The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV

by Unknown

The woman with the infant at the breast is in no condition to plow on the farm, labor hard in the workshop, discharge the duties of a juryman, conduct cases as an advocate in court, preside in important cases as a judge, command armies as a general, or bear arms as a private. These duties, and others of like character, belong to the male sex; while the more important duties of home, to which I have already referred, devolve upon the female sex. We can neither reverse the physical nor the moral laws of our nature, and as this movement is an attempt to reverse these laws, and to devolve upon the female sex important and laborious duties for which they are not by nature physically competent, I am not prepared to support this bill.

He was followed by Senator Dolph, who said:

Mr. President, I shall not detain the Senate long. I do not feel satisfied, when a measure so important to the people of this country and to humanity is about to be submitted to a vote of the Senate, to remain wholly silent.

Fortunately for the perpetuity of our institutions and the prosperity of the people, the Federal Constitution contains a provision for its own amendment. The framers of that instrument foresaw that time and experience, the growth of the country and the consequent expansion of the Government, would develop the necessity for changes in it. Under this provision, at the first session of the First Congress, ten amendments were submitted to the Legislatures of the several States, in due time ratified by the constitutional number, and thus became a part of the Constitution. Since then there have been added to the Constitution by the same process five different articles. To secure an amendment requires the concurrent action of two-thirds of both branches of Congress and the affirmative action of three-fourths of the States. The question as to whether this resolution shall be submitted to the Legislatures for ratification does not involve the right or policy of the proposed amendment....

No question in this country has been more ably discussed than this has been by the women themselves. I do not think a single objection which is made to woman suffrage is tenable. No one will contend but that women have sufficient capacity to vote intelligently. Sacred and profane history is full of the records of great deeds by women. They have ruled kingdoms, and, my friend from Georgia to the contrary notwithstanding, they have commanded armies. They have excelled in statecraft, they have shone in literature, and, rising superior to their environments and breaking the shackles with which custom and tyranny have bound them, they have stood side by side with men in the fields of the arts and the sciences.

If it were a fact that woman is intellectually inferior to man, which I do not admit, still that would be no reason why she should not be permitted to participate in the formation and control of the government to which she owes allegiance. If we are to have as a test for the exercise of the right of suffrage a qualification based upon intelligence, let it be applied to women and to men alike. If it be admitted that suffrage is a right, that is the end of controversy; there can no longer be any argument made against woman suffrage; because, if it is her right, then, if there were but one poor woman in all the United States demanding the right it would be tyranny to refuse the demand.

But our opponents say that suffrage is not a right; that it is a matter of grace only; that it is a privilege which is conferred upon or withheld from individual members of society by society at pleasure. Society as here used means man's government, and the proposition assumes that men have a right to institute and control governments for themselves and for women. I admit that in the governments of the world, past and present, men as a rule have assumed to be the ruling class; that they have instituted governments from participation in which they have excluded women; that they have made laws for themselves and for women, and have themselves administered them. But, that the provisions conferring or regulating suffrage, in the constitutions and laws of governments so constituted, have determined the question of the right of suffrage, can not be maintained.

Let us suppose, if we can, a community separated from all others—having no organized government, owing no allegiance to any existing governments, without any knowledge of the character of those present or past, so that when they come to form one for themselves they can do so free from the bias or prejudice of custom or education—a community composed of an equal number of men and women, having equal property rights to be defined and to be protected by law. When such community came to institute a government—and it would have an undoubted right to institute one for itself, and the instinct of self-preservation would soon lead it to do so—will my friend from Georgia tell me by what right, human or divine, the male portion could exclude the female portion, equal in number and having equal property rights, from participation in the formation of such government and in the enactment of its laws? I understand that the Senator, if he would answer, would say that he believes the author of our existence, the ruler of the universe, has given different spheres to man and woman. Admit that; and still neither in nature nor in the revealed will of God do I find anything to lead me to believe that the Creator did not intend that a woman should exercise the right of self-government.

During the consideration by this body, at the last session, of the bill to admit Washington Territory into the Union, referring to the fact that in that Territory woman already had been enfranchised, I briefly submitted my views on this subject, which I now ask the Secretary to read.

The Secretary read as follows: " ... I do not believe the proposition so often asserted that suffrage is a political privilege only, and not a natural right. It is regulated by the constitution and laws of a State, I grant, but it needs no argument to show that a constitution and laws adopted and enacted by a fragment only of the whole body of the people, but binding alike on all, are a usurpation of the powers of government.

"Government is but organized society. Whatever its form, it has its origin in the necessities of mankind and is indispensable for the maintenance of civilized society. It is essential to every government that it should represent the supreme power of the State, and be capable of subjecting the will of its individual citizens to its authority. Such a government can derive its just powers only from the consent of the governed, and can be established only under a fundamental law which is self-imposed. Every person of suitable age and discretion who is to be subject to such a government has, in my judgment, a natural right to participate in its formation. It is a significant fact that, should Congress pass this bill and authorize the people of Washington Territory to frame a State constitution and organize a State government, the fundamental law of the State would be made by all the citizens who were to be subject to it, and not by one-half of them. And we shall witness the spectacle of a State government founded in accordance with the principles of equality, and have a State at last with a truly republican form of government.[51]

"The fathers of the republic enunciated the doctrine 'that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' It is strange that any one in this enlightened age should be found to contend that this declaration is true only of men, and that a man is endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights not possessed by a woman. The lamented Lincoln immortalized the expression that ours is a government 'of the people, by the people and for the people,' and yet it is far from that. There can be no government by the people where one-half of them are allowed no voice in its organization and control. I regard the struggle going on in this country and elsewhere for the enfranchisement of women as but a continuation of the great struggle for human liberty which, from the earliest dawn of authentic history, has convulsed nations, rent kingdoms and drenched battlefields with human blood. I look upon the victories which have been achieved in the cause of woman's enfranchisement in Washington Territory and elsewhere, as the crowning victories of all which have been won in the long-continued, still-continuing contest between liberty and oppression, and as destined to exert a greater influence upon the human race than any achieved upon the battlefield in ancient or modern times."

Mr. President, the movement for woman suffrage has passed the stage of ridicule. The pending joint resolution may not pass during this Congress, but the time is not far distant when in every State of the Union and in every Territory women will be admitted to an equal voice in the government, and that will be done whether the Federal Constitution is amended or not....

No measure involving such radical changes in our institutions and fraught with so great consequences to this country and to humanity has made such progress as the movement for woman suffrage. Denunciation will not much longer answer for arguments by the opponents of this measure. The portrayal of the evils to flow from woman suffrage such as we have heard pictured to-day by the Senator from Georgia, the loss of harmony between husband and wife and the consequent instability of the marriage relation, the neglect of husbands and children by wives and mothers for the performance of their political duties, in short the incapacitating of women for wives and mothers and companions, will not much longer serve to frighten the timid. Proof is better than theory. The experiment has been made and the predicted evils to flow from it have not followed. On the contrary, if we can believe the almost universal testimony, wherever it has been tried it has been followed by the most beneficial results.

In Washington Territory, since woman was enfranchised, there have been two elections. At the first there were 8,368 votes cast by women out of a total vote of about 34,000. At the second election, which was held in November last, out of 48,000 votes, 12,000 were cast by women.

I desire also to inform my friend from Georgia that since women were enfranchised in Washington Territory nature has continued in her wonted course. The sun rises and sets; there are seed-time and harvest; seasons come and go. The population has increased with the usual regularity and rapidity. Marriages have been quite as frequent and divorces have been no more so. Women have not lost their influence for good upon society, but men have been elevated and refined. If we are to believe the testimony which comes from lawyers, physicians, ministers of the gospel, merchants, mechanics, farmers and laboring men—the united testimony of the entire people of the Territory—the results of woman suffrage there have been all that could be desired by its friends. Some of the results have been seen in its making the polls quiet and orderly, awakening a new interest in educational questions and those of moral reform, securing the passage of beneficial laws and the proper enforcement of them, elevating men, and doing so without injury to women.

Senator James B. Eustis (La.) inquired whether, if the right of suffrage were conferred, women ought to be required to serve on juries. To this Senator Dolph replied: "I can answer that very readily. It does not necessarily follow that because a woman is permitted to vote and thus have a voice in making the laws by which she is to be governed and by which her property rights are to be determined, she must perform such duty as service upon a jury. But I will inform the Senator that in Washington Territory she does serve upon juries, and with great satisfaction to the judges of the courts and to all parties who desire to see an honest and efficient administration of law." The following colloquy then ensued:

Mr. Eustis: I was aware of the fact that women are required to serve on juries in Washington Territory because they are allowed to vote. I understand that under all State laws those duties are considered correlative. Now, I ask the Senator whether he thinks it is a decent spectacle to take a mother away from her nursing infant and lock her up all night to sit on a jury?

Mr. Dolph: I intended to say before I reached this point of being interrogated that I not only do not believe that there is a single argument against woman suffrage which is tenable, but also that there is not a single one which is really worthy of any serious consideration. The Senator from Louisiana is a lawyer, and he knows very well that a mother with a nursing infant, that fact being made known to the court, would be excused. He knows himself, and he has seen it done a hundred times, that for trivial excuses compared to that, men have been excused from service on a jury.

Mr. Eustis: I will ask the Senator whether he knows that under the laws of Washington Territory this is a legal excuse from serving on a jury?

Mr. Dolph: I am not prepared to state that it is; but there is no question in the world but that any Judge, this fact being made known, would excuse a woman from attendance upon a jury. No special authority would be required. I will state further that I have not learned that there has been any serious objection on the part of any woman summoned for jury service in that Territory to performing that duty. I have not learned that it has worked to the disadvantage of any family, but I do know that the judges of the courts have taken especial pains to commend the women who have been called to serve upon juries for the manner in which they have discharged their duty.

I wish to say further that there is no connection whatever between jury service and the right of suffrage. The question as to who shall perform jury service, who shall perform military service, who shall perform civil official duty, is certainly a matter to be regulated by the community itself; but the question of the right to participate in the formation of a government which controls the life, the property and the destinies of its citizens, I contend is one which goes back of these mere regulations for the protection of property and the punishment of offenses under the laws. It is a matter of right which it is a tyranny to refuse to any citizen demanding it.

Now, Mr. President, I shall close by saying, God speed the day when not only in all the States of the Union and in all the Territories, but everywhere, woman shall stand before the law freed from the last shackle which has been riveted upon her by tyranny and the last disability which has been imposed upon her by ignorance—not only in respect to the right of suffrage but in every other respect the peer and equal of her brother, man.

Senator Vest then entered into a long and elaborate discussion of the resolution, in which he said:

Mr. President, any measure of legislation which affects popular government based on the will of the people as expressed through their suffrage is not only important but vitally so. If this government which is based on the intelligence of the people, shall ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature or corrupt suffrage. If the Ship of State launched by our fathers shall ever be destroyed, it will be by striking the rock of universal, unprepared suffrage. Suffrage once given can never be taken away. Legislatures and conventions may do everything else; they never can do that. When any particular class or portion of the community is once invested with this privilege it is fixed, accomplished and eternal.[52]

The Senator who spoke last on this question refers to the successful experiment in regard to woman suffrage in the Territories of Wyoming and Washington. It is not upon the plains of the sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman suffrage can be tested. Suffrage in the rural districts and sparsely-settled regions of this country must from the very nature of things remain pure when corrupt everywhere else. The danger of corrupt suffrage is in the cities, and those masses of population to which civilization tends everywhere in all history. Wyoming Territory! Washington Territory! Where are their large cities? Where are the localities in which the strain upon popular government must come?

The Senator from New Hampshire, who is so conspicuous in this movement, appalled the country some months since by his ghastly array of illiteracy in the Southern States.... He proposes to give the negro women of the South this right of suffrage, utterly unprepared as they are for it. In a convention some two-years-and-a-half ago in the city of Louisville an intelligent negro from the South said the negro men could not vote the Democratic ticket because the women would not live with them if they did. The negro men go out in the hotels and upon the railroad cars; they go to the cities and by attrition they wear away the prejudice of race; but the women remain at home, and their emotional natures aggregate and compound the race-prejudice, and when suffrage is given them what must be the result?

Mr. President, it is not my purpose to speak of the inconveniences, for they are nothing more, of woman suffrage.[53] I trust that as a gentleman I respect the feelings of the ladies and their advocates. I am not here to ridicule. My purpose only is to use legitimate argument as to a movement which commands respectful consideration if for no other reason than because it comes from women. But it is impossible to divest ourselves of a certain degree of sentiment when considering this question. I pity the man who can consider any question affecting the influence of woman with the cold, dry logic of business. What man can, without aversion, turn from the blessed memory of that dear old grandmother, or the gentle words and caressing hand of that blessed mother gone to the unknown world, to face in its stead the idea of a female justice of the peace or township constable? For my part I want when I go to my home—when I turn from the arena where man contends with man for what we call the prizes of this paltry world—I want to go back, not to be received in the masculine embrace of some female ward politician, but to the earnest, loving look and touch of a true woman. I want to go back to the jurisdiction of the wife, the mother; and instead of a lecture upon finance or the tariff or the construction of the Constitution, I want those blessed, loving details of domestic life and domestic love.

I have said I would not speak of the inconveniences to arise from woman suffrage—when the mother is called upon to decide as a juryman or jurywoman rights of property or rights of life, whilst her baby is "mewling and puking" in solitary confinement at home. There are other considerations more important, and one of them to my mind is insuperable. I speak now respecting women as a sex. I believe that they are better than men, but I do not believe they are adapted to the political work of this world. I do not believe that the Great Intelligence ever intended them to invade the sphere of work given to men, tearing down and destroying all the best influences for which God has intended them.

The great evil in this country to-day is in emotional suffrage. The great danger to-day is in excitable suffrage. If the voters of this country could think always coolly, and if they could deliberate, if they could go by judgment and not by passion, our institutions would survive forever, eternal as the foundations of the continent itself; but massed together, subject to the excitement of mobs and of these terrible political contests that come upon us from year to year under the autonomy of our government, what would be the result if suffrage were given to the women of the United States?

Women are essentially emotional. It is no disparagement to them they are so. It is no more insulting to say that women are emotional than to say that they are delicately constructed physically and unfitted to become soldiers or workmen under the sterner, harder pursuits of life. What we want in this country is to avoid emotional suffrage, and what we need is to put more logic into public affairs and less feeling.[54]

There are spheres in which feeling should be paramount. There are kingdoms in which the heart should reign supreme. That kingdom belongs to woman, the realm of sentiment, the realm of love, the realm of the gentler and holier and kindlier attributes that make the name of wife, mother and sister next to that of God himself.

I would not, and I say it deliberately, degrade woman by giving her the right of suffrage. I mean the word in its full signification, because I believe that woman as she is today, the queen of home and of hearts, is above the political collisions of this world, and should always be kept above them....

Sir, if it be said to us that this is a natural right belonging to women, I deny it. The right of suffrage is one to be determined by expediency and by policy, and given by the State to whom it pleases. It is not a natural right; it is a right that comes from the State.[55]

It is claimed that if the suffrage be given to women it is to protect them. Protect them from whom? The brute that would invade their rights would coerce the suffrage of his wife or sister or mother as he would wring from her the hard earnings of her toil to gratify his own beastly appetites and passions.[56]

It is said that the suffrage is to be given to enlarge the sphere of woman's influence. Mr. President, it would destroy her influence. It would take her down from that pedestal where she is today, influencing as a mother the minds of her offspring, influencing by her gentle and kindly caress the action of her husband toward the good and pure.[57]

Senator Vest then presented a list of two hundred men from Massachusetts, among them forty-five clergymen, remonstrating against any further extension of suffrage to women. He next presented the old-time letter of Mrs. Clara T. Leonard of that State protesting against the enfranchisement of women. Senator Hoar called attention to the fact that the writer herself was an office-holder, a member of the State Board of Lunacy and Charity, to which Senator Vest answered:

Ah! but what sort of an office-holder? She held the office delegated to her by God himself, a ministering angel to the sick, the afflicted and the insane. What man in his senses would take from woman this sphere? What man would close to her the charitable institutions and eleemosynary establishments of the country? That is part of her kingdom; that is part of her undisputed sway and realm. Is that the office to which woman suffragists of this country ask us now to admit them? Is it to be the director of a hospital? Is it to the presidency of a board of visitors of an eleemosynary institution? Oh, no; they want to be President, to be Senators and Members of the House of Representatives and, God save the mark, ministerial and executive officers, sheriffs, constables and marshals. Of course, this lady is found on this board of directors. Where else should a true woman be found? Where else has she always been found but by the fevered brow, the palsied hand, the erring intellect, aye, God bless them, from the cradle to the grave the guide and support of the faltering steps of childhood and the weakening steps of old age.[58]

Oh, no, Mr. President, this will not do. If we are to tear down all the blessed traditions, if we are to desolate our homes and firesides, if we are to unsex our mothers and wives and sisters and turn our blessed temples of domestic peace into ward political-assembly rooms, pass this joint resolution. But for one I thank God that I am so old-fashioned that I would not give one memory of my grandmother or of my mother for all the arguments that could be piled, Pelion upon Ossa, in favor of this political monstrosity.

I now present a pamphlet sent to me by a lady. I do not know whether she be wife or mother. She signs this pamphlet as Adeline D. T. Whitney. I have read it twice, and read it to pure and gentle and intellectual women. I shall not read it today for my strength does not suffice.[59] ... There is not one impure, unintellectual aspiration or thought throughout the whole of it. Would to God that I knew her, that I could thank her on behalf of the society and politics of the United States for this production. She says to her own sex: "After all, men work for women; or, if they think they do not, it would leave them but sorry satisfaction to abandon them to such existence as they could arrange without us."

Oh, how true that is, how true!