Women -- Massachusetts; Women -- Suffrage -- United States; Women's Anti-Suffrage Association of Massachusetts
Why does double suffrage, with its train of proved evils and its false
appraisal of woman's contribution to the general welfare, come knocking
at our doors? Not a natural right; a failure wherever tried; demanded by
a small minority in defiance of all principles of true democracy; what
excuse is there for it?
The confusion of social and personal rights with political, the
substitution of emotionalism for investigation and knowledge, the mania
for uplift by legislation, have widely advertised the suffrage
propaganda. The reforms for which the founders of the suffrage movement
declared women needed the vote have all been accomplished by the votes
of men. The vote has been withheld through the indifference and
opposition of women, for this is the only woman's movement which has
been met by the organized opposition of women.
Suffragists still demand the vote. Why? Perhaps the answer is found in
the cry of the younger suffragists: "We ask the vote as a means to an
end--that end being a complete social revolution!" When we realize that
this social revolution involves the economic, social, and sexual
independence of women, we know that Gladstone had the prophet's vision
when he called woman suffrage a "revolutionary" doctrine.
Woman suffrage is the political phase of feminism; the whole sweep of
the relation of the sexes must be revised if the woman's vote is to mean
anything more than two people doing what one does now. Merely to
duplicate the present vote is unsound economy. To re-enforce those who
clamor for individual rights is to strike at the family as the
self-governing unit upon which the state is built.
This is not a question of what some women want or do not want--it is
solely a question of how the average woman shall best contribute her
part to the general welfare. Anti-suffragists contend that the average
woman can serve best by remaining a non-partisan and working for the
common good outside the realms of political strife. To prove this
contention they point to what women have done without the ballot and
what they have failed to do with it.
Anti-suffragists are optimists. They are concerned at the attempt of an
organized, aggressive, well financed minority to force its will upon the
majority of women through a false interpretation of representative
democracy; but they know that a movement so false in its conception, so
false in its economy, so false in its reflections upon men and its
estimate of women, so utterly unnecessary and unnatural, cannot achieve
a permanent success.
II
THE BALLOT AND THE WOMAN IN INDUSTRY
MRS. HENRY PRESTON WHITE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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