The woman who votes becomes an important factor in life, for a double reason. In the first place, when a woman votes the candidate must take care that his conduct and record meet with a good woman"s approval, and this makes better men of the candidates.
In the second place, and far more important, is this reason:
When women shall vote, the political influence of the good men in the community will be greatly increased. There is no doubt whatever that women, in their voting, will be influenced by the men whom they know. But there is also no doubt that they will be influenced by the GOOD men whom they know.
Men can deceive each other much more easily than they can deceive women--the latter being providentially provided with the X-ray of intuitional perception.
The bl.u.s.tering politician, preaching what he does not practise, may hold forth on the street corner or in a saloon, and influence the votes of others as worthless as himself. But among women his home life will more than offset his political influence.
The bad husband may occasionally get the vote of a deluded or frightened wife, but he will surely lose the votes of the wives and daughters next door.
Voting by women will improve humanity, because IT WILL COMPEL MEN TO SEEK AND EARN THE APPROVAL OF WOMEN.
Our social system improves in proportion as the men in it are influenced by its good women.
As for the education of women, it would seem unnecessary to urge its value upon even the stupidest of creatures. Yet it is a fact that the importance of thorough education of girls is still doubted--usually, of course, by men with deficient education of their own and an elaborate sense of their own importance and superiority.
Mary Lyon, whose n.o.ble efforts established Mount Holyoke College, and spread the idea of higher education for women throughout the world, put the case of women"s education in a nutsh.e.l.l. She said:
"I think it less essential that the farmers and mechanics should be educated than that their wives, the mothers of their children, should be."
The education of a girl is important chiefly because it means the educating of a future mother.
Whose brain but the mother"s inspires and directs the son in the early years, when knowledge is most easily absorbed and permanently retained?
If you find in history a man whose success is based on intellectual equipment, you find almost invariably that his mother was exceptionally fortunate in her opportunities for education.
Well educated women are essential to humanity. They insure abler men in the future, and incidentally they make the ignorant man feel ashamed of himself in the present.
ASTRONOMY WOMAN"S FUTURE WORK
In the centuries to come, perhaps a thousand centuries from now, perhaps a little sooner, woman will get her chance on earth.
Population will have reached its normal limit, and nature"s wise law, dealing with a really civilized race, will automatically limit children to two in each family.
Schools and nurseries will be scientific and perfect. The care of children will be the duty of the State. Very poor women will be unknown, and unknown will be the woman burdened with the isolated care of children in an isolated household.
In those distant days woman will do her share of the world"s intellectual and artistic work. Physical work of all kinds will have been practically annihilated by machinery. Our big, muscular bodies, developed hitherto with an eye to pursuing wild animals, carrying heavy burdens and fighting each other like dog-apes in the forest, will be refined and very different from their present brutality.
It will be an agreeable earth, a very agreeable and much improved human race. ----
Those millennial days, which are sure to come, will find us with our little earthly problems solved. We shall have outgrown our infancy, and, like a child that has learned to walk and balance itself, we shall understand the forces of nature and use them.
Our princ.i.p.al occupation will be harmonious life on this planet and persistent investigation of the marvels of the universe outside of our own little sphere.
As centuries have gone by on earth, power has dwelt with different cla.s.ses of human beings. In the days of the Troglodytes, when one gentleman would crack another gentleman"s thigh-bone to get at the marrow, the most important man of course was the one best able with physical force to murder his fellows.
At various times the great explorer, the great military strategist, has been the most important of men. To-day the most important man is the organizer of industry. He is really the most important, not only in the size of his reward, but in the service which he renders. Nature gives the biggest reward to him who does the most important work.
A thousand centuries from now the most important human being will be the most efficient astronomer.
The man who shall bring us accurate news of other worlds will be welcomed as was Christopher Columbus or Drake or Raleigh in his day.
Women will be very important factors in astronomical research.
The work of the astronomer is especially the work of patience, of enthusiasm, of devotion.
Patience, enthusiasm and devotion are more highly developed in women than in men.
Already, in view of her extremely limited opportunities, woman has done admirably well in the field of astronomy. We note that it is a woman at Cambridge whose stellar photographs first located the new star in Perseus. In England, in Germany and in France women astronomers are doing work almost equal to that of the best men.
Everybody will remember the faithful labor of Herschel"s sister, working all through the night and sleeping through the day, month after month and year after year, helping her great brother in his studies.
There is a kind of small-fry man who dislikes the idea of mental development among women. He is a mouselike kind of creature, so thoroughly conscious of his own smallness, so thoroughly in love with his own importance, that he dreads the intellectual woman, who makes him feel microscopic.
Despite the protests of such men, some of whom are editors, women are making progress. When they shall give to science, especially to astronomy, the pa.s.sionate, devoted attention which they have given for ages to the care of children, they will rank among the highest on earth.
WOMAN"S VANITY IS USEFUL
We"ll waste no time in proving that women, from the cradle to the grave, at all hours and all ages, are sincerely interested in their personal appearance.
No man should object to this--the const.i.tutional guarantee referring to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness covers the ground fully.
But it is not enough for men NOT TO OBJECT to woman"s various innocent vanities.
Every man should be delighted that women are vain. Each man should do what he can to keep the vanity alive.
FOR WOMAN"S VANITY, DEARLY BELOVED, IS THE ONE AND INDISPENSABLE PRESERVER OF HER HEALTH.
A woman cannot be pretty, according to her own notions, unless HEALTHY.
If too fat, she is not pretty--and she is miserable until, through self-control, she gets thin.
If too thin, she is not pretty. At present she has a crazy sort of idea that to be "skinny" is to be attractive. That is a pa.s.sing delusion. In the long run women realize that there is nothing beautiful about a female living skeleton, and they strive through normal living to become normal.
Above all, no woman can have a good complexion unless she have good health and live normally. This one absorbing question of complexion does more for woman"s health; it gives us more strong mothers, and more sensible girls, than all the preachings, beseechings, prayers and expostulations of all the world"s male advisers.
A woman"s instinct is to eat buckwheat cakes, adding boiling hot coffee and iced water. She likes to eat candy between meals, and her idea of a fine luncheon is lobster salad and ice cream. But small spots appear. Those fine pink cheeks get too pink or too pale, and sensible eating is adopted as a life rule.
Even the hideous corset squeezing is counteracted by the power of complexion. Woman likes to look like a wasp, and if she could she would move her poor system all out of place for the sake of a waist hideously small.
But, providentially, a waist squeezed too mercilessly gives a bright pink tip to the end of the nose; and for the sake of the color of that nose-tip the poor waist gets a rest--the corset is let out.
It cannot be denied that among idle, nervous women to-day there is a tendency to take stimulants to excess, and even to smoke abominable cigarettes.
Alcohol, fortunately, ruins the complexion. And for the sake of their looks women often deny themselves and show a strength of resolution that would not be called forth by any moral appeal.