The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage | Page 3

other words, I set
them forth as results which have been reached after reiterated efforts to
call up to mind the totality of my experience, and to de-tect the factor

which is common to all the individual experiences.
When for instance I propose a definition, I have endeavoured to call to
mind all the different uses of the word with which I am
familiar--eliminating, of course, all the obviously incorrect uses.
And when I venture to attempt a generalisation about woman, I
endeavour to recall to mind without distinction all the different women
I have encountered, and to extricate from my impressions what was
common to all,--omitting from consideration (except only when I am
dealing specifically with these) all plainly abnormal women.
Having by this procedure arrived at a generalisation--which may of
course be correct or incorrect--I submit it to my reader, and ask from
him that he should, after going through the same mental operations as
myself, review my judgment, and pronounce his verdict.
If it should then so happen that the reader comes, in the case of any
generalisation, to the same verdict as that which I have reached, that
particular generalisation will, I submit, now go forward not as a datum
of my individual experience, but as the intellectual resultant of two
separate and distinct experiences. It will thereby be immensely
fortified.
If, on the other hand, the reader comes to the conclusion that a
particular generalisation is out of conformity with his experience, that
generalisation will go forward shorn of some, or perchance all, its
authority.
But in any case each individual generalisation must be referred further.
And at the end it will, according as it finds, or fails to find, acceptance
among the thoughtful, be endorsed as a truth, and be gathered into the
garner of human knowledge; or be recognised as an error, and find its
place with the tares, which the householder, in time of the harvest, will
tell the reapers to bind in bundles to burn them.
A. E. W. 1913.

INTRODUCTION
Programme of this Treatise--Motives from which Women Claim the
Suffrage--Types of Men who Support the Suffrage--John Stuart Mill.
The task which I undertake here is to show that the Woman's Suffrage
Movement has no real intellectual or moral sanction, and that there are
very weighty reasons why the suffrage should not be conceded to
woman.
I would propose to begin by analysing the mental attitude of those who
range themselves on the side of woman suffrage, and then to pass on to
deal with the principal arguments upon which the woman suffragist
relies.
The preponderating majority of the women who claim the suffrage do
not do so from motives of public interest or philanthropy.
They are influenced almost exclusively by two motives: resentment at
the suggestion that woman should be accounted by man as inherently
his inferior in certain important respects; and reprehension of a state of
society in which more money, more personal liberty (In reality only
more of the personal liberty which the possession of money confers),
more power, more public recognition and happier physiological
conditions fall to the share of man.
A cause which derives its driving force so little from philanthropy and
public interest and so much from offended amour propre and
pretensions which are, as we shall see, unjustified, has in reality no
moral prestige.
For its intellectual prestige the movement depends entirely on the fact
that it has the advocacy of a certain number of distinguished men.
It will not be amiss to examine that advocacy.
The "intellectual" whose name appears at the foot of woman's suffrage

petitions will, when you have him by himself, very often Make
confession:--"Woman suffrage," he will tell you, "is not the grave and
important cause which the ardent female suffragist deems it to be. Not
only will it not do any of the things which she imagines it is going to do,
but it will leave the world exactly where it is. Still--the concession of
votes to women is desirable from the point of view of symmetry of
classification; and it will soothe the ruffled feelings of quite a number
of very worthy women."
It may be laid down as a broad general rule that only two classes of
men have the cause of woman's suffrage really at heart.
The first is the crank who, as soon as he thinks he has discerned a
moral principle, immediately gets into the saddle, and then rides
hell-for-leather, reckless of all considerations of public expediency.
The second is that very curious type of man, who when it is suggested
in his hearing that the species woman is, measured by certain
intellectual and moral standards, the inferior of the species man,
solemnly draws himself up and asks, "Are you, sir, aware that you are
insulting