The History of Woman Suffrage Volume IV Part 12

FOOTNOTES:

[28] John Randolph Tucker, Va.; Nathaniel J. Hammond, Ga.; David B.

Culberson, Tex.; Patrick A. Collins, Ma.s.s.; George E. Seney, O.; William C. Oates, Ala.; John H. Rogers, Ark.; John R. Eden, Ill.; Risden T. Bennett, N. C.; Ezra B. Taylor, O.; Abraham X. Parker, N.

Y.; Ambrose A. Ranney, Ma.s.s.; William P. Hepburn, Ia.; John W.

Stewart, Vt.; Lucien B. Caswell, Wis.

[29] See History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 715.

[30] This had been done when Miss Anthony voted in Rochester, N. Y., in 1872.

CHAPTER VI.

FIRST DISCUSSION AND VOTE IN THE U. S. SENATE--1887.

Although the Senate Select Committee on Woman Suffrage had reported several times in favor of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Federal Const.i.tution which should prohibit disfranchis.e.m.e.nt on account of s.e.x, and although Thomas W. Palmer, in 1885, had delivered a speech on the question in the Senate, it never had been brought to a discussion and vote.[31] Urged by the members of the National a.s.sociation, and by his own strong convictions as to the justice of the cause, Senator Henry W. Blair (N. H.), on Dec. 8, 1886, called up the following, which he had reported for the majority of the committee on February 2 of that year:

JOINT RESOLUTION PROPOSING AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSt.i.tUTION OF THE UNITED STATES EXTENDING THE RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE TO WOMEN.

_Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress a.s.sembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein)_, That the following article be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States as an amendment to the Const.i.tution of the United States; which, when ratified by three-fourths of the said Legislatures, shall be valid as part of said Const.i.tution, namely:

SECTION 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of s.e.x.

SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the provisions of this article.

Senator Blair supported this resolution in a long and comprehensive speech, that will be recorded in history as one of the ablest ever made on this subject, in the course of which he said:[32]

Upon solemn occasions concerning grave public affairs, and when large numbers of the citizens of the country desire to test the sentiments of the people upon an amendment of the organic law in the manner provided by the provisions of that law, it may well become the duty of Congress to submit the proposition to the amending power, which is the same as that which created the original instrument itself--the electors of the several States.

It can hardly be claimed that two-thirds of each branch of Congress must necessarily be convinced that the Const.i.tution should be amended, before it submits the same to the judgment of the States.

If there be any principle upon which our form of government is founded, and wherein it is different from aristocracies, monarchies and despotisms, that principle is this: Every human being of mature powers, not disqualified by ignorance, vice or crime, is the equal of and is ent.i.tled to all the rights and privileges which belong to any other human being under the law.

The independence, equality and dignity of all human souls is the fundamental a.s.sertion of those who believe in what we call human freedom. But we are informed that women are represented by men.

This can not reasonably be claimed unless it first be shown that their consent has been given to such representation, or that they lack the capacity to consent. But the exclusion of this cla.s.s from the suffrage deprives them of the power of a.s.sent to representation even when they possess the requisite ability....

The Czar represents his whole people, just as much as voting men represent women who do not vote at all.

True it is that the voting men, in excluding women and other cla.s.ses from the suffrage, by that act charge themselves with the trust of administering justice to all, even as the monarch whose power is based upon force is bound to rule uprightly. But if it be true that "all just government is founded upon the consent of the governed," then the government of woman by man, without her consent given in a sovereign capacity, even if that government be wise and just in itself, is a violation of natural right and an enforcement of servitude against her on the part of man. If woman, like the infant or the defective cla.s.ses, be incapable of self-government, then republican society may exclude her from all partic.i.p.ation in the enactment and enforcement of the laws under which she lives. But in that case, like the infant and the idiot and the unconsenting subject of tyrannical forms of government, she is ruled and not represented by man. This much I desire to say in the beginning in reply to the broad a.s.sumption of those who deny women the suffrage by saying that they are already represented by their fathers, their husbands, their brothers and their sons.

The common ground upon which all agree may be stated thus: All males having certain qualifications are in reason and in law ent.i.tled to vote. These qualifications affect either the body or the mind or both. The first is the attainment of a certain age.

The age in itself is not material, but maturity of mental development is material, although soundness of body in itself is not essential, and want of it never works forfeiture of the right. Age as a qualification for suffrage is by no means to be confounded with age as a qualification for service in war.

Society has well established the distinction, and also that one has no relation whatever to the other--the one having reference to physical prowess, while the other relates only to the mental state. This is shown by the ages fixed by law, that of eighteen years as the commencement of the term of presumed fitness for military service and forty-five as the period of its termination; while the age of presumed fitness for the suffrage, which requires no physical superiority certainly, is set at twenty-one years when still greater strength of body has been attained than at the period when liability to the dangers and hards.h.i.+ps of war begins. There are at least three million more male voters in our country than of the population liable by law to the performance of military duty. It is still further to be observed that the right of suffrage continues as long as the mind lasts, while ordinary liability to military service ceases at a period when the physical powers, though still strong, are beginning to wane.

The truth is that there is no legal or natural connection between the liability to fight and the right to vote.

The right to fight may be exercised voluntarily, or the liability to fight may be enforced by the community, whenever there is need for it, and the extent to which the physical forces of society may be called upon in self-defense or in justifiable revolution is measured not by age or s.e.x, but by necessity, which may go so far as to call into the field old men and women and the last vestige of physical force. It can not be claimed that woman has no right to vote because she is not liable to fight, for she is so liable, and the freest government on the face of the earth has the reserved power under the call of necessity to place her in the forefront of the battle itself; and more than this, woman has the right, and often has exercised it, to go there. If any one could question the existence of this reserved power to call woman to the common defense, either in the hospital or the field, it would be woman herself, who has been deprived of partic.i.p.ation in the Government and in shaping public policies which have resulted in dire emergency to the State. But in all times, and under all forms of government and of social existence, woman has given her body and her soul to the common defense.

The qualification of age, then, is imposed for the purpose of securing mental and moral fitness for the suffrage on the part of those who exercise it. It has no relation to the possession of physical powers at all.

The property qualification for suffrage is, to my mind, an invasion of natural right, which elevates mere property to an equality with life and personal liberty, and it ought never to be imposed. But, however that may be, its application has no relation to s.e.x, and its only object is to secure the exercise of the suffrage under a stronger sense of obligation and responsibility. The same is true of the qualifications of sanity, education and obedience to the laws, which exclude dementia, ignorance and crime from partic.i.p.ation in the sovereignty. Every condition or qualification imposed upon the exercise of the suffrage, save s.e.x alone, has for its only object or possible justification the possession of mental and moral fitness, and has no relation to physical power.

The question then arises why is the qualification of masculinity required? The distinction between human beings by reason of s.e.x is a physical distinction. The soul is of no s.e.x. If there be a distinction of soul by reason of the physical difference, woman is the superior of man. In proof of this see the minority report of this committee with all the eulogiums of woman p.r.o.nounced by those who, like the serpent of old, would flatter her vanity that they may continue to wield her power. I repeat that the soul is of no s.e.x, and that so far as the possession and exercise of human rights and powers are concerned, s.e.x is but a physical property, whose possession renders the female just as important as the male, and in just as great need of power in the government of society. If there be a difference, however, her average physical inferiority is really compensated for by a superior mental and moral fitness to give direction to the course of society and to the policy of the State. If, then, there be a distinction between the souls of human beings resulting from s.e.x, woman is better fitted for the exercise of the suffrage than man.

It is a.s.serted by some that the suffrage is an inherent natural right, and by others that it is merely a privilege extended to the individual by society at its discretion. However this may be, its extension to any cla.s.s must come through the exercise of the suffrage by those who already possess it. Therefore, the appeal by those who have it not must be made to those who are asked to part with a portion of their own power. It is only human nature that the male s.e.x should hesitate to yield one-half of its power to those whose cause, however strong in reason and justice, lacks that physical force by which so largely the ma.s.ses of men themselves have wrung their own rights from rulers and kings.

It is not strange that when overwhelmed with argument and half won by appeals to his better nature, and ashamed to refuse blankly that which he finds no reason for longer withholding, man avoids the dilemma by a pretended elevation of woman to a higher sphere, where, as an angel, she has certain gauzy, ethereal resources and superior attributes and functions which render the possession of mere earthly, every-day powers and privileges non-essential to her, however mere mortal men may find them indispensable to their own freedom and happiness. But to the denial of her right to vote, whether that denial be the blunt refusal of the ignorant or the polished evasion of the refined courtier and politician, woman can oppose only her most solemn and perpetual appeal to the reason of man and to the justice of Almighty G.o.d. She must continually point out the nature and object of the suffrage and the necessity that she possess it for her own and the public good.

What, then, is the suffrage, and why is it necessary that woman should possess and exercise this function of freemen? I quote briefly from the majority report of the Senate Committee:[33]

"The rights for the maintenance of which human governments are const.i.tuted are life, liberty and property. These rights are common to men and women alike and both are ent.i.tled to the sovereign power to protect these rights. This right to the protection of rights appertains to the individual, not to the family, or to any form of a.s.sociation, whether social or corporate. Probably not more than five-eighths of the men of legal age, qualified to vote, are heads of families, and not more than that proportion of adult women are united with men in the legal merger of married life. It is, therefore, quite incorrect to speak of the State as an aggregate of families duly represented at the ballot-box by their male head. The relation between the government and the individual is direct; all rights are individual rights, all duties are individual duties.

"Government in its two highest functions is legislative and judicial. By these powers the sovereignty prescribes the law and directs its application to the vindication of rights and the redress of wrongs. Conscience and intelligence are the only forces which enter into the exercise of these primary and highest functions of government. The remaining department is the executive or administrative, and in all forms of government the primary element of administration is force, but even in this department conscience and intelligence are indispensable to its direction.

"If, now, we are to decide who of our sixty millions of human beings are, by virtue of their qualifications, to be the law-making power, by what tests shall the selection be determined? The suffrage is this great primary law-making power.

It is not the executive power. It is not founded upon force.

Never in the history of this or any other genuine republic has the law-making power, whether in general elections or in the framing of laws in legislative a.s.semblies, been vested in individuals by reason of their physical powers....

"The executive power of itself is a mere physical instrumentality--an animal quality--and it is confided from necessity to those who possess that quality, but always with danger, except so far as wisdom and virtue control its exercise.

Therefore it is obvious that the greater the spiritual forces, whether found in those who execute the law, or in the large body by whom the suffrage is exercised, and who direct its execution, the greater will be the safety and the surer will be the happiness of the State.

"It is too late to question the intellectual and moral capacity of woman to understand political issues and intelligently decide them at the polls. Indeed the pretense is no longer advanced that woman should not vote because of her mental or moral unfitness to perform this legislative function; but the suffrage is denied to her because she can neither hang criminals, suppress mobs nor handle the enginery of war. We have already seen the untenable nature of this a.s.sumption, because those who make it bestow the suffrage upon very large cla.s.ses of men who, however well qualified they may be to vote, are physically unable to perform any of the duties which appertain to the execution of the law and the defense of the State. Scarcely a Senator on this floor is liable by law to perform military or other administrative duty, yet this rule set up against the right of women to vote would disfranchise nearly this whole body.

"But it is unnecessary to grant that woman can not fight. History is full of examples of her heroism in danger, of her endurance and fort.i.tude in trial, of her indispensable and supreme service in hospital and field.... It is hardly worth while to consider this trivial objection--that she is incompetent for purposes of national murder or of b.l.o.o.d.y self-defense--as the basis for denying a fundamental right, when we consider that if this right were given to her she would by its very exercise almost certainly abolish this great crime of the nations, which has always inflicted upon woman the chief burden of woe."

Mr. Blair then demonstrated the intellectual ability of the woman of the present day, proving in this respect her capacity and fitness to vote. He quoted from the minority report of the Senate Committee, which had been submitted by Senators Brown and c.o.c.krell, saying:

It proceeds to show that both man and woman are designed for a higher final estate--to-wit, that of matrimony. It seems to be conceded that man is just as well fitted for matrimony as woman herself, and the whole subject is illuminated with certain botanical lore about stamens and pistils, which, however relevant to matrimony, does not prove that woman should not vote unless at the same time it proves that man should not vote. And certainly it can not apply to those women, any more than to those men, whose highest and final estate never is merged in the family relation at all....

The right to vote is the great primitive right in which all freedom originates and culminates. It is the right from which all others spring, in which they merge, and without which they fall whenever a.s.sailed. This right makes all the difference between government by and with the consent of the governed, and government without and against the consent of the governed; and that is the difference between freedom and slavery. If the right to vote be not that difference, what is? If either s.e.x as a cla.s.s can dispense with the right to vote, then take it from the strong and do not longer rob the weak of their defense for the benefit of the strong. But it is impossible to conceive of the suffrage as a right dependent at all upon such an irrelevant condition as s.e.x. It is an individual, a personal right, and if withheld by reason of s.e.x it is a moral robbery.

It is said that the duties of maternity disqualify for the performance of the act of voting. It can not be, and I think is not claimed by any one, that the mother who otherwise would be fit to vote is rendered mentally or morally less fit to exercise this high function in the State because of motherhood. On the contrary, if any woman has a motive more than another person, man or woman, to secure the enactment and enforcement of good laws, it is the mother, who, besides her own life, person and property--to the protection of which the ballot is as essential as to those of man--has her little contingent of immortal beings to conduct safely to the portals of active life through all the snares and pitfalls woven around them by bad men and bad laws, and to prepare rightly for the discharge of all the duties of their day and generation, including, if boys, the exercise of the very right denied to their mother.

Certainly if but for motherhood woman should vote, then ten thousand times more necessary is it that the mother should be armed with this great social and political power for the sake of all men and women who are yet to be. It is said that she has not the time. Let us see. By the best deductions I can make from the census and from other sources, of the women of voting age in this country not more than one-half are married and still liable to the duties of maternity; for it will be remembered that a considerable proportion of the mothers at any given time are below the voting age, while another large proportion have pa.s.sed beyond the point of this objection. Then why disfranchise the half to whom your objection, even if valid as to any, does not apply at all; and most of these, too, the most mature and therefore the best qualified to vote of any of their s.e.x?

But how much is there of this objection of want of time or physical strength to vote in its application to those women who are bearing and training the coming millions?... The average mother will attend church at least forty times yearly from her cradle to her grave; and there is, besides, an infinity of other social, religious and industrial obligations which she performs because she is a married woman and a mother rather than for any other reason whatever. Yet it is proposed to deprive all women alike of an inestimable privilege for the reason that on any given day of election perhaps one woman in twenty of voting age may not be able to reach the polls....

When one thinks of the innumerable and trifling causes which keep many of the best of men and the strongest opponents of woman suffrage from the polls upon important occasions, it is difficult to be tolerant of the objection that woman by reason of motherhood has no time to vote....

It is urged that woman does not desire the privilege. If the right exist at all it is an individual right, and not one which belongs to a cla.s.s or to the s.e.x as such. Yet men tell us that they will vote to give the suffrage to women whenever the majority of women desire it. What would we say if it were seriously proposed to recall the suffrage from all colored or from all white men because a majority of either cla.s.s should decline or for any cause fail to vote? If one or many choose not to claim their right it is no argument for depriving me of mine or one woman of hers. There are many reasons why some women declare themselves opposed to the extension of suffrage to their s.e.x. Some well-fed and pampered, without serious experiences in life, are incapable of comprehending the subject at all. Vast numbers, who secretly and earnestly desire it, from the long habit of deference to the wishes of the other s.e.x upon whom they are so entirely dependent, and knowing the hostility of their "protectors" to it, conceal their real sentiments. The "lord" of the family referring this question to his wife, who has heard him sneer or worse than sneer at suffragists for half a lifetime, ought not expect an answer which she knows will subject her to his censure and ridicule. It is like the old appeal of the master to his slave to know if he would like to be free. Full well did the wise and wary slave know that happiness depended upon declaring contentment with his lot....

We are told that husband and wife will disagree and thus the suffrage will destroy the family and ruin society. If a married couple will quarrel at all, they will find the occasion, and it would be fortunate indeed if their contention might concern important affairs. There is no peace in the family save where love is, and the same spirit which enables husband and wife to enforce the toleration act between themselves in religious matters will keep the peace between them in political discussions. At all events this argument is unworthy of notice unless we are to push it to its logical conclusion, and, for the sake of peace in the family, to prohibit woman absolutely the exercise of free speech and action. Men live with their countrymen and yet disagree with them in politics, religion and ten thousand of the affairs of life, as often the trifling as the important. What harm, then, if woman be allowed her thought and vote upon the tariff, education, temperance, peace, war, and whatsoever else the suffrage decides.

We are told that no government of which we have authentic history ever gave to women a share in the sovereignty. This is not true, for the annals of monarchies and despotisms have been rendered ill.u.s.trious by queens of surpa.s.sing brilliance and power. But even if it be true that no nation ever enfranchised woman--even so until within one hundred years universal or even general suffrage was unknown among men.

Has the millennium yet dawned? Is all progress at an end? If that which is should therefore remain, why abolish the slavery of men?