night hideous. All is quiet, peaceful; and the women of the village feel the presence of our students, when met in the streets in the evening, to be a protection rather than an exposure. It is almost five years since I came here, and, as yet, I have had no practical joke or college prank, as they are called, played upon me -- not in a single instance." A very intelligent writer in the Westminster Review, acquainted with this and with many other colleges, testifies to the decisive superiority here in moral behavior, and puts double honor on the name before so transcendently honored, by saying, in a touch of pleasantry, that "male students were first called gentlemen at Antioch."

     The experiment of joining the two sexes in the same studies, and composing in that manner the society of college life, has now been carried far enough, I think, to show that it is the only plan which is really according to nature. Whether the colleges and universities of the old monastic type will change in their organizations, so as to claim their advantages in the better way discovered, remains to be seen. Perhaps they would not do it if they could, and perhaps they can not do it if they would. It remains, in either case, to be seen whether they have benefits of any kind, sufficient to compensate for their moral disadvantages, and so to keep them still in existence.

     The two sexes brought together in this manner, it is hardly necessary to say, will be rapidly discovering their true scale of merit. It matters little whether they are found to be equal or unequal in their talent of scholarship; for it does not follow that the greatest facility of acquirement will be issued in the greatest power, or will even be felt as having now the greatest practical breadth and volume. Enough, that both sexes will better understand, and more respect each other, and will learn to take their relative places more exactly and gracefully. That they have in fact a complementary nature one to the other, will be distinctly felt, and all but visibly seen; and the college itself, in its double combination of male and female impulse, will be only a more complete man or humanity, than it otherwise could be. The male talent, and the female, will be a great deal more exactly apprehended than they have been. It will even be seen that sex is predicable of talent as of organization, and both sexes of mind will be receiving qualities and contributions from each other in their cross relations, such as answer with general exactness to the husbanding and meet helping of the marriage bond itself.

     Educated on this footing of equality, women will very soon escape their unrighteous disabilities, and obtain a place in the scale of estimation that exactly corresponds with their personal weight and capacity, and more than that they have no right to ask. Employments will be open to them just according to what they are best qualified to do, and their wages, like the wages also of men, will be in the exact compound ratio of what they can do, and what they personally are. And as what they personally are includes a great deal of favor to their woman's look and voice, they will scarcely miss the full reward of their industry.

     As they have been educated with men, they will also become educators with men, and if they can fill the highest, most responsible places of management and presiding trust, they must and will obtain such places, and the rewards that men have in the same. They will have professorships allowed them, such as they can more appropriately fill -- not of mechanical philosophy perhaps, or chemistry, or metallurgy, or fortification, but of the languages, of botany, of moral science, and, not improperly, of the exact mathematics.

     Meantime, the different learned professions will be opened a certain way, at least, in offers of engagement, as the profession of medicine is doing now. The practice of medicine is, to a great extent, proper to women as to men, and is often a great deal more proper to women. In cases of surgery, the steady and firm hand of a man is indispensable. At the same time, a great many cases occur where, over and above the necessary proprieties of sex, a practice is wanted that combines both nursing and medicine, and for all such cases a female physician is even required. That we have educated female physicians already in the field, engaged in a large and lucrative practice is, in this view, a matter of fair congratulation. It will do no harm, but will properly gladden a great many friends of humanity, if their number is largely increased.

     Our women are less forward in claiming a place in the legal profession, though, in one or two cases a preparation for it is reported as now begun. Perhaps it may some time be discovered that the proper work of this profession is capable of being divided, or set in two departments, one of which is altogether suitable for women. First, there is a silent, in-door, office work, that includes the investigation of authorities and the citation of precedents; the framing of legal documents, such as deeds, contracts, pleadings, and the like; the notary-public functions; and, why not often? the clerkships of courts of record. In the second will be classed the out-door hunt of crimes, frauds, and disguised ownerships; the uncovering and preparing of evidences; the advocacies and public litigations of causes. This second department is only for men; for, whatever we may think of their talents, women are quite out of place in this kind of engagement. No doubt they often have the talent necessary to maintain, or manage a cause. The wonderful adroitness and persistency and more than lawyer-like resource, or insight of law, displayed by Mrs. Gaines in the conduct of her suit, are sufficient evidence of this. But the battle she maintained was to vindicate her own right, not that of another; and perhaps she was saved, by this fact, from some of the very disagreeable personal effects that would otherwise have followed. Still, we have good right to say that, if we will have women left us and not mere female men, there is no woman who can pitch herself into the wrangle, and debate, and vehement fight of a bar, and do it for a living, without becoming a virago shortly. Her eye, her look, her voice, her impetuous action will suggest a knife-blade edge sooner than some would think. The soft lines will vanish; the music that was will be sharpened to clangor, the bold air will dismiss the modesty, and the general expression will be -- "caution! have a caution!" Saying nothing of the change which has cost us a woman, the unmaking she suffers in her voice and manners, will reduce her shortly, without fail, to a very unpopular, ineffective advocate. And it would be even a greater mistake for her to think of being a more qualified judge, because of the finer equity of her womanly dispositions. Indeed it is a considerable part of her incapacity that she is not wicked enough to sift, expose, and vigorously score the lying tricks of evidence. Besides, women lack authority, and never bear it well when they assume it. A judge who has nerve to support the even poise of authority during all the intricacies of a whole week's trial, must be more than a remarkable woman therefore -- a kind of Radamanthus, somewhat manlier than a man.

     But if women are allowed to find a sphere open, in the office-work side of the legal profession, it will be a very great advantage gained for them as regards the range of their employment, even though they should consent to have no part in the litigant operations of courts and causes. It would give them also a more prominent and distinctly admitted place in the world of business.

     Precisely what is allowable, or not allowable, to women, as regards the clerical profession, it may not be easy to determine; only it is clear as need be that a much larger and more forward operation is permissible, without damage to the Christian order, and with real advantage to the Christian cause. We have many more Christian women than Christian men; their piety ranges higher, and they have many of them higher gifts of experience, and practically speaking, a more instructed insight of the Christian truth and life[.] They pray more and commonly know better how to pray. They do more volunteer work. So richly gifted, have we still no use to make of them, better than to put an extinguisher on them and keep them in suppression? If we think we are detained by Scripture usage and law, we can at least fulfill the Scripture usage, and make deaconesses of them. And if we can make three or four of them deaconesses, we can, with as little disorder, make a much greater number if we please, and set them forth on missions of public service; as Phebe the deaconess of the church at Cenchrea was sent, in that manner, to Rome. And if they used their office well, would they not "purchase to themselves a good degree and great boldness in the faith," even as the deacons might in theirs? A single glance in this direction shows that a large field is here open to the ministrations of Christian women, a much larger field than, as yet, they have been called to occupy.

     As regards the ministry of the word, or the matter of public speaking in the churches, it is very evident that what Paul lays down as restriction in the 11th and 14th chapters of his First Epistle to the Corinthians -- requiring in the former that no woman pray or prophesy with her head uncovered, and in the latter that she keep silence altogether -- that all such restriction is now gone by, in the going by of the particular specified reasons in which it was based; viz.: the public "shame" or scandal it would be to religion, under the then accepted laws of womanly modesty, and the current impressions of disgrace incurred and decency violated, when these laws are disregarded. "Shame," and again "shame," is the consideration on which he turns his argument for restriction, first in one case and then in the other. But we of the present age have no longer any feeling that a woman throws off her modesty because she speaks unveiled; though, in Turkey and some other parts of the world, that feeling may still prevail. We have still our likes and dislikes, in one degree or another, to the public speaking of women in all sorts of assemblies; but almost nobody imagines that a woman who simply prays in the Spirit, or takes what Jeremy Taylor calls "the liberty of prophesying," in public meetings for religion, is therefore broken loose from the proper restraints of delicacy. It is our general conviction that scenes of battle and high wrestling are not for women, and that when they go in to wrangle thus with men, they had much better be somewhere else; but nobody has ever observed that Lucretia Mott, or any speaker of the Quaker sisterhood, long practiced in the prophesying of the Spirit, has been hardening in voice, or look, or becoming in any respect less womanly. So far the restrictions of the "shame" are gone by, and the right of speaking for religion, under the inspirations of religion, belongs apparently to women as to men[.] And if women have gifts that qualify them specially for such ministrations, there appears to be no good reason longer why they should be kept under the ban of silence.

     But the question of ministration is one thing, and the question of administration another. And it is to cut off this, as I understand, that the apostle has enjoined it on women to "keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted them," he says, "to speak, but to be under obedience, as also saith the law." The "speaking" here intended, appears to be not exactly prophesying and praying in the Spirit, for these he appears to have just now allowed, under the restriction of a veil; but a speaking as in council and authority -- a debating of administrative matters, where they will put themselves in measure with men, and assume a power of leadership which does not belong to them -- is plainly meant to be included. When, accordingly, we ask how far the clerical profession is open, or may be, to women, there is no objection to allowing that anything which belongs to the quickening, and edifying of assemblies in the Spirit may be left open to them; only when we come to matters of church administration and presiding rule, these do not come within their jurisdiction. They can not, in true Christian order, be made pastors, or presbyters, or bishops; no one of the apostles ever heard of such a thing. What a catalogue of honorable women     does the apostle recite, in the last chapter of his Epistle to the Romans: -- Phebe, "succorer of many," including also the apostle himself; Priscilla, named before her husband, as having "periled even her own neck," with his, for the apostle's deliverance, "to whom all the churches of the Gentiles now give thanks;" "Mary, who bestowed much labor" on the apostle himself; Junia, named with respect, as having been "in Christ before him," and as being now a character "of note among the apostles;" "Persis who labored much in the Lord;" Rufus' mother whom the great apostle loves to salute in the title "his mother and mine." What homage and respect does he testify to these heroic women, and what estimate does he hold of their almost common ministry with him, in the word and sacrifice of Jesus! He had work enough for them, such as many of our fastidious over-orderly patrons of order are never finding any place to allow; and yet the nearest he ever came to putting any one of them in rule, was when he allowed a single one of them as a deaconess in her little suburban chapel. Our conclusion is, on the whole, that, as in the medical and legal professions, so in the clerical, there is a large department of ministry and service that may properly be open to women, though no official right of administration or presiding rule is permitted. It is even conceivable that a considerable number of women, fitly trained, should carry on the quickening and edifying work in as many churches, under the presiding oversight and rule of some common presbyter or bishop, doing every one of them, it may be, a greater and more valued work than he.

     How far we may rightfully and hopefully go in setting open to women a wider range of employments, and by that means increasing the rate of wages for their labor, will here be seen. I might dwell, in the same manner, on the advantage they will gain and have already gained, by assuming their place in the field of art and literary production. What better, higher names can we ask in this field than Mrs. Stowe, Margaret Fuller, Gail Hamilton, and the long and brilliant train that follow in the inspiration of their example, and the courage raised by their success. All such victories gotten by the sex are gotten for the whole sex, and even for the humblest and most undistinguished members. They are raised universally in personal consideration, and more employments at higher wages are open to them. And then, the more things they do and do well, the more they will be called to do. They will take the field of common school education largely to themselves, and their compensations will be graduated by their service. They will get hold of the ideas and laws of business, and their business faculty will be more respected. And so they will take a more forward part in the trades; sometimes on their own account, and sometimes in the subordinate ranges of clerkship, book-keeping, and the like. They will thus begin, ere long, to conquer places and ranges of business from which formerly they were excluded, becoming, not improperly, managers of hotels, bank-tellers, brokers, actuaries of insurances, private bankers, type-setters, overseers of printing. Breaking into such new fields, they will cease to crowd each other as now, by an over-supply in the market of operative industry; till finally the poor sewing women will obtain some easement of their truly hard lot -- the grace of mitigation will be reaching down even to them. They will no more work and die as now, but they will begin to work and live. I do not say or think that women will ever obtain, in the general, as high wages as men, partly because the number of their employments must be much smaller, and partly because they can not always do an equal, or equally perfect style of work.

     The great departments of agriculture, engineering, and war, seafaring, railroad making, architecture, machine building, all the heaviest, roughest, tensest forms of creative labor are reserved for men. Almost any woman would even think it an affront to be offered a part in them. Indeed, she has neither muscle, nor eye, nor hand, for these engagements. How often do we hear it asserted as a fact unquestionable and well understood, that no sewing woman was ever yet able to make a perfect, gentleman's, coat. Sewing all her life long, she has never obtained the precision of eye, and firm guidance of hand necessary to this very nicely combined, delicately complex, really constructive whole of stitch-work. And it is only just that men should have this advantage; for if they could not excel in the mechanical perfectness and precision of all such mechanical labor, they would sink to a dishonored grade, as being only the world's male drudges, in bearing, as they must, all the roughest offices, and hardest, coarsest forms of service. And if women are disposed to complain that they can not do as perfect work as men, let them take their compensation in the fact that they are excused everywhere, except among savages, from the hardest, and most nearly animal drudgeries of labor. And if their works require no such tension of faculty as may set the exactness of their hand, and the firm precision of their motions, it must be sufficient for them that a fine flexibility and grace of action are left them, to be their special ornament.

     It will be understood, of course, in our contrivances of ways to enlarge the spheres and advance the opportunities of women, that they are to be carefully defended by the laws, in their rights of character, and family, and property. If there is no way to adjust the scheme of legal process and record in our courts, but to regard the married woman as femme covert, existing in and under the name of her husband, and having no right of suit in her own name; there must yet be due provision made for the complete assertion of her personality, and the due protection of her property from every sort of encroachment, whether by her husband, or by wrong-doers acting in conspiracy with him. The law must be law for women, as truly as for men. Every thing must be so adjusted, if possible, as to remove the liabilities of wrong, and fortify the securities of right, and multiply the chances of industry for women. If we undertake to legislate for them, we must do better for them in favor, than they can propose, or dictate, or vote for themselves, and bow them gallantly forward into all best conditions and positions appropriate to their sex.

     What then -- for this is getting now to be the principal and most forward question -- what are we to say or decide in respect to the question of suffrage for women? Does it follow that in doing all which is best, and for the highest possible advantage of women, we are called to give them an equal place with men in the ballot, and the right of public office? To this question we are now brought, and what I have been saying in this present chapter, has been specially designed to prepare it in such manner as to place it in the best condition for a just settlement.

     Many persons who mistook their ground, in opposing the abolition of slavery, are naturally shy, under this new question, of being caught again, and are half ready to leap into the gulf of what is called the emancipation of women, before they can distinctly see the bottom of it. Others again, who have all their lives long meant to keep the van of human progress and never fall behind, are now being pushed on blindly by their mere habit, as if there were some real inconsistency in turning conservative now. They have a certain dislike or distaste for any such holding back of motion, and it troubles them that, for some reason, they do not feel as ready to go forward as they would expect. The very great distinction between reforms that go with nature, and reforms that go against nature, they do not apprehend distinctly enough to have the benefit of it. And just here lies the question, we are now to see, of this very great, fearfully momentous question of women's suffrage.

     It is amazing that so many of our writers and debaters are able to handle this question so lightly. For one, I am never able to look down this gulf without a shudder of recoil. I read two days ago in the "Nation" newspaper an article headed, "Is there such a thing as sex?"-- the most brilliant and really most complete utterance I have anywhere met, and to which I may perhaps recur hereafter -- but there was a single point in the conception of it which I could not see, and felt to be even dangerously false. The writer wanted us to look on this matter tentatively; saying, in effect, "go on, make approaches, carry out the reform by stages, and make it sure, that you are not too far an your way, whenever you may wish to retrace your steps." But the terrible thing about this revocare gradum is that there is no such possibility. Women having once gotten the polls will have them to the end, and if we precipitate our American society down this abyss, and make a final wreck of our public virtue in it, that is the end of our new-born, more beneficent civilization. The race must now look for some other and second new world -- where shall it be found -- that can set on foot still another and better experiment. Our sun is set; is there any other sun to rise?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

II. NO RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE ABSOLUTE IN MAN OR WOMAN.
 

     IN a campaign raised for women's suffrage, it was to be expected that the argument would take its beginning at our American doctrine of rights; or, as is sometimes put, of equal rights, natural rights, rights of natural equality. Probably the proposed reform itself is due to an over-absolute, uncritical reception of that doctrine; being only a fair extension, or logically right version of it. However this may be, the advocates of women's suffrage are quite innocent, doubtless, of any suspicion that these and other like phrases, current in our green age of statesmanship, are more pretentious than solid, and take us more by their sound than by any properly discovered meaning. And they have as good right to hold them in faith, and draw them into their particular applications, as many others have to hold them in the same faith, and yet eschew the applications.

     If we desire to know exactly what merit or meaning there may be in these famous declarations of rights, equalities, compacts, consentings of the governed through majorities, and the like, we must take the lesson where the lesson was first taken. After long ages of priestcraft and princecraft in royal and noble families, ages of wrong and crushing absolutism, under pretext even of divine right, certain forward minds began to be stirred with a natural detestation. They were such men as Rousseau and Voltaire and others, sometimes called malignants; otherwise, philosophers, free-thinkers, agitators for liberty. They hated government -- royalty that is, and aristocracy -- as a shocking insult and fraud, and hated religion as the stupendous lie that seasoned and sanctified the fraud; assuming that what they saw of government was government, and what they saw of religion was religion. Full of this immense disgust, they betook themselves mentally to the woods, and began to envy the people of the woods. Savage life -- this they called the paradise, and they even seemed to picture it with a true longing. Here are no distinctions but the simple equality of nature, the virtues are unsophisticated, the religion is nature, government, if they have it, is a matter of simple consent and compact.

     The picture had such fascination to them and to thousands far away, in sympathy with them, that a kind of general effort began, to conceive a doctrine of the state, that was in fact a doctrine of the woods. The new philosophy, or new liberty began thus at the condition of nature; under taking to show how men, qualified and set on by the promptings of nature, could originate a state of civil order and obligatory law. The problem was to create obligation from below that is not from above; such as will stand firm and sure, apart from any terms of divine order or sanctions of divine magistracy. The government that was to be, must be contributed by the consent of the governed, and as the governed are all mere natural men, standing on that footing of equality -- as they do in the woods -- their consent is in their vote, and their vote is grounded in their equal right to vote. And so, out of mere nature, and built up from below, there is to be raised a complete civil order, binding on each citizen -- no thanks to God -- because the general citizenship so orders and decrees. Sometimes the scheme is further elaborated by showing that all right government so made, is in fact a "social compact;" where the multitude come in to surrender enough of their individual right and liberty, to make up a pool of endowment for the state. A whole system of phraseologies came into use in this manner that belonged to the general type of the free-thinking philosophy, and fell into such currency in speech that multitudes received the mixture without knowing at all whence it came. Even the really great mind of Locke took in somewhat of the infection, without being duly aware of the sophistry and dangerous falsity covered up under these pretentious guises.
 

     In this way it came to pass that our fathers of the American revolution, long ago taken by these catch-words of liberty, fell into their use, more easily than was to be desired, in their manifestoes and public declarations. And the phraseologies thus adopted were what Mr. Choate very properly, though to the mortal offense of many, called "the glittering generalities." They are just what led Mr. Calhoun into his miserably delusive state-rights sophism, where he infers that if government is founded in consent, then it is an agency or trust contributed by the parties, and therefore terminable by them. Bitterly have we paid for this very cheap imposture of philosophy, in our late dreadful war of rebellion, and now it is to be seen, whether it may plunge us again down this other, deeper gulf of women's suffrage.

     The short argument, as it is commonly put, runs thus: women are the equals of men, and have therefore an equal right to vote. In which very brief and very simple form of deduction, there are, if we are not willing to be taken by the shallowest possible fallacies, two quite plainly untrue conclusions. First, it is not certainly true that women are equal to men. They are equally women as men are men; they are equally human as men; they are so far equally entitled to protection as men, but it does not hence appear that they are equal to men. They may be superior to men; they may be inferior to men; but what is a great deal closer probably to the truth, they may be very unlike in kind to men; so unlike that in the civil state they had best, both for their own sake and for the public good, stand back from any claim of right, in the public administration of the laws. How far this unlikeness extends is not here the question. I shall undertake, at a future stage of the discussion, to state more precisely in what the relative unlikeness consists; for the present I cannot forbear citing from the Nation, a very short but excellently vigorous statement of the fact itself. "The unlikeness between men and women is radical and essential. It runs through all the spheres. Distinct as they are in bodily form and features, they are quite as distinct in mental and moral characteristics. They neither think, feel, wish, purpose, will, nor act alike. They take the same views of nothing. The old statements that one is passive, the other active; one emotional, the other moral; one affectionate, the other rational; one sentimental, the other intellectual, are likely to be more than verified by science. Of course, these statements, whether verified or not, do not justify the imposition of arbitrary limits on opportunity or enterprise. It still remains to determine what place each can fill, what work each can do, what standard each can reach; and these nature should be left to determine. But that both can not occupy the same place, do the same work, or reach the same standard, ought, we think, to be assumed. Nature has decreed it so." Accordingly, if the two sexes are so very unlike in kind, there can, so far, be no predication of equality between them. And then, just so far, the argument for a right in women to vote, in consideration of their equality, is inconclusive. We do not say that a yard is equal to a pound, because the two measures have no common quality; though it may be that a yard of some one thing is equal in value to a pound of some other. We do not say, taking an example where there is more appearance of a common quality, that silk and flax are equal; and yet they may make an equally strong, or equally fine thread; but since one will make a finer lace, and the other a more splendid robe, one a superb damask, and the other a superb velvet, we do not think of saying at all, that they are equal, because they are so far different in kind. In which also we may see, that, while women and men have a great many common properties, they have also a great many which are not common -- so many, that we never can be sure what we mean by it, when we say that they are equal.

     Yes, but their rights are equal, some will hasten, it may be, to answer, and that is enough to support the argument. Doubtless they have a perfect and complete right to be women, as men have to be men, but it may be, still, that the having a perfect right to be either women or men, does not include any right of voting at all -- that is the very question here in issue.

     The second fallacy above referred to is built on an argument equally baseless; it is that, being equal to men, women have a right to vote because men have a right to vote. Here the meaning is, if there is any, that men have a natural right to vote, or a right to vote that is grounded in nature. The words man and suffrage have, in this view, a fixed relation; a universal and permanent relation; such that suffrage never was or can be denied them, save by a public wrong; for every right is a something never to be stripped away, except by a wrong. Since, then, prior to the arrival of our own American Republic, there had never been more than two or three small peoples in the world that acknowledged any right to vote at all, and these no equal right, but only rights so unequal that a very few men of grade, as in Rome, counted more than a whole bottom tier of rabble that composed the chief population of the city, we are seen to have begun our public history, by assuming that there never before had been a legitimate government in the world! If we could say that, and not be shocked by the nonsense of our assumption, we were certainly a very remarkable people. How much better and closer to the sound realities of history, to have confessed, that all the great monarchies, and the rising and falling, and dawning and vanishing, and even the merely de facto states, had a certain morally incipient and legitimate authority, even though they gave no right of voting at all, and never heard or even thought of such a thing. Besides, we had not then, and never since have had, ourselves, any equal right of voting as being men, saying nothing of women, under our own constitutions and liberties. Some of us have been voting on the score of our property; some on the right we have bought by military service; some on the ground of qualifications imparted by our education; some on the count of our slaves. Doubtless we that are males are all so far equal, but we never to this day have been allowed to vote on our naked equality, except in here and there a single State. How then does it fare with the argument that women have a right, on the score of their equality with men, when men themselves can not vote on the score of their own equality with one another? Besides, if any of us think to make out a natural right of voting, whether in men or women, a sufficient hunt of our psychologic nature ought to find some place in it where the right, for so many ages undiscovered, inheres. It was observed, long ages ago, by such men as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others, that our very nature is configured, all through, to the civil state, and the condition of civil obligation; but no man has ever yet discovered that there is a right to vote twisted in among our functions and rational categories. When that discovery is made, it will be as soon as any such natural right can be set in account, and made a basis of argument for the voting of women.

     Whence then do we get what now we call the right to vote? If it is not grounded in our nature, whence comes it? Some will imagine that the payment of taxes involves a right of representation, and this a right of voting; so that we have a good title to the suffrage made up indirectly. But the right of representation -- who has ever imagined, till quite recently, that such a right must accrue on the payment of taxes, and that no government is legitimate which does not allow that right? How little government has there been in the world that had even a thought of representation as connected with taxation? -- has there been no government, therefore, but only wrong? It may be desirable, I grant, since the people are taxed, that they should have some check upon the taxing power, and some voice in the public appropriation of money. But that is a matter which belongs to a consideration of measures and regulations, and not in any sense to first principles. Our fathers in the revolution had a great deal to say of being taxed by the Parliament without being represented in it, and seemed almost to hang the vindication of their revolt on this one point of grievance. But there was a peculiarity in their protest which neither they nor we have always observed, as distinctly as the due understanding of it requires. It was really a protest against having this great, new world farmed and used, for the benefit of a little, far-off patch of island in the German Ocean, which, compared with the gigantic world-empire here in debate, had no consequence and could have no continental future at all. On this canvass of outspreading futurity it was, that so many vehement protestations, indignations, and threats, cast their shadows. The real meaning was that such and so great a people are not to be kept for the fleece! And yet these same colonial fathers and patriots were every year taxing thousands, both of men and women, without any thought of a wrong, in not giving them a chance of representation. And if, afterward, they discovered that their argument could rightly be extended, so as to include the relations of individual persons to the state, they did not even then discover, and it is not to this day discovered, that women paying taxes have, by consequence, a right of representation. All that we can now say is that it stands before us as a question to be debated, whether it will be for their benefit and for the public good, that women be partakers also in the right of suffrage and of representation.[?] It is not a question of absolute right or first principle, as when the right of conscience is asserted; for then there is no point to be debated; but it is a question of benefit concerned or not concerned, in a certain political measure -- that, and nothing more. In the admission of men to a right of suffrage, it has never been voted for any one absolute reason. Sometimes it has been because they are taxed, sometimes because they are liable to be, sometimes because they perform military duty, sometimes because it discourages or takes away hope from their virtue not to allow it, sometimes because the refusal awakens animosities in them against the state. So if women ever have the right of voting accorded to them, it must be for a like variety of reasons, and not on the ground of any absolute principle.

     What then becomes, some will ask, of the great law of consent, that in which we affirm "that governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." That may be true, or partly true, I answer in some possible sense of the terms, but never as an absolute proposition. It may be true enough sometimes to be asserted antagonistically with great advantage; as where there is really wanted some limit, or countercheck for the due restraining of power. But if it be meant that no government is legitimate, save as it has the actual consent of its people, then there have been very few legitimate governments. Nay, there never has been one, and is not now. No fifth part of our own people, in fact, ever consented to the government, whether formally or by implication.

     No new statute passed, ever had the consent of more than a very small fraction of the people. Minors, women, invalids, absentees, voters of the opposing party -- take away all these, and how much of consent is left? If the major vote of such as have the ballot supposes general consent, then it must be by a legal fiction so great, that it would scarcely be greater without any vote at all.

     If it be meant that all just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed, in the sense, that so many "just powers" are, in fact, gotten by the surrender and contribution of rights belonging to individuals -- an argument very often stated and by many soberly believed -- then it is in point to answer that no civil right, or power, ever belonged, or, by any possible supposition, could belong, to any individual, or multitude of individuals. Has any individual a right to make arrests, a right to enforce contracts, a right to put contending parties on trial for the settlement of their disputes, a right of imprisonment, or penal enforcement, or making war or peace; a right, in one word, to exercise the least authority, or law-giving power over society? In this particular sense of the terms, we are rather to say that no one just power of government was ever derived, or ever could be, from the consent of the governed.

     There is nothing, therefore, to be gained for women's suffrage, under this principle, as the champion debaters of the sex are often heard to assume. Women must get their right to vote, if at all, just where men have gotten it; out of history, out of providential preparations and causes, out of the concessions of custom, out of expediences concluded, and debated reasons of public benefit. We have no better right than this, as men, and there is no better right to be, for women. The question is concluded for them, by no a priori matter, but it is their right and privilege to show, that a power to hold office and vote will be for the real benefit of their sex, and for the solid and permanent good of society. Indeed, if they can only make it appear that they themselves will be put in a more favorable condition of life and character, by thus opening the political arena to them, we shall even deem the controversy, if there be a controversy, to be effectually ended. If we sometimes oppress them by our heedlessness, it is our custom rather, in matters of deliberate purpose, to give them more than will be either for their benefit or our own.
 

     Having argued in this manner the question of right, showing that suffrage is a right given, never a right to be demanded because it inheres beforehand in the person, and that neither men nor women have any title to it, save what is grounded in considerations of benefit, I am tempted to add another clause and topic in the argument, just for the purpose of taking down a little our egregious opinion of the suffrage. The transcendent merit we assume for our institute of free suffrage is not quite as evident as we think it is; far less evident than our women think it is, when they look to find a new-creation stage of advancement in it. In a certain large view, it has done bravely for us, and we have much to boast in it; which we do not forget to boast, in terms, that far exceed all rational proportions of merit, and even display some tokens of national conceit. After all, our free suffrage state, when taken close at hand, as when we go to the ballot, makes a rather coarse, half nasty element; where men are pitched into count, without any consideration of merit or weight, and where they vote promotions, with only the feeblest, mere chance reference to the merit of the promotions voted. The machinery is dreadfully loose, and the look of order and right is only what a pell-mell operation yields. We are coaxed and flattered, for the time, by the feeling that we are doing something great, and getting a more advanced consequence in it. But, for one, I seriously doubt whether any so great benefits, either personal or public, are coming out of the suffrage, as we are wont to assume. It certainly can make the corruptest, most intolerable government in the world; as it is rapidly finding how to do already in the city of New York, and it is plainly to be seen that possible evils are covered up in it, that may finally take us down backward, faster than its former benefit has sent us onward. That it has a law of limitation in its own nature, and will come to its end and disappear within a comparatively short run of time, is far more probable than some of us suppose.

     I speak in this manner, having distinctly in mind a certain way of promotion established in one of the great nations of the world, that has a far superior dignity and much better promise both of permanence and character. Instead of electing by suffrage, it elects by contest; that is, by trials of merit and personal qualification. It works by the West Point method, and hangs promotion at the end, on the scale of merit discovered. The whole grand nation, comprising four hundred millions of people, is a West Point cadetship extended. The humblest as well as the highest of the youth, are put in schooling, and then are sifted three times over, by three great examinations that go up by an ascending series. And then, out of the very limited number of the cadets that are crowned at the last, are to come all the high officers of the kingdom -- officers to be who will be known as long as they live, to have excelled, first, in scholarship; secondly, in talent and capacity of writing; and thirdly, in the well-attested record of an upright, pure behavior. Our contempt for this Chinese people had better be expended fast, for we shall not have our opportunity long. A nation that existed a thousand years before the Trojan war, came to its full type in the days of Pericles, and still holds on as by some gift of civil immortality, well and most systematically governed still, with less of fraud, injustice, and official peculation in its magistracies than we have in ours, and a great deal less of crime, and a great deal more both of industry and high morality in its people than we are able to claim in our own, is not despisable, except by ignorance. Their only misfortune is that they have been too stringently educated; chained fast, in that manner, to the classic lore of their fathers, and kept back from the progressive studies of natural science; but already they are creating great universities to repair the deficit. And their fearfully intense scholarship will put them very soon at our side in all the modern ideas, sciences, and improvements, and they will stand forth in their new great future only the more conspicuous, that they have had so grand a past. And God forbid that they ever be so far captivated by our dreadfully inferior, cheap way of suffrage, as to give up their cadetship way of promotion for it; a plan that has put the whole nation climbing upward, and will keep it climbing, to the end of the world -- only climbing the more rapidly and surely now, that it has gotten new springs of life and self-renewing order. Emerging in this manner into modern ideas, and a modern career, China will, by this time, be the supreme world-wonder of history and historic empire, and the clumsy and coarse figure we make in our half-qualified magistracies chosen by suffrage, will not be as impressive as most of us would like to believe. Though perhaps it will comfort us a little, that these people of China do themselves maintain a suffrage in a certain lower plane of life, where it makes a kind of volunteer department for their benefit. They choose a class of elders, so called, who are, in fact, a board of referees for settling their controversies, and helping them maintain their rights when oppressed by wrongs and exactions of the state officers. They are no part of the government any more than arbitrators, or a vigilance committee, would be with us; and yet the government allows their choice to simplify its own immense complexities, and bring the people help in what would also be theirs.

     I have sketched this outline, not exactly required by the argument, simply because a considerable dose of humility is needed visibly, to cure us of the nonsense, which having first infected our men with undue conceit of advancement, is now infecting our women with as unreal and excessive hope that they may win the same. There is much less for us all here than our coarse patriotic fervors assume, and a great deal less for women than for men. If the scheme of suffrage must go down, it will be a very great advantage that our women are not in it. It will go down, if at all, simply by the rotting process of its own corruptions, and our ambitious women will find little comfort in being the bad other half that goes down with it.
 
 
 
 
 

III.     WOMAN NOT CREATED OR CALLED TO GOVERN.
 

     IT was a point made, in the brief chapter preceding, that no argument for women's suffrage, based on the equality, or equally human property of women with men, can have more than a show of validity; for the reason that men and women are, to some very large extent, unlike in kind; and it may be so far unlike, as to forbid any rational comparison as respects equality; and, of course, to forbid any such inference of right for women because that right is accorded to men. It becomes, in this view, a matter of consequence to inquire whether the supposed unlikeness of kind includes matters of distinction that amount to a proper disqualification, or which really forbid, as contrary to nature, the extension of any such political right to women.

     It is not to be denied that women are made in the image of God as truly as men, having faculties and categories of mind that are equal in number, and so far similar in kind, as to pass under the same general names. What is right and true to one sex, is right and true also to the other. They think by the same laws, they perceive, and judge, and remember, and will, and love, and hate, in the exercise of functions that compose personalities psychologically similar, however different in degree, and however differently tempered, fibered, tensified, and toned for action. In a word, they are equally human, and compared with orders of being above and below them are of the same kind. And yet in their relationship of sex, within their own human order, they are so widely different, nevertheless, that the distinction never misses observation. Their very personality, which even seemed identical in the inventory, taking on sexhood, becomes broadly differential in that fact, and submits to a deep-set, dual classification.

     A mere glance at the two sexes, externally related, suggests some very wide distinction of mold whatever it be. The man is taller and more muscular, has a larger brain, and a longer stride in his walk. The woman is lighter and shorter, and moves more gracefully. In physical strength the man is greatly superior, and the base in his voice and the shag on his face, and the swing and sway of his shoulders, represent a personality in him that has some attribute of thunder. But there is no look of thunder in the woman. Her skin is too finely woven, too wonderfully delicate to be the rugged housing of thunder. Her soft, upper octave voice, her small hands, her features played as in quality and not for quantity, her complexion played as if there were a principle of beauty living under it -- there is abundance of expression here, as many great, proud souls of heroes have been finding in all ages, but it is unOlympic as possible in kind. Glancing thus upon man, his look says, Force, Authority, Decision, Self-asserting Counsel, Victory. And the woman as evidently says, "I will trust, and be cherished, and give sympathy and take ownership in the victor, and. double his honors by the honors I contribute myself." They are yet one species, but if they were two, they would be scarcely more unlike. So very wide is the unlikeness, that they are a great deal more like two species, than like two varieties. Their distinction of sex puts them in different classes of being, only they are classes so nearly unified by their unlikeness, that they compose a whole, so to speak, of humanity, by their common relationship. One is the force principle, the other is the beauty principle. One is the forward, pioneering mastery, the out-door battle-ax of public war and family providence; the other is the indoor faculty, covert, as the law would say, and complementary, mistress and dispenser of the enjoyabilities. Enterprise and high counsel belong to one, also to batter the severities of fortune, conquer the raw material of supply; ornamentation, order, comfortable use, all flavors, and garnishes, and charms to the other. The man, as in fatherhood, carries the name and flag; the woman, as in motherhood, takes the name on herself and puts it on her children, passing out of sight legally, to be a covert nature included henceforth in her husband. They are positivity and receptivity, they are providence and use, they are strength and beauty, they are mass and color, they are store-house and table, they are substance and relish, and nothing goes to its mark or becomes a real value till it passes both.

     But we are dealing, so far, in this outward delineation of the sexual distinctions, in matters general, and have not taken up, as yet, the more particular matter at issue in our question of suffrage. The precise point here to be observed, is that masculinity carries, in the distribution of sex, the governmental function. The forwarding force, the brave-and-dare element, whether toward nature or against human opposers, the responsible engineering of place and work and calling, all determinations outward, whether toward enemies, or among causes, or in ventures of commerce, or in diplomatic treaties and warlike relations of peoples, belong to man and to what may be called his manly prerogative. That is, man is to govern; all government belongs to men. Not that women are never set in kingly positions to represent, or personate the kingly power; of that I shall speak hereafter in another place. For the present, I simply remark, that the authority they wield in such cases is only what the masculine traditions put upon them, or into them, when they are used to fill the gaps of kinghood, by maintaining the court pageantries and the royal signature; they do not reign as kings do by an authority that is largely personal in themselves. Were they obliged to maintain themselves in that way, it would very soon be discovered how little authority there is in women. We take pleasure not seldom in allowing women to rule us by the volunteering deference we pay to their womanhood; we often talk of our loyalty to the sex; but we never see the woman who can hold a particle of authority in us by her own positive rule or the emphasis of her own personality.

     To prevent misunderstanding it may be proper to say that I am not asserting a right here in men to bolt upon women, wives for example, in the peremptory way of command; I am only asserting the natural leadership, the decision-power, the determinating will of the house and the state, as belonging to men. Certain engineering questions, for example, must be settled, the question of expenditure as related to income, the question of residence, occupation, emigration; where of course every endeavor should be made to compose differences of feeling and judgment, and settle points by agreement. But if a case arises, where agreement is impossible, one of the two, clearly, must decide, and it must be the man. The woman's law of allegiance, sometimes a hard one, requires it of her to adhere to the man, submit herself to his fortunes, and go down with him bravely, when his day of disaster comes. The sway, the determinating mastership, must so far be with him, and it can not be anywhere else, without some very deplorable consequences to his manhood. If he has no sway-force in him equal to this, no authority of will and council that enables him to hold the reins, he is no longer what nature means when she makes a man. And the refractory woman who has so far balked his manhood will have honored herself quite as little as him.

     Happily, it is just as natural to women to maintain this beautiful allegiance to the masterhood and governing sway-force of men, both in the family and the state, as we could wish it to be. Nothing, in fact, is more touching than to see how far they will go, how much they will bear, how absurdly persist in dressing up the masculine idol they have undertaken to crown, or exalt. They do no such thing toward other women, they totally disown the authority of women, and can not even think it possible for women to preside in their assemblies. They do not ask, it may be, how, or why it is that they insist on having a man to preside? but if they could see the reason, as it lies in the inner feeling, they would discover in it a most complete refutation of their claim of suffrage itself. Looking on their chairman -- a man, and why a man? -- they would confess that, by that sign, their very cause is convicted of incongruity. Or if it occurs to them to urge, in excuse, that women have no experience in the ordering of assemblies, they can be more easily qualified, than they can to make a speech. They are, some of them, quick enough to learn Jefferson's Manual quite through, in half a day. Probably enough, too, the man they have chosen, never before presided over an assembly in his life.

     Now the right of suffrage as demanded for women, is itself a function of government. Besides, it contemplates also, as an integral part of the proposed reform, that women should be eligible to office. For if this were not conceded, we know perfectly beforehand, that the women voters would so wield their balance of power as to conquer the right of office in a very short time. All office must, of course, be open to them, as certainly as the polls are open. Indeed they sometimes take the jubilant mood even now, in their anticipation of the day, when they will have their seat in Congress, on the bench of justice, in the President's cabinet, and why not in the chair of the Presidency itself? when the missions abroad, the collectorships, the marshal and police functions, will be theirs, and finally, the heroic capabilities of women so far discovered, as to allow them a place in the command of fleets and armies, and full chance given their ambition, to win, as for solid history, what many call the mythic honors of a Semiramis or a Deborah.

     The claim put forward then is, and will be commonly allowed to be, a claim of authority; a claim by women to govern, or be forward in the government of men; wherein they deny, in fact, a first distinction of their sex. The claim of a beard would not be a more radical revolt against nature. It says "give us force, give us the forward right, give us authority, let us take our turn also at the thunder." Just contrary to this, I feel obliged to assert the natural subordination of women. They are put under authority by their nature itself, and if they will not take it as their privilege to be, if they call it insult and oppression, they set a character on their position which no man could; they put contempt themselves on their womanhood. Indeed, their very claim of suffrage on the ground of their equality with men, ignores just what is most distinctive in their kind, and is neither more nor less than a challenge of the rights of masculinity. And the harshest thing that can be said of their reform would be, that they mean it as it is.

     Asserting in this very decisive manner the natural submission of women, and their very certain lack, whether as respects the right or the fact, of authority, it will seen to many, as I very much fear, to be a harsh, or even a rude and coarse attack upon their seem. If it is so taken, it certainly need not be. We Americans take up some very crude notions of subordination, as if it implied inferior quality, character, power. No such thing is true, or less than plainly false. Subordination is one thing, inferiority an immensely different thing. Subordinate as they are, in their naturally sheltered relation, I seriously doubt whether we should not also assert their superiority. They do quite as much, and I strongly suspect, more for the world. Their moral nature is more delicately perceptive. Their religious inspirations, or inspirabilities, put them closer to God, as having a more celestial property and affinities more superlative. It may be that men have larger quantity in the scale of talent, while yet they are enough coarser in the grain of their quality to more than balance the score.

     Quality of brain, whatever we may say of size, can not be less than a matter of chief significance, and the fiber of a woman's brain is likely to be as much finer as the fiber of her skin; capable also, for that reason, of a more delicately feeling and bright insight, a more dramatic fancy-play, and a facility and grace of movement far more closely related to beauty. And who of us, making due account of the late admirable works of genius presented by our women authors, has not sometimes been taken hold of secretly by the question, whether finally a new age of literature is not coming on the world, in the mental unfolding of this other hitherto but half-discovered half of the race. Or if we talk of inspirations and the inspired forces of genius, have we no reason to imagine that, when the more divinely impregnate thought of the womanly souls is born, we shall see a divine daughterhood that has more than sonship in it, a finer and more glorifiable humanity. Mary herself -- was she not subordinate to Joseph? But she was not therefore inferior.

     And if we should be obliged, in this way, to admit that the womanly nature, all over the world, is instinctively submitted to the manly nature, must we for that reason judge that woman is less honored, less divinely gifted, lower in the scale of possibilities?

     What are we doing in fact, even now and always, but submitting our manhood to her in another and different way of submission, that implies a tribute of homage more tenderly delicate and voluntary, and more beautiful to look upon than any that can possibly be rendered, either by her or by us, on the so much desired footing of equality. Equality! Great heaven! are we so blind as to think no beauty possible in these terms of sexhood, because they import relations of difference? Must humanity become a bin of seeds all just alike, before we can be patient with our part in it? And again, to make up the beauty and true interest of life, why should not our children insist on being born at a point past majority, with their teeth and beards already grown, and their old peo     ple's wisdoms ripened before experience? Why this odious, never to be endured inequality? How strange indeed, how cross to our best notions of justice, and of true social equity and beauty, that parents are born older than their children, getting rights that include no equal vote at all, and that vary in as many grades and colors as the fit care and discipline of so many ages require.

     But there is an aspect of privilege, in this matter of subordination, which, instead of inferring the inferiority of women, gives them, when morally considered, the truest and sublimest conditions of ascendency. The highest virtues, purest in motive and really most difficult, are never to be looked for in the most forward and potentially regnant states. They belong rather to the subject conditions, where the coarse admixtures of pride and worldly power are shut away. We get the true analogy here in the great domain of nature, where the coarse and forceful causes seem to be doing every thing, and yet, in all finest, truest estimates of power, do comparatively nothing. The sun blazes and burns, the volcanoes burst and bury cities with ashes, the earthquakes rock and rend, the comets blaze on the sky, and the fierce windstorms tear it; and these and such like make up, as we think, the supreme causes to which all the humblest ingredients of our landscapes are of course inferior. And yet, if we come to the true scale of honors gotten upon human feeling, or in it, these same humbler, these inferior things of the landscapes are, in fact, immensely superior, and the others have but a hundredth part of the significance. The dews, the grasses, the green life of the trees, the fragrant breath of the mornings, the sunset colors on the clouds and the hills, the springs that break out under them, and the brooks leaping down their slopes, the songs of the birds, the feeding of cattle in their pastures -- the inventory is a long one; who can tell what is in it, or how much? This only we know, that the great world-forces holding sway and swinging above are scarcely appreciable, in comparison with the finer things of beauty they subordinate. We do not half as much respect or feel the dominating forces of the world as we do the dominated graces. Or if certain gross, coarse-judging souls, will think great things are done for them only by causes that bruise and batter, and that other things subordinate to these are of course inferior, these latter still will not be inferior even to them. After all, the woman things of the world, the patient-working, unobtrusive, graceful causes will be doing more.

     Under this analogy, we perceive how force, by its own nature, always and of course subordinates beauty. And it is just as true in things moral and spiritual as in things natural. Only they that are humble can be exalted; only the last can be first. The highest, finest molds of good, are grown only in the lowliest and most subject conditions. Was Mary inferior because she was a lowly, subject woman? Was her holy thing, her son, inferior because he was subject, in his beautiful childhood, and subject all his life long, down to the last hour's breath and the last nail driven? Many have imagined that they discovered in Jesus both a manly and a womanly nature, and that he became the perfect one, because in this union he was able, in so great force and authority, to bear so many things with a gentle submission and an unfaltering patience.

     There can not, in this view, be a greater mistake, or one that indicates a coarser apprehension, than when our women, agitating for the right of suffrage, take it as an offense against their natural equality, that they are not allowed to help govern the world. It is as if the gentle mignonnette and violet were raised in protest against the regal dahlia, when they are in truth a great deal more potentially regnant themselves. What do these women ask, in fact, but to be weighed in the gross weight-scales of force, making nothing of that higher, finer nature, by which God expects it of them to flavor the world. They must govern, they must go into the fight, they must bruise and batter themselves -- what are they equal to, if they are not equal to men? As if it were nothing, a little way back, after all the coarse things of the world are done, to govern, by graces, the men that govern by forces, and go through family and country, and the times, with a ministry more powerful, finer in the motive, less mixed with selfishness and will, and just as much closer to the really celestial type of good. God save us from the loss of this better, almost divinely superior ministry; for lost it will assuredly be, when our women have come down to be litigators with us in the candidacies, contests, and campaigns of political warfare. Still life is then no more, and the man who goes home at night from his caucus fight, or campaign speech, goes in, not to cease and rest, but to be dinned with the echo, or perhaps bold counter-echo of his own harsh battle. The kitchen dins the parlor, and one end of the table dins the other. Upstairs, down-stairs, in the lady's chamber -- every where the same harsh gong is ringing, from year to year. Oh! if we could get away! how many will then say it, and pray it -- into some bright corner where yet there are true women left -- women with soft voices, shrilled by no brassiness or dinging sound of party war!

     Why, if our women could but see what they are doing now, what superior grades of beauty and power they fill, and how far above equality with men they rise, when they keep their own pure atmosphere of silence, and their field of peace, how they make a realm into which the poor bruised fighters, with their passions galled, and their minds scarred with wrong -- their hates, disappointments, grudges, and hard-worn ambitions -- may come in, to be quieted, and civilized, and get some touch of the angelic, I think they would be very little apt to disrespect their womanly subordination. It will signify any thing but their inferiority. If they are already taken with the foolish ambition of place, or of winning a public name, they may not be satisfied. But in that case they barter for this honor a great deal more than they can rightly spare. God's highest honors never go with noise, but they wait on silent worth, on the consciousness of good, on secret charities, and ministries untainted by ambition. Could they but say to the noisy nothings of this bribery, "Get thee hence, Satan," as Christ did to the same coarse nonsense of flattery, they would keep their subject-way of life as he kept his, and would think it honor enough that they also came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. And if it be the question for them, whether it is better to be classed in privilege with Jesus the subject, or with Cæsar the sovereign, it should not be difficult to decide.

     Thus far we go in the principle that women are made to be subordinate, and men to be the forward operators and dominating authorities of the world. They have another field, where their really finer qualities and more inspirable gifts may get full room and scope for the most effective and divinest offices of life. Indeed we do not evenly set the balance of the question, if we do not say that woman has her government as truly as man, only it is not political, not among powers, and laws, and public causes. He governs from without downward, and she from within upward, and though there be a great difference of kind between our two words master and mistress, using this latter in its true, good sense, there is not a whit more of control signified, when we say that the man is the mastering power of the woman, than that she is the mistressing power of the man. He is at a point of sway more coarse, direct, and absolute -- more nearly akin to force. She is at a point where she captivates the force, by a beautiful and right enjoyment of it, takes possession of the man, property, and soul, and will, and calling, and makes him joyfully her own. If the cases were inverted, he would make a coarse, awkward figure doubtless in the mistressing kind of government; but if we are to agitate for equality, why should he not have the beautiful chance given him of being a mistress-power in life -- on the score of equality, even as she obtains a mastering power in life, when she obtains the suffrage? [.]

     As regards this right of priority and pioneering headship in man, and the so far subordinate and subject state in woman, implying still no superiority in him, and more than possible superiority in her, we have another illustration furnished by religion, that to such as have a true insight of the Christian plan or economy, will be strikingly apt and impressive. I refer to what is called the law and the gospel, as mutually related to each other. The law, which is the man, goes before, rough-hewing the work of government. It is Sinai-like, and speaks in thunder. It commands, and, by sanctions of force, where force is wanted, vindicates its own supreme authority. It so far has priority in rule, that it never can have any thing less; for the cessation of law is the cessation of government, and if it should only fall into second place or equal place with any thing else, it would lose the inherent sovereignty of its nature, when, of course, it can be law no longer. The gospel, meantime, coming after in order is the woman. It is subject as gospel to the husband, that is, to the law; it is made under the law; and the whole historic operation, by which it is organized, is itself obedience, submission, love, and sacrifice. And it is so perfectly subject to the law, that it professes nothing but a fulfillment of the law, and a universal recovery to it. Setting up for equality with law, or for itself, as having good right to assert and advance itself, is never so much as thought of; if it can but write the law on the heart of transgressors, all its wifely ends or ambitions are answered. And this it is supposed to do, by what is called grace; that is, by a way of approach so gentle, so winsome, and lovely, and close to the manner of true womanly grace, as to be another, more effective, side of the divine power; that which is the power of God unto salvation.

     And now suppose the question to be raised, which of these is superior -- works in the highest talent, does the greatest things, takes largest hold of the future, bears the loftiest inspirations, has most beauty of God in it, and really displays the finest, most etherealizing power? Undoubtedly it is the gospel. It goes above the law in doing every thing for it, and overtops it in glory, by submission to it. No power is in it, but the power of suffering and a subject state. It lives in sorrow and dies in sacrifice, and accomplishes just what the law, in "that it was weak," could not accomplish. The coarse ideas of force, and majesty, and all the pomps and thunders of enforcement are omitted here, and the simple wifehood of God's love, and beauty, is revealed, by what is lowliest and most dejected. And this is grace, the world-transforming grace in which God's empire culminates.

     And yet our women will not have their subordinate, or subject state, because it makes then inferior! They want, alas! the culture of soul that is wanted to see the superiority to which they are elected. They come in the wedding grace of their Cana, or the suffering grace of their Calvary, and insist on their right to be Sinai, and play the thunders too themselves. "Give us also power," they say; and power to them is force, or an equal right of command. A most miserable and really low misconception, if only they had grace to see it. Here is their true power, in a disinterested and subject life of good. And there is a way in this to govern men, that is greatness itself and victory. What can the woman do that wants to vote, in order to be somewhat, but fume, and chafe, and tear, under what she calls the wrongs of her husband -- so to make her weakness more weak, and her defeat more miserable -- when if she could only consent to be true gospel and woman together, to be gentle, and patient, and right, and fearless, how certainly would she come out superior and put him at her feet. There seems to me, in this view, I confess, to be a something sacred, or angelic, in such womanhood. The morally grandest sight we see in this world is a real and ideally true woman. Send her to the polls if you will, give her an office, set the Hon. before her name, and by that time she is nobody.
 
 
 

     As regards this question of suffrage, or the allowing of suffrage to women, there is yet another way of constructing the argument, which, though it may not be another, may be more convincing to some, viz.: -- that the male and female natures together constitute the proper man, and are, therefore, both represented in the vote of the man. And the radical idea here assumed of the composite unity of the two, is attested, in fact, all over the world, in one form or another, and in different modes and degrees, whenever a marriage puts them in connection as husband and wife. The woman passes under shelter and protection, so far as even to drop her family name, and be only known under the family name of her husband. In the English common law she is said to be femme covert, a woman who is included, as respects all civil rights, in her husband. Her personality is so far merged in his, that she can not bring a suit any more in her own name, for it is a name no longer known to the law. The assumption is that, being in and of her husband, he will both act and answer for her, except when arraigned for crime. The Roman or civil law received by so many of the principal nations of the world, carries similar ideas with it, asserting the civil absorption of the wife in the husband in terms but slightly qualified.

     The Russian law and the Chinese correspond. In all which we may see how close to nature runs the impression that woman is a complementary personality, and is rightly taken to exist in her husband, as she passes under his name in her marriage, and is consentingly covered by his protectorship.

     Hence it is put forward by some, as the true answer to the claim of women's suffrage, that they are already represented in and by the vote of their husbands. But this again is only saying that they will be duly cared for and protected, by the voice their husbands have in government, when they do not govern for themselves. And nothing can be assumed more safely than that; for if by some lache of marital attention, helped by a certain natural gravitation toward injustice when attention sleeps, the laws may sometimes slip or subside into ways that bear oppressively on women, the wrong will be easily rectified. There is no deliberate willingness in men to oppress women; and as soon as any sufficient reminder comes, and a real grievance is shown, there is sure to be some adequate reform that redresses the wrong discovered. Our legislators, have abundantly shown their readiness, and even zeal, to remove every sort of harshness in the laws toward women; they make haste in it, and are willing even to go beyond the real equity and do, since it is for women, more than is equal, and more than they would ask legislating for themselves. If they want, indeed, a partial legislation, softer and more favorable than strict equality, their surest way to get it is to let it be the legislation of men. They will do any thing for women that has even a semblance of right.

     What matter then is it, whether women have a representation by their own ballot or not? Perhaps it may better suit their ambition to be powers, than wards of the state, but it is a very fatuitous and really most unsentimental ambition. Oh! if we could only be assured as men, that we should be governed well, and safely defended in every right, secured in every privilege, without any representation at all, any right of suffrage, what better and more halcyon day of promise could heaven let down upon us. Such government would be like that of God Himself. There is no privilege in representation, no inherent right of it in any state, save that, as rulers are themselves under evil, and prone to ways of wrong as God is not, it is convenient and imparts a feeling of security, to have the subjects themselves allowed a voice in the laws, and a part in their just enforcement. It is no first principle then, as our new state reformers assume, that women have a right of representation because they are human; in that way a right of suffrage; for nobody has any such right of representation, if only he can be well governed without such right; and women are as nearly sure of that as they can be, in the fact that they are made sure by the vote and representation of their husbands.

     But they are many of them single persons, it may be urged, and have therefore no husbands by whose vote their rights may be protected. On this account too some of the opposers of women's suffrage, apprehending a defect in their argument based in the representative office of husbands, have conceded the right of widows and single women to vote; only requiring them to lose that right when they pass into the femme covert state.

     But this would open a way for innumerable frauds, and confusions without end. Happily the whole cast of the argument is mistaken. Women are not changed in their nature, or in any natural right, because they are married. What we have to say is, that all women alike are made to be married, whether they are or not. The sex-nature of men and women is not altered by marriage, and according to that sex-nature, women are to be sheltered legally by men. Government is not given them, but protectors are given them, who are tender above all terms of equality. So that if it were necessary for them to be represented, and they had a right to be, the whole female order would be most effectively represented in the whole male order, without respect to any chances, or mischances, of marriage whatever.

     And so there is to be secured for women a more benignant, softer kind of protectorship, which is bruised and battered by no contests, or made hard and imperious by no mere dominations of force. Of what use would government be, if all fine sentiments and gentle deferences and loyalties were killed by it? And there must be room for these in harbors and havens one side of the storms; where only soft winds blow, and silent atmospheres and breathings are allowed. The masculine half-being must be allowed to sink into the bigger self that he calls his home, and be sheltered in the womanly peace he has protected, for the gentler and more dear protection of his own more stormy life. Living only as male creatures in society with male, they would keep their pride, their will, their dry grudges, and self-seeking torments, and these would be their inventory. It is only when they take in the complementary graces of a domestic keeping -- the carefulness, the love, the beauty -- that they save moisture enough to fully and completely exist. That is the protectorship of men. This is the protectorship of women. And if the question be which is first in consequence, dearest, and most necessary, the women certainly shall say the first, and the men quite as certainly the last.
 
 
 

IV. SCRIPTURE DOCTRINE COINCIDES.
 

     HAPPILY, we are not obliged to hang our opinions in this matter of women's suffrage on the moral expositions and dictations of Scripture; for the two points now made in respect to the natural subordination, or subject state, of women, and to the secondary, complementary office they hold in filling out the manhood of men, when merged politically in their protectorship, need no scriptural authority to support them. The Scripture has nothing to say of this matter, which is at all variant from what we see with our eyes. Indeed no scripture revelation, which at all disagrees with the bisexual facts of our existence as they are, could be true, or have any authority over the revelations made by such facts. The scripture revelations might interpret the revelations of nature, and let us farther into their meaning; or they might impart new disclosures that go farther and give us additional knowledge; but I do not see, in this particular case, that they do either. They seem to merely reiterate, and put in stronger emphasis, just what we learn by the sight of our eyes -- that, and nothing more. However, a great many minds will revert almost instinctively here to what is given us by scripture authority, and will ask for the sentence it propounds as a final and determinate settlement, so far, of the questions in issue. Besides, we only pay a decent reverence to the teachings of God, when we bring our questions before this tribunal of divine authority and reason, as it is proposed in this chapter to do.

     Coming, then, to the Word, what saith the Word? Take what view we please of the story of the creation, it scarcely matters as far as this particular subject is concerned; for the representation is, in any case, that the woman is created, not to be the man's re-duplication, or a second man, but to be the meet-helper of the man. She is to be a subsidiary nature, filling out the complete humanity of the man; and this fact is figured in a way of representation that makes her nature derivative from his, and so far of a quality at once cognate and complementary. "And Adam said, this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh."

     So the parties stand in the scale of the creation. They are one flesh as being two, because one is the complement of the other. Then follows the precipitation of the fall, in which the composite unity becomes a bond of retributive liability, even as every other blessing is touched by the pangs of disorder. Before it was, "be fruitful and multiply;" now it is, to the subject party, "in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." What before was only a protectoral relation, where the forward nature takes the subject into care and dear safe-keeping, is now to become a partly embittered relation, and be more or less galled by oppressions, such as wrong-doers in power will lay on the subject companions God gave to their protection. "Thy desire shall be to thy husband." This interprets no more the real order of nature, but the disorder of unnature; and how sadly and how heavy with sighing, all down the after ages, has the sentence been repeating its verifications; female nature suing, as it were, to male, and how often, alas! getting from even its love itself but a slack appreciation; sometimes burdens unstinted and weary homages of sorrow; sometimes only roughness and neglectful insolence. Visibly the man has precedence and the woman a subordinate lot, only it is no more the sweet relationship of order and protective sympathy originally intended, but of one made hard and dry by the partly retributive extirpations of love and tenderness. And still, under so many repulses and discouragements, the desire of the woman is, none the less fixedly, to the man and to his rule, harsh as it is now become in its severity, and dismally distempered by the abuse of power.

     We descend across the ages to the times and declared maxims of the New Testament era. Nothing, of course, is put down here to re-emphasize the retributions of sin, but the subordination of the woman to the man, and the complementary part she fills in the sheltered condition of her dependence, is, if possible, more emphatically stated. As "the head of every man is Christ," so "the head of the woman is the man;" as "he is the image and [reflected] glory of God," so "the woman is the glory of the man." "For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man." "The woman is to learn in silence, with all subjection" -- "not to teach nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."

     Now, these heavy pronouncements of the apostle come down with a kind of pounding emphasis on women, that sounds harshly. I should not dare to write in this way, and scarcely to think in this way, without adding something that is more appreciative and more delicately respectful both to merit and feeling. If Paul had been well married, that is, to such a wife as by character and personal attractions could make herself the mistress every wife should be, in the respectful homage of her husband, I think he would have learned some things about women which, in fact, he never did learn, and would have been as much more courteous and tenderly gracious in his words. And if he had lived in this particular age, I am not quite sure that he would have had as much to say of the obedience of women; for it will be observed that when he is speaking in this manner he is having respect almost always to "the shame" religion suffers when women are less patient, or less quietly subordinate, under the frequently domineering rule of their husbands, than the manner of the age requires. The point which has so great importance with him is, that Christian women shall not raise an accusation of scandal against the gospel, by the boldness of their liberty in the spirit and of their faith in Jesus. Of course Paul did not know every thing, whether about women or any other subject of knowledge. What the Spirit gave him he knew, and for all other kinds of knowledge he was on a footing with his age. And, in this view, doing justice to all that he positively declares, we are permitted to doubt whether he had a fully rounded conception of the finer and more superlative qualities of womanly talent. Do we not see, in fact, that womanly gifts are a great deal higher than his old-time habit and his mere bachelor acquaintanceship ever allowed him to know?

     And yet he is perfectly right in every positive utterance and moral pronouncement he makes. So far he indorses and sanctions the grand first truth of the sexly nature seen by us all; the superior headship of man, and the subordinated, complementary life of woman; and so the base note of his music is rightly keyed. And, it must also be said, in justice to his seemingly harsh and somewhat overbearing dictations or casuistries, that he does sometimes contrive to give a less despotic and more thoughtfully tender look to the governing right of husbands. He does not say, "Assert your rights and put your women in their places," as he almost seemed to be doing just now, but he says, "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church." In this most sacred bond he conceives the two to be, in some sense, two no more, a man and a woman, but "one flesh" rather; practically unified, as in some mystic consolidation -- even as Christ and the church is made one by what he calls the "great mystery," their secret marriage bond in the Spirit. In this bond, so truly sacred, let them both abide as natures sealed for unity; "let every one of you, in particular, so love his wife even as himself -- [another self]; -- and the wife see that she reverence her husband." He is husband still, and she is wife -- their natural distinction remains -- they only temper now the look of their relation, by as much as they soften the authority, to love on one side, and deepen the obedience, to reverence on the other.

     Passing now to Peter who had been married, it is pleasant to see what his marriage has done for him, in the more appreciative manner of his writing. He begins at the same point with Paul -- "Likewise ye wives be in subjection to your own husbands;" and the motive stated is one that encourages a confidence of power superior in some sense to the word of the gospel, and even to apostolic preaching itself, viz.: that their husbands may "without the word," -- without preaching, without exhortation -- "be won by the conversation [the beautiful way] of their wives." In the same strain he goes on to speak of their adorning -- which is to be no outward glare of trinkets, and gems, and braidings of hair, and dresses in the mode, as many think who count women only a toy -- but it is to be internal worth and beauty, the hidden magic of a dear, celestial character; that which, in God's scale of judgment, is of great price. And I know not any thing ever said in Scripture of mortal beauty and perfection, which carries an impression so superlative as this word   all-perfect, precious, dear above price, and that "in the sight of the Lord;" as if it were conceived that a woman, dignified by such internal beauty, is really the finest mold of created being ever looked upon by even God himself.

     Next, the apostle brings out another specially grand point in the behavior of Christian women, as related to the precedence and authority of their husbands, setting Sarah before them as the model of all finest dignity -- "even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord; whose daughters ye are when ye do well and are not afraid with any amazement." And if any thing will class a woman in her subject state with Christ himself in his, it will be that she is able to carry herself steadily through all the ungracious and violent and often fierce exactions of her lot, with a brave woman's heart, never cowed or driven out of courage by the tyrant her submission crowns. A delicate, defenseless, yet unfearing woman is a brave sight! Her type of life is more like that of Christ than any man's can be, and so this rough-minded, impetuous, fisherman apostle evidently feels himself.

     And, therefore, we are not surprised, when he goes on in the very next verse to exhort the "doing honor" to such women. Honor, as we commonly speak, is a kind of homage, such as inferiors pay to superiors, a subject nature to a governing nature. Rough apostle that he is, he is yet gallant enough to make a beautiful inversion here, calling on the husbands to give honor to the wives -- the stronger vessel to the weaker and more fragile -- and to take grade with them, so far, in the new love, as to be heirs together with them in the grace of life. He also intimates that if they can not do this, but must always be clamoring for equal rights on one side, or disowning the same on the other, their very "prayers will be hindered."

     What now is the general result to which we are brought by this review of the Scripture, but that women are out of place in the governing of men. Even Comte himself does but echo the rejected word when he says, "Woman may persuade, advise, judge, but she should not command." The Scriptures have more delicate and genial ways of speaking often, than in some of the citations here made, but in whatever terms they speak, terms of cherishment, as for one's own body, or of love as to a second self, or of honor paid to the precious ornament of a beautiful soul, or of gallant deference and mindfulness to a person tenderly fragile, there is clearly never a thought that women have a claim, on any score, to be set forward as campaigners in the state with men. The assertion of their political equality with men would have shocked any apostle, or other scripture writer, and an agitation by women, based on such equality, to secure the right of open contest with men for political office and power, would have been looked upon even as an offense against nature itself -- an outrage on decency and order utterly abominable. The great question of female suffrage they decide only the more effectually without naming it, for indeed it was a thing unknown, whether as respects the rights of men or of women, and we hear them say, just what we have been seeing with our eyes, that men are the force-element of the world, the imperative sex, and women the beauty-element, called to reign by the more sacred title of obedience and trust; both in unity, to be one flesh, a complemented whole of ornament and strength.

     About the only aspect of equality, or likeness of kind between the two sexes, anywhere presented in the Scriptures, relates to the future life, where, we are told, they "neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." And the declaration appears to be still more significant, when taken as connected with the fact that no scripture angel is put in the feminine gender, and that the word angel itself has no feminine. All which, as some may argue, tokens the fact, that sex belongs here below, and that both sexes alike have the real staple in them of a common angelhood in the life to come -- which staple of course pertains to them as truly here, and makes them equal here as there.

     The argument will be far-fetched of course, but arguments are wont to be, when they can not be found closer at hand. At the same time, truth obliges me to say, that I have a certain pleasure in it, or at least in tire facts at the base of it, that it allows a view of woman and her womanly relations to man, that well accommodates our admirations, and allows us to think with great satisfaction of her future possibilities. As there is to be no marrying, or giving in marriage, so there is to be no sex, according to our common, more humano, sense of the terms. And yet, in the more spiritual and properly celestial sense, the two complementary natures are still on hand, and are wanted for the complete ordering and variety of the consummate social whole. Husbandhood and wifehood are there, in the old-time bonds and recollections, by which they wove their lives together, in obligations which it would be a shame even to goodness and purity ever to forget. They are married no more, and yet they are married; even as all friends are joined everlastingly to friends in the offices of truth and duty, that bound them together. In this manner the grand society of angels comprehends married people and single people, and children grouped in part according to their life-time obligations, offices, and affinities. True, there is in one view, neither male nor female there, even as the apostle declares that, in Christ, there is neither, and yet, the intolerable dryness there of a pure male state, unblessed by womanly grace and feeling, is not to be dreaded. For there is a sexhood also in spirits, as truly as in organic life, and the sex-quality is only glorified, not obliterated. But their scale of quality is, it may be, greatly changed, if not inverted in dignity. Thus the force-natures -- the male -- that went forward, and took the helm of government and public war, appear to have graduated now as respects their force-element, having no longer much call for either government or war upon their hands. And now come up the beauty-natures that were subject, even as Christ came up into His divine ascendency when he rose from the dead, revealing now their quality and shining with him, "in the kingdom and patience" of his suffering Messiahship. These women, that were once put under and made subject, break into eminence now, as the soprano natures once in a while could and did in the contests of art below, and the superior fineness of their mold puts them in a tier of honor and power, which they have gloriously earned by their subject state. They were humbled, and are now exalted. Probably enough the man-spirits have more thunder in them still, but thunder is no very considerable power among the unfearing and sublimely loving good; for, to all such, quality and not quantity is the glory that most impresses their homage. And still, it may be that, as Christ, ascending out of weakness and the grave, felt "all power" gathering in upon him, in the spring of his reactions, so these women that were humbled, taking grade henceforth as angels, will the more excel in strength, and be chariots of God, more swift on their axle, when they go upon his errands.

     And have we not possibly here a tolerable, or at least, not absurd solution of that rather fine-drawn riddle by which Paul has so long plagued the commentators: -- "For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head, because of the angels." The "power," that is the authority she is under, signified by her veil, ought, he argues, to be on her head, as the token of her subject womanhood, till her graduation is accomplished, and she takes her equal right among angels. She is put in this womanhood, and the subject lot of her sex, to produce a duality and the answering relationships of a twofold quality or kind -- so as to spell the otherwise intolerable monotony of an isolated and single nature. Double sentiments are thus to be raised, and a beautiful dialogue of duty and feeling, in two kinds of duty, and two kinds of feeling, is to keep two echoes in play, and by so much of part and counterpart, maintain the dear society of life. This double appointment, therefore -- more honorable in fact for the woman, though it does not so appear -- she must never rebel against, but must wear upon her head the veil that signifies her office, till her finer nature comes to the flower. She will do it because of the angels and her own half Christly graduation among them.

     Be it then allowed, that such kind of sentiments as I am here discovering, are only put upon the Scripture, and not found in it, they are none the less worthy, and it may be, none the less true. I believe that they are from the Scripture, and reveal, as in beautiful forecast, the sublime culmination of what is called so often the dejected lot of woman. A great many things, because of the trial that is in them, are not dejected, but are only the more honorable and supremely elect. Who in fact are the true privileged of mankind but the heroes; and who are the heroes but those who master great adversities, those who have been able to suffer, and are therefore fit to reign? In this view it is, that I can only look with supreme pity on the campaigning women of this day, who have so far mistaken the honors of their sex, as to see no privilege but in being clear of it. They ought to see beforehand that they can not be men; and since they must be women, why should they be teaching both themselves and their sex to have a more fixed distaste of just what they must in any case be? They appear to be overmuch impressed with the clatter and clangor of our political machinery; there are so many rights in question, and such worlds of flash argument to assert them and defend them, and getting office signifies so much, and their over-easy admirations and ambitions are set in a glow, and their selfish appetite kindled puts them on asking: Why should not we go in for a part of the game also? Are we not dying for the want of something to do, and what better thing is there for us to do? Have we not as good rights as men? Have we not the same? Are we not men ourselves?

     Of course they are, in some true sense of the terms, but I wish it could be seen that they think as much and have as high an opinion of being women. For one, I have a considerable satisfaction in having women; just such, I mean, as can be and love to be women. I want them exactly not to govern, not to vote, not to be the stumping power of assemblies; natures that go to make atmosphere, and not to burn it up; who can be apart, who can wait in silence, who can think it a privilege not to be required in the times of conflagration, and assume it as their finer and more gentle lot to be in the sweetness of God, and keep some flavor of it for the flavorless and hard-worn life of their husbands. They are also to be greatly desired, that they may put something into their husbands, if possible, that is fit to be enjoyed, and worthy of being respected and honored. And if they do not make history fast in this manner, God be thanked, if some are willing to live without making history. Give us women enough to do the disinterested part of the world's life, and think it all the more honorable that they do not want to be honored, and then we are so far sure that there is something great in the world. And if this be the calling of women, when they are shut away from place and power, is there any calling which they can not better afford to lose?
 
 

V. SUBTLE MISTAKES OF FEELING AND ARGUMENT.
 

     THE false motives and mistaken arguments, that make their appearance in discussions of this subject, are too many to be recounted. To handle the whole chapter of them specifically and exhaustively is impossible, but it may be important to single out, for exposition, a few that operate most broadly and carry most effect.

     It is very desirable that our women agitators in this field should understand the real motive by which they are instigated, and there is much reason to believe that they sometimes do not. There is a terrible ennui upon them; a want of motive, opportunity, possibility, which would even make it pardonable to break out in almost any sort of revolt, or wildest sally. They fall on the question of suffrage and political life, and get so much taken with the notion of equality propounded that, before they know it, they begin to see all the kingdoms of the world, and imagine themselves really conquering place and signification in the promised equality. It is impossible not to speak of them here with sympathy and true respect; all the greater respect, we might say, that they can dare something excessive. However heated they may be in their expectations, they are not off the basis of reason so far as to wholly misconceive the reform that engages them. The re-sexing of their sex, even so far as to make it manly in habit and action, they know to be impossible. They might very well know beside, that they will burden their condition with worse disadvantages, and heavier weights of depression, if they undertake any thing which supposes a feeling of disrespect to their sex. Probably enough they do not, but it is not difficult to see, that they are working in a kind of impatience that idealizes relief, in the subtle, undefined, indefinable, hope of some masterhood state which is somehow to be gained, in the suffrage, and to be a virtual equivalent of masculinity. Political power and place, it is believed, will mend their condition. They will conquer, in this manner, a new sphere and platform of life, where they will at least be in peerhood with men, and the dishonored, sadly depressed lot of their sex will be taken away. I believe no such thing. On the contrary, I am under a conviction, not to be resisted that the depression they are under will be greatly increased. Giving the ballot, we shall give stones for bread; putting them, as women, to a test they can not stand, and forcing them down thus into a more hopeless prostration than could otherwise ever be reached.

      To say again, that I most profoundly sympathize with their endeavor, however mistaken, is unnecessary.

     If I were a woman, in the present lot of women, I think I should certainly wish to be a man, and that any change, giving but a semblance of a chance that way, I should hail with delight and accept with eagerness. The wages allowed their industry are so unequal; their employments so restricted; their subjection, so often, when married, to an overbearing tyrant will they have no counter force to resist; the crime it is for them to be heart-broken, and publish their woes by the sad look of their silence; and, what is worst and saddest of all, the worse than broker's corner, wherein all unmarried women are penned by restrictions they can not escape -- unable to work, because it will humble their position; unable to venture on great operations in trade, because a woman can not get the necessary credit; subject to indignities and much laughter, when they undertake a profession; wanting marriage as the proper woman's place, with a conscious ability to fill it, and with no ambition, save to be the ornament and cherished love of a worthy and true husband, yet chained fast under bonds of delicacy which well nigh forbid so much as the being approachable by a man. When, I say, these things are duly considered as pertainings of a woman's lot, we might almost justify them in a riot against natural sexhood itself, if there were any thing to be gained by it.

     And yet there is one matter, just now referred to, where a genuine reform would accomplish more for women, as I verily believe, and take them out of the corner that now pinches them a great deal more certainly, than to give them a right of suffrage and of civil office; having also the farther advantage, that it would give them a more open way to the proper woman's life, for which they are made, instead of taking them off into quasi battles with men, for points of precedence and prerogatives of government which do not belong to them and never can; I speak here of a reform that takes off, or somehow loosens the embargo on women, as respects advances toward marriage. The assumption now is, that women must be first lassoed and taken, courted long and skillfully then and almost to the death, before they can venture an approving look. If they can not be conquered, then they must not be had, and they must take this ground themselves. On one side there must be a close fence of prudery, hard as possible to be got over; and on the other, the man who will try, must go to it bravely, which alas! for his modesty is likely to be quite impossible. Full three-quarters of the men who get stuck in their bachelor life and are never married, are in fact the most in-born adorers of women; such as never in their lives can muster courage for any advance, just because the shrine they look upon has too much divinity in it for their mortal approach. Of course it will not do for unmarried women to put themselves in a way of being suitors to men. That kind of suitorship would even be an offense, and raise a sense of revulsion; nobody would recommend to women that they get over their modesty; but the almost cholic stringency of what are called good manners, in this matter, might be relaxed, without real impropriety and with