THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE, by GK Chesterton
It will be better to adopt in this chapter the same process that appeared a piece of mental justice in the last. My general opinions on the feminine question are such as many suffragists would warmly approve; and it would be easy to state them without any open reference to the current controversy. But just as it seemed more decent to say first that I was not in favor of Imperialism even in its practical and popular sense, so it seems more decent to say the same of Female Suffrage, in its practical and popular sense. In other words, it is only fair to state, however hurriedly, the superficial objection to the Suffragettes before we go on to the really subtle questions behind the Suffrage.
Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection to the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On the contrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a military thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is that it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under certain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes the government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women; and, secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise something else; which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not create revolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King’s head once. But you can knock off the King’s hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only wanted to be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any government arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a proceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion.
It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes their superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none of the advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test. War is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably—numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever. There is also, of course, in the case of these women, the further falsity that is introduced by their sex. It is false to state the matter as a mere brutal question of strength. If his muscles give a man a vote, then his horse ought to have two votes and his elephant five votes. The truth is more subtle than that; it is that bodily outbreak is a man’s instinctive weapon, like the hoofs to the horse or the tusks to the elephant. All riot is a threat of war; but the woman is brandishing a weapon she can never use. There are many weapons that she could and does use. If (for example) all the women nagged for a vote they would get it in a month. But there again, one must remember, it would be necessary to get all the women to nag. And that brings us to the end of the political surface of the matter. The working objection to the Suffragette philosophy is simply that overmastering millions of women do not agree with it. I am aware that some maintain that women ought to have votes whether the majority wants them or not; but this is surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal democracy to the destruction of actual democracy. What should the mass of women decide if they do not decide their general place in the State? These people practically say that females may vote about everything except about Female Suffrage.
But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and possibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the matter in a slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the real roots of woman’s position in the western state, and the causes of our existing traditions or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this purpose it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic, the mere Suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which, though much more old, are, I think, considerably more fresh.
I would add a note to this, which might turn into a longer post. Many of the modern theories are unworkable, including feminism. One way we might observe this is in how few fiction books even try to work through a complete social system including their pet theories. In general what you see, at best, is a quick sop to their system and then on life goes… with no attempt to see how it would work out.
Indeed it is often worse than that. What I often see is them taking their theory, putting it in an unrealistic setting, and then pointing to it as if ‘see, it works!”. Thus if one reads David Weber’s “Honor” Series, one sees a ‘woman’ who is in many ways a man. She is taller than the average woman, stronger than the average woman (or even the average man), is never pregant or needing to breastfeed… etc etc. She suffers from lots of ‘prejudice against women’, all the while not having any of the attributes of a woman!
It seems to be that this indicates that even feminists don’t believe in feminism.
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Links
Poems
Posting and analysing some important poems.
Rudyard Kipling
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
The Benefactors
The Female of the Species
The Benefactors
The Glory of the Garden // Podcast Version
Edgar Guest
Keep Going
One More Turn // Podcast Version
The Glory of the Garden
It Takes a Heap O’Livin // Podcast Version
Sue’s Got a Baby
Only a Dad
Is Anybody Happier?
Can’t
On Quitting
Hard Luck
Courage // Podcast Version
Thomas J. Williams
Once to Every Man or Nation
JRR Tolkien
I Sit Beside the Fire and Think
Doug Wilson
The Vineyard of En Gedi
Quotes
A bunch of fun and significant quotes:
Feminists don't believe in women. That is a good conclusion, and one that more women are coming to.