Section III: Some Exceptions
Chapter XII: Women Insurgents
"In times like these every soul should do the work of a full-grown man. When I pass the gate of the Celestials and good Peter asks me where I wish to sit, I will say: 'Anywhere so that I am neither a negro nor a woman. Confer on me, Great Angel, the glory of white manhood, so that henceforth I may feel unlimited freedom.'"
—Letter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony.
"It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust."
—Letter of Susan B. Anthony to her brother.
"Whatever is morally right for a man to do, is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights."
— Angelina Grimké Weld.
Doubtless nothing more surprised the orthodoxy and the social conventions of American society in the earlier half of the Nineteenth Century than the way in which a few hundred women broke loose, so to speak; coming out from the domesticated masses to demand all sorts of unprecedented rights, to champion unpopular causes, to enter activities where their labors rather than their voices had hitherto been acceptable. And yet the modern student of history sees in this ebullition simply the logical consequences of the political and intellectual ferment of the later Eighteenth Century, which left as its principal residuum the doctrine of equal rights and opportunities for all classes of men.
When once the doctrine had been implanted it was inevitable that reasoning minds should soon begin to ask: Why not for women, too? Acute and just-thinking men could not but see the inconsistencies involved in a career like that of Mercy Warren, whose satirical poems and dramas were of as great service to the revolutionary cause as that contributed by many a fighting man; but whose status remained that of an inferior and childish being:
"Noble and understanding as this lady of '76 was in fact, and recognized by the men of her day to be, in thebry she was anything but that. She was a person of inferior mind, unable to master the strong meat of education, unfit to be trusted with the guardianship of her property or her children, lest both suffer, not to be allowed free speech in public lest her tongue run away with her and disorder and loose doctrines be encouraged, not to be allowed to mix in the gatherings or deliberations of men lest her household, her manners, and public morals suffer. The greatest men of New England are on record on these points, and the Church and the Law upheld them."1
The appreciation of human rights engendered by the struggle for independence was quickened by the teachings and social experiments of Robert Owen, and by the socialistic propaganda of the early forties. In the wake of the extraordinary prosperity following the panic of 1837, and as a result of all these economic and humanitarian theorizings, two movements arose which were destined to precipitate a concrete feminine protest. Temperance and the abolition of slavery were calculated by their very nature to appeal to the highly developed sympathies of womenkind; and, as moral issues, might naturally have been deemed suitable to their sphere in life. The instinctive interest of women was not in social or religious theory; rather, there were many like Lucretia Mott, the Quaker preacher, who wrote of herself:
"The highest evidence of a sound faith being the practical life of a Christian, I have felt a far greater interest in the moral movements of our age than in any theological discussion."
Inspired, therefore, by the humaner aspects of religion, women organized temperance meetings, raising the money and doing the largest part of the work, only to be excluded not merely from the rostrum, but even from the debates on the floor. The spectacle of Antoinette Brown, the ac credited delegate of two societies to a temperance convention in New York, standing for an hour and a half, while the men delegates wrangled and fought over her right to speak, and the clergymen cried, "Shame on such women!" is incredible in our day. One must enter into it from the standpoint of a woman to comprehend the effect of such injustices and insults repeated again and again upon women whose only offense was that they wished to share in a philanthropic movement.
The denial of free speech, based on Paul's injunction that women should keep silence in the churches, was, in fact, the exciting cause of the first and most extreme phase of the woman's rights movement. The women delegates who accompanied William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to the National Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, were refused seats and the right of taking any active part in the meeting. Eight years afterward the first woman's rights convention met, at which the most extreme anti-man resolutions ever produced in the history of the movement were adopted. Wholly untrained in the underlying historical causes of their situation, and accustomed to dealing with the concrete in domestic life, they made a violent attack on mankind in the tone of slaves denouncing their masters.
"The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
"He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
"He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she has had no voice.
"He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men.
"He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law civilly dead.
"He has taken from her all right in property, even in the wages she earns.
"He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and, in the case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of woman.
"After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
"He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.
"He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
"He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.
"He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life."
One of the most characteristic human tendencies is for the aggrieved of any class not to stop with the mere enumeration of their grievances, but to place the blame for their condition upon those in power. The historian, however, having divested any protest of this inevitable and bitter tone, must determine whether the wrongs alleged did in truth exist. If they did, the violence of expression is explained, if not always fully justified. The grievances for the first time categorically stated by women in 1848 were not exaggerated, although the blame for their existence could not justly be laid upon men then living; for even now, after the lapse of more than half a century, four of the dozen complaints still stand, and others have been only partially remedied.
It is not surprising, therefore, that a class so limited in education and social experience, and awakened all at once to the injustices of their position, should allow their indignation to get away with reason and prudence, nor that their tactics should be amusingly feminine. Perhaps they were not the less effective on that account. For thirty years after this declaration, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony were partners in agitation—"pertinacious incendiaries" their contemporaries called them—having no compunction in harassing the most dignified bodies of men. Mrs. Stanton confessed:
"Whenever we saw an annual convention of men, quietly meeting year after year, filled with brotherly love, we bethought ourselves how we could throw a bombshell into their midst, in the form of a resolution to open the doors to the sisters outside. . . . In this way, we assailed in turn, the temperance, educational, and church conventions, agricultural fairs, and halls of legislation."
Yet, if the picture of these insistent methods brings now a smile, it brings, too, contradictory feelings of pity and respect—pity that educated men should have been the most narrow-minded of all; and respect for feminine conviction and courage which led women to risk, in behalf of their sex, all that they had been taught was most lovely and respectable.
The denial of an active and recognized share in the temperance and educational reforms of the time was by no means the most serious of the grievances of thoughtful women. The married woman was still under the status of the Common Law, which gave her no control of her children, no matter what her husband's treatment of her or of them might be; and which made her almost wholly dependent on her father, her husband, or her son in affairs of property. Lockwood states correctly the position in which women found themselves:
"Till the late forties the Common Law provisions respecting the property rights of married women obtained in every state except Louisiana. These provisions wrested from women all property rights. If an unmarried woman through gift or inheritance came into possession of property, real or personal, she forfeited all claim to it and all right to its management and control when she married. It then at once became the property of her husband, and if he died, leaving no children, it passed to his nearest kin, leaving the widow with but a dower in real estate and a small share in the personal property."
Owen, in The Free Inquirer, put in less dispassionate terms the bitterness which women themselves no doubt felt:
"She can inherit nothing, receive nothing, earn nothing, which her husband cannot at any time legally wrest from her. All her rights are swallowed up in his. She loses, as it were, her legal existence. She may be—thanks to occasional and gratuitous generosity she sometimes is kindly and even rationally treated; but she has no right to demand—I will not say kindness—but even the most common justice and humanity. A man may not beat his wife too unmercifully, nor is he allowed to kill her. Short of this he can scarcely transgress the law, so far as she is concerned."
It is a truism of history to say that, to whatever degree there is unchecked power over helpless or inferior persons, there will be a corresponding degree of abuse. Susan Anthony protected and concealed a married woman, who ran away from an abusive and unfaithful husband—a man of conspicuous station—in order to keep her child. Miss Anthony was persecuted by her friends and the anti-slavery people because she would not reveal the fugitive's hiding-place, but she declared:
"As I ignore all law to help the slave so will I ignore it to protect an enslaved woman."
The wife was able to earn her living in secret for some years, but her husband finally drew the income from her books, and stole the daughter from her. Such cases were by no means uncommon at this period. One of my very earliest recollections is a picture of a wretched and determined woman with a baby under her shawl, who had taken refuge after nightfall behind our kitchen stove, begging my father to help her run away from a drunken husband, because there was no safety for the child, nor help to be invoked from the law. The little Elizabeth Cady saw many frantic women appealing to her father for legal protection, and when she was told that it was "The Law" encased in the yellow volumes on the shelves which prevented him from helping them, she began to cut the "woman laws" out of his law books.
Alice Stone Blackwell has expressed dispassionately the attitude of thinking women with regard to the legal view of women's services and their property rights which was current in America at the time the woman movement began:
"Most men are better than the law, and few husbands use the extreme and tyrannical power which the law gives them; but there the law is, ready for any bad husband to take advantage of it. . . . This does not show any special depravity on the part of men. If women alone had made the laws no doubt the laws would have been just as one-sided . . . only it would have been the other way round. No doubt it would have taken a long and arduous man's rights movement to bring about the needed improvements, and . . . we may be sure that the women would not have so far altered the old laws as to make them glaringly unjust to women."
It required ten years of incessant attack in the state of New York to get a modification of the law giving the man sole control of the children; and when the women agitators, diverted by the Civil War, rested from their vigilance for one session, the Legislature quietly put the law back on the statute books in almost its original form—and the women had to begin all over again. And at the time of this writing only thirteen states give to women the joint guardianship of their children.
It is necessary constantly to remind ourselves of such facts as these if we would comprehend the bitterness with which the woman's rights movement began. Nor must we forget that marriage and motherhood was the only career held open to women or deemed creditable to them; that from the Pulpit and the Press their potential motherhood was urged as the unalterable reason for their protection and support by mankind. Such inconsistency between doctrine and deed on the part of men, though disguised under the veil of religion and domestic purity, was too evident to be missed even by the untrained female intellect. Many a domestic woman, without the courage or capacity of the exceptional leaders of the woman's rights movement, had as great a sense of injustice which she dared not express. Very few men, even, have the courage to quarrel with their bread and butter, or to disrupt their family peace for the sake of a principle; how much less, then, should women accustomed to ages of subordination be expected to do so, although it might ultimately bring them greater freedom and happiness?
Besides the growing sense of human rights in the air about them, and the social injustices of which they were becoming keenly sensible, another kind of limitation began to chafe women who had to support themselves outside the home. The widespread movement for common-school education, for better private schools, and, finally, for people's universities, created a sudden demand for teachers. Then, as now, men could make more money and have more exciting careers in other occupations than teaching. Moreover, when the male population was reduced and families were impoverished by the Civil War, the number of women who must earn wages was greatly increased, and, for the educated woman, teaching was the easiest and least unwomanly path to self-support.
They found themselves compelled to accept from one-half to one-third as much as men for their work in the same positions. Miss Anthony, for instance, taught twelve years before she undertook her life-work as a reformer, during most of which she received eight dollars a month in positions where men had been paid from twenty to thirty dollars. At a state teachers' convention, held in Rochester in 1853, there were five hundred teachers present, two-thirds of them women. All of them had paid their fee, but not one of them was allowed to speak or vote—except Miss Anthony, who, by her pertinacity, won a grudging permission from the male minority to make one short speech. At this time, in Rochester, New York, a woman principal received two hundred and fifty dollars a year in positions where men received six hundred and fifty dollars; while in the state at large there were eleven thousand teachers, four-fifths of whom were women, yet the women received only one-third of the total salary fund.
No sooner did women begin to teach in considerable numbers than they discovered the superficial and inadequate character of their book education, which they had to remedy as best they might by night study and scanty courses in schools invariably inferior to those provided for young men. In this respect girls of good birth who did not attempt to earn their living were scarcely better off than their poorer sisters. Elizabeth Cady went two years to a boarding-school, which was then considered the best in the country, but she records those years as "the dreariest in her life." Lucy Stone's parents expected her to stay at home and work on the farm, while her brothers went to college; but she refused to do so, borrowed the money to go to Oberlin—the only college of good rank open to her—and there discovered her remarkable gift for public speaking. Of Lydia Maria Child it is recorded:
"She combined the authorship of more than thirty books and pamphlets with a singular devotion both to public and private philanthropies, and with almost too exacting a faithfulness to the humblest domestic duties."
Yet, although she had a superior mind as compared with that of her brother, Convers Francis, who became one of the most advanced thinkers of the Unitarian body, she had
"a very unequal share of opportunities, having, in fact, only such preparation as she could get in attending the public schools and one year in a private seminary."
Girls who, by their ambition and innate capacity, could not help rising above the feminine standards of the day, were pitied rather than encouraged to utilize their powers. The father of Frances Gage, when she was helping him to make barrels, used to be sorry for himself rather than for her, because she was not a boy. After the premature death of her brother at Union College, the little Elizabeth Cady studied very hard and won a Greek prize, with which she hoped to surprise her father and comfort him somewhat for the loss of his brilliant son. But when she brought the trophy to him, he only bemoaned the fact that she was not a boy. And, although in later years she read law so as to entertain intelligently her father's legal guests, when she joined the woman's rights movement he brought all his authority to bear, and told his married daughter, who was to prove herself as able as he, that he would rather "see her under the sod" than engaged in such an agitation.
When once the exceptional woman had mustered courage for the hardships of getting an education, or had jeopardized her social standing by joining in some of the current reforms, her resentment toward narrow-minded men was doubtless intensified by their refusal to acknowledge her capacity, or to recognize ungrudgingly the value of her service. The experience of Antoinette Blackwell was certainly calculated to make a beautiful and talented woman into an iconoclast. Having partly worked her way through Oberlin College, and taught for several years, she returned there to study theology, and at the end of her course was refused a license to preach solely because she was a woman. Theology was, indeed, a scandalous field of labor for women from the standpoint of church conservatism, but in fields of social service far less unusual, and in which the feminine gifts were certainly useful, women workers found just as little appreciation.
The story of Frances Gage is an example of the tardy and inadequate recognition of services as valuable and far more exceptional than those of many fighting men during the Civil War. Although poor and in the midst of bearing and rearing eight children, she yet found time to read and write and speak of slavery, temperance, and woman's rights; she suffered the loss of property because of her abolition principles; and when, by reason of her husband's illness and business failure, she had to support the family as assistant editor of an agricultural paper, the War destroyed the paper. She sent four sons to the army, and she and a daughter went to the South to give their unpaid services to the soldiers. So terrible were the conditions there that she came back, to travel through the North and speak merely for her expenses, in order to rouse the public to remedy them. When over fifty years of age, she was still serving as unsalaried agent of the Sanitary Commission; and, finally, after the War, she still had ability enough to earn for herself a home for her old age. In this woman was combined the practical business ability of a man, with the largest motherly and humane instincts, and yet her life has been given slight notice, except in woman's rights publications.
How deeply this lack of appreciation of the sacrifices, the hardships, and the labors of the women of the country incident to the great war has cut, may be known from a single paragraph in the Autobiography of Susan B. Anthony.
"There can never be an adequate portrayal of the service rendered by women of this country during the Civil War, but none will deny that, according to their opportunities, they were as faithful and self-sacrificing as the men. . . . Yet not one of these ever received the slightest official recognition from the government. In the cases of Miss Carroll, Dr. Blackwell, and Mrs. Griffing, the honors and the profits were all absorbed by men. Neither Clara Barton nor Dorothea Dix ever asked for a pension. All of these women at the close of the war asked for the right of suffrage. . . .
"What words can express her humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question."
Here was in truth a cause for humiliation even to those women who had taken no part in the woman's rights movement, and one which has had its share in converting the conservative women of our day to the necessity for self-assertion. For the suffrage, extended to the negro as a measure of protection, has inevitably been given to foreigners of every race and class, until there is presented the curious situation of a government, founded for the expression of democratic ideas, all of whose ignorant citizens may vote, and nearly half of whose educated and property-owning members are shut out from representation or share in public issues.
It was customary for a generation after the War to give as an unanswerable reason why women should not be given the vote, that they could not fight for their country. Although this is not so often heard in modern times, it was none the less untenable even when it was in vogue. The figures of the Provost Marshal's Bureau during the War showed the physical condition of more than a million men. Two hundred and fifty-seven out of every thousand were declared unfit for military service, and their unfitness was in inverse proportion to their social and political importance, as shown below:
Occupation | # of Men Declared Unfit for Military Service per 1000 |
---|---|
Unskilled laborers | 348 |
Tanners | 216 |
Ironworkers | 187 |
Lawyers | 544 |
Journalists | 740 |
Clergymen | 954 |
click to view a photo of the original table |
In a time when these facts were familiar it was no doubt galling to women to know that of the divines, the editors, and the lawyers who filled Congress, nearly all of whom were opponents of women's rights, the majority could not themselves be defenders of their country.
Since the orthodox churches were the chief disseminators of the traditional views of woman's sphere, it was inevitable that exceptional women should take refuge in the societies representing newer and less conventional forms of religious and social dogma. The Society of Friends put no hindrance in the way of women becoming preachers, and recognized their capacity as human beings, regardless of sex. Lucretia Mott, with a family of little children about her, felt the call of the Spirit, and, in spite of delicate health and many cares, became one of the rarest as well as one of the keenest of the early women in public life. It may be that the strong heart of Susan B. Anthony would have failed but for the wise and wholly sympathetic backing of her fine old Quaker father. The incorrigibly honest, sensitive, hungry-minded Anna Dickinson might, perhaps, have been stunted to the stature of a mere Ishmaelite instead of becoming a great political speaker, had she not been born in a gentle and earnest community of Friends.
In all the Utopian and socialistic colonies characteristic of this period of our history there were women drawn from their home churches by the larger and more prophetic atmosphere to be breathed there. Frances Wright took refuge in New Harmony with the followers of Owen. The Unitarian societies received accessions both from the less liberal Friends and from the Trinitarian bodies, of women as well as men, who could no longer endure the narrow and inhuman bonds which they set. Such colonies as New Harmony and Brook Farm, though founded from motives far removed in the beginning from those which were precipitating the woman question, inevitably promoted the development of exceptional women whose careers were in themselves a contradiction of the accepted views as to feminine capacity. Then, as now, whenever a thinking man came to know such a woman, he ever afterwards had an enlarged idea of what women might become under the stimulus of broadened opportunities.
Although a few of the most striking of the early come-outers from domestic womenkind were made so by some thwarting personal experience, by far the larger number were normal women driven into publicity by the necessity of self-support, or by their attachment to some benevolent cause or social reform. The husbands of some failed in business; others were widows obliged to earn a living for their children, or daughters helping their parents. In such cases they were of necessity blindly doing men's work, because they could not earn enough in the purely domestic avocations. This unpremeditated escape from domesticity was often made imperative by the change from an agricultural to an industrial regime in the communities about them, and by the exigencies of war. Just as on the Continent of Europe women have for ages been replacing in the fields of production the men drawn from them for military purposes, so many women in the United States, during and after the War, replaced the men in the field, the office, and the factory.
A modern novelist makes one of his characters says:
"There have been thousands of Queens. Only a few have been great. Do you know why those few were great? Because there was no King to meddle; they had to be queens, and so they became immortal."
In our day it is so common to see women who have been released from the domestic routine by loss of family, or childlessness, or failure to marry, making themselves efficient in the same fields as men, that it requires an effort to realize the strength of character on the one hand, or the social compulsion on the other, which was necessary half a century ago to make a woman break through the conventions.
If they had but known it, these women, who formulated the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, touched only lightly the basic question which underlay all the struggles of the women of the Nineteenth Century, when they declared:
"He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God."
Beneath the demand for specific rights and the protest against definite injustice, lay something more fundamental which conditioned them all: should women be allowed to judge for themselves what was right and wrong, and to act accordingly? Were they at last grown-up human beings, or still only in tutelage to men? Without being aware of it, these first come-outers were arming themselves against the oldest traditions of society-the authority of the Church over the human mind, and the authority of man over woman. Dimly, and as yet by instinct, rather than reason, the first exceptional women knew that their case was analogous to that of the slave for he, too, was caught in the meshes of a tradition pegged fast at every point to the Christian Scriptures. The doctrine of plenary inspiration and the practice of literal interpretation still gave to every man an unanswerable rebuttal for every argument in behalf of female freedom.
In much of the literature of the woman movement it is assumed that the women insurgents of the last century set out to emancipate their kind in a temper of sheer eccentricity and belligerency but nothing could be further from the truth. They were rather like the patriots of the American Revolution: for a long, long time conscious of injustice, but unwilling to precipitate a struggle; then, when the fight was suddenly imminent, a few went into it as into a joyous contest, but by far the larger number went re luctantly, at the call of duty, and shrinking from the necessity of making themselves odd and conspicuous. Not one of the women who are now recorded as the leaders of the movement began as a deliberate promoter of female rights; all were literally driven into the fight by the arrogant complacency of reformers who were perfectly sure that God had ordained them a chosen sex for the guidance and control of the weaker vessels.
Looking upon the pitiful beginnings of the woman movement, it seems as if the Spirit of Justice, wearily hovering for centuries about the world, at last breathed upon the altar fires of homekeeping women, and kindled them into flame, until they were obliged to join in some of the moral issues of their time, though it might lead to social martyrdom. Of all the moral questions bruited in the thirties and forties, slavery was the most odious; but women who began to work most modestly for educational and temperance reforms found themselves driven by their very femininity to take part in it. Inasmuch as by their potential motherhood they were sensitized to finer human issues, they could not escape being caught up by the wave of humanitarianism which was engulfing the Western World.
From whatever little islet of home-keeping traditions they came, no sooner did they set out for a larger continent than they began to find themselves tossed about on a stormy sea, and, in the minds of their conservative friends, regarded as wholly lost. In an old book called Eminent Women of the Age, the tone of which is extremely conservative, I find the following paragraph:
"The women who devoted themselves to the antislavery cause in the early days, endured the double odium of being abolitionists and 'women out of their sphere.' . . . The Press and the Pulpit exhausted the English language to find adjectives to express their detestation of so horrible a revelation as 'a woman out of her sphere.' A clerical appeal was issued and sent to all the clergymen of New England calling on them to denounce in their pulpits this unwomanly and unchristian proceeding."
But when once they had faced and accepted ostracism as the price of a share in social service, it was natural, if not altogether wise, that they should lend themselves to every other kind of reform. They could not be satisfied to pursue single-mindedly one chosen and greater cause—they must give their support to every small and ill-advised one as well; bringing upon themselves and upon higher issues the cumulative odium and ridicule of them all. For three-quarters of a century the fundamental human question, whether woman was made "for man," or whether she was an adult being with an "inalienable right" to judge and act for herself, has been obscured, distorted, and delayed by the opprobrium attached to contemporary social reforms. From infidelity and free-love, with which the Owenites were charged, to the subversion of society by abolition; from the derision heaped upon the "water-cure" and transcendentalism, to the Bloomer costume, every form of public ridicule has been associated with the reforms demanded by and for women.
Miss Anthony was one of the first to see clearly that, so far as the solution of the woman question was concerned, this policy was a mistake. After reluctantly adopting the Bloomer costume, she abandoned it, and wrote in explanation to a friend:
"I found it a physical comfort but a mental crucifixion. It was an intellectual slavery; one could never get rid of thinking about herself, and the important thing is to forget self. The attention of my audience was fixed upon my clothes instead of my words. I learned the lesson that to be successful a person must attempt but one reform. By urging two, both are injured, as the average mind can grasp and assimilate but one idea at a time."
In our time the phrase "woman's rights" is almost exclusively used to refer to woman suffrage; but when the Declaration of Sentiments was made in 1848, the denial of suffrage was only one, and by no means the most important, of the twelve grievances enumerated. To-day it remains the most important of those not yet remedied, the others being already partially accomplished and fallen back to the normal position of a few among many desirable reforms for the public welfare. The extremely slow progress of opinion with regard to suffrage has been due partly to the discredit shed upon it by its connection with anti-slavery; but still more to the decline of enthusiasm with respect to manhood suffrage, which was originally looked upon as the democratic panacea for all political and social ills.
The disappointing results of manhood suffrage, attributed in part to the addition of the illiterate negro and the unassimilated foreigner, has led to a reaction against the extension of suffrage as a means of social reform. The apathy of women themselves and the conservatism of intelligent men with regard to woman suffrage may be assigned in great measure to the general feeling that, since manhood suffrage has not reformed the world, the calling in of women, presumably less intelligent, would produce even worse conditions.
As so often happens in the development of any truth, the aspects deemed most important in the beginning are gradually subordinated to broader ones. The emphasis upon freedom from the moral domination of men, made by the first female insurgents, is now transferred to a readjustment of the marriage relations and the question of economic responsibility. Because the tradition of feminine docility and tutelage is still in possession of a majority of men's minds, the woman who breaks through it anywhere pays a penalty. Not so terrible, not so far-reaching as the first fugitives paid for their venture outside their sphere, but a very real one, nevertheless.
Miss Tarbell, in her History of the American Woman, has summed up the debt which the world owes to the militant type of womanhood:
"She was then, and always has been, a tragic figure, this woman in the front of the woman's movement—-driven by a great unrest, sacrificing old ideals to attain new, losing herself in a frantic and frequently blind struggle, often putting back her cause by the sad illustration she was of the price that must be paid to attain a result. . . . But there is no home in the land which has not a better chance for happiness, no child which does not come into a better heritage, no woman who is not less narrow, no man who is not less bigoted, because of the impetus their struggle and sacrifice gave to the emancipation of the sex."
To the first martyrs among women we owe above all the fact that, however mistaken in a particular cause or method, a woman may now judge for herself; that she may now begin to remake her own sphere, upheld and encouraged by men of larger minds, and of sympathies which are at last human, not simply masculine.
Notes
1 Tarbell, American Magazine, vol. 69, p. 14.