keeps women out of activity, social influence and citizenship,
let us a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it
actually does keep her out of
When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against Female Suffrage
keeps women out of activity, social influence and citizenship,
let us a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it
actually does keep her out of. It does definitely keep her out
of the collective act of coercion; the act of punishment by a mob.
The human tradition does say that, if twenty men hang a man from
a tree or lamp-post, they shall be twenty men and not women.
Now I do not think any reasonable Suffragist will deny
that exclusion from this function, to say the least of it,
might be maintained to be a protection as well as a veto.
No candid person will wholly dismiss the proposition that the idea
of having a Lord Chancellor but not a Lady Chancellor may at least
be connected with the idea of having a headsman but not a headswoman,
a hangman but not a hangwoman. Nor will it be adequate to answer
(as is so often answered to this contention) that in modern
civilization women would not really be required to capture,
to sentence, or to slay; that all this is done indirectly,
that specialists kill our criminals as they kill our cattle.
To urge this is not to urge the reality of the vote, but to urge
its unreality. Democracy was meant to be a more direct way
of ruling, not a more indirect way; and if we do not feel that we
are all jailers, so much the worse for us, and for the prisoners.
If it is really an unwomanly thing to lock up a robber
or a tyrant, it ought to be no softening of the situation
that the woman does not feel as if she were doing the thing
that she certainly is doing. It is bad enough that men can
only associate on paper who could once associate in the street;
it is bad enough that men have made a vote very much of a fiction.
It is much worse that a great class should claim the vote be cause
it is a fiction, who would be sickened by it if it were a fact.
If votes for women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean
what they were meant to mean. A woman can make a cross on a
paper as well as a man; a child could do it as well as a woman;
and a chimpanzee after a few lessons could do it as well as a child.
But nobody ought to regard it merely as making a cross on paper;
everyone ought to regard it as what it ultimately is, branding the
fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow, signing the death warrant.
Both men and women ought to face more fully the things they
do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing them.
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