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"Women are entirely distinct from men, altogether unlike, quite a different order of beings." Are they indeed? Then, if they are so distinct, how can men represent them, make laws for them, administer their rights, judge them in court, spend their tax-money? If they are the same with men, they have the same rights; if they are distinct, they have a right to a distinct representation, distinct laws, courts, property, and all the rest. Arrange it as you please, it comes to the same thing.
"A woman who takes proper care of her household, has no time to know anything about politics." Why not say, "a man who properly supports his household, has no time to know anything about politics?" Show me the husband who does not assure his wife that his day's work is harder than her's. How absurd, then, to suppose that he has time to read the newspaper every day, and step round to the ballot-box once a year—and she has not?
"Women, after all, are silly creatures." No doubt they are, often enough. As the old lady says in a late English novel, "God Almighty made some of them foolish, to match the men." And the men have done their best to turn the heads of others, who were no fools by nature. But it is the theory of democracy that every man has a right to express his own folly at the ballot-box, if he will—and in time, perhaps, learn more sense by so doing. And why not every woman too?
☞ The amount of it all is, that woman must be enfranchised; it is a mere question of time. All attempts to evade this, end in inconsistency and nonsense. Either she must be a slave or an equal; there is no middle ground. Admit, in the slightest degree, her right to education or to property, and she must have the right of suffrage in order to protect the property and use the education. And there are no objections to this, except such as would equally hold against the whole theory of democratic government.
