The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-05-07
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Editorial Opinions of the Leading Journals
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wOMANS SUFFRAGE IN PARLIAMENT I.
From the n. y. World.
Doubtless the "victory" for womanwood
suffrage in the House of Commons will be
the theme of infinite graduation by the suf-
frage-seekiDg persons who are to assemble
here next week in convention.
But lest that body should, in the exuberancs
of its Joy, 90 the length of enumerating its
chickens of political franchise prior to their
incubation, it is proper to point out to it that
the bill which has passed TO second reading,
in thin House, by vote In which, we may
be tolerably confident its advocates were re-
presented nearly in their full strength and its
opponents by a very inadequate section of
what must be their whole number, has not
by any means become the law of England.
and that, if it had, it is not at all the sort of
measure which they are agitatng for the en-
actment of in America.
There is many q slip between the second
reading in one House of Parliament and the
final passage in both of a bill which appears
to be socially SO revolutionary, though in
purely political sense so nugatory, as this
The division indicated that less than half the
House was present. There are possibly in
the whole House twenty thorough going
advocates of the extension of the suffrage to
women. OF the remaining one hundred and
odd who voted with them it is much more
rational to believe, as the tone of the debate
so far as we can catch it from the cable
authorizes us to do, that some were actuated
by wish to hear the subject debated and
others by spirit of levity, than to believe
that the majority of Englishwomen are pre-.
pared to contradict in practice their own most
cherished prejudices for the sake of that
logical analogy and that theoretical symmetry
which the promoters of the bill seem to have
mainly in view in urging it. To predict
that such bill will never, upon the compul-
sion OF logic alone, pass Parliament of the
Englishmen of this generation is to hazard
nothing.
But what should chiefly restrain the exu-
berant Joy of our sisters is that the bill has
recommended Itself to such members of Par
Lament as have been persuaded to vote for it
by the absence of all those properties which
would, in their eyes, give such "a measure its
chief value. The bill does not alter or en-
hance the rights of married women at
all. 1t leaves ,Sthe ten1e cOUert precisely
where she is left by the common law-as
having no legal existence independently of
her husband Virgins and widows can vote
if the bill should ever become law; but
matrons are left in their present predicamen5.
Yet it is the woes of married women
which have formed the chief burden of the
complaint of our own Equal Rights Associa-
ton and Woman's Parliament. These woes
are alleviated by the statutes of this State to
a mildness far beyond what remain the me-
di@val rigors of the English law. And yet
our own matrons-those of them, that is who
feel moved to proclaim their wrongs through
newspapers and from platforms although
thus blessed above other women, uplift their
querulous voices, as in the case of their
legendary prototype, who was provided with
ample comestible and bibulous, as they with
legal necessities and luxuries, and of whom
it is nevertheless related that
''This old woman would never keep quiet"
What can we expect of the consistent seeker
for suffrage in New York but that she should
spew out of her mouth, as thing neither
cold nor hot, the bill ostensibly in behalf of
her sex which had been introduced into Par
lament, and denounce the mover of it, Mr.
Jacob Bright, who made it merit in his
bill that under it 'there would be but one
female to nine male voters, as a recreant
and a traitor.
We scarcely ever hear a complaint of the
present system of things which does not pro-
ceed upon the oppression of wives by hus-
bands. But the heartless husband who figures
so prominently in the ReOOIutiOA, and whose
delight and occupation it is to lacerate,
oppress, and trample upon the wife of his
bosom, is left at liberty by this bill to pursue
those practices with the impunity which now
attends him. The married women have nei-
ther actual nor virtual representation under
a law which extends the suffrage to unmar-
ried women. Nay, their case is worse than if
they were left exclusively at the mercy of
men. For the unmarried woman, at the time
she attains the legal majority of man, is
already passing from the manageable period
of woman, and few years more will convert
her into an inveterate old maid; and nothing
is more notorious than the persistent and
vindictive persecution with which the ancient
virgin embitters the life and maligns the
character of the married of her SEX
1t is awful to think what would become of
our own champions of stricken sex if such
measure should pass an American Legisla-
ture. Two women are grinding at the mill of
the Revolution. Miss Anthony would be
taken to purify the polls or to enlighten the
legislature, and Mrs. Stanton be left to raise
horrid clamors, despair and die. The celibate
would devote her faculties, as voter or as
legislator, to wreaking her revenges upon the
hated race of matrons. And the last state
of that married woman would be worse than
the first.
Let not our sisters be too forward to cele-
brate the Parliamentary friends who thus
keep the word of suffrage to the ear but
break it to the hope.