Suffragette

“ What if their mothers on this platform be angular, old, wrinkled, and gray? They, too, have fought a good fight for freedom, and proudly bear the scars of the battle. We alone have struck the key-note of reconstruction. While man talks of "equal, impartial, manhood suffrage," we give the certain sound, "universal suffrage." While he talks of the rights of races, we exalt the higher, the holier idea proclaimed by the Fathers, and now twice baptized in blood, "individual rights." To woman it is given to save the Republic. ”

“ The late Miss Helen Blackburn, historian of the movement, truly observes, "The seed of the Women's Suffrage agitation lay in that one short word 'male.'" The twentieth-century woman wonders why women made no protest. ”

“ Under pavilions, or in adjoining rooms, or in the very shadow of the ballot-box, women presided at well-filled tables, serving refreshments to the voters, and handing to those who would take them, tickets bearing the words: "For Constitutional Amendment Relating to Right of Suffrage," while the national colors floated alike over governing and governed; alike over women working and pleading for their rights as citizens, and men who were selling woman's birth-right for a glass of beer or a vote. ”

“ But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. (Applause.) If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the Government, let the question of woman be brought up first and that of the negro last. (Applause.) While I was canvassing the State with petitions and had them filled with names for our cause to the Legislature, a man dared to say to me that the freedom of women was all a theory and not a practical thing. ”

“ Though you yourselves may doubt the expediency of woman suffrage, though you may question the soundness of our claim, yet, in the name of democracy, which permits the people to make and amend their constitutions, and in the name of American womanhood, prepared by a century of unmeasured advance for political duties, we beg your aid in the speedy submission of this question. We ask this boon in the direct interest of the thousands of women who do want to vote, who suffer pangs of humiliation and degradation because of their political servitude. ”

“ We permit the lame, the halt and the blind to go to the ballot-box; we permit the foreigner and the black man, the slave and the freeman, to partake of the suffrage; there is but one thing left out, and that is the mother that taught us, and the wife that is thought worthy to walk side by side with us. It is woman that is put lower than the slave, lower than the ignorant foreigner. She is put among the paupers whom the law won't allow to vote ”

“ Are not the primal virtues, those which make life good and fair and which are a woman's glory,—are they not humble and quiet and unobtrusive? The suffrage has not emancipated the masses of men, who are still held captive in the chains of poverty and dehumanizing toil.
Do women themselves, those, at least, in whom the woman soul, which draws us on and upward, is most itself, desire that the vote be given them? ”

“ Drawing the Lines.—If the fifteenth article of Constitutional Amendments ever gets ratified and becomes the rule of suffrage, it will have at least one good effect. Woman will then know with what power she has to contend. It will be male versus female, the land over. All manhood will vote not because of intelligence, patriotism, property, or white skin, but because it is male, not female. All womanhood will be newly outraged and debased, not for ignorance, disloyalty, poverty, or a black skin, but because it is female, not male. ”

“ From the bottom of my soul I hate the idea of meeting women at the polls; and yet, if woman suffrage ever becomes a fact, I can not stay away. For my fraction of power inevitably makes me thus much responsible for the civil government of my country. ”

“ Our protest is not that all men are lifted out of the degradation of disfranchisement, but that all women are left in. The Revolution and the National Woman's Suffrage Association make woman's suffrage their test of loyalty, not negro suffrage, not Maine law or prohibition. Do you believe women should vote? is the one and only question in our catechism. In this period of reconstruction the Woman Suffrage Associations sent their first delegates to National political conventions. ”

“ I have never been sanguine as to the near and rapid accomplishment of the admission of women to the right and duty of suffrage, but I have never doubted of its ultimate accomplishment, because I believe that every movement, founded in justice and wisdom, will at length prevail. The cause of woman suffrage never seemed to me more worthy of the consideration of thoughtful men than now. What it has suffered, all causes that strike at deep principles must expect to suffer in their early history. ”

“ This, then, is the philosopher who gives intellectual prestige to the Woman's Suffrage cause.
But is there not, let us in the end ask ourselves, here and there at least, a man who is of real account in the world of affairs, and who is—not simply a luke-warm Platonic friend or an opportunist advocate—but an impassioned promoter of the woman's suffrage movement? ”

“ It always has been clear to me that woman suffrage is the one great principle underlying all reforms. With the ballot in her hand woman becomes a vital force—declaring her will for herself, instead of praying and beseeching men to declare it for her. ”

“ Women are holding their meetings; and with great ability do they urge their claim to the rights of property and suffrage. But, as in the case of the colored man, the great needed change is in himself, so, also, in the case of woman, the great needed change is in herself. Of what comparative avail would be her exercise of the right of suffrage, if she is still to remain the victim of her present false notions of herself and of her relations to the other sex?—false notions so emphatically represented and perpetuated by her dress? ”

“ The question for every man and woman, he thought, was the true basis of the reconstruction of our government, not the rights of woman, or the negro, but the rights of all men and women. Suffrage for woman was even a more vital question than for the negro; for in giving the ballot to the black man, we bring no new element into the national life—simply another class of men. ”

“ Women Claim the Suffrage--Types of Men who
Support the Suffrage--John Stuart Mill.
THE task which I undertake here is to show
that the Woman's Suffrage Movement has no
real intellectual or moral sanction, and that
there are very weighty reasons why the suf-
frage should not be conceded to woman.
I would propose to begin by analysing the
mental attitude of those who range themselves
on the side of woman suffrage, and then to pass
on to deal with the principal arguments upon
which the woman suffragist relies. ”

“ Sitting on deck hour after hour, how often I queried with myself as to the significance of the boon for which women were so earnestly struggling. In asking for a voice in the government under which we live, have we been pursuing a shadow for forty years? In seeking political power, are we abdicating that social throne where they tell us our influence is unbounded? No! no! the right of suffrage is no shadow, but a substantial entity that [Pg 953] the citizen can seize and hold for his own protection and his country's welfare. ”

“ I confess that I believe in the idea of aristocracy—i. e. "the rule of the best ones"—not by blood or position, but the aristocracy of character, to which our laws point when they declare that prison characters shall not vote.
The ballot of any community cannot rise above its character. A town full of abandoned women would be cursed by the application of woman suffrage. ”

“ To the people of that young commonwealth, destined by its manifold resources and the intelligence of its men and women to become the Empire State of the Rocky Mountains, I refer you, in the fullest confidence that, with scarcely a dissenting voice, they will say that woman suffrage is no longer an experiment, but is a practical reality, tending to the well-being of the State. ”

“ Now if that be a law of heredity, it is a law which is as yet unheard of outside the sphere of the woman suffrage societies. Moreover, one is accustomed to hear women, when they are not arguing on the suffrage, allege that clever mothers make clever sons. ”

“ If it can only be done through woman’s suffrage, then woman’s suffrage must surely come, because, whether British legislators care for the good of women or not, nature does care, and as the race moves forward the working woman will have to be protected. ”

“ As a consequence, Woman's Suffrage is again a leading question in practical politics. On this occasion it is not complicated by any demand for an extension of the franchise to men, but is raised as a clear and distinct issue which will have to be dealt with on its own merits. ”

“ The advocates of woman suffrage are certainly entitled to great respect, and there is much force in many of their arguments. When a woman of high character and culture asks us why she should not have the right to vote while a plantation negro or an immigrant knowing nothing of American institutions or of the English language has that right, the appeal to our sympathies is very strong. ”

“ It is enough for me to know that the charter of our Nation states that "taxation without representation is tyranny," and that "all just government is founded on the consent of the governed." No woman wrote those words. They were written by men. I stood recently at a woman suffrage meeting in Boston, and I heard a gentleman say, "I am willing, on certain conditions, that women shall vote. When women shall suppress intemperance, I am willing they shall have the ballot." ”

“ In accordance with this we have John Stuart Mill making propaganda for woman suffrage in a tractate entitled the Subjection of Women; we have a Woman's Freedom League —"freedom" being a question-begging synonym for "parliamentary franchise"—and everywhere in the literature of woman's suffrage we have talk of woman's "emancipation"; and we have women characterised as serfs, or slaves—the terms serfs and slaves supplying, of course, effective rhetorical synonyms for non-voters. ”

“ Since the purpose of the National American Woman Suffrage Association is "to secure the right to vote to women citizens of the United States," we have called this national convention of suffragists. From every State will come delegates, who will bring with them the growing spirit of rebellion against injustice....
We call upon every public-spirited woman to come and help devise methods of carry. ”

“ The goal towards which many of us have been striving for nearly half a century is in sight. I appeal to each and all of my fellow-suffragists not to be over confident, but so to act as if the success of the suffrage cause depended on herself alone. ”

“ As chairman of the committee appointed by our National Suffrage Association to address letters to the large conventions held this year, allow me to bring before you the great need of the recognition of women in all of the rights, privileges and immunities of United States citizenship. Though your association has for its principal object the management of the great brewing interests of this country, yet I have noted that you have adopted resolutions declaring against woman suffrage. ”

“ Universal manhood suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel depotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone ”

“ When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against Female Suffrage keeps women out of activity, social influence and citizenship, let us a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it actually does keep her out of. ”

“ Upon a full and fair trial, we believe they would conclude that the right of suffrage for woman was, on the whole, rather a plague than a profit, and vote to resign it into the hands of their husbands and fathers. ”

“ But the opportunist—the practical politician, as he calls himself—will perhaps here intervene, holding some such language as this:—"Granting all you say, granting, for the sake of argument, that the principle of giving votes to woman is unsound, and that evil must ultimately come of it, how can you get over the fact that no very conspicuous harm has resulted from woman suffrage in the countries which have adopted it? ”

“ The great body of our women, and the best of them, have accepted the elective franchise as a precious boon and exercise it as a patriotic duty—in a word, after many years of happy experience, woman suffrage is so thoroughly rooted and established in the minds and hearts of the people that, among them all, no voice is ever uplifted in protest against or in question of it. ”

“ We are organizing an afternoon reading society, to have read aloud "The History of Woman Suffrage," and shall soon place it on the shelves of the public library of the village. While we cannot point to any wonderful revolution in public sentiment because of our work, we are nevertheless full of courage, and under the leadership of our State president, Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, we shall go forward in faith and good works, hoping for the end of woman's political slavery. ”

“ The Fates preserve us from Female Suffrage; for give women votes and patriotism is swamped by the only women who would care to exercise the privilege of voting: the clamorous New Woman, all crotchets, fads and Radical nostrums for the regeneration of the parish and the benevolent treatment of subjugated races in an Empire won by the sword and retained by might. ”

“ We have now sufficiently considered the suffragist's humanitarian schemes, and we may lead up to the consideration of her further projects by contrasting woman's suffrage as it presents itself under colonial conditions—i. e. woman's suffrage without the female legislative reformer and the feminist—with the woman suffrage which is being agitated for in England—i. e. woman suffrage with the female legislative reformer and the feminist. ”