Women and Politics

Women and Politics

Charles Kingsley's "Women and Politics" opens by contrasting John Knox, who three centuries earlier argued in his 'Regiment of Women' that women's natural inferiority made them unfit to rule, with John Stuart Mill, whose new book 'Subjection of Women' argues the opposite: that women's natural equality with men fits them to rule. Kingsley traces how, after some fifteen hundred years of "unreason" propagated by celibate theologians who branded women temptresses, witches, and "noxious animals" (citing Sprenger, Meier, Delrio, and noting Michelet, Lecky, and Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy' as sources on this literature), European opinion gradually shifted. He credits figures such as Marguerite d'Angouleme and the scientific and biblical influences in southern France, along with Scotland's reverence for Mary Stuart and England's devotion to Elizabeth, with replacing contempt for women with admiration. He points to Sidney's 'Arcadia,' Lyly's 'Euphues,' Spenser's 'Fairy Queen,' and Shakespeare's plays as having permanently elevated the conception of woman, despite lingering coarser traces in Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ben Jonson. Kingsley praises Mill's book highly, invoking M. Agassiz's observation that great truths pass from "not true," to "contrary to religion," to "everyone knew it already," and hopes Mill's doctrine will become self-evident to boys raised on Spenser and Shakespeare rather than Horace and Juvenal. He notes that mixed schooling of farmers' daughters and labourers' sons, Cambridge local examinations, and the Royal College of Science in Ireland (where young ladies have beaten young men for prizes) all confirm women's intellectual capacity, quoting Mr. Fitch's report to the Schools Inquiry Commission that a woman's right to knowledge should rest on her capacity to receive it. He then reviews related works: Mr. Boyd Kinnear's article on the 'Social Position of Women' (which he urges be reprinted as a pamphlet for working men); Dr. Hodgson's 'Lectures on the Education of Girls, and Employment of Women'; Mrs. Josephine Butler's introduction to 'Woman's Work, and Woman's Culture'; and Miss Wedgewood's article on 'Female Suffrage.' He quotes Mrs. Butler's statistic that the 1861 census counted three and a half million English women working for subsistence, two and a half million of them unmarried, with self-supporting women increasing by over half a million since 1851, as evidence that the "Woman's Question" arises from market necessity rather than theory. Kingsley argues that a demand for employment has led to demands for education and, in turn, for the franchise, since women have no more reason to submit to laws made solely by men than men would have to submit to laws made solely by women. He warns that recent extensions of the franchise have enfranchised many drunken, wife-beating men while withholding the vote from virtuous, wealthy, educated women, calling this unjust. He argues the "keeping a house over one's head" test of active citizenship applies equally to women, citing Mill's example that the best-administered Indian states were governed by illiterate women confined to harems, and naming Miss Burdett Coutts and the late Dowager Lady Londonderry as capable managers of wealth. He quotes Mr. Butler on female teachers and governesses (citing the Institution in Sackville Street, London) who support dependents despite theoretical assumptions that only men are breadwinners, and extends this to maiden aunts and sisters. Kingsley dismisses objections that voting would distract women from domestic duty, arguing such duties are voluntary and self-imposed. He suggests women's participation might purify politics, invoking Mrs. Fry, Miss Nightingale, and Miss Burdett Coutts as women already fit to demand political pledges or sit in Parliament, and quotes Mill's closing paragraph about princesses proving as competent as princes when given equal opportunity. He argues men are merely "duller and more conceited" than women, comparing English boys taught female inferiority to negro boys taught to beat their mothers. Kingsley contends that because girls in most classes (except the "lower-upper" professional class) are actually better educated than boys — staying longer at school, less corrupted by drink and business, benefiting more from family life — enfranchising women would raise, not lower, the average quality of the electorate. He defends unmarried women ("old maids") as often the "elite" of their sex, having sacrificed marriage for family duty or self-respect rather than being marriage-market rejects, quoting an admirable nurse who declined to marry a man who was not "a scholar" and did not "bathe every day." He closes by asserting that self-supporting spinsters owe the State the same allegiance as men of full age, receive no special privileges, and expect only the same protection of life and property as men — and that since their relations, powers, and duties toward the State mirror men's, common sense and justice must eventually grant them similar rights. A footnote lists the reviewed works: Mill's 'Subjection of Women,' Josephine Butler's edited 'Woman's Work and Woman's Culture,' W. B. Hodgson's 'Education of Girls, and Employment of Women,' and Lydia Ernestine Becker's 'On the Study of Science by Women,' from the Contemporary Review, March 1869.

By Charles Kingsley · First published 1869 · Genre: Feminism, Political Science, History · 7,747 words

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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.

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