Catt wrote this introduction to the book “The Woman Voter’s Manual” by S.E. Forman and Marjorie Shuler, which was “…sent forth to meet the evident desire of the American woman to know more about her government. Its purpose is not to satisfy that desire but to stimulate it.” The book contains chapters on the Constitution; the federal government; state and local government; the territories; political parties; international relations; taxation and commerce; corporations; and elections.
Of the 27,011,330 women of voting age in the United States, more than one-third are now enfranchised, either as voters for presidential electors, or as fully as our present national laws permit women to be enfranchised. No woman in the United States is yet enfranchised as is her husband or her father or her son or her brother, and will not be until woman suffrage is incorporated in the national constitution. Not even then, unless she can come to hold her naturalization in her own person instead of as a cloak to be put on and off as she marries, unmarries or is widowed.
Whatever the voting strength of these more than 900,000 women of voting age may be, the fact of viii practical value for such a book as the present one is that a large and ever increasing number of women citizens are avid for information on the new questions of local, State and national government which women and men must now decide together. They are coming up to these questions with a vivid new personal interest that bids fair to lift “civil government” out of the cold aloofness of academic discussion on the one side, and the “mire of politics” on the other. To be bromidic, women are going to humanize questions of government. That will not be, I think, because only to woman is given the human outlook on life, but because the human is composite of men and women and the human in the outlook of both is stirred and developed through cooperative rather than segregated work.
As emergent voters the women of America are to-day facing the same fundamental questions as to the new responsibility as are the young American man of twenty-one and the immigrant. The enfranchisement of woman, the coming of age of the young man, and the naturalization of the immigrant—there you have the three agencies through which the electorate of America is to be kept in a state of inquiry and action instead of in a condition of acquiescence and being.
A prime difference in the three cases is that the ix woman is asking all the questions that the other two ought to ask but do not. Of course it would be the woman who would ask the questions. For one thing, it does not go so hard with women to admit their ignorance as it does with men. For another, woman was had to fight for suffrage while the young man was acquiring it as he acquired his moustache, by the simple expedient of getting older, and the immigrant man was acquiring it by the simple expedient of living in America long enough to take on some of those American ideals and commitments into which the woman, if native, was born; and having fought for the suffrage, the fight has informed woman with a special sense of the value in the thing fought for, and a special desire fully to understand it. Suffragists alone would start the questions, but it is not suffragists alone among women who want the answers. The antis mean to vote, the indifferent mean to vote.
In the result, texts on civil government become at one leap of intimate value. Instead of remote summaries of the function of the “judiciary, the legislative, the administrative,” that of which they treat is identified as breakfast table talk—the mayor's appointments, home rule for cities, what the legislature is doing with the child labor bill, what Washington will do with bills defining the authority of the government in its war control of this, that, or the x other. There is an acute recognition of “the government” as a matter of close contact and an immediate intention to understand it better. And conversely, from now on, thanks to woman's enfranchisement, achieved or impending, it will be necessary for the government to understand woman better, so that the give-and-take, the reflex from woman suffrage into the body politic, and out again upon the community, may be better assimilated.
WOMAN SUFFRAGE A WAR MEASURE
When the world war began shaking the existing ideas of government about, it had the effect upon them that is produced by shaking a barrel of apples, the little ones went to the bottom and the big ones came to the top. Consider some of the first little apples to go out of sight. In Italy and in France women had distinct civil disabilities such as the necessity of getting their husbands' authorization before they could act in legal matters. These ideas have not only sunk to the bottom of the barrel, but have apparently shrunk to a size which has permitted them to fall through cracks and disappear. In a cataclysm which has destroyed class distinctions by demanding leadership from all classes, sex discrimination could no longer endure in the light of the complete sacrifice for service shown by both sexes. In Italy and France xi municipal suffrage is in process of establishment. It is urged by statesmen as much as by woman suffragists. In France it is indeed a necessity, since in many communities the only people left to protect the standards of life are loyal women who have served their country no less ably than the front line soldiers who have given their lives for France.
The fiercest opponents of woman suffrage in England have demonstrated no little ingenuity in their lightning changes from adamantine hostility to suffrage to fervid acceptance of it.
Democracy has become a password. Every state paper and suggested basis of peace drives home, as with bayonet thrusts, the basic fact that for the word democracy, one may now substitute the phrase “government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Outside of Germany it would be hard to find a statesman with the temerity to gainsay this. Up to date Germany is the only great country which has failed to grasp the fact that this is the real issue of the war. Outside of Germany there are few political leaders—and those few mainly men advanced in years—who do not now know that women are among the “governed.” By its recent Franchise Reform Bill, Hungary has demonstrated that the two vital issues, “government by the people” and “women are people,” xii are recognized as fundamental to the life of that nation.
WHAT SHE DOES WITH THE VOTE WHEN SHE GETS IT
In the United States the great suffrage victories of the year 1917 have urged the question on beyond interest in its merits or the abstract justice involved in it, to the practical application of it. Whether women vote when they can; what they do with their votes when they get them; and the effects of their enfranchisement upon home and community are, fortunately, demonstrable propositions. In every full voting State in which the records are sufficiently complete to form a basis of judgment, three things have been established: women register and vote in about the same proportion as men; they show an intelligent interest in elections, and they double the voting strength of their states with a comparatively small increase in voting paraphernalia.
Knowledge of the kinds of legislation attempted or achieved by voting women likewise rests upon facts. The legislation accomplished follows the psychology of women; it follows the matters in which they are most vitally interested. If there is truth in the theory that men and women in political life. In New Zealand, where woman have voted for twenty-five xiii years, the infant death rate is lower than in any other part of the world. And the New Zealand methods of caring for the health of women and children are cited as models by authorities. A burning grievance of mothers for countless years was the fact that in the eyes of the law the children they had borne did not belong to them; they belonged to the fathers. When a controversy arose over the disposition of the child, or its religious education, or the right to inherit from it, the advantage has always lain with the father. As soon as woman began to emerge as a social entity, even before she had the vote, this deep suffering of mothers found voice. For seventy years mothers have struggled for an equal share with fathers in the control of their own children. In almost every full suffrage state in the Union this matter has received a first consideration and equal guardianship obtains in every State where women vote on the same terms as men. It does not obtain to any such extent where fathers only vote, as only twenty-five per cent. Of the thirty-six male suffrage States have this law. The District of Columbia's equal guardianship law is the result of the hard work of a woman lawyer.
Six of the woman voting States have secured an eight-hour day for women. Sixty-three per cent. of the full suffrage States (New York not included) have a minimum xiv wage law, less than fourteen per cent. of the man-suffrage States have one. Every full suffrage State has a mothers' pension law. Ninety per cent. of the full suffrage States (New York not included) have the injunction and abatement law.
Recently the Chicago Chief of Police sent out a call for a woman protective police force as a war measure. Behind this recognition of the fact that women can be relied upon as a rear guard, lies an interesting history of a movement to use women as police even in normal times of peace. This movement, both in England and the United States, was initiated by women, urged by women, and steadfastly defeated in America until women got the vote. The mere possession of the franchise by the women of Chicago, before they had a chance to put it in practice, acted as a lever to set the Chicago women police idea on its feet. What the women police have meant in time of war is a momentous chapter not yet written.
Women voters in Illinois, California, Colorado, Washington, and Montana are on record as having achieved such domestic legislation as state-wide laws concerning food inspection. Earl Barnes reports that he has seen “nowhere else such statutes as fearlessly and vigorously enforced as in Idaho.”
Montana is, next to New York, one of the youngest xv children in the suffrage group. It gained enfranchisement in 1914, yet by 1916, the first political campaign in which the women voters participated, old political wheel horses were astonished at the concentration of effort of and energy exhibited by the whole woman electorate of Montana. A woman State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Who ran entirely upon her special qualifications and was supported by the women because of her fitness was elected by an overwhelming majority. Other legislation worked for by women in their first campaign in Montana included an eight-hour day for women, improvements in the mothers' pension law, establishment of a child welfare division of the Department of Public Health and an expert survey of the feebleminded of the State. Colorado's Juvenile Court Law has been called by the head of the National Child Labor Committee “one of the best, if not the best.”
As she has become possessed of the vote, the female of the species has proved herself rather fundamentally averse to office-seeking. The practice of women in full suffrage States has been to occupy such public positions as logically develop out of their special training. Women, who make up eighty per cent. of the teaching profession and who as parents are vitally in touch with the needs of childhood, have in all xvi full suffrage States acceptably filled local and state positions as superintendents of public instruction or as members of school boards or as commissioners of Public Welfare in connection with the labor of women and children. In some instances marked ability or experience in these lines has led them into legislative positions. In full suffrage States the woman lawyer is naturally less impeded in her advance from post to post in her own profession than her professional sister in non-suffrage States. The woman doctor mounts the rungs of her ladder less weighed down with artificial burdens. The point in all this is the reassuring fact that the state undergoes no volcanic wrench when women participate in its political career. What women are bound to do anyway, whether because of natural abilities or personal inclinations or because of economic and industrial pressure, they do with fewer handicaps when they have the franchise than when they haven't it. Experience also shows that the large social movements by which all mankind is affected predetermine these matters for women as well as for men. When vast numbers of women are needed in industry they go into it. If such a situation arises, justice and expediency both demand that women should be protected by their own ballots, not by so-called representative ballots, as on the face of it no one ballot can be xvii counted upon to express two persons' “consent” in government.
An obsession exists among some men lest women begin at once to untie all the neat packages into which political parties have tied their inherited traditions. A few men are still shuddering lest women will want to revolutionize banking legislation, throw the tariff overboard and run amuck amongst stocks and bonds. In the first place, they never have done anything of the sort in any State where women vote, and in the second place, women are conservative spenders. A reproach against them has been their timidity in thinking in the gross. They have so long thought in littles.
NO SEX SEGREGATION IN POLITICS
Woman, the voter, disproves too, all along the line, the contention that there will ever be a distinct woman's party in the history of the United States. Human interests find few such vertical lines of cleavage between the sexes. It is inconceivable that the thousands of homes in the country could ever be split apart longitudinally. If the extraordinary injustices against women permitted by men in past generations have never yet bred up a group of women combined for attack, is it likely that, as those grievances are more and more removed and men's and women's interests xviii become more and more identical, there will ever be a collective strife of women against men? Human needs are normally group needs, family needs, or needs of industrial units. Society may split apart in horizontal sections with whole groups of men and women will be found valiant in supporting the measures they espouse. But because of the very structure of human society it will never happen that masses of women will have desire to cohere in opposition to masses of men. Nature and personal affections would soon prove too strong for such political differentiations. It is together, as human beings, not as men and not as women that the voters of the United States are moving forward into the new democracy with its larger questions and its finer and surer answers.
Forman, S.E., and Marjorie Shuler. 1918. "The woman voter's manual." with an introduction by Carrie Chapman Catt. New York: The Century Co.
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