Letter on Woman Suffrage from one Woman to Another, A.
(Gilder, Helena de Kay). A Letter on Woman Suffrage from One Woman to Another. New York, April, 1894. [New York: Privately printed (by J.J. O'Brien & Son, ca. 1894?)].
12mo.; printed wrappers; faint soiling to cover.
First edition. NUC, one copy; two copies of a De Vinne printing in 1894; second edition, 1909. In this lengthy anti-woman suffrage “letter,” Gilder insists on the essential inequality between men and women, asserting that woman will only retain her superiority to man as long as she remains in her natural realm, that of “the true humanities.” She begins by attacking the notion that there is power in the vote:
Nothing is less well proven than that the franchise has changed the character of the immigrant or educated the negro. Freedom and better opportunities may have done it. The ballot alone often proves a means of corruption…
The women, it seems to me, who ask for suffrage are dazzled by a word, and attach to the franchise a value that, in their case at least, would be fictitious, for they would only hold their right by the force of the men who were willing to defend that right…Perhaps [women of the past] were not so dazzled by the word vote as are their descendants. To them the heavy work, the defense of the state, was offset by the care of the hearth-fire…All education, all philanthropy, all society are her demesne, and it seems to me it is wide enough without a pretense of governing, when she could only drop a ballot, and could not enforce the law which that ballot is meant to stand for.
We have become accustomed during this century and in America to regard the power to vote as both a natural right and great privilege. I do not believe it is either. It is a difficult and serious duty which men have taken upon themselves as a means of getting some expression of opinion from the whole nation, believing that something more just might thus be arrived at than by the governing of persons called kings. …
We are asked at this time to double all the dangers of the ballot by allowing hundreds of thousands of the most unprepared class in the community to vote without restriction or preparation.
Having disposed of the topic of why women should not want the vote, she turns her attention to what services they are best disposed to render to society, namely child bearing and rearing and everything that is an extension of these:
If men have burdened themselves with the state, they have left women free to be their critics, their intelligent advisers. They have kept them from all that is coarse and vulgar in politics. …
The stronger must protect the weaker vessel, for she is the promise of the future and the previous yet frail vessel in which the flame of life is carried. Take away from men the task of protection and you cast them back two thousand years—you make them savages…if they struggle with women it brutalizes them and degrades them while it robs women of their especial superiority.
…to make little men of women is so ugly; to unsex them, so intensely inartistic.
She is the vessel of honor—too frail for rough usage, yet capable of the office of life-bearer, and as such to be guarded and built about with care and love. Everything related to this one essential difference is hers: first the family, next the house, the school, the hospital, the charities, the college, the university—everything that opens the world to the young and that helps the downtrodden. Hers, too, may be the cleanliness and sanitation of the city; and the housekeeping generally of the community.
With this in mind, she exclaims, incredulously:
And this is not enough, but now her small shoulders must bear the state, the railroads, and the commerce of the worlds!
You cannot make the childbearer the same and the breadwinner, and she ought not to be made so. She must stay within and elaborate her work in silence and mystery—with recueillement—and the whole masculine world must wait for her and u
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