it; that the
best women revolt with profound distaste from every thing of the
sort. But is this distaste a veracious instinct? or is it a
prejudice, owing to the ideal of feminine character and life, which
they have been educated to admire? Men have coveted a monopoly of
executive power, and held up passive obedience as the fittest type of
womanliness. Women, as a general rule, partake the prejudices, and
like to flatter the vanity, of the stronger sex. The question is not,
What do women desire? but, What ought they to desire? What is right
and best for them? The question must not be decided by any thing
extrinsic or accidental, any prejudices or fortuitous associations.

Every measure of intrinsic justice should be sustained despite of the
incidental evils which may be feared. The opinion that women would be
demoralized by voting, is no reason for withholding that right from
them, if it be a right. To become egotistic, clamorous, corrupt, and
brazen, is not a necessary accompaniment of political life; but is
the personal fault of those who become so, and just as much a vice in
men as in women, just as good a reason for recalling those from the
ballot-box, as for withholding these. There is no incompatibility
between the different realms of duty or of privilege.

What would be the effect of female voting? The physical womanliness
of woman essentially consists in wifehood and maternity. This, of
course, cannot be changed by any enlargement of her domain of
interests and activities. Her moral womanliness consists in modesty
and self-denial, the preponderance of disinterestedness over egotism.
Now, is there any real likelihood that the assumption by women of the
elective franchise, with its accompaniments, will destroy this type
of womanhood, universally acknowledged as the ideal of womanly beauty
and excellence? Is it not too well established in the authority of
the most cultivated souls, to be so easily shaken? It is the true
type, which, developed out of the historic progress in social
conditions, cannot be lost, but must be more confirmed and glorified
by the continued action, in the future, of the same causes which have
already produced it. Not the destruction of the most exalted moral
type of feminine character, rather its extension to masculine
character, is what is to be looked for in the changes of the future.
The greater the number of types of character exhibited to the public,
and the greater the facility of c