gestures of oratory are gestures of military leadership; pointing the
people to a path or waving them on to an advance. Notice that long sweep
of the arm across the body and outward, which great orators use naturally
and cheap orators artificially. It is almost the exact gesture of the
drawing of a sword.

The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even that
votes are unworthy of women. It is that votes are unworthy of men, so
long as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancient
militarism of democracy. The only crowd worth talking to is the crowd
that is ready to go somewhere and do something; the only demagogue worth
hearing is he who can point at something to be done: and, if he points
with a sword, will only feel it familiar and useful like an elongated
finger. Now, except in some mystical exceptions which prove the rule,
these are not the gestures, and therefore not the instincts, of women.
No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike the
political woman; an entirely different thing. The instinct has nothing to
do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such a desire
exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown and
proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles from
the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical motherhood
before the procession of some great religious order. But that she should
stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands; leaning
forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth open a little
longer and wider than is dignified--well, I only write here of the facts
of natural history; and the fact is that it is this, and not publicity or
importance, that hurts. It is for the modern world to judge whether such
instincts are indeed danger signals; and whether the hurting of moral as
of material nerves is a tocsin and a warning of nature.