Enfranchisement of women : $b Reprinted from the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, for July 1851 — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Enfranchisement of women : $b Reprinted from the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, for July 1851
John Stuart Mill · en
We do not imagine that any American democrat will evade the force of
these expressions by the dishonest or ignorant subterfuge, that "men,"
in this memorable document, does not stand for human beings, but for
one sex only; that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," are
"inalienable rights" of only one moiety of the human species; and that
"the governed," whose consent is affirmed to be the only source of
just power, are meant for that half of mankind only, who, in relation
to the other, have hitherto assumed the character of _governors_. The
contradiction between principle and practice cannot be explained away.
A like dereliction of the fundamental maxims of their political creed
has been committed by the Americans in the flagrant instance of the
negroes; of this they are learning to recognize the turpitude. After a
struggle which, by many of its incidents, deserves the name of heroic,
the abolitionists are now so strong in numbers and influence, that they
hold the balance of parties in the United States. It was fitting that
the men whose names will remain associated with the extirpation from
the democratic soil of America of the aristocracy of color, should
be among the originators, for America and for the rest of the world,
of the first collective protest against the aristocracy of sex; a
distinction as accidental as that of color, and fully as irrelevant to
all questions of government.
Not only to the democracy of America the claim of women to civil and
political equality makes an irresistible appeal, but also to those
radicals and chartists in the British islands, and democrats on the
continent, who claim what is called universal suffrage as an inherent
right, unjustly and oppressively withheld from them. For with what
truth or rationality could the suffrage be termed universal, while half
the human species remain excluded from it? To declare that a voice in
the government is the right of all, and demand it only for a part,--the
part, namely, to which the claimant himself belongs,--is to renounce
even the appearance of principle. The chartist who denies the suffrage
to women is a chartist only because he is not a lord; he is one of
those levellers who would level only down to themselves.