Anti-Suffrage Essays by Massachusets Women

Author:Massachusets Women [Women, Massachusets]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9781502859945
Google: -1QDogEACAAJ
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
Published: 2014-10-16T06:24:49+00:00

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An essential weakness in the suffrage argument is the failure to distinguish between government and culture, the functions and the instruments of each. Government is an organization for compelling one portion of the community to do the will of another portion. In a democracy, the minority is forced to obey the majority. The fundamental idea is compulsion, a thing not lovely in theory and frequently unlovely in practice. The golden haze that surrounds the dream of ideal democracy is dissipated by contact with any given city ward. The machinery of government is a matter of stress and strain; of selfishness, cruelty, and hate, at the worst; at best, of conflicting interest, mutual incomprehension, and maddening friction. When we refer to good government, we may mean either of two things. We may perhaps describe a community where the majority is notably successful in imposing its will on the minority so that laws are strictly enforced and scrupulously obeyed. In my experience, this is not the sense in which the suffragist uses the phrase. Woman suffrage is not advertised as a means of producing a more tractable minority. On the contrary, as Mr. Taft has pointed out, the suffrage movement is a conspicuous instance of one great menace of the age, the unwillingness of minorities to abide by the best judgment of the state as a whole. Again, the campaign orator does not assure the Maine audience that under equal suffrage statewide prohibition, instituted by male voters, will become a fact instead of a joke; no speaker in our home town has informed us that woman's vote will wipe out the saloons that defy the "no" of the March meeting. Rather, as I understand it, the "good government" which the suffragist promises to inaugurate consists of improved legislation along certain specific lines. That is to say, she promises not that the laws will be better enforced, but that they will be different. A community's predilection for good laws or bad, however, depends not on government but on civilization. Public opinion is moulded by innumerable forces, of which the home, the church, the newspaper, and the public school are merely illustrations. In most if not all of these, women already play a conspicuous part; through them they wield an incalculable power. The confusion, unconscious or otherwise, of these forces of culture and the forces of government, is one of the prime fallacies of the suffrage position.

To make the true state of the case more clear, take a single institution, the public school, with its various bearings on the question of woman suffrage. Pass over the school committee vote which only about two per cent of Massachusetts women regularly use, and consider merely the power which the very nature of our school system puts in women's hands. All the children in our primary grades, and all but an infinitesimal fraction of those in the grammar grades, are taught by women. The preponderance of woman teachers is nearly as great in the high

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