Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Again, it is said, "Those who make laws must execute them; government
needs force behind it,--a woman could not be sheriff or a policeman."
She might not fill these offices in the way men do, but she might far
more effectively guard the morals of society, and the sanitary
conditions of our cities. It might with equal force be said that a
woman of culture and artistic taste can not keep house, because she
can not wash and iron with her own hands, and clean the range and
furnace. At the head of the police, a woman could direct her forces
and keep order without ever using a baton or a pistol in her own
hands. "The elements of sovereignty," says Blackstone, "are three:
wisdom, goodness, and power." Conceding to woman wisdom and goodness,
as they are not strictly masculine virtues, and substituting moral
power for physical force, we have the necessary elements of government
for most of life's emergencies. Women manage families, mixed schools,
charitable institutions, large boarding-houses and hotels, farms and
steam-engines, drunken and disorderly men and women, and stop street
fights, as well as men do. The queens in history compare favorably
with the kings.
But, "in the settlement of national difficulties," it is said, "the
last resort is war; shall we summon our wives and mothers to the
battle-field?" Women have led armies in all ages, have held positions
in the army and navy for years in disguise. Some fought, bled, and
died on the battle-field in our late war. They performed severe labors
in the hospitals and sanitary department. Wisdom would dictate a
division of labor in war as well as in peace, assigning each their
appropriate department.
Numerous classes of men who enjoy their political rights are exempt
from military duty. All men over forty-five, all who suffer mental or
physical disability, such as the loss of an eye or a forefinger;
clergymen, physicians, Quakers, school-teachers, professors, and
presidents of colleges, judges, legislators, congressmen, State prison
officials, and all county, State and National officers; fathers,
brothers, or sons having certain relatives dependent on them for
support,--all of these summed up in every State in the Union make
millions of voters thus exempted.
In view of this fact there is no force in the plea, that "if women
vote they must fight." Moreover, war is not the normal state of the
human family in its higher development, but merely a feature of
barbarism lasting on through the transition of the race, from the
savage to the scholar. When England and America settled the Alabama
Claims by the Geneva Arbitration, they pointed the way for the future
adjustment of all national difficulties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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