Dr. Jacobi, in her address before the Constitutional Convention, said: "Still, all women do not demand the suffrage. We are sometimes told that the thousands of women who do want the suffrage must wait until those who are now indifferent, or even hostile, can be converted from their position. Gentlemen, we declare that theory is preposterous. It is true that the exercise of an independent sovereignty necessitates the demonstration of a very considerable amount of independence. A rebel state that cannot break its own blockade may not call upon a foreign power to move from its neutrality to do so. But the demand for equal suffrage is in nowise analogous to a claim for independent sovereignty. It is rather analogous to the claim to the protection of existing laws, which any group of people, or even a single person, may make."
Under a democratic government a claim for equal suffrage is a claim to share the independent sovereignty that protects, and therefore it cannot be analogous to a claim for protection, individual or otherwise, under that sovereignty. Does Dr. Jacobi mean that in asking for suffrage she does not ask to be as much an independent sovereign as any masculine voter of them all? The comparison of woman's claims to suffrage to the protection afforded by existing laws, suggests a narrowing of the demand to fit the requirements of an apparently hopeless struggle for a majority vote of women.
The Government is spoken of by Suffragists as if it were something exterior to and apart from the individual voters—a code of laws that had been set going and would run of itself, the laws being changed by more or fewer votes, but the power to execute being automatic and continuous. As this is the opposite of the actual situation, these rebels will have to "break their own blockade" like any others.
The "pacific blocade" that is enforced by the Quaker guns of this movement has its peaceful war-cries. One of the most exultant is an allusion to the expression "We the people" in the preamble of our national Constitution, with the question whether "people" does not include women. A reading of the entire preamble shows that, of the six achievements there specified as the purpose of the Constitution, every one is a thing that only men can do—with the possible exception of the fifth, which proposes rather vaguely to "promote the general welfare."
As to the thousands of women who want the vote, there are some figures as to the majority that "are indifferent or even hostile." I see by the pamphlet published by the New York State Suffrage Association, that they have but 1,600 paying members, which is not one in a thousand of the women in the State over twenty years of age. As Mrs. Winslow Crannell has made a careful computation from figures published in the "Woman's Journal," edited by Henry B. Blackwell and his daughter Alice Stone Blackwell, I quote her results: In Maine there are but 12 Suffragists to every 100,000 of the people; in New Hampshire, but 5 to every 100,000; in Massachusetts, but 51 to every 100,000; in Connecticut, but 23 to every 100,000. Pennsylvania has but 14 in 100,000; Kentucky has 32 to 100,000; Michigan, but 6 to 100,000; Illinois has 13 to 100,000; Ohio has 11 to 100,000; Iowa has 6 to 100,000; Virginia, but 1 to 100,000; New Jersey, 8 to 100,000; Arkansas, 3 to 100,000; South Carolina, 3 to 100,000. California has 33 in every 100,000, and Maryland has 6 in 100,000. If the suffrage is claimed for tax-paying women, it can be shown that there are, in New York State, for instance, at least 1,500,000 women who do not pay taxes. But, as a matter of fact, the tax-paying women of this State were among the first signers of Anti-suffrage petitions.
CHAPTER XI.
WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE HOME.
The tenth count in the Suffrage Declaration is: "He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God."
In the "History of Woman Suffrage," the editors say: "Quite as many false ideas prevail as to woman's true position in the home as elsewhere. Womanhood is the great fact of her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations."
The first legislation demanded by the Suffragists was that which called for a change of the marriage laws, so as to admit of divorce, first for drunkenness, and later for several other causes. In discussing the matter in convention, Mrs. Stanton presented resolutions that declared, among other things, "That any constitution, compact, or covenant between human beings that failed to produce or promote human happiness, could not, in the nature of things, be of any force or authority; and it would be not only a right, but a duty, to abolish it. That though marriage be in itself divinely founded, and is fortified as an institution by innumerable analogies in the whole kingdom of universal nature, still a true marriage is only known by its results; and like the fountain, if pure, will reveal only pure manifestations. That observation and experience daily show how incompetent are men, as individuals, or as governments, to select partners in business, teachers for their children, ministers of their religion, or makers, adjudicators or administrators of their laws; and as the same weakness and blindness must attend in the selection of matrimonial partners, the dictates of humanity and common-sense alike show that the latter and most important contract should no more be perpetual than either or all of the former."