In supporting these resolutions, Mrs. Stanton said, "I place man above all governments, ecclesiastical and civil—all constitutions and laws." "In the settlement of any question, we must simply consider the highest good of the individual." Antoinette Brown Blackwell followed Mrs. Stanton with a series of resolutions in which she opposed her, and defended the sanctity of marriage. Wendell Phillips moved that neither series of resolutions be entered on the journal. Mr. Garrison said they did not come together to settle the question of marriage, but he should be sorry to rule out Mrs. Stanton's resolutions and speeches. Miss Anthony said: "I hope Mr. Phillips will withdraw his motion…. I totally dissent from the idea that this question does not belong on this platform. Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter. By it, man gains all, woman loses all. Tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him; meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her…. By law, public sentiment, and religion, from the time of Moses down to the present day, woman has never been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man…. She must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all."
The resolutions were carried and recorded, and are published to this day, with added testimony to the same effect from a hundred Suffrage sources. We turn back to trace one of the lines through which this teaching has come down. The Suffrage leaders mention as special inspirers of their movement besides Ernestine Rose (who seconded Mrs. Stanton's resolutions) and Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the writings of those women we find the same sentiments set forth with delicacy or vulgarity, according to the nature of the writer. Margaret Fuller, in her Dial essay, published in 1843, "The Great Lawsuit—Man Versus Woman, Woman Versus Man," says: "It is the fault of marriage, and of the present relation between the sexes, that the woman belongs to the man, instead of forming a whole with him. It is a vulgar error to suppose that love—a love—is to woman her whole existence. She is also born for Truth and Love in their universal energy. Would she but assume her inheritance, Mary would not be the only virgin mother." Mary Wollstonecraft believed that marriage consisted solely of mutual affection, and that there should be no outward promise or tie to bind. If love were to die, the heart should seek other affinity. The licentious words of Frances Wright need not be repeated. With Mephistophelian promptings, Ernestine Rose stood forever a-tip-toe, whispering in the ear of the purer American feeling that would often have faltered. At the time of the passing of Mrs. Stanton's resolutions she said: "But what is marriage? A human institution, called out by the needs of the social, affectional human nature for human purposes…. If it is demonstrated that the real objects are frustrated, I ask, in the name of individual happiness and social morality and well-being, why should such a marriage be binding for life?… I ask that personal cruelty to the wife may be made a State's-prison offence, for which divorce shall be granted. Wilful desertion for one year should be a sufficient cause for divorce…. Habitual intemperance, or any other vice which makes the husband or wife intolerable and abhorrent to the other, ought to be sufficient cause for divorce." Essentially the same idea was repeated by Dr. Hulda Gunn in a recent Suffrage meeting.
In asking for laws that carried out these claims, or some of them, Mrs. Stanton said, in addressing the New York Legislature in 1854: "If you take the highest view of marriage as a Divine relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only recognize it…. But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws that control all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human, half-divine institution, which you may build up but cannot regulate."
These doctrines—from those of Frances Wright to those of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony—were put forth in the name of social purity and true marriage. A great body of Suffragists never have accepted them. They were repugnant, in this form, to a majority who were demanding "equal rights." In January, 1871, Mr. Hooker (husband of Isabella Beecher Hooker), said in the New York Evening Post: "The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement. The two have no necessary connection. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments in favor of Woman Suffrage is, that the marriage relation will be safer with women to vote and legislate upon it than where the voting and legislation are left wholly to men. Women will always be wives and mothers, above all things else. This law of nature cannot be changed, and I know of nobody who desires to change it." As he had just been referring to "persons who advocated easy divorce," and who originated the Suffrage movement, his statement that he knew of nobody who desired to change marriage seems funny.
It was one of the matters remarked upon with satisfaction by Suffrage leaders during our Constitutional Convention Suffrage campaign, that such a large number of speakers advocated Suffrage because of its advantage to the home. Mrs. Cora Seabury said: "Where woman is, homes naturally exist, and not without her. The 'divine veracity in nature,' which in her case has survived the chaos of ages and the varying civilization of six thousand years, is not now to be disproved by an incident comparatively so trivial as that of taking the ballot." Dr. Jacobi puts the idea in this way: "Mr. Goldwin Smith declares that woman suffrage aims at such a 'sexual revolution' as must cause the 'dissolution of the family.' The Suffrage claim does not aim at this; it seeks only to formulate, recognize, and define the revolution already effected, yet which leaves the family intact. The Patria Potestas is gone. A man has lost, first, the right to kill his own son, then the right to order the marriage of his daughter, then the right to absorb the property of his wife. Nevertheless, he survives, and the family, shorn of its portentous rights, bids fair in America to remain the happiest of all conceivable natural institutions; more profound than society, so immeasurably deeper than politics that the fortunate wife, daughter, or sister is puzzled when the two are mentioned in the same breath."
All these writers agree in demanding the ballot in order to make some essential change in woman's condition. Some of them hold that this change cannot be made unless the relations of wife and mother can be set aside when the individual considers them detrimental; others hold that it can be made and leave the relations intact; and one believes that this change is already so far made, while the relations are still intact, that nothing need be feared from further change. It reduces itself to matter of opinion and prophecy on the part of those who agree with the early leaders that essential change is needed, but do not agree with them as to the steps necessary. The appeal must be to facts.
The originators of the movement ought to know what the movement meant. The marriage laws were the first attacked, and are still being hammered at in favor of divorce, although legislation has outrun their demand in changing the outgrown laws in regard to property and contracts. Mr. Hooker said: "The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement." How can that be, when the women who inspired the Suffrage movement, and who began it and still carry it on, proclaimed this as a necessary part? But, this question aside, it may be said that the marriage relation has been the most unsafe in the hands of the women whose idea of equality either repudiates it outright or inveighs against its present status. From the revolutionary and infidel portion of France, from which it sprang, to the recently dead Oneida Community, who but women who imbibed the doctrine that marriage was bondage, have sustained the various forms of license which called itself freedom? Transcendentalism and Libertinism worked together, and both found women who could be fitted to the task of destroying the home.
Mrs. Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes have not existed "naturally." There was a long, long time in human history when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last, through mighty struggles, the family was evolved—the final grouping of the race—the social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has so well progressed that to-day the man's family is dearer to him than his own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who proclaim that man is woman's enemy, are the assassins of their own peace and of the growing peace of home.
A proof that "women will not always be wives and mothers above all things else," is to be found in the story of the women who have engaged in intrigue from the days of ancient Egypt. A woman State senator-elect says: "I am a Mormon, and believe in polygamy." The organizations that are first to proclaim the so-called freedom of woman from the marriage bond, are the same that would repudiate all government, human and divine.
But man has no more set the bounds of woman's life than woman has set those of man's. It is false to say that man has "usurped the prerogative of Jehovah," in assigning her a sphere of action. He has assigned neither her sphere nor his own. Their spheres have been worked out from the conditions that made them male and female. The ideal that faith could picture was presented in the Old Testament, and when Christ said, "For the hardness of your hearts Moses commanded to write a bill of divorcement, but in the beginning it was not so," he spoke the ultimate word. Save for adultery, the family was not to be broken, and the laws of modern life, which grow freer in every other respect, are approaching nearer to this model as society progresses, and most rapidly so in the most progressive states.