Whether the Women are equally qualified
with Men for Government and Public Offices.
Our female champion is in a very great passion with Cato for excluding her sex
from all Government; and, I must own not without some appearance of reason.
For it is certainly true that Cato was not the most well-bred man who ever
spoke of them. He had too little of the courtier in him to flatter; and spoke too
plain truth not to fet a pretty Lady, who wants to wear the breeches, on pouting.
But Sophia would have much more reason to be angry with him, if he had been
the only one of opinion that women are to be ever kept in subjection.
Whereas unluckily for them, all the greatest sages of antiquity, as well as the
wisest legislators of all ages, have been of the same mind. The greatest poets,
the most eminent divines, the brightest orators, the ablest historians, the most
skilful physicians, and the profoundest philosophers, in a word, all who have been
famous for excelling in learning, wisdom, and parts, have condemned the
women to perpetual subjection, and less noble, less perfect, and consequently
inferior to men.
The laws of all common-wealths are so many confirmations of the subjection they
have ever been in. Neither can the men free them from this
subjection, without revolting against the decree of Heaven, which appointed
them masters, as I have already shown, and therefore need not repeat. There are
not wanting other texts of scripture to confirm this matter.
Ecclesiasticus, ch.vii. absolutely forbids the men to give woman any power over
their minds;
and the prophet Micab positively says to them, Keep the doors of thy mouth
from her who lyeth in thy bosom.
. . . How exactly of a mind are the divines and the poets! Euripedes tells us,
that of all animals, especially the intellectual ones, woman is the poorest thing.
Therefore, says Pittacus, "keep womankind in subject." Tibullus says, "they are
a cruel generation void of all Faith." Menander says almost the same, and adds
that "when a woman speaks with most affability, it is then she is most to be
dreaded." And if we believe Plautus "Once a woman has any mischief in her
head, sickness, nay what is worse old age, is less insupportable to her, than
being thwarted in the pursuit of it.
Either let her complete it, or you make her completely miserable. But if by chance
or whim she attempts anything that is good, how soon is she sick and tired of it!
Whatever you do, if she begins anything tolerable, never be afraid of her hurting
herself; she'll be sure to do little enough. For women have a natural Genius for
exceeding in mischief, but are never guilty of excess in what is right."
The greatest of orators are not the most favourable to them, and the best the
character Cicero, one of the ablest, had to give them, was that they are a
covetous race, sovereignly ruled by the inordinate love of lucre. Nor are the
physicians a jot more in their interest.
We are assured by Philo that the women, according to the common received
opinion of the faculty "are but a kind of imperfect men, that their understandings
are naturally weaker than ours, and that they are incapable of comprehending
anything but what immediately falls under the jurisdiction of their sensation."
If we credit historians, whose opinions are less to be suspected as being founded
on the irrefragable evidence of experience, we shall find women everywhere a
weak, inconsistent generation, ever irresistibly led away by some predominant
passion, which enslaves and engrosses them.
"The fair sex (says Tacitus) is not only weak and unequal to toil, but, if truth may
be spoken, cruel, ambitious, and greedy after power." Valerius Maximus goes yet
further and assures us, that the practice of poison had still been unknown, if the
cruel artifice of that sex had not made it necessary to enact laws against it.
Cato then was not the only wise man who thought the women unfit to govern.
The sacred writers tell us they are not to be trusted; divines, poets, orators,
physicians, and historians agree that they are weak, silly, poor, fickle, cruel,
ambitious things, ever forward in mischief, ever sluggards in good. Pretty
qualifications truly to entitle them to Government and public offices!
But let us suspend our judgment till we hear what the philosophers think.
Those oracles of wisdom may perhaps be more their friends, and then it will ill
become us to be their adversaries. Not at all; Aristotle tells us that "a city must
needs be wretchedly governed which is governed by women," and well may he
think so who tells us that "the judgment of boys is only imperfect, but that of
women is absolutely impotent." Therefore, says an anonymous author, "when
things are come to so bad a pass as to suffer an old woman to reign, or interfere
in state affairs, nothing better is to be expected than to see her rend the state and
involve it in calamities and confusion." Among men the oldest are generally the
fittest to govern, because the most confirmed in wisdom and experience, but in
women, according to this author, age is incapable of any wisdom: and no
wonder at it, when their judgment is all impotence.
To which if we add their natural itch of tattling, their invincible curiosity, and
their innate aversion to secrecy, it can no longer be doubted that they are
absolutely unfit for public Government, and every office connected with it.
Nothing more requisite in one who is to be entrusted with Government, than a
steadiness which no curiosity can make giddy, and nothing more powerful to
make a woman give up the most important interests of her own or others than
curiosity. Secrecy is the very soul of public administration, which to require
from that tongue-punished race would be downright barbarity.
The wise Romans were thoroughly convinced of the natural incapacity of women
for keeping a secret, and therefore were kind enough to them never to entrust any
of them with one. Every one knows the strategem young Papirius was forced
to make use of to satisfy his mother's curiosity, without betraying the secrets of
the Senate. Being one day extremely solicited by her to reveal the subject of
that morning's debate, to rid himself of her importunities, he was reduced to the
necessity of feigning, that a law was proposed to allow the men a plurality of
wives. There needed no more to alarm the whole sex.
Papirius's mother, spite of her solemn engagements, divulges it to all the women
she knew, and they to as many more, till the whole tribe of wives, acquainted with
it, formed themselves into a league, and began to make open opposition to a law
so odious to them. How safe would the young Senator have been, had he been
indiscreet enough to trust his tattling mother with a real secret as he did with a
fiction!
Plutarch tells us of another Senator, who, teased by his wife, on the like score,
beyond all power of toleration, and unwilling to mortify her, told her, that a lark
being seen to fly over the Senate house with a golden helmet on his head and a
spear on his claws, the augurs had been consulted, to know what it could
portend.
To make it appear the more like a real secret, he had had the precaution to exact
from her the most solemn vows of privacy, assuring her that nothing less than his
life could atone for his divulging it to her, should it be known he had done so. But
what force could the fear of a husband's death have to make a woman keep a
secret, who must herself burst or vent it? No sooner had her husband taken leave
of her, to return again to the Senate, than she eased herself of the intolerable
burden, and the tale flew so swiftly about the city, that, before he got to his
journey's end, he had it whispered in his ear as a profound secret, by one who
supposed him to have been absent from the Senate.
At his return home he charges his wife with having undone him. But she, with a
confidence peculiar to that sex, flatly denies her having divulged what he
entrusted her with; and to silence him at once, of three hundred Senators in the
house, why should the secret be supposed to come from you alone, says she?
She had carried her boldness yet farther, but for his stopping her mouth by
telling her, that it was a fiction of his own making.
Fulvius was far from coming off so well, but he must blame himself for
knowing womankind no better. We are obliged to Plutarch for the account.
Augustus displeased with Fulvius for disinheriting his own nephews in favour
of Livia's children, blamed him for it; and he like a silly oaf was weak enough
to tell it his wife.
She immediately tells the Empress of it; and the Empress upbraided the Emperor
with it. So that the next time Fulvius went to court was to receive a severe
reprimand from Augustus, and the pleasure of finding himself undone.
And what did he get by returning home to tell his wife what she had done, and that
he was resolved to stab himself? Why, no other satisfaction than to be answered
that he was a fool and deserved no better fate, for living with her for so long
without finding out that she was a true woman, and could not keep a secret.
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