Self-constitution

“ Can society complain, when prostituting herself and depriving me of my rights, that I resisted her usurpation and denied her authority? Shall she, doing wrong herself in the first instance, undertake to punish? ”

“ What woman most needs is a true appreciation of her womanhood, a self-respect which shall scorn to eat the bread of dependence. Whoever consents to live by "the sweat of the brow" of another human being inevitably humiliates and degrades herself.... No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature. ”

“ For the Constitution is a legal expression of the conditions under which prostitution has flourished; the social evil is rooted in institutions and manners which have promoted it, in property relations and business practice which have gathered about them a halo of reason and practicality, of morality and conscience. Any change so vast as the abolition of vice is of necessity a change in morals, practice, law and conscience. ”

“ Resolved, That inasmuch as on woman are imposed by her Creator the duties of self-support and self-defense, and by government the responsibilities of taxation and penalties of violated law, she should be protected in her natural, inalienable rights, and secured in all the privileges of citizenship. ”

“ Just what will be the outcome of the attempt to resolve woman into a normal relationship to modern industry without violation of the rights [pg 374] of self-direction and protection, which she claims as her prerogative, and at the same time to preserve society from the social blight of the reduction of considerable numbers of workingwomen to prostitution and abandoned living, remains to be determined by the wisdom and experience of the twentieth century. ”

“ Since men, in the name of their naïve selfishness, claim the right to confiscate woman to their use, to extol to her the charms of the gyneceum, to suppress her rights, and to preach to her the sweets of absorption, must not women re-act against these soporific doctrines, and recall their daughters to the sentiment of dignity and individuality. ”

“ The assumption that religion should content itself with persuasiveness, and that morality should be sparing in its demands, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that a denial of civic rights constitutes a release from moral obligations makes for such a shattering failure of nerve that it brings insanity in its wake. And the assumption that poverty justifies prostitution, or exonerates the prostitute, lets down the last [Pg 41] walls of human resistance. It is easier to find a royal road to learning than a royal road to self-mastery and self-respect. ”

“ Self-government.The drift of our social relations is from status to contract, from accepting life at second-hand to an original acquaintance with its sources. While the slave becomes a citizen, and the hireling an owner, it is a poor commentary on man's gallantry and good sense that she, whom he loves beyond all other beings incarnate, should be the last instead of the first object of this ameliorating law. ”

“ Consequently those who can not, through lack of self-control or excessive lust, conform to social and ethical standards of purity, cripple themselves in reproductive power. Prostitutes, a big population in every country, every age, bear few, if any, children. ”

“ Here our laws are made by irresponsible people—people who demoralize and debauch society; people who make their living in a large measure by upholding the institutions that are inherently, forever, and always corrupt. (Applause.) Laws that are made by the people who own dramshops, who keep gambling-saloons, who minister to the depraved passions and vices of either sex, laws made by the idler, the dissipated, by the demoralized—are they laws? It is true that this government is founded upon caste. Slavery is abolished, but the aristocracy of sex is not. ”

“ Let the libertine reflect a moment on the situation of that woman, who, being forsaken by her betrayer, is reduced to the necessity of turning prostitute for bread, and judge of the enormity of his guilt by the evils which it produces.
It cannot be doubted but that numbers follow this dreadful course of life, with shame, horrour, and regret; but where can they hope for refuge: "The world is not their friend, nor the world's law." ”

“ You can scarcely conceive the tyranny exercised by these wretches: considering themselves as the instruments of the very laws they violate, the pretext which steels their conscience, hardens their heart. Not content with receiving from us, outlaws of society (let other women talk of favours) a brutal gratification gratuitously as a privilege of office, they extort a tithe of prostitution, and harrass with threats the poor creatures whose occupation affords not the means to silence the growl of avarice. To escape from this persecution, I once more entered into servitude. ”

“ Self-government jn the home and the State is the inalienable right of every normal adult and the refusal of this right to women has resulted in social, legal and economic injustice to them and has intensified the existing economic disturbances throughout the world. ”

“ Always remember that the laws of a country possess a really terrible responsibility through the way in which they influence the rising generation. Inequality between the sexes in the law of divorce, tolerance of seduction of minors, the attempt to check sexual disease by the inspection of vicious women, whilst equally vicious men are untouched—all these striking examples of the unjust and immoral attitude of legislation will serve to show how law may become a powerful agent in producing prostitution through its direct attitude towards licentiousness. ”

“ Prove that the qualities that give to man the right of citizenship, do not exist in woman.
I shall be severe with you on this head. To subordinate woman in a social order in which she must work in order to live is to desire prostitution; for disdain of the producer extends to the value of the product; and when such a doctrine is contrary to science, good sense, and progress, to sustain it is cruelty, is moral monstrosity. The woman who cannot live by working, can only do so by prostituting herself; the equal of man or a courtesan, such is the alternative. He is blind who does not see it. ”

“ I begin to see how much right there is on the side of those people who would keep women in subjection. You have been allowed to act with independence, and the result is that you have ruined my life and debased your own. ”

“ One wonders if these short-cut reformers have ever been acquainted with a single member of this class they hope to repress by legal enactments or [364] other measures, such as early marriage, better wages for women, moral education, the censorship of amusements, and so forth. It is not so simple. You see, what is needed is an understanding of the conditions, not from the reformer's standard of thought, but from that of the prostitute, which is a very different matter. How can any one hope to reform a class whose real lives, thoughts, and desires are unknown to them? ”

“ But simple as this maxim may appear, and suited to the level of the meanest capacity, the talent of applying it on all the important, but more especially on all the most trivial, occurrences of domestic life, so as to secure private peace and public dominion, has hitherto been monopolized by the female adepts in the art of self-justification. ”

“ Resolved, That the monopoly of the elective franchise, and thereby of all the powers of legislation and government, by men, solely on the ground of sex, is a monstrous usurpation—condemned alike by reason and common-sense, subversive of all the principles of justice, oppressive and demoralizing in its operations, and insulting to the dignity of human nature. ”

“ Now the greatest part of offenses with us are capital; as if any one be guilty of adultery; if any one force a virgin; if any one be so impudent as to attempt sodomy with a male; or if, upon another's making an attempt upon him, he submits to be so used. There is also a law for slaves of the like nature, that can never be avoided. ”

“ What then are the means of subsistence for women destitute of fortune? The distaff, or else their charms if they have any. Yes, prostitution more or less glossed over is their only resource, which philosophy again contests to them; this is the abject fate to which they are reduced by this civilization, this conjugal slavery which they have not even thought of attacking. ”

“ Gentlemen who would blush to be thought negligent in the offices of frivolous gallantry lack the manhood to accord to women their substantial rights. And, strange to say, ladies dwelling in luxurious ease join with the fops of society to cast contempt upon the earnest aspirations of woman for the possession of her just rights. We have acted upon the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, so far as to make all men equal before the law; but women, our mothers, our wives, our sisters, and our daughters, we condemn to inequality—many to servitude. ”

“ By the assumption of a difference or by the denial of her rights, he either declares her as unable or as unworthy to stand upon an equal plane with himself; he divests her of her human dignity or degrades her into a second-class human being. ”

“ Wemyss as to feel that three essentials of civilization are so bound up together that with leaving either one we may lose the rest—I mean, my right to my property, my right to my wife, and my right to personal liberty. The same radicalism which, on the one hand, sets up a tyranny of majority government to tell me what I shall think, what I shall eat, what I shall spend, is that which, on the other hand, tends to the age of reason and the regulation of property out of existence, and women’s rights to lose themselves as women, and absolute liberty [189] of divorce. ”

“ Once entrapped in this grave of modesty and virtue—this home of concentrated debauchery and sexual perversion—a woman becomes a virtual slave to the brothel-keepers, [332] many of whom set the law at defiance within the four walls of their unhallowed dens, and, aided by toadying satellites, terrorize and oppress the unfortunate females doomed to spend years of misery with none but shameless libertines and strumpets for their associates! Someone may ask—“If these women have legal rights, why don’t they appeal to the police or to the Courts?” ”

“ The first essential of character, it must be insisted, is the power of self-support, of self-direction, of self-achievement. This is, now seen to be an essential for women as for men. The only adequate solution of problems of commercialized prostitution includes for each girl capable of that attainment the power of easy and complete 259self-support. ”

“ The less fit a man is for the possession of power—the less likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that person's voluntary consent—the more does he hug himself in the consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself) will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it. ”

“ we hold further that government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; that it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life. ”

“ Are you to force prostitution and wrong upon those people by these unjust laws? Are you to compel wickedness and crime? Are you going to let it stand upon the statute books of the Southern States that the only woman free to work for her own child shall be the mother of illegitimate children? That is the consequence of what you are doing to the people who in all time past, since they have lived upon this continent, have been denied the right of sacred marriage; and who must have, as Wendell Phillips tells us, forty years to outgrow the past, or to educate them. ”

“ Men have had chief control of the world thus far, and of the results they have not much reason to be proud. For those who decline, or are denied monogamous marriage, politics, theology, science, literature, philosophy, public opinion, all the social intelligence of which history brings us an account, has evolved but three methods of solving the woman question—chattel and capital bondage, polygamy and prostitution. ”

“ It is only necessary to be content to "do as every one else does," and accept the bare limit of the social code under which you live as the guide of conduct.
[Note.—I am reminded here by my wife, Josephine, that, though the statute-laws are broken by few of our friends, there is one law which women who claim to be highly civilized and exceedingly superior are constantly breaking—the statute which forbids them to smuggle.] ”

“ Is not this the position taken by people who hold that it is better to have prostitution in order to provide for the assumed sex [Pg 95] irregularity of men than to risk the loss of a woman’s “virtue” through the removal of those conventions and taboos which prevent her from coping with the situation herself and making her own moral decisions? I can see no difference. Has man at any period of his checkered moral career devised a more unpleasant method of saving his own soul? ”

“ Even the prostitute, the professional and the amateur, will benefit: restrict the opportunities of this easy way of getting money and presents from men and other ways of living and obtaining presents must be resorted to. Thus there will be a finer chance of reformation than ever there was before. To urge moral reforms, to talk sloppy nonsense about liberty, about the poor prostitute, police interference, and all that humbug; to seek cover under "the unequal [148] action of the laws between men and women," or any other form of excuse, is willfully to falsify the position. ”