Henry B. Blackwell

“ Municipal suffrage for women, on the contrary, is an experiment which can be repealed at any time by a Legislature of men alone, elected by men alone. If the presence of women at town-meetings and municipal elections proved distasteful to the men, the Legislature would soon repeal the law. Every fair-minded opponent of Woman Suffrage should vote for Municipal Woman Suffrage, in accordance with Governor Long's recommendation, as the shortest way to put an end to the agitation for Woman Suffrage by giving it a trial. ”

“ It will only double the vote—women will vote as their husbands do.
Then the family will cast two votes instead of one. But the quality of the voters changes the quality of politics. A political party of men and women will not be the same as a party of men alone. Women on an average are more peaceable, refined, temperate, chaste, economical, humane, and law-abiding than men. These qualities will influence the character of the Government. The united votes of men and women will give the fullest, fairest, and most accurate expression of public opinion. ”

“ Our ten years' experience of School Suffrage for women proves the contrary. The women who have voted are admitted to be good and intelligent. The demand for suffrage comes from the respected leaders and educated representatives of their sex. No woman can vote in Massachusetts unless she can read and write. ”

“ Are Democrats who have given suffrage to poor men of foreign birth, or Republicans who have forced negro suffrage on the reluctant South, afraid to share political power with their own intelligent mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters?
8. Women are represented already.
Men cannot represent women, because they are unlike women. Women as a class have tastes, interests and occupations which they alone can adequately represent. Men specially represent material interests; women will specially represent the interests of the home.
9. Only bad and ignorant women would vote. ”

“ Yet that is only a small and disjoined part of the system of Municipal Suffrage. It does not include a vote on the management of schools, or a share in the nomination of candidates. Small as it is, the right is restricted in the case of women by limitations which make it troublesome to exercise. A woman must apply every year to be registered. Under parallel conditions not 500 men would have voted for school committee. That over 20,000 women have done so in a single year, under such restrictions, is a proof of eminent and unselfish public spirit. ”

“ Women have not physical strength to enforce laws; therefore they should not help make them.
One-half our male voters have not physical strength to enforce laws, yet they help make them. Most lawyers, judges, physicians, ministers, merchants, editors, authors, legislators and congressmen, and all men over forty-five years old, are exempt from military service on the ground of physical incapacity. ”

“ Most women do not want to vote.
Except in years of presidential election, a majority of men in Massachusetts do not vote. This is shown by statistics. The right to vote for governor, State legislature, municipal, town and county officers, often calls out less than half the male vote, in spite of public opinion, party machinery, torchlight processions, newspaper articles, expenditure of money, and personal efforts of candidates. From 10,000 to 20,000 women in Massachusetts register every year to vote merely for school committee. ”

“ Jacob Bright has written to the Massachusetts Legislature that in England Woman Suffrage has proved "good for women, good for Parliament, and good for the country." It has worked so well there that it has been extended to the women of Scotland. Within three years it has been granted to the women of New Zealand and South Australia. Women now vote for all National, State and local officers in the States of Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, also on property qualifications in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward's Island, Ontario, and Manitoba. ”

“ Moral force, such as women possess, is as necessary as physical force to national well-being.
17. If women vote they must fight.
Women are the mothers of men. Lucy Stone says: "Some woman perils her life for her country every time a soldier is born. Day and night she does picket duty by his cradle. For years she is his quartermaster, and gathers his rations. And then, when he becomes a man and a voter, shall he say to his mother, 'If you want to vote you must first kill somebody?' It is a coward's argument!" ”

“ The most civilized class of men now spend their leisure in the society of educated women. They go with women to lectures, church meetings, concerts and parties. They do not go to the primary meetings because the women are excluded. Let the women go, and the men will go too. ”

“ Voting is the authoritative expression of an opinion. It requires intelligence, conscience, and patriotism, not muscle. All the physical force of society is subject to call to enforce law, but cannot create law. ”

“ It will make domestic discord when women vote contrary to their husbands.
In cases where husbands and wives vote together it will be an additional source of sympathy and bond of union. In cases where they vote differently they will agree to differ, as they now do in religious matters. A man will not respect his wife the less because she has an opinion of her own and is free to express it. ”

“ In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, but all are one. Women as well as men are commanded to "call no man master." Nowhere is it said in the Bible to women, "Thou shalt not vote." ”

“ In the beginning, we are told, God made man in his own image male and female, and gave them dominion; not man dominion over woman. Among the Jews, God's chosen people, Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, a married woman, was judge, and led their armies to victory. ”