credit to a _man_ to be called a professional politician? The
pursuits of men in the world, to which they are directed by the
natural aptitude of sex, and to which they must devote their
lives, are as foreign from political functions as those of women.
To take an extreme case: there is nothing more incompatible with
political duties in cooking and taking care of children than
there is in digging ditches or making shoes, or in any other
necessary employment, while in every superior interest of society
growing out of the family, the stake of women is not less than
men, and their knowledge is greater. In England, a woman who owns
shares in the East-India Company may vote. In this country she
may vote as a stockholder upon a railroad from one end of the
country to another. But if she sells her stock, and buys a house
with the money, she has no voice in the laying out of the road
before her door, which her house is taxed to keep and pay for.
And why, in the name of good sense, if a responsible human being
may vote upon specific industrial projects, may she not vote upon
the industrial regulation of the State? There is no more reason
that men should assume to decide participation in politics to be
unwomanly than that woman should decide for men that it is
unmanly. It is not our prerogative to keep women feminine. I
think, sir, they may be trusted to defend the delicacy of their
own sex. Our success in managing ours has not been so conspicuous
that we should urgently desire more labor of the same kind.
Nature is quite as wise as we. Whatever their sex incapacitates
women from doing they will not do. Whatever duty is consistent
with their sex and their relation to society, they will properly
demand to do until they are permitted.

The reply to the assertion that participation in political power
is unwomanly, and tends to subvert the family relation, is simple
and unanswerable. It is that we can not know what is womanly
until we see the folly of insisting that the theories of men
settle the question. We know now what the convenience and
feelings of men decide to be womanly. We shall know what _is_
womanly in the same sense that we know what is manly, only when
women have the same equality of development and the same liberty
of choice as men. The a