A Contribution To the Same-sex Marriage Debate

In 1909  Lord Curzon wrote a tract called Fifteen Good Reasons Against The Grant Of Female Suffrage. Curzon was a conservative man but he was no doddering aristocrat. Far from it, he was a respected senior minister in the British government, Viceroy of India for two terms, a writer and an explorer who had been awarded the Royal Geographic Society’s gold medal for his discovery of the source of the Oxus. The opinions he expressed in his tract were shared by the majority of educated men, and many women too, at the beginning on the 20^th century. Nineteen years later the Representation of the People Act (1928) gave all women the vote. One wonders what the arguments being used against same-sex marriage, curiously similar to Curzon’s, will sound like to our ears nineteen years from now. “Traditional values” are amorphous things and they can have a very brief shelf life. Reason 1.  “Political activity will tend to take women away from her proper sphere and highest duty, which is maternity.”  Reason II. “It will tend by the divisions it will introduce to break up the harmony of the home.” In other word, allowing women to vote will lead to the breakdown of the family. Reason III. “The grant of the vote to women cannot possibility stop short at  a restricted franchise on the basis of a property or other qualification…Its extension to them would pave the way to Adult Suffrage. There is no permanent or practical halting-stage before.” At present only people earning a certain level of income and  owning  property  valued   above a certain amount can  vote. If we enfranchise women everyone will start demanding it - labourers, tradesmen, farmers, etc.  It is a slippery slope. Reason IV. “Women have not, as a sex or a  class, the calmness of temperament or the  balance of mind, nor have they the training necessary, to qualify them to exercise a weighty judgement in political affairs.” Woman are psychologically unsuitable to be given this responsibility. Reason VIII. “The presence of a large number of females in the constituencies returning a British government to power would tend to weaken Great Britain in the estimation of foreign powers. Reason IX. “It would be gravely misunderstood and become a source of weakness in India.” In short,  if women were given the vote it will  weaken the social and political order and perhaps even threaten the Empire. Reason X. “The vote once given, it would be impossible to stop at this. Women would then demand the right to become MP’s, Cabinet Ministers, Judges, etc. Nor could the demand be logically stopped.” It will open the floodgates for them to demand other even more undesirable rights. Reason XIV. “The intellectual emancipation of women is proceeding, and will continue to do so, without the enjoyment of political franchise. There is no necessary connection between the two.” Don’t they already have enough?   Reason XV. “No precedent exists for giving women as a class an active share in the government of a great country or empire, and it is not for Great Britain, whose stake is the greatest, and in whose case the result of failure would be the most tremendous, to make the experiment.” There is no precedent for this move and we have no idea what the consequences of it will be.