72 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts^ and Letters. 



SOCIAL SCIENCE AND WOMAN SUFFEAGE. 



BY REV. CHARLES CAVERNO, A. M.. 



Amboy, 111. 



The English periodical, Nature^ reviewing an essay of Hux- 

 ley's on what it calls "the irrepressible woman question," 

 makes the following statement . " We are confident that this 

 question is one which must be ultimately settled mainly upon 

 physiological grounds, and it is just because the conventions 

 of society very rightly do not admit of the full and fair discus- 

 sion of those grounds before mixed audiences that the extreme 

 emancipationists have been enabled to obtain for their theory 

 the amount of currency which has fallen to its lot." It would 

 seem, however, if the conventions of society forbid the discus- 

 sion on the platform and in the parlor of the most fundamental 

 aspects of one of our gravest social problems, that there ought 

 to be some method devised by which such material matters 

 may be brought prominently before the public mind. Human 

 society cannot be preserved if matters which are of primary im- 

 port cannot somehow be subject to open and general consider- 

 ation. Social Science, if it is to have any value at all, ought 

 to adapt itself to such exigency. The object of this essay will 

 be to suggest thought mainly upon the physiological features 

 of the question of suffrage for woman. 



So far as the advocates of political fi-anchise for woman have 

 gone, their position seems, in the main, to be correct. We ac- 

 cept the most radical theories of " rights " that have been pro- 

 pounded. We maintain that "governments derive their just 

 powers from the consent of the governed." 



