THE WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:I .SIR,—Your habitual fairness in dealing with opponents leads me to hope that you will not refuse a place in the Spectator to this letter, suggested by the article in your last issue on the "Jocular Pleas for and against 'Woman's Suffrage." Whether or not it would be better that the disputants should forego the use of the light artillery of ridicule and sarcasm, and meet each other only with the ponderous weapons of fact and logic, I am not much concerned to discuss, as it is a question of the same kind as the general disarmament of nations. No one will disarm till quite sure that the others will disarm also, a certainty which can never be attained. Least of all can we expect that the opponents of women's suffrage should abandon the only weapons many of them possess. Restricted to fact and logic, they would be dis- armed indeed, and brickbats and rotten eggs are the time- honoured weapons of the politicians who are neither able nor willing to convince, but only to put down their opponents. I would only protest against the assertion that there is any likeness between their weapons and those used by Miss Cobbe and her friends. As well might you compare the actual brickbat and rotten egg with the polished and feathered arrow. In her hands, fact was the arrow shot straight and unerring, and wit and humour only the feathers added to speed its flight. But to my point ; you imply that if sarcasm were admissible at all, you would bestow it unsparingly on the "perfectly ludicrous" disparity be- tween the aim avowed by the speakers at the women's suffrage meeting—" the addition of a few thousand women-householders, widows, or spinsters to the Register "—and the immense influence on the position of women generally they asserted would follow from the admission of this "handful of women in every consti- tuency." Without insisting on the obvious retort, that if it is so ludicrous to suppose that the admission of this handful of women can produce any marked influence on the course of politics, why not admit them at once, and remove a manifestly unjust distinc- tion between one group of ratepayers and another, I would ask whether, in writing these words, you remembered that when ad- mission to a political or any other privilege means the removal of a badge of inferiority from a portion of the population, the influence of such removal is not in proportion to the numbers who can exercise the privilege, but extends over the position of the whole body, every individual included under it? Now no one who calmly reflects upon it can deny that the political disability of women is a badge of inferiority ; that when adults in possession of the faculties of human beings and the requisite legal qualifications are placed under special disabilities as regards citizenship, and debarred from the privileges extended to all other adults having the same property- qualification, not being criminals, lunatics, or idiots, a stigma is cast upon them, from the effect of which no chivalry, no gentle and generous feeling in the best of the other sex can preserve them. That stigma would be removed by giving women-householders the franchise, and the handful of women which would be added to every constituency would directly, in some degree, indirectly, in a very large degree, in- fluence the legislation which has stamped that stigma on our laws regarding women. Many of those householders will be widowed mothers who have suffered from the wrong which Miss Cobbe touched upon with such pathetic eloquence—the exclusive pro- perty of the father in the child—and from another wrong she did not mention,—that which takes the guardianship of her children from the widowed mother, unless the father has left it to her by his will, and even then deprives her of the right of appointing guardians in her turn, unless that also is expressly conferred upon her by the same will. Such legislation never could have existed, but for the deep, underlying, though half-unconscious sense of woman's inferiority which pervades the minds of men, and which is strengthened by a thousand acting and reacting influences, from boyhood upwards. And as the respect of others is one of the most powerful elements in self-respect, so the change which raises women in public estimation, by raising them to the level of other citizens, will raise their character and standard of worth in them- selves.
Had I space, history would furnish me with a thousand illus- trations of this truth ; and I could, I think, quote in support of my argument many words of your own applying to other dis- qualified groups of human beings, not women. But I think I have said enough to show that the ground is not hollow under the feet of those who ask, and persist in asking, only for the equal application of the householding qualification to women as well as men ; and that it is not they, but their opponents who have to rid their minds of shams, especially of the greatest sham of all, —that it is for the sake of women's own best intermits that they refuse them enfranchisement, to preserve the delicacy which is not injured by skating-rinks and London ball-rooms from the hazards of the polling-booths ; and guard the purity and sweet- ness of womanly influence, which run no risks from the present freedom of women in every direction but that which might elevate and dignify them, from the danger of contact with the larger thought, the wider sympathies, engendered by the responsibilities [Our correspondent evades the main issue. What we maintain, and what, indeed, no one can deny, is, that even if the measure proposed by Mr. Russell Gurney and his friends were carried, the "badge of inferiority" would not be removed, but would remain. It would be still as true as ever that the qualification for the franchise has been so selected as to exclude the great majority of mature and respectable women from the vote ; and unless they demand the supplementing of that condition by another, or its exchange for one which would be as fair to women as to men, they have not "the courage of their convictions," and do not ask for what their principles imply.—En. Spectator.]
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