by larry gilman » May 3rd, 2010, 3:40 pm
Well, Chesterton simply opposed suffrage: he thought that women should not have the vote. He made the claim (debatable) that voting was “unfeminine” (p. 224, What’s Wrong with the World, 1920 Dodd Mead edition) -- made it before and after suffrage was actually achieved, made it eloquently and at length and from a variety of angles and in many books and essays. And to that claim he adjoined the independent and additional assertion that allowing women to vote and run for office was akin to forcing women to vote and run for office -- could be construed as imposing political involvement on women, which would in turn be tantamount to “destroying womanhood” by giving women “unwomanly powers” (same citation) -- i.e., forcing them into the violence and scrum of politics. A more classic form of imprisoning women atop a pedestal could hardly be found. (The higher a pedestal is, the more effective a prison it is.) “I respect you! I adore you! You are far too fine to sully yourself with all this grubby real-world power stuff -- whether you want to or not! Only high atop that pedestal will all your feminine qualities remain safe!”
Despite his never-failing eloquence, all this was profoundly silly even if one were to grant GKC's sweeping essentialist claims about the nature of men and women. Extending the franchise to women did not place one whit of obligation on any individual woman to dump her infant on the floor and rush off to a voting booth or run for high office. And many or most women don’t, fact, bother to do these things. That’s up to them. Before suffrage, it wasn’t up to them. (Though they always could dump the infant on floor, and sometimes did.) That’s the nub. Whatever one thinks of “femininity” (where I disagree with Chesterton) or the limits of voting itself as a form of democratic expression (where I agree with him, as on a thousand other things), to argue that giving women a right would be to impose on them an obligation was illogical and false to fact. But it was the crux of his argument.
The anti-suffragists like GKC wanted to maintain a concrete, legal, sweeping prohibition on women’s direct involvement in politics, a prohibition that some women, whether a majority or not (Chesterton claimed not), thought unjust. The anti-suffragists wanted to prevent certain women from doing something those women wanted to do and that all men could do: the pro-suffragists, on the other hand, wanted to allow those women to do what they wanted to do -- and at the same time never forced any other woman to do or not do that thing. GKC tap-danced very hard and he was always good to watch but in elementary justice there was only one way to go, and I am glad we went it. Voting is a form of power: if there dwells somewhere today a woman who thinks that the exercise of that power is demeaning to her sex, she is as free to not exercise it as she would have been in 1850.
Universal franchise: a panacea for society’s ills? Not even close. But then, no single act of elementary justice is.
PS. The claim of GKC's "bitterness" against Suffragettes I would have to support by quotation, and I clearly have not yet done so. I could, but I admit that so far this is just a bald assertion. But I have to go do some paying work . . .