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WOMAN AND THE STATE

WHAT is the State? "The State? I am the State," declares the political despot. A few women have been despots and successfully proved that sex is not an absolute disqualification for an absolute monarchy. "The State? We are the State," declared the reigning families of Feudalism; and women were heads of these great families in the absence of the lord of the manor; and when widowed, or unmarried, solely represented the family power. Hence, sex has been proved in many civilizations and in many eras of our own civilization no practical disqualification for aristocratic leadership in the State.

"The State? We are the State," said, for ages, the owners of landed property; and the "freehold vote," the "property vote" has often included women. Hence, sex has been proved no positive disqualification in a political order based upon lands and dollars. The State has passed or is rapidly passing from despotism, from aristocracy resting on militarism, from the control of landed proprietors and the owners of large estates, to what we call democracy, based on manhood

suffrage. In this process, women have lost for a while their footing in the political arena. If the rule of the State goes by blood of one reigning family, then it has proved easy to escape a Salic law and, for the sake of holding a dynasty secure, make a woman queen in default of a male heir. If the rule of the State goes by blood of several reigning families who hold the fighting strength of the people at their disposal, then it is easy to ordain that those great houses shall be represented in the councils of the nobles and have their soldiers on the fields of battle which determine the history of the State, even if a woman's hand sends the troops and wields the political power. If the rule of the State goes by rent rolls, broad acres, and chests of gold, then it is easy to see that "the dollar should vote," no matter whether man or woman holds it, and that the land should speak, even if a spinster or a widow is its sole heir. We call the modern State democratic. Hélie defines the State as "the people organized into a political body." He declares it "becomes a free people, organized into a democratic State, when all the citizens can participate in the direction and examination of public affairs." As regards men, our civilization has moved rapidly in the last two hundred years toward such a State of "one man, one vote." first white men only were full citizens, now men of all colors may be, racial distinctions tending rapidly to disappear as qualification or disqualification for the electorate. As Renan, speaking of race mixtures in government, says wisely, "Ethnography is a science of

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1 Faustin Hélie, Institute of France.

At

rare interest, but to be free it should be without political application."

The subject of still greater interest, the subject of sex, is not yet freed from political application even in the minds of most leaders of thought. When Bluntschli 2 says, the "State as a manlike, composite person, produced by the union of men, is not merely a civil person but a moral civil person," he means only a moral civil person composed of the masculine sex alone. And when Maurice Block declares that the "Principle of nationalities is legitimate when it tends to unite in a compact whole the scattered groups of the population, and illegitimate when it tends to divide them," he seems not to consider women as a group of human beings who should become conscious parts of that compact whole. Indeed, Paul Janet "distinguishes the family from the State," in that "the State is composed of men free and equal, but the family rests upon inequality"; from which it seems that in his view even adult women never emerge to a free and equal position. If Janet's theory were true, that would, of course, mean a perpetual guardianship and control of all women by all men and especially of all wives by all husbands, and yet no political expert now clearly preaches that logical outcome of the theory. In point of fact, while blood and land and money were the basis of governmental rule, widows and spinsters were often counted in as a part of the body politic. Aristotle, who defended slavery, found some trouble in defend'J. C. Bluntschli, Editor Staatswörterbuch.

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Maurice Block, Principle of Nationalities.

* Paul Janet, Institute of France, Political Science.

ing the perpetual legal minority of even married women, and, to quote Janet again, it was indeed a "delicate achievement of Aristotle when he distinguished conjugal from paternal power, calling the first a republican and the second a royal power." If, however, "the family is the social unit" in the literal meaning of those words, and the phrase "universal suffrage" as the basis of a democratic State includes only men, then the head of the family, the man, does and must exercise "royal power" not only over his children but over his wife, for he speaks for the whole family when he votes. This might pass without much question. while democratic States were demonstrating merely a new mechanism of political order; but when the democratic State becomes consciously moved by social sentiment, the submergence of one-half of the race in the family order becomes a source of uneasiness, both moral and intellectual.

To go no further back than our own United States history, the first legislative body in America, inaugurated at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, was elected by all the male inhabitants. Monarchy, nobility, landed estates and money had suddenly ceased to be a basis. of the suffrage. A common manhood was fallen back upon as the one great reason for equality of rights in government. But women, at that period, were not considered human in the same sense that men were. They owned no property if married, their husbands possessed all they inherited or earned. They could not exercise the slightest contract power. They were unable to act as legal guardians for their youngest

children; they had no power to protect their persons against their husbands, even in gross misuse; they must live where and how their husbands determined. Legally, they were perpetual minors. We must remember that at this period women were still under the common law in which an ancient enactment thus outlines a husband's duty: "He shall treat and govern the aforesaid A." (meaning his wife) "well and decently and shall not inflict nor cause to be inflicted any injury upon the aforesaid A., except in so far as he may lawfully and reasonably do so in accordance with the right of a husband to correct and chastise his wife." Said Blackstone in 1763, "as the husband is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with the power of restraining his wife by domestic chastisement in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his apprentices and his children for whom the master and the parent is also liable in some cases to answer." The Civil Law as well as the Common Law gave the husband the right of corporal punishment of the wife, "a severe beating with whips or clubs for some misdemeanors; for others only a moderate correction." The husband who killed his wife committed murder, but a wife who killed her husband was believed to commit "petty treason" and could be punished in the most cruel manner as a rebel against duly constituted authority as well as a common criminal.

This family subordination, as John Stuart Mill so clearly showed, was the basis of political nonentity for women, when equality of rights for men was first in