Read Ebook: The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage by Wright Almroth

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And when I venture to attempt a generalisation about woman, I endeavour to recall to mind without distinction all the different women I have encountered, and to extricate from my impressions what was common to all,--omitting from consideration all plainly abnormal women.

Having by this procedure arrived at a generalisation--which may of course be correct or incorrect--I submit it to my reader, and ask from him that he should, after going through the same mental operations as myself, review my judgment, and pronounce his verdict.

If it should then so happen that the reader comes, in the case of any generalisation, to the same verdict as that which I have reached, that particular generalisation will, I submit, now go forward not as a datum of my individual experience, but as the intellectual resultant of two separate and distinct experiences. It will thereby be immensely fortified.

If, on the other hand, the reader comes to the conclusion that a particular generalisation is out of conformity with his experience, that generalisation will go forward shorn of some, or perchance all, its authority.

But in any case each individual generalisation must be referred further.

And at the end it will, according as it finds, or fails to find, acceptance among the thoughtful, be endorsed as a truth, and be gathered into the garner of human knowledge; or be recognised as an error, and find its place with the tares, which the householder, in time of the harvest, will tell the reapers to bind in bundles to burn them.

A. E. W. 1913.

INTRODUCTION

Programme of this Treatise--Motives from which Women Claim the Suffrage--Types of Men who Support the Suffrage--John Stuart Mill.

The task which I undertake here is to show that the Woman's Suffrage Movement has no real intellectual or moral sanction, and that there are very weighty reasons why the suffrage should not be conceded to woman.

I would propose to begin by analysing the mental attitude of those who range themselves on the side of woman suffrage, and then to pass on to deal with the principal arguments upon which the woman suffragist relies.

The preponderating majority of the women who claim the suffrage do not do so from motives of public interest or philanthropy.

They are influenced almost exclusively by two motives: resentment at the suggestion that woman should be accounted by man as inherently his inferior in certain important respects; and reprehension of a state of society in which more money, more personal liberty , more power, more public recognition and happier physiological conditions fall to the share of man.

For its intellectual prestige the movement depends entirely on the fact that it has the advocacy of a certain number of distinguished men.

It will not be amiss to examine that advocacy.

The "intellectual" whose name appears at the foot of woman's suffrage petitions will, when you have him by himself, very often Make confession:--"Woman suffrage," he will tell you, "is not the grave and important cause which the ardent female suffragist deems it to be. Not only will it not do any of the things which she imagines it is going to do, but it will leave the world exactly where it is. Still--the concession of votes to women is desirable from the point of view of symmetry of classification; and it will soothe the ruffled feelings of quite a number of very worthy women."

It may be laid down as a broad general rule that only two classes of men have the cause of woman's suffrage really at heart.

The first is the crank who, as soon as he thinks he has discerned a moral principle, immediately gets into the saddle, and then rides hell-for-leather, reckless of all considerations of public expediency.

The second is that very curious type of man, who when it is suggested in his hearing that the species woman is, measured by certain intellectual and moral standards, the inferior of the species man, solemnly draws himself up and asks, "Are you, sir, aware that you are insulting my wife?"

To this, the type of man who feels every unfavourable criticism of woman as a personal affront to himself, John Stuart Mill, had affinities.

We find him writing a letter to the Home Secretary, informing him, in relation to a Parliamentary Bill restricting the sale of arsenic to male persons over twenty-one years, that it was a "gross insult to every woman, all women from highest to lowest being deemed unfit to have poison in their possession, lest they shall commit murder."

To this lady he is always ascribing credit for his eminent intellectual achievements. And lest his reader should opine that woman stands somewhat in the shade with respect to her own intellectual triumphs, Mill undertakes the explanation. "Felicitous thoughts," he tells us, "occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly lost for want of a husband or friend . . . to estimate them properly, and to bring them before the world; and even when they are brought before it they generally appear as his ideas."

This, then, is the philosopher who gives intellectual prestige to the Woman's Suffrage cause.

But is there not, let us in the end ask ourselves, here and there at least, a man who is of real account in the world of affairs, and who is--not simply a luke-warm Platonic friend or an opportunist advocate--but an impassioned promoter of the woman's suffrage movement? One knows quite well that there is. But then one suspects--one perhaps discerns by "the spirit sense"--that this impassioned promoter of woman's suffrage is, on the sequestered side of his life, an idealistic dreamer: one for whom some woman's memory has become, like Beatrice for Dante, a mystic religion.

We may now pass on to deal with the arguments by which the woman suffragist has sought to establish her case.

PART I

ARGUMENTS WHICH ARE ADDUCED IN SUPPORT OF WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE

ARGUMENTS FROM ELEMENTARY NATURAL RIGHTS

Signification of the Term "Woman's Rights"--Argument from "Justice"--Juridical Justice-"Egalitarian Equity"--Argument from Justice Applied to Taxation--Argument from Liberty--Summary of Arguments from Elementary Natural Rights.

Let us note that the suffragist does not--except, perhaps, when she is addressing herself to unfledged girls and to the sexually embittered--really produce much effect by inveighing against the legal grievances of woman under the bastardy laws, the divorce laws, and the law which fixes the legal age of consent. This kind of appeal does not go down with the ordinary man and woman--first, because there are many who think that in spite of occasional hardships the public advantage is, on the whole, very well served by the existing laws; secondly, because any alterations which might be desirable could very easily be made without recourse to woman's suffrage; and thirdly, because the suffragist consistently acts on the principle of bringing up against man everything that can possibly be brought up against him, and of never allowing anything to appear on the credit side of the ledger.

The arguments which the woman suffragist really places confidence in are those which are provided by undefined general principles, apothegms set out in the form of axioms, formulae which are vehicles for fallacies, ambiguous abstract terms, and "question-begging" epithets. Your ordinary unsophisticated man and woman stand almost helpless against arguments of this kind.

For these bring to bear moral pressure upon human nature. And when the intellect is confused by a word or formula which conveys an ethical appeal, one may very easily find oneself committed to action which one's unbiased reason would never have approved. The very first requirement in connexion with any word or phrase which conveys a moral exhortation is, therefore, to analyse it and find out its true signification. For all such concepts as justice, rights, freedom, chivalry--and it is with these that we shall be specially concerned--are, when properly defined and understood beacon-lights, but when ill understood and undefined, stumbling-blocks in the path of humanity.

We may appropriately begin by analysing the term "Woman's Rights" and the correlative formula "Woman has a right to the suffrage."

For the moment--for we shall presently be coming back to the question of the enforcement of rights--our task is to examine the arguments which the suffragist brings forward in support of her claims.

In reality it is only very few who clearly apprehend the nature of Justice. For under this appellation two quite different principles are confounded.

The primary and correct signification of the term Justice will perhaps be best arrived at by pursuing the following train of considerations:--

When man, long impatient at arbitrary and quite incalculable autocratic judgments, proceeded to build up a legal system to take the place of these, he built it upon the following series of axioms:-- All actions of which the courts are to take cognisance shall be classified. The legal consequences of each class of action shall be definitely fixed. The courts shall adjudicate only on questions of fact, and on the issue as to how the particular deed which is the cause of action should be classified. And such decisions shall carry with them in an automatic manner the appointed legal consequences.

For example, if a man be arraigned for the appropriation of another man's goods, it is an axiom that the court shall adjudicate only on the issue as to whether the particular appropriation of goods in dispute comes under the denomination of larceny, burglary, or other co-ordinate category; and that upon this the sentence shall go forth: directing that the legal consequences which are appointed to that particular class of action be enforced.

This is the system every one can see administered in every court of justice.

There is, however, over and above what has just been set out another essential element in Justice. It is an element which readily escapes the eye.

I have in view the fact that the classifications which are adopted and embodied in the law must not be arbitrary classifications. They must all be conformable to the principle of utility, and be directed to the advantage of society.

If, for instance, burglary is placed in a class apart from larceny, it is discriminated from it because this distinction is demanded by considerations of public advantage. But considerations of utility would not countenance, and by consequence Justice would not accept, a classification of theft into theft committed by a poor man and theft committed by a rich man.

The conception of Justice is thus everywhere interfused with considerations of utility and expediency.

There is, as already indicated, another principle which passes under the name of Justice. I have in view the principle that in the distribution of wealth or political power, or any other privileges which it is in the power of the State to bestow, every man should share equally with every other man, and every woman equally with every man, and that in countries where Europeans and natives live side by side, these latter should share all privileges equally with the white--the goal of endeavour being that all distinctions depending upon natural endowment, sex, and race should be effaced.

If we accept this principle of egalitarian equity as of absolute obligation, we shall have to accept along with woman's suffrage all the other "isms" believed in, and agitated for, by the cranks who are so numerously represented in the ranks of woman suffragists.

If, on the other hand, we accept the doctrine of egalitarian equity with the qualification that it shall apply only so far as what it enjoins is conformable to public advantage, we shall again make expediency the criterion of the justice of woman's suffrage.

Putting, then, this form of argument out of sight, let us come to close quarters with the question whether the payment of taxes gives a title to control the finances of the State.

Now, if it really did so without any regard to the status of the claimant, not only women, but also foreigners residing in, or holding property in, England, and with these lunatics and miners with property, and let me, for the sake of a pleasanter collocation of ideas, hastily add peers of the realm, who have now no control over public finance, ought to receive the parliamentary franchise. And in like manner if the payment of a tax, without consideration of its amount, were to give a title to a vote, every one who bought an article which had paid a duty would be entitled to a vote in his own, or in a foreign, country according as that duty has been paid at home or abroad.

In reality the moral and logical nexus between the payment of taxes and the control of the public revenue is that the solvent and selfsupporting citizens, and only these, are entitled to direct its financial policy.

Now if a woman insists, in the face of warnings that she had better not do so, on taxing man with dishonesty for withholding from her financial control over the revenues of the State, she has only herself to blame if she is told very bluntly that her claim to such control is barred by the fact that she is, as a citizen insolvent. The taxes paid by women would cover only a very small proportion of the establishment charges of the State which would properly be assigned to them. It falls to man to make up that deficit.

And it is to be noted with respect to those women who pay their full pro rata contribution and who ask to be treated as a class apart from, and superior to, other women, that only a very small proportion of these have made their position for themselves.

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