REPEAL LAWS
There is in Boswell's "Life of Johnson" a correspondence which is well
worth reading by both advocates and opponents of woman suffrage. Boswell,
who was of an old Scotch family, had a difference of opinion with his
father about an entailed estate which had descended to them. Boswell wished
the title so adjusted as to cut off all possibility of female heirship. His
father, on the other hand, wished to recognize such a contingency. Boswell
wrote to Johnson in 1776 for advice, urging a series of objections,
physiological and moral, to the inheritance of a family estate by a woman;
though, as he magnanimously admits, "they should be treated with great
affection and tenderness, and always participate of the prosperity of the
family."
Dr. Johnson, for a wonder, took the other side, defended female heirship,
and finally summed up thus: "It cannot but occur that women have natural
and equitable claims as well as men, and these claims are not to be
capriciously or lightly superseded or infringed. When fiefs inspired
military service, it is easily discerned why females could not inherit
them; but the reason is at an end. _As manners make laws, so manners
likewise repeal them_."
This admirable statement should be carefully pondered by those who hold
that suffrage should be only coextensive with military duty. The position
that woman cannot properly vote because she cannot fight for her vote
efficiently is precisely like the position of feudalism and of Boswell,
that she could not properly hold real estate because she could not fight
for it. Each position may have had some plausibility in its day, but the
same current of events has made each obsolete. Those who in these days
believe in giving woman the ballot argue precisely as Dr. Johnson did in
1776. Times have changed, manners have softened, education has advanced,
public opinion now acts more forcibly; and the reference to physical force,
though still implied, is implied more and more remotely. The political
event of the age, the overthrow of American slavery, would not have been
accomplished without the "secular arm" of Grant and Sherman, let us agree:
but neither would it have been accomplished without the moral power of
Garrison the non-resistant, and Harriet Beecher Stowe the woman. When the
work is done, it is unfair to disfranchise any of the participants. Dr.
Johnson was right: "When fiefs [or votes] implied military service, it is
easily discerned why
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