Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women in politics -- United States
In selecting representatives to carry out their will, women have certain
obvious defects of temperament and training. Having been brought up for
generations to judge men only as providers of sustenance and fathers of
children, they must at first find it difficult to consider candidates
impersonally. Still, their general morality and their standards of right
are probably superior to those of men, and they are more intolerant of
faults, and they find it harder to compromise on matters of character
than do men. One can hardly believe that 1,700 women could be found
among the respectable, church-going, American-born residents in any
county of America, who would sell their votes, year after year, as that
number of men voters has recently confessed to doing in Adams County,
Ohio. In fact, Judge Blair says: "There was one class of the population
which rebelled against the practice. It was the womanhood of Adams
County, which had never become reconciled to the custom, and whose
continual hostility has resulted finally, I hope, in its
abolishment."[46]
[46] Seventeen Hundred Rural Vote-Sellers, by A.Z. Blair, _McClure's
Magazine_, November, 1911.
Of the need of women for the training which participation in political
life gives there can be no doubt. Their lives have always been directly
dependent upon other individuals, and they are prone to think in small
details. Any training which extends the horizon of their interests and
enables them to deal more largely with these details will fit them
better for living in a world where industrial, business and social
changes are so rapidly merging details in larger wholes. Experience in
selecting candidates for public office would also do much to broaden
women's judgments of life, and would help to break down the pettiness
which sometimes characterizes their personal relations.
In the case of women, the community has a double reason for desiring
that they shall develop political judgments and become acquainted with
political methods. It is not only that they may share in the general
intelligence and carry their fair part of the political burdens; but
they have become the teachers, both in homes and schools, of the
oncoming generation of male voters. We no longer live in small
communities where children can see the simple processes of government
operating around them, but in a complex civilization where it must all
be interpreted to them, and mainly by women. Many boys who complete our
elementary schools never work a day under the direction of a man. In the
homes, busy fathers increasingly turn over the training of children to
their wives. How can these women train safe citizens for the future if
they do not understand the processes involved well enough to use them
themselves?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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