2. Women demand the right to vote for the sake of the moral effects.
The moral effects of the right to vote deserve as much consideration as the political ones. Women’s participation in political affairs means a general elevation of woman’s intellectual level; it signifies her intellectual and material independence.
The narrower the field in which a person must practice an occupation, the less significant the interests to which that person is forced to devote his or her life, and the more paltry that person’s intellectual life will likely be. [ . . . ] Being cordoned off in this manner not only leads to dwindling intellectual energy and situations and mental outlooks characterized by sad monotony, it almost always also results in the weakening of moral character. [ . . . ] What is left to a woman? – The satin robe and the Indian shawl, the arts of coquetry and the staging of her charms, if she wishes to advertise herself a bit. After all, humanity is addicted to advertising. Since her inner values do not win her any influence, she concentrates her talents on externals.
How is it that men complain about the money their wives spent on toiletries? [ . . . ]
If a woman does not command a strong mind, she will, by virtue of confinement to a lesser sphere, become enslaved by those manners and vices of servitude that she needs to make her situation bearable. She requires cunning, hypocrisy, intrigue, and flattery. Just how often has the striving of a nobly disposed and highly talented female spirit been curtailed by the pernicious influences of her situation? For any human being, no matter how excellently disposed, is capable of degeneration.
Men’s despotism condemns woman to corruption. To this day, women have no share in the affairs of state, and prostitution flourishes in cities and on the countryside alike.
[ . . . ]
Men, the good Lord’s policemen, force women’s thoughts into the spheres of lower contemplation, and she takes revenge on society’s despotism by making herself an encumbrance to human progress.
[ . . . ]
In all fairness, we cannot completely blame men for not wanting to tolerate women being at their side in state affairs. We consider it perfectly natural that they should stubbornly cling to their gendered privileges. Did any estate or class ever relinquish privileges of any kind voluntarily? We consider it perfectly acceptable if they do not wish to cook the soup and tend to the little children; even among the most intelligent men, the notion of women’s participation in the state is inseparable from the idea that part of own their energies would have to be spent in kitchens, nurseries, and washhouses, as a form of compensation.
We are not directing our bitterest sentiments, our harshest accusations against men, but against women who cowardly tolerate being shoved aside by one generation after another. Any prouder mind and any braver female heart rebels against the women who are satisfied with the freedom to cook and sew to their heart’s content, who shrink into insignificant nothings before men; against the women who sacrifice their lively minds and hearts, time and again, on the altar of the veneration of men, who still tolerate it when Griselda, that picture of misery, that fool of feeling and reason, is presented to them as the paragon of perfect femininity; and who, once they are no longer suitable for serving man’s lust and benefit, live, without grumbling, on society’s charity in some quiet corner, even though they might be in full possession of their mental faculties for decades to come.
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