The Project Gutenberg eBook, Women and Politics, by Charles Kingsley

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Title: Women and Politics

Author: Charles Kingsley

Release Date: January 23, 2007 [eBook #20433]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN AND POLITICS***

Transcribed from the 1869 London National Society edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org

WOMEN AND POLITICS.

BY THE
REV. CANON KINGSLEY.

_REPRINTED FROM_ '_MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE_.'

Published by the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE & CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE, FARRINGDON STREET
AND 80 PARLIAMENT STREET, WESTMINSTER
1869.

WOMEN AND POLITICS. {3}

Somewhat more than 300 years ago, John Knox, who did more than any man to
mould the thoughts of his nation--and indeed of our English Puritans
likewise--was writing a little book on the 'Regiment of Women,' in which
he proved woman, on account of her natural inferiority to man, unfit to
rule.

And but the other day, Mr. John Stuart Mill, who has done more than any
man to mould the thought of the rising generation of Englishmen, has
written a little book, in the exactly opposite sense, on the 'Subjection
of Women,' in which he proves woman, on account of her natural equality
with man, to be fit to rule.

Truly 'the whirligig of Time brings round its revenges.' To this point
the reason of civilised nations has come, or at least is coming fast,
after some fifteen hundred years of unreason, and of a literature of
unreason, which discoursed gravely and learnedly of nuns and witches,
hysteria and madness, persecution and torture, and, like a madman in his
dreams, built up by irrefragable logic a whole inverted pyramid of
seeming truth upon a single false premiss. To this it has come, after
long centuries in which woman was regarded by celibate theologians as the
'noxious animal,' the temptress, the source of earthly misery, which
derived--at least in one case--'femina' from 'fe' faith, and 'minus'
less, because women had less faith than men; which represented them as of
more violent and unbridled animal passions; which exp