Ezra Hervey Heywood

“ It is desired now only to affirm woman's natural, inalienable claim to that principle of common law, everywhere conceded to man, which holds all persons innocent until proved guilty; to share in the serviceable government which lifts up the oppressed, in pulling down oppressors and finds its chief guarantee in popular freedom, and the imperishable sense of right. Who says democracy will not justify itself in her as in him? If the Goddess of Liberty is worthy of the imperial honor of a statue of the dome of the Federal Capitol, she may enter ward rooms and town halls as a voter. ”

“ For seventy years one-eightieth part of the American people ruled our States with the iron rod of property in man; that form of political robbery is now broken, but, through subtler methods, slaveholders survive, and North and South get the earnings of labor more successfully than ever; working women, because physically the weakest, being their most deeply defrauded and helpless victims. Since one can justly take from another only what he renders an equivalent for in labor cost, the right to hold property he has not earned or received as the free bequest of others' service is purely imaginary. ”

“ Current objections to woman's enfranchisement can hardly be accounted for, except on the supposition that the sexes, even husbands and wives, are not yet personally acquainted with each other or truth. Justice unites persons widely remote; injustice separates infinitely those standing side by side. Men reputed to know something of the nature of liberty, so-called radicals who have ceased to represent the normal sense, or even the intelligence of the hour, talk flippantly of "universal suffrage" while shutting out one-half of humankind. ”

“ If men are so bad they cannot be trusted to vote with women ought they to vote for women? Those accustomed to govern in schools, able to teach more than males can learn, will not consent to be life-long vassals of boys they educate. The mother of nine children, successfully raised and started in life, why prefer a whiff of cigar smoke to her for President? Government is a bloody, barbarous thing, chiefly because it ignores ethics of which woman is the clearer and most steadfast exponent. ”

“ Minors become of age, slaves are emancipated, lunatics regain reason, idiots are endowed with intelligence, criminals are pardoned, traitors amnestied, disfranchised males of every class shed their disabilities and are restored to liberty; but the fact of sex—the crime of womanhood—dooms one to perpetual vassalage! Not the ability to drink, chew, smoke, lie, steal and swear, votes—though election day too often indicates these vices to be important conditions of membership in the male body politic—but intellect, conscience, character, are supposed to vote ”

“ The most significant spectacle of modern civilization is the trial of institutions in the court of reason, the liberation of intellect, from much which has been "bowed down to as the intention of nature and the ordinance of God." Personality, the origin and mainspring of reform, the point where renewing life enters decaying fact, is the germ of that wilderness of pronoun I's we call society, which was made for man, not man for it. ”

“ Approaching her before marriage with requests, afterward with commands, the lover, kneeling to an adored maid, will swear himself incapable of one of the thousand huts he may not hesitate to inflict on her as wife. As we do not find two hills without a hollow between them, so two intelligent beings, however loving, cannot abide together in healthful peace unless the separate, intact liberty of each is perpetually held inviolate. To commit one's self beyond recall to finite being, for any purpose whatever, makes unitary concord impossible and undesirable. ”

“ It is needless to adduce further evidence to show the right way to be the safe way. Women's enfranchisement will renovate public affairs quite as soon as men are ready for it; and much private dirty linen is destined to overhauled in the great political washing-day near at hand. With an ideal object and courage to work towards it, her arrival in literature, theatres, churches, schools or business brings reformation. As a bevy of girls were playing under my window, and one slip of womanhood put her saucy foot on a mutual right, the other scattered screaming "I'll tell mother, I'll tell mother." ”

“ Politics are merely a matter of business, the ways and means to certain ends. Principle is the what, policy is the how of affairs. The Queen of England is conceded to be, in the gentler traits, a model to her sex, though she rules an empire which encircles the globe; will our queen of hearts be less a woman when dropping a piece of paper into a box? ”

“ From Maine, New Hampshire and other States; from the Canadas and beyond the seas, girls disgusted with or starved out of household service, go to factories; thence to the clothing marts of cities; thence—the path thither strewn with the diseased, the dying and the dead, such is the reluctance of nature—they crowd the swiftly descending ways of prostitution! And though the average length of life there is but four years, statistics show that the "social evil" is less destructive to woman's physical beauty and vitality than the labor system as now organized. ”

“ The family retains its place, in the hope of unity and honesty, at least in a narrow circle; enlightened liberty will eliminate its defects and universalize its merits. As the old spinning wheel and power loom have given place to great factories; so the single tenement, with its cooking drudgery, washtubs and neglected children, will disappear in recognized housekeeping, the scientific classification of woman's industrial and maternal functions. Be just and fear not; what love has joined, can be put asunder only by destroying the conditions out of which love springs and flourishes. ”

“ If ignorant, they made it a penal offence to teach him to read; if poor, they robbed him of his earnings by law. But who are negro men and Chinese that we should confer irresponsible power on them? To admit any man, be he black, red, yellow, or a minor—our curled, white darling, just come of age—to the franchise, who is not pledged to share it with women, is treason to liberty, a desertion of the logical duty of the hour. ”

“ But civil law being merely the creature of man, and binding only as it enacts rights, those who presume to legislate for citizens—permanent residents of mature age and sound mind, who contribute to the material or moral welfare of society—of either sex or any race without power of attorney, or other definite commission, are guilty of fraudulent usurpation, and their acts morally void. "Taxation without representation is tyranny," was a potent rallying cry in the struggle for a male independence, which compels women to pay for the support of governments they had no voice in creating. ”

“ When the mailed hand of force is withdrawn, leaving woman free like man to do wrong even at her own cost, to stand or fall on her own merits, she will do well—in making love or laws, a loaf of bread or an immortal being—just in proportion as responsibility is recognized, intelligence enlarged and liberty inviolate. ”

“ Those who would send the fugitives back, tighten the laws and double the guards, are little aware of what a moral earthquake they are reading the riot act to. The old notion that slavery was the corner-stone of the republic was not more absurd and monstrous than the idea that woman's legal suppression is the corner-stone of the family. The question is not whether reform will disturb existing relations, but whether any system should continue if that system invades essential right and public interest. ”

“ Simply because this booted, spurred and whiskered thing called government is a usurpation, and men choose to have it so. Since, then, custom not reason, fraud not justice, prejudice not good sense, object, this is a question not for argument, but for affirmation. Those who acknowledge the validity of existing government, by increasing its numerical power, not merely drop a stitch in their logic, but surrender the flag of impartial suffrage to its enemies. The negro certainly has quite as good right to vote as his late masters. ”

“ We do not make love by statute and cannot unmake it that way. The law of cohesion between souls is as natural and inevitable as between atoms and globes. The fascinating intelligence at whose feet, in his truest moment, the male lover days all ”

“ Singularly enough the managers of that revolution, after affirming life and liberty to be inalienable rights, proceeded to destroy life by wholesale in battle, and were so insincere as to deny liberty to a weaker race. The same hands which slew tyrants on Bunker Hill spread the shield of Federal law over chattel bondage at the South, and the Union of '89 became "a herd of States hunting slaves." ”

“ The parent fraud of this gigantic system is the piratical principle that one may take from another what he does not render an equivalent for, incarnate in the government monopoly, the political usurpation which, determining by force the nature and amount of currency, makes free money a penal offence. This is the first great wrong the labor movement has risen to overthrow, and, with woman's heart and vote on the right side of the battle, we are sure to win. ”

“ The average life of slaves on cotton plantations was seven years, in rice fields five years; the recital of these facts roused Northern indignation and created a great political party to put down the bad thing. But our laws and customs to-day actually destroy more girls and women than slave codes murdered negroes then! How long must American girls be crucified, on the fiery cross of self-destruction, to save this people? ”

“ In determining essential right we settle woman's rights, for the greater includes the less; every political or reformatory convention is the reappearance of government, through imperfect mediums, the people, from its primary source, natural equity. The subtle law which regulates movements of sovereign particles of the body politic, the cardinal principle of civil liberty allows every one to do what she or he will, provided they invade not the equal right of every other one to do the same. Out of this come freedom of thought, expression and movement ”

“ England has one Stuart Mill, America one Emerson, but it were unlucky to have two; for why should nature be so given out as to repeat herself? In requiring woman to be the shadow, or echo of man, we mar creative intention, and rob society of the better service which intuitive sense waits to render. The value of self-supporting independence doubtless suggested the remark of a wit—"A wife is a fortune—when she is poor." ”

“ The old claim of tyranny, "the king can do no wrong," is reasserted by that many-headed monster, the majority, which widens the circle of despotism, but retains the fact. As people were to the king so woman is now an appendage of man, who claims to be her "head," though nature seems not to have limited heads to the exclusive possession of either sex. That there is no natural feeling of dependence, on one hand, or of superiority on the other, is evident to the most casual observer of spontaneous dealings of the sexes. ”

“ All hail, Equality! Then indeed will moral regeneration begin, social concord be possible, when the sexes, meeting as intelligent beings, mutually accountable to each other and to destiny, engaged irretrievably to nothing but right, reason together on the issues of life, and welcome its yet untried privileges. ”

“ In the prevailing ignorance of what true affectional intercourse is, and the studied avoidance of domestic ethics both by scholars and moralists, suffrage is of course but the initiative, the beginning of wisdom. Women should not be too solicitous about men's sins, for they have plenty of their own to answer for. The angels we hear so much about, like men, eat, drink and catch cold, and like men, in an emergency, will lie and steal. Appealing from women to woman we aim to establish a principle, not especially to vindicate persons, and merely assert her right to opportunity and fair dealing ”

“ That passion now thought incapable of analysis, uncertain in its origin, accidental in its course, inspiring alike the darkest and brightest experiences, replete with ecstacy and tragedy, love, inherently pure, ineffably beneficent, is destined to make inclination one with duty, liberty the bride of order, and justice the security of citizens and the life of states. ”

“ If this be his fate now, who can protect him when the "suppressed sex" are free, and he is obliged to risk his charms in an open market? Armed with jealousy and cunning, in the absence of better weapons of defence, ignorant, frivolous, exacting, woman now often drags man down; her subjected condition being fruitful in vices of artifice and power, of unnatural dependence and imperious self-assertion, the aggressor, as usual, suffers most. Imbruted mind is the reflex result of the exercise of arbitrary power, and those who trample on the weak are the first to cringe to the strong. ”

“ To think slavery liberty and dependence an honor; to be satisfied "with what we have rather than with what we want," that is the calamity. Speculative thought has ranged from asserting the absolute non-existence of mind, save as a form or function of matter, to a belief in the merely phenomenal existence of matter dependent on a sentient immaterial entity, mind, which, wresting from philosophy a recognition of its distinct independent being here, now comes back from the other side of death to say it lives there also. ”

“ The simple fact that she was not consulted in framing the marriage contract, to which from the origin of society she has been forced to submit, alone justifies the woman's rights agitation; for all admit that contracts are morally binding only when parties thereto have a free voice in determining their conditions. This institution, for whose safety male keepers are so alarmed, now stands on usurped irresponsible power, and until reconstructed on the basis of equality and justice, rebellion against it is a duty. ”

“ It is high time that the on most deeply interested in marriage and reproduction should be consulted as a responsible partner; that the maker of men should have free choice of materials, methods and conditions wherewith to perfect her wondrous work.
Educating her for service, not for show, pleasure or sacrifice merely, we must first aim to make a woman, of whom the wife and mother will be, more important, complete and attractive attributes than hitherto. But education, which should develop strength, not cripple it, has been to her, thus far, mainly perversion. ”

“ If she has a soul, if she is a party to be consulted, her legal self-responsible equality cannot be denied, for there is no middle ground between chatteldom and freedom. The change proposed, the recognition of one half the race, hitherto ignored, is indeed momentous, though dreadful only to those who fear to do right, and trust the consequences—but forget its disastrous alternative. "The worst thing that can befall one guilty of sin, is not to be punished for it;" mindful of this fact, nature ordains her laws, more honored in the breach than the observance, to be self-executing ”