Woman and the Republic / A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates

by Helen Kendrick Johnson

I cannot agree with Dr. Jacobi that a low tone habitually prevails in relation to public affairs. The guards freshly thrown about the ballot, and the greater watchfulness over entrance to citizenship, are two of the most obvious advances at this moment.

CHAPTER V.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE LAWS.

In the fourth and fifth counts of the Declaration of Sentiments, the Suffragists say: "Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides." "He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead."

The following four counts all refer to a married woman's civil deadness; and I will give them in order, and then consider the five counts together:

"He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns." "He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband." "In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement." "He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be proper causes, and, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands."

That the women did not find themselves, as might be supposed from their charges, living under the edicts of the Middle Ages, is proved by their hunt through statute-books for such of the eighteen grievances as relate to laws. They also say that "while they had felt the insults incident to sex, in many ways, as every proud thinking woman must, yet they had not in their own experience endured the coarser forms of tyranny resulting from unjust laws; but had souls large enough to feel the wrongs of others." Until they knew what those wrongs were, it would seem they could hardly have felt for them intelligently. It would seem, too, that the great body of American women were also unaware that they had been, and were still being, legally and morally robbed, enslaved, and murdered. In fact, Suffrage speakers have been compelled to account for their unconcern by considering it the result of long subjection, and at the same time have had to claim that these stupid beings were fit to rule with and over men.

While the counts contain concrete statements, the closing clause—"the law in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands"—sets forth an abstract idea in justification of which they furnish no proof. In the counts as they stood in the Declaration of Sentiments, the general laws were not accused of doing any injustice, personal or civil, to an unmarried woman, except in reference to the one matter of withholding the vote, which they claimed was wrong because she had an inalienable right to the ballot and was subject to tax. Not a personal law did they ask to have changed for her protection. They recognized the fact that, unless she was married, a woman in the United States stood upon a legal equality with man. The hue and cry in regard to a married woman was, that she was not treated as if femme sole. The femme sole could make contracts and wills, sue and be sued, and do all and sundry in her own name that her brother could do. With a married woman the situation was different. Will any one contend that in the past the married woman has been held in less honor than the unmarried? Can it be thought for a moment that the law-makers expressed their contempt for wives and mothers, and their respect for daughters and sisters who were unmarried? Tradition and fact, poetry and prose, romance and reality, all go to prove that the reverential feeling of the world has gathered about the wife and the mother. The men who made those laws turned for their ideals of abstract justice to their mothers' faith and teaching; and it seems most incongruous to assume, as do the Suffrage arguments, that, while all the laws relating to women were tyrannical at some point, those in regard to married women were the ones wherein men embodied their most cruel and revengeful feeling. It also appears to be a gratuitous assumption that whatever was different in the legal treatment of men and women came from man's belief in his own supremacy, especially toward the wife into whose hands he had committed the keeping of his home and his honor.

In 1881, after more than thirty years of agitation of the subject, the Suffrage leaders said: "The condition of married women under the laws of all countries has been essentially that of slaves, until modified in some respects, within the last quarter of a century, in the United States." And again they said: "The change from the old common law of England, in regard to the civil rights of women, from 1848 to the advance legislation in most of the Northern States in 1880, marks an era both in the status of woman as a citizen and in our American system of jurisprudence. When the State of New York gave married women certain rights of property, the individual existence of the wife was recognized, and the old idea that husband and wife are one, and that one the husband, received its death-blow. From that hour the statutes of the several States have been steadily diverging from the old English codes. Most of the Western States copied the advance legislation of New York, and some are now even more liberal."

This sentence contains another of the constantly recurring instances of the methods by which the Suffrage mind jumps to unwarranted conclusions. When the State of New York gave married women certain property rights, it recognized their legal existence in a new way, but not their individual existence—that had been recognized by every act of law and custom, from the registry of their birth to that of their marriage or their death. Socially and civilly, every woman in the United States had had opportunity to make her individuality felt, and if there was any difference in advantage in respect of this, it was supposed to lie with the married woman. So true is this, that Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Mott had to hunt for oppressive laws, and most of the women of this land have no real sense of the great and liberal change in laws concerning married women since 1848. I am no more approving of or admiring the old English common law, or the canon law, concerning women, than I am approving of or admiring the law that came to light recently in the Transvaal and would have allowed the torture of Jameson and his men, who, as a matter of fact, were allowed to go almost unpunished. The law of the Dutch Government in Africa belonged to the Middle Ages; their conduct belonged to to-day. I only believe that at the time when it was possible for one man to frame for another man such laws of physical and mental torment as every code reveals, their laws for women were the best they could devise, and were those which led to the freedom of the women of to-day. A law of England still favors only the first-born son, and he only because he is the firstborn. What wonder that girls have been denied succession; and what an evidence of man's desire to show favor and not the "insult incident to sex," that he has placed woman on thrones upon which he has had to sustain her by main force.