The condition of subjection in which women have been held is the result
of this principle; the result of superior strength, not of superior
rights, on the part of men. Superior strength, combined with ignorance
and selfishness, but not with malice. It is a relic of the barbarism in
the shadow of which nations have grown up. Precisely as nations have
receded from barbarism the severity of that subjection has been relaxed.
So long as merely physical power governed in the affairs of the world,
the wrongs done to women were without the possibility of redress or
relief; but since nations have come to be governed by laws, there is
room to hope, though the process may still be a slow one, that injustice
in all its forms, or at least political injustice, may be extinguished.
No injustice can be greater than to deny to any class of citizens not
guilty of crime, all share in the political power of a state, that is,
all share in the choice of rulers, and in the making and administration
of the laws. Persons to which such share is denied, are essentially
slaves, because they hold their rights, if they can be said to have any,
subject to the will of those who hold the political power. For this
reason it has been found necessary to give the ballot to the emancipated
slaves. Until this was done their emancipation was far from complete.
Without a share in the political powers of the state, no class of
citizens has any security for its rights, and the history of nations to
which I briefly alluded, shows that women constitute no exception to the
universality of this rule.

Great errors, I think, exist in the minds of both the advocates and the
opponents of this measure in their anticipation of the immediate
effects to be produced by its adoption. On the one hand it is supposed
by some that the character of women would be radically changed--that
they would be unsexed, as it were, by clothing them with political
rights, and that instead of modest, amiable and graceful beings, we