One Woman, No Vote
Making the case against women’s suffrage.
In 1908 the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League, an organization that, as the name indicates, advocated against the extension of the franchise to women, asked Mary Ward to become its founding president. Most of the prominent anti-suffragist women in the United Kingdom were aristocrats, and Ward, a famous commoner who supported women’s education, was supposed to help legitimize and popularize the cause. Although this approach did lead to some initial success for the anti-suffrage movement, Ward’s involvement would harm her career and her reputation. Standing on the wrong side of history made Ward seem old-fashioned and out of touch with her audience.
In the following excerpt from “Why I Do Not Believe in Woman Suffrage,” written for the popular American magazine Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1908, Ward justifies her position.
It is interesting to find during a short visit to the United States that the woman-suffrage question is a live matter here once more, and that Americans, in some parts of the country at least, are scarcely less occupied with arguments for and against than we are in England; although the arguments used on this side of the Atlantic are not quite those to which we have grown accustomed in England during the noisy agitation of the last two years—agitation which, as many of us think, has not really advanced the cause of women’s suffrage by a hair’s breadth.
The situation in England with regard to woman suffrage is indeed very different from what it is in America. With us the country is governed under two distinct franchises: one the imperial franchise, which sends members to the House of Commons, the other the local government franchise, which elects the members of all our local and municipal bodies—the county councils throughout the country, the town councils, the district and parish councils—electing them on different days, and not simultaneously as in the States. After some years of agitation English women are not only able to vote for all these local and municipal authorities, they are also eligible as members; their right to sit upon the councils has only just been conceded, and marks an important stage in what one may call the local government division of the woman-suffrage question. In England a woman, for instance, may be an elected member of the London County Council, which is, in effect, the local parliament of five million people, and may take part in all the important affairs, including the education of eight hundred thousand children, which come under the jurisdiction of the council.
We English thus possess a clear dividing line. In local government, women are now in all respects, potentially, the equals of men, and the only question which remains is whether the electors will return women to the local government bodies in a fair proportion, now that it is legal for them to do so. Education, the care of the blind, deaf, and crippled, the supervision and treatment of lunatics, important matters of sanitation and housing, even the water supply and the communications of London—all these are now open to women, in full cooperation with men; and those of us who are most opposed to the concession of the imperial franchise to women have been, in many cases, among the most ardent supporters and upholders for years of the full extension to women of all local government rights and privileges. Moreover, we know that, as our present prime minister, Mr. Asquith, said recently, many matters which are now settled by the Imperial Parliament, and take up time there which can ill be spared from other subjects, will ultimately be delegated to the local government councils; and thus we see before us a vast expanding field in which the new training and the new mental energies of women may and will find abundant scope; a field, moreover, where, broadly speaking, they are able personally to acquaint themselves with the facts and conditions on which they may be called to vote or to legislate facts and conditions at their own doors, and in which they are constantly taking as much personal share as men.
And if it is contended that, except for the power of making bylaws, the function of these local bodies is administrative but not legislative, and therefore it is still not women, but men, who make the laws locally administered in the Imperial Parliament, and that on these laws, while they are in the making, women are not sufficiently heard, the answer is—for England—that the local government machinery could very easily and with universal good will be made to yield some further method by which the opinion of women could be directly brought to bear on those subjects where women have a peculiar right to speak.
But beyond this sphere there is in both countries another—essentially different; and where the principle of division is so clear, one cannot but think that even in the more vast and complex organization of the United States some means could be devised of bringing it universally to bear. What then is the principle, and what are the main facts on which it rests?
The principle merely insists that there is, and always will be, a natural division between the spheres of men and women; an axiom we may deny as we will but which has a way in the end of “proving” itself “upon our pulses.” Is there any reasonableness in denying that men have built up the modern political state, and that men must maintain it? The modern state, as we know, depends ultimately on force. This is constantly disputed by the idealists of the world; but if it were not the case mankind would not be spending these vast sums, all over the earth, on armies and navies; The Hague Conference would not have refused to admit any discussion as to the limitation of armaments; and your president, the chief—as you yourselves insist—of the most pacific nation in the world, would not have sent a recent message to Congress asking for four new battleships of the most advanced and formidable type. Women may say what they please, but the whole present state of the civilized world shows that force, physical force, armed with the most deadly inventions known to the brain of man, is what each modern state in the long run and in the last resort depends on for its national existence. We may lament that it is so; we may look forward to a time when the world will be really ruled by arbitration; but that day is a long way off. And, meanwhile, women have no right to claim full political power in a state where they can never themselves take the full responsibility of their actions, because they can never be called upon finally to enforce them.
But the modern state depends on several other fundamental activities—physical force being the ultimate sanction of all of them—in none of which can women take any personal share. Finance and commerce are carried on by men; and you have had disastrous evidence during this passing year in your own country as to the effect finance may have upon the general life. You may say perhaps that finance and commerce might be more efficiently and righteously organized than they are, but shall we improve them by bringing in the votes and the political influence of those who have never had any guiding or responsible share in commerce and finance? Finance and commerce, again, depend on transport, on ships and railways, without which no modern state can exist; and ships and railways depend themselves upon the great metal and mining industries, which are the exclusive concern of men. A patriarchal state can be maintained practically without finance, transport, or mining; but wherever these enter in they make the framework of the state; and that framework has been made and must be maintained by men.
Then again there is diplomacy; the modern state by reason of its very complexity, and of the enormous importance of the issues with which it deals, can only defend itself—short of weapons of war—in the great world competition by the skilled weapons of diplomacy. And this skill depends upon a trained knowledge of the world and its affairs, which only men can get. It is their natural business to get it; they are not held back from getting it by the cares of the home and family; and, as far as we can see, it must always remain their business, by virtue of a natural selection, against which it is childish to fight. Do women wish to embarrass the diplomacy which protects them and their children by adding to the ignorance vote of the men, already immensely strong, an ignorance vote which is imposed by nature and irreparable?
One common reply to these arguments is that women are concerned in all these things as the daughters, wives, and mothers of men. Nothing is more true; and the fact carries with it the necessity for a wider outlook and a wider mental training for women in the future than they have been accustomed to in the past. Their influence on all great questions should be, and will be, in proportion to their education. It is only where force and numbers come in that they ought to yield the field to men. Indeed, the educated woman will probably, it seems to me, as time goes on, have an influence somewhat greater than that of the ordinary educated man. Her sex, and the fact that she stands at present outside of the rough-and-tumble of politics, make the better type of men more inclined to listen to her; and the more knowledge she obtains, and the more political forbearance she shows, the greater will this influence be.
Meanwhile, in the case of the poor, the difference between the man and the woman, in point of political judgment, is necessarily more strongly marked than it need be in the richer classes. The wife of the working man has the sole care of the children and the home and, in the majority of cases, is overburdened by it; her thoughts do not travel beyond the home circle, or that of the nearest local affairs; she has, indeed, neither interest nor time for even rudimentary politics. But the man has at least the rough training of the public house and its talk, of the village caucus and convention, if nothing else, and in addition he has generally the practical education given by his workman’s club, his debating society, and all the hundred opportunities forced upon him, often by the mere conditions of his trade, of becoming acquainted with the great political issues of the day.
So that in the case of the educated woman the political vote would rather diminish than increase the power she has, or might have, already; while in in case of the uneducated the vote would couple political power with a political inexperience imposed by natural conditions, and practically not alterable by woman’s will.
As to the danger of women’s vote to a modern state we in England are, in some ways, more vulnerable than you. Our ministry may be upset at any moment by a chance vote on water, or gas, or cordite, or any other pretext; and the whole country may be instantly plunged into a general election, the result of which may change the whole face and history of England. We have none of the checks provided by your Constitution; and, therefore, with us the dangers of an increased ignorance vote are enormous, and merely to risk them is, in my belief, an unpatriotic act.
On the other hand, the personal power of your president is a greater factor in your national life than the power of an English prime minister is in ours; and the excitement attending a presidential election is notoriously great. The admission of women to the federal franchise, and to the power of vitally influencing the presidential election, has therefore—coupled with the natural disadvantages of women—its special dangers for you, which are probably equal to those we are conscious of in our own case.
And finally, does not this insistence upon the suffrage for women imply an absurd glorification of the vote as an instrument of power? The vote is only one of many means by which a man asserts himself in his world. It is a necessary part of the mechanism of the modern state, and all those great matters which depend exclusively on man’s force and brain have to be settled by it. The possession of the vote has been, no doubt, a great education for masses of men, as probably the local government vote will be for English women. But the great male trade unions were built up and their liberties won in England before household suffrage in 1867; the mere possession of the vote has not done much for the agricultural laborer since 1884.
The suffrage for men is a recognition of the reality of things. Men have made the modern political state, they only can maintain it, and they must govern it. In the case of women—outside the local government field—the vote would be out of correspondence with facts, and it would rest on unreality.
But the intellectual, the moral, and the industrial life are created by a hundred forces other than the political force, and from the exercise of no one of them are women shut out. What we have to do is to press forward in all these fields; and it is possible, even probable, that women’s influence in them, exercised apart from the ordinary political machine, will be all the stronger and all the healthier.
This is no mere “hearth and fireside” argument. The time has gone by, if it ever existed, when a woman can be said to have no interests beyond her home. On the contrary, the public life of the modern state cannot do without women. It seems to me a discredit to America that women are not more officially and universally concerned in those public matters of local administration where they are as competent and as much needed as men. But if we are wise, we women, both of England and America, shall let what we may call the imperial franchise, in both countries, alone. If we are true patriots, we shall not claim it; we shall concern ourselves in local and social administration; in legislation and politics we shall endeavor to bring the powers of thought and education to bear, together, perhaps, with such special machinery as I tried to indicate in the earlier part of this paper; but we shall not ask for power where we can have no true responsibility.
There is a greatness in self-restraint, as there is a greatness in self-assertion. Let us insist with all our will on our public right to educate children, to have a say in reforming the dwellings of the poor, in the moral and physical purification of our towns, in the brightening of our country life, in the national care of the sick and insane, and upon equal opportunities with men in the realms of science and art. But let us, in the name of common sense, leave to men the franchise which determines war and peace, diplomacy and finance, and those vast industrial affairs which are exclusively masculine—the franchise which elects president and Congress, and puts a British prime minister in power.