If supporters of equality for women want to vote for the best candidate, they must look to a person regardless of gender and must disregard the gender of political opponents.
There is historical context for this advice.
John Stuart Mill, the 19th century English philosopher and economist, was probably the most articulate and enlightened of his time on the subject of equality for women. In his autobiography, he wrote about his work as a member of parliament.
With regard to an amendment to the Reform Bill to extend voting rights in England: “(It) was by far the most important, perhaps the only really important, public service I performed in the capacity of a member of parliament: a motion to strike out the words which were understood to limit the electoral franchise to males, and thereby admitting to the (sic) suffrage all women who, as householders or otherwise, possessed the qualification required of male electors. For women not to make their claim to the suffrage, at the time when the elective franchise was being largely extended, would have been to abjure the claim altogether.”
He wrote The Enfranchisement of Women (1853) and his key analysis, The Subjection of Women (1869), was the foundation of political equality for women.
Was his work any less significant because he was not female? Of course not.
With regard to those who wanted compromise on the issue of women’s suffrage, he wrote: “... to take one’s stand on a principle, one should go the whole length of the principle.” This concept was to enrich and give boundaries to the fight for female suffrage in England and in America.
Although suffrage for women was not considered a popular position in England (similar to the situation in the United States), Mill was returned to parliament with a majority of some hundreds over his Conservative competitor.
As Mill’s views became more popular, he was pleased to write that “what was undertaken as a moral and social duty” turned into a personal success.
Mill was an original thinker and of strong conviction on complete equality in all legal, political, social and domestic relations which ought to exist between men and women.
He wrote: “I saw no more reason why women should be held in legal subjection to other people, than why men should.”
Even today, and even in scholarly circles, one hears that men and women are different from birth. Following Mill, I say it is too soon to tell. We have not had equal opportunity for long enough.
During the 19th century struggle for women’s rights in America, many saw a competition between rights for black people and those for women.
Frederick Douglass, famed abolitionist, said in 1881: “A woman should have every honorable motive to exertion which is enjoyed by man, to the full extent of her capacities and endowments. The case is too plain for argument. Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence.”
And the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said, “Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.”
Should the views of Douglass and Garrison have been degraded because they were men? Of course not.
Centuries earlier, the Greek philosopher Plato was very critical of the Greek attitude toward women: “Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.”
Which brings us back to the choice on Election Day. Maffei may be running against two women, but in this race, he is the strongest feminist.
Karen DeCrow, an attorney and author from Jamesville, is in the National Women's Hall of Fame and writes an occasional column for The Post-Standard.