Observations and Comments on the Vote

An excerpt from ‘Mother Earth: Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature’, November 1915, New York City, published and edited by Emma Goldman

To perpetuate stupidity and ignorance, nothing could be invented more effective than the Vote. The Vote is the symbol of cowardice, fear, the mastery of the mob. To vote in an American election is to insult your own intelligence, to inoculate yourself with the poison of mediocrity. Therefore it is truly a bitter, tiresome farce to witness the foolish women of many States clamoring for the Vote as the key to freedom and political purity, as the safe and sane means of education, as — why enumerate all the benefits they are going to derive from the Vote?

The wise exploiters of the mob, the grafters and bosses, wisely realize that there shall accrue still greater profits from politics, with women voting. They are aware that woman suffrage will mean the increase in power of the political machine, an increase in graft, a greater and more fertile field of exploitation, and a wider possibility of meddling and “regulating” morals and customs. They have a vision of future possibilities of “moral reform” and its consequent train of graft and swindle and bleeding of victims. Suffrage creates, as these wily Machiavellis are well aware, a habit of thought which induces people to believe that all benefits are derived from the Vote; that politicians are the saviors of the country; that Woodrow Wilson is a great and good man; that laws are necessary; that laws are wisely made; that laws are to be respected; that the majority is always right; that the government of the United States is run by the people, for the people, and is of the people.

Suffrage, in short, creates and vitalizes all those fallacies that paralyze, stupify, and deaden the intellect — so that the exploitation of the great majority becomes a task that has long been compared to that of taking candy from a baby. And it is around this flabby, stinking, pestiferous corpse — the Vote — around this dead, decaying, idea that the human flies are swarming, besmearing themselves with its flattering fallacies.

Yet so prevalent has the suffrage disease become that even the radicals have become inoculated with its vicious virus. It was only to be expected, of course, that Socialist papers like the N. Y. Call should champion the “cause,” but it is rather disappointing to find The Masses devoting an entire edition to “Votes for Women.”

Perhaps MOTHER EARTH alone has any faith in women. Perhaps we alone believe women no longer need dolls; that women are capable and are ready to fight for freedom and revolution ; that they are strong enough to stand on their own feet, to use their own powers, to fight for ideals, to die fighting. We are ready to place our faith, at any rate, in the few women who are doing these things today rather than in the forty thousand or forty million who troop up Fifth Avenue like a huge flock of sheep after the banner of a dead idea.