Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America

by Susan Fenimore Cooper

FEMALE SUFFRAGE

by

Susan Fenimore Cooper

(This e-text has been prepared from the original two-part magazine article, "Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America," by Susan Fenimore Cooper, which appeared in Harper's New Weekly Magazine, Vol. XLI (June-November, 1870), pp. 438-446, 594-600. The author is identified only in the Table of Contents, p. v, where she is listed as "Susan F. Cooper."

Transcribed by Hugh C. MacDougall jfcooper@wpe.com

{Because "vanilla text" does not permit of accents or italics, accents have been ignored, and both all-capital and italicized words transcribed as ALL CAPITALS. Paragraphs are separated by a blank line, but not indented. Footnotes by Susan Fenimore Cooper are inserted as paragraphs (duly identified) as indicated by her asterisks. All insertions by the transcriber are enclosed in {brackets}. For readers wishing to know the exact location of specific passages, the page breaks from Harper's are identified by a blank line at the end of each page, followed by the original page number at the beginning of the next.

{A Brief Introduction to Susan Fenimore Cooper's article:

{The question of "female suffrage" has long been resolved in the United States, and—though sometimes more recently—in other democratic societies as well. For most people, certainly in the so-called Western world, the right of women to vote on a basis of equality with men seems obvious. A century ago this was not the case, even in America, and it required a long, arduous, and sometimes painful struggle before the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920.

{Why then, take steps to make available through the Gutenberg Project an article arguing AGAINST the right of women to vote—an article written by a woman?

{There are two reasons for doing so. The first is that Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) was no ordinary woman. She was educated in Europe and extremely well read; she was the daughter and literary assistant of James Fenimore Cooper, America's first internationally recognized novelist; and she was a naturalist and essayist of great talent whose "nature diary" of her home village at Cooperstown, published as "Rural Hours" in 1850, has become a classic of early American environmental literature.