SHALL WOMEN VOTE?
A Matrimonial Dialogue
By Isabella Beecher Hooker
Scene: New York, February 18, 1860
Dramatis Personae: Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith
Mr. Smith:
Did you read this Editorial in the Independent, on women’s voting?
Mrs. Smith:
Yes … (pause) … and I thought the premises excellent but the conclusions decidedly weak.
Mr. Smith:
I don’t know about that. It was rather a new idea to me and one of some force too, that women, by the very fact of their sex and the sicknesses incidental to it, are unfitted for public life.
Mrs. Smith:
To be sure. That is the case, with mothers who are rearing a family, but how many there are, like my sister Martha, for instance, who have got through with that long ago—children all married and gone, and she left with nothing under the sun to do.
Mr. Smith:
She has a house and a husband to care for. You know how she said she could not possibly leave home and go to Boston the other day to take care of Rebecca, sick as she was, because Mr. Howard had the rheumatism and couldn’t even get his coat on without her help.
Mrs. Smith:
Yes—and I did go—leaving all my little children behind and nobody the worse for it either. But that is not to the point. The thing is just here. If you take all the single women and all who would be single if they did not fear the loneliness and ennui of such a life, all the widows and childless ones, and then the middle-aged mothers who have reared their brood and started them on their own independent flight—taking all these, there is material enough I am sure, for a very respectable Congress—respectable in point of character and ability too, as well as numbers. And I tell you what, my dear. I have been thinking of this very thing lately, in reference to Sister Martha and others like her. Just see what maturity of thought, real wisdom, there is in her, gained in this most motherly way of discriminating between her children, adapting influence and government according to character and bringing out a harmonious whole, from so many discordant or at least different elements. What a pity that such a disciplined mind should lie inactive, unfelt almost, in the very fulness of its power! It’s a shame, I declare it is. She must stay at home, forsooth, to pull the sleeve over her husband’s rheumy old arm.
Mr. Smith:
My, you grow eloquent, my dear—but then you must remember that there are not many women like your sister, either in character or situation.
Mrs. Smith:
I am not so sure of that. I could mention quite a number in our own circle this moment. There are Mrs. Ransom, and Mrs. Harry Pugh, and Mrs. George Pugh, and Mrs. Babcock, and those two old maid Pimlicos—if they were only a little younger—and there’s Lizzie Hamilton, just ready to enter the sisterhood, except for the odium, and ever so many more, every one of them capable of exerting a wholesome influence in a deliberative body of any kind, if they only had a chance and had been living in the expectation of a call some day.
Mr. Smith:
Well, suppose they had a call to sit, for instance, on a jury; jurors are town officers, you know, chosen by each town or village, as a body to be selected from when occasion requires . And if a man is called, he must go and perhaps sit up all night on a tough case. What would one woman do, among eleven men, shut up by themselves in the Court House, all night long?
Mrs. Smith:
In the first place, —they won’t sit up all night under the new regime. Women know better than to expect pure judgments, according to evidence, from midnight consultations and manipulations. Your jurors, in the millennial times now dawning, will go home early, go to bed at nine o’clock, sleep over knotty points—maybe praying a bit over them first—and wake in the morning with revised judgments and stout hearts to maintain them.
Mr. Smith:
But women being on a jury would involve their presence during the discussion of very delicate (you would say indelicate) matters. What do you say to that?
Mrs Smith:
I say just this—and I am glad you have brought it up —I have wanted to talk over this whole question of modesty and propriety with you for a long time, for I fear we do not agree here as well as in most things. My position is and always has been, since I have thought at all, that a man is by nature less fitted to handle “delicate subjects”, so called, than a woman. It is just as Mr. Beecher has said in his speech on “Woman’s Influence on Politics,” in this very same paper (have you read that, by the way?), “Men think from the physical and passional stand point,” and so, it seems to me, are very susceptible of contamination when dealing with subjects exciting to the passions. “Women,” as he truly says, “think from the stand point of affection and moral sentiment.” Consequently, in the same circumstances, they will impart a purifying influence, rather than receive a taint.
And I do most firmly believe that if there were but one woman on the bench, or among the advocates, or in the jury box, the character of criminal trials would be materially changed and the newspapers would have no chance to report the nauseous matter that the public taste now demands (so they say). I can’t tell you what I have felt on this custom of allowing boys to read, in the classics and elsewhere, things that their sisters mustn’t, and so training up men to talk obscenities among themselves that they would shudder to have their wives listen to. And, speaking of jury trials, as illustrative of the whole matter, there is not a discussion of principles or of evidence under the laws of anatomy, physiology, and so on, that a woman could not enter into with as much ability and fineness of perception as a man. While looking at it from her higher stand point, she would certainly come to closer discriminations and more righteous judgments.
I tell you, Harry, I feel on this subject as on no other, and the range is wide as earth and time and eternity too, for that matter. For there is no such thing as sex in the next world, I take it, and this is but the Primary Department to that. It is just here that I seem to see the hand of God in human development more clearly than elsewhere. I see how woman first led the way to sin.
Through her fine susceptibilities, she first admitted the great temptation. She longed to soar beyond the garden walls and reach the divine. “Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” Man, easily seduced through his senses, followed, but with no upward gaze. Now, I see woman, purified by long ages of suffering, self-disciplined in the cloister of home, ready to lead the way to knowledge and purity—one at last—and man, toiling through the same ages to supply the demands of his senses, burdened by the woman he cannot live without and by their common offspring, made strong through labor and conflict. Wisdom, purity, and strength—from this time, these three walk hand in hand, with even pace, till the great consummation.
There you have it, my first speech. I declare, and I feel easier for getting it off. It has lain on my soul, like lead, these months past.
Mr. Smith:
Well, I should think it would. There is theology and philosophy, sense and nonsense, all in a heap. I trust you feel relieved, and there’s no harm done, I assure you. I must say, however, that your now seems a long way ahead, if it is anywhere. There does not seem to be much prospect at present of the angelic times you prophesy.
Mrs. Smith:
I don’t see them so very far off in my vision. It depends upon whether you look at the details or only the ground plan. There are indications, plenty of them already. Don’t you remember what Doctor Mason told us about Miss Hartwell’s endeavors to obtain a medical education, and how through his intervention she at last gained permission to witness dissections in the Anatomical Rooms of a college, with a large class of young men, if she chose to do it—and she did choose and went day after day, through the whole course, and the young men looked with reverence and not a jest nor indecency was perpetrated from first to last? I have never forgotten that, for the Doctor wasn’t a radical, he just mentioned it to us as a remarkable thing with which he happened to be connected.
Mr. Smith:
Yes, I remember, and there is something in it, no doubt. But to come back to the voting, don’t you see that in most cases, you only duplicate the vote, and so merely add to the labor of counting up? Every wife would be pretty sure to vote just as her husband does—and daughters with their fathers or mothers.
Mrs . Smith:
Yes, yes, my good sir. Husband and wife might vote for the same candidate (I won’t say party; it will be man and measures, not parties, by that time), but that is not necessarily the very same candidate the husband would vote for, were his wife in her old ignorance and indifference on political matters. She would imitate the wise procedure of a certain young gentleman I knew once who, having a spicy young girl that hated abolitionists more than she did slavery, begged her in the long winter evenings of the first year to read aloud, out of pity to his weak eyes, “The Life of Wilberforce” by his Sons—English Edition—Six Volumes, and surreptitiously laid on her table, “Jay’s View,” “Thom L. Kimball on West Indian Emancipation,” etc. , etc ., till in the course of months, she waked up a fullblooded Anti-slavery woman—and did not at once suspect the influence. That is just the way I would serve you, if I could ever catch you on the wrong side of anything, which I fear I never shall, while that great top knot of benevolence holds its own.
In politics, for instance, just suppose that you voted the Democratic ticket (never mind curling your lips—I only said suppose). Wouldn’t I subscribe and pay for the Evening Post, for instance, and wouldn’t I read you nice little bits of literary criticism— “Philology as illustrative of History,” etc ., etc ., night after night? And wouldn’t you just like to look the paper over for yourself, politics and all, before long? And at last, we should “both vote for the same candidate.” Of course we should, and what’s more, he would be elected too.
Mr. Smith:
You mentioned, I think, that you should pay for your charming paper. Permit me to inquire, if you please, where you would procure the necessary funds?
Mrs. Smith :
I shall give a lecture, fifty dollars for one night. That would pay for several papers, and leave something for your birthday present besides.
Mr. Smith:
But I thought you had tried giving lectures at night and with slight encouragement.
Mrs. Smith :
Giving lectures? Yes, I have. But I shall change my audience —”Fit though few”—and leave the curtain out. You’ll see, one of these days, how it will be. At least you would, if I were driven to seek your conversion. Masculine immaculateness is a poor stimulant to feminine activities, however; I found that out long ago.
Mr. Smith:
I do not succumb to flattery, my love. You have failed to convince me that homes can spare their mistresses very often, even for the public good. I fear I shall hold to this “one idea,” through all time, at least.
Mrs. Smith:
And so you may, without a word to the contrary from me. I don’t wish to see the homes robbed any more than you do, and I don’t think they will be when every disability is removed from woman. This is a matter that will take care of itself, as every right thing does, in the fulness of time. It is here just as it was years ago, when rights of color were first talked about and amalgamation was the weighty argument against allowing a black man to vote. I remember how you hooted the idea that white girls would rush to marry black men the moment they were admitted to the simple rights of men. And so now, every other woman in town is not going to Congress, nor the Legislature, nor the Court Room just because she is granted the right to vote, and to speak, and to do every other thing that God made her capable of doing.
There will be frictions, mistakes, and excrescences during the period of discussion and change as there always have been and must be in a world full of imperfect creatures, but when the new order is once established, women will serve only where they are wanted, as indicated by the votes of the majority, men, as well as women, being the judges.
Mr. Smith:
There is no doubt about their being wanted. They always are wanted – everywhere – and that is just the trouble. A man has to fight and pray sometimes to get one woman to help build his nest and make things snug and comfortable there, and just as he is nicely settled, things all arranged to his mind, it would not be so pleasant to have her making “appropriations” elsewhere, “regulating foreign and domestic relations,” etc ., etc ., all out of her own head. You can see that at a glance.
Mrs. Smith:
You men are not the ones to complain, however, as I see. Numbers being equal, you have on your side, first, precedents, your great legal stronghold; then, pride, passion and prejudice, all to be overcome before the experiment even can be tried.
Mr. Smith:
A formidable chain of redoubts, certainly. I pray, how do you expect to carry the day?
Mrs. Smith:
Begin with a siege, of course, and then skirmishes, hot shot, and bombs, all in good time; a little feminine strategy now and then, by way of variety. But “Magna est veritas et praevalebit” – the only Latin I ever knew, except “E pluribus unum.” That’s the great hope, after all.
Mr. Smith:
Not a forlorn hope, I trust, after all that erudition.
Mrs. Smith:
I do not succumb to jokes, Sir. They are all very well in their way, and you make good ones sometimes, but I put it to you now, on the spot, what rights have you as an intelligent, moral, and accountable being that I have not? We are peers, before God and man; you have said so to me a thousand times virtually, and all after this is but a question of time and expediency.
Mr. Smith :
Time! Precious little of that you would allow! You would vote for universal suffrage without distinction of color or sex this minute if you had the chance!
Mrs. Smith :
Yes, I would give an individual vote, certainly, but if absolute power were in my hands, I would not open the polls to women today—no, nor next year, nor ever, unless public opinion demanded it. I honor too highly the Divine precedent to do such a thing as that. It has been the one thing hardest for me to learn, this “patience of waiting”, but I see more and more the strength and beauty of this gradual upbuilding, this calling on the ages to work, this doing with our might, and leaving the results with God.
Mr. Smith:
Oh, well, you are too ideal for me. I distinguish the possible only, and work and pray for that alone. But you would insist on the last word in any case, wouldn’t you? So I may as well give up here as anywhere.
Mrs. Smith :
The last word? Yes, certainly. Prescriptive rights are not to be despised with a world full of better ones ahead. I give it to you, “Discretion is the better part of valor.”
[END OF SELECTION]