FEMALE SUFFRAGE (A Historical & Conservative Viewpoint) ebook

FEMALE SUFFRAGE

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Female Suffrage

MR. FORSYTH’S bill for removing the electoral disabilities of women, the second reading of which is at hand, has received less attention than the subject deserves. The residuum was enfranchised for the sake of its vote by the leaders of a party which for a series of years had been denouncing any extension of the suffrage, even to the most intelligent artisans, on the ground that it would place political power in unfit hands. An analogous stroke of strategy, it seems, is now meditated by the same tacticians in the case of female suffrage, the motion in favor of which is brought forward by one of their supporters, and has already received the adhesion of their chief. The very foundations of society are touched when party tampers with the relations of the sexes.

In England the proposal at present is to give the suffrage only to unmarried women being householders. But the drawing of this hard-and-fast line is at the outset contested by the champions of women’s rights; and it seems impossible that the distinction should be maintained. The lodger-franchise is evidently the vanishing-point of the feudal connection between political privilege and the possession of houses or land. The suffrage will become personal in England, as it has elsewhere. If a property qualification remains, it will be one embracing all kinds of property: money settled on a married woman for her separate use, as well as the house or lodgings occupied by a widow or a spinster. In the counties already, married women have qualifications in the form of land settled to their separate use; and the notion that a spinster in lodgings is specially entitled to the suffrage, as the head of a household, is one of those pieces of metaphysics in which the politicians who affect to scorn any thing metaphysical are apt themselves unwarily to indulge. If the present motion is carried, the votes of the female householders, with that system of election pledges which is now enabling minorities, and even small minorities, to control national legislation, will form the crow-bar by which the next barrier will be speedily forced.

Marriage itself, as it raises the position of a woman in the eyes of all but the very radical section of the Woman’s Right party, could hardly be treated as politically penal. And yet an act conferring the suffrage on married women would probably be the most momentous step that could be taken by any legislature, since it would declare the family not to be a political unit, and for the first time authorize a wife, and make it in certain cases her duty as a citizen, to act publicly in opposition to her husband. Those at least who hold the family to be worth as much as the state will think twice before they concur in such a change.

With the right of electing must ultimately go the right of being elected. The contempt with which the candidature of Mrs. Victoria Woodhull for the presidency was received by some of the advocates of female suffrage in America only showed that they had not considered the consequences of their own principles. Surely she who gives the mandate is competent herself to carry it. Under the parliamentary system, whatever the forms and phrases may be, the constituencies are the supreme arbiters of the national policy, and decide not only who shall be the legislators, but what shall be the course of legislation. They have long virtually appointed the ministers, and now they appoint them actually. Twice the Government has been changed by a plébiscite, and on the second occasion the budget was submitted to the constituencies as directly as ever it was to the House of Commons. There may be some repugnance, natural or traditional, to be overcome in admitting women to seats in Parliament; but there is also some repugnance to be overcome in throwing them into the turmoil of contested elections, in which, as soon as female suffrage is carried, some ladies will unquestionably claim their part.

There are members of Parliament who shrink from the step which they are now urged to take, but who fancy that they have no choice left them because the municipal franchise has already been conceded. The municipal franchise was no doubt intended to be the thin end of the wedge. Nevertheless there is a wide step between this and the national franchise; between allowing female influence to prevail in the disposition of school-rates, or other local rates, and allowing it to prevail in the supreme government of the country. To see that it is so, we have only to imagine the foreign policy of England determined by the women, while that of other countries is determined by the men; and this in the age of Bismarck.