Should Women Vote Sources. 5. Women s self-esteem was ruined due to their treatment at the hands of men.

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1 Tracy High School Honors Mrs. Lee Should Women Vote Sources Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote a Declaration of Sentiments for the first Woman s Rights Convention held in Seneca, New York, in She based the document on Thomas Jefferson s Declaration of Independence. Like Jefferson, Stanton included a list of complaints. Below is a summary of those complaints. 1. Women had to obey laws created without their input. 2. Women could not attend college. 3. Married women were for all intents and purposes, legally dead. 4. Women were not allowed to vote. 5. Women s self-esteem was ruined due to their treatment at the hands of men. 6. Unmarried women were taxed with no say in how the money was spent. 7. Women could not be ministers, doctors, or lawyers. Women s work was low-paying. 8. Women had fewer rights than men with low morals and men who were not citizens. 9. Women in divorce cases had no say over matters such as who would raise their children. 10. A married woman had not rights to property or the money she earned. 11. Men were given complete control over and responsibility for their wives. 12. Men were unrightfully playing God by deciding what was appropriate for women. 13. Because women could not vote, they could be more easily exploited. 14. Women were not allowed to hold important positions in the church or the state. 15. There was a different standard of behavior for men and women.

2 Said provision is in the form of a limitation upon the right of Suffrage, confining that right to less than one half of the citizens of the State over the age of twenty-one years... On what principles is our Government founded? The principles following in the bill of rights, which are, among other things these: "That all government of right originates from the people." 1. But aside from the universally recognized principles of the Bill of Rights, what right has any one class of the citizens to sit in judgment on allowing to others the exercise of their rights? Nobody can, and we believe no one does, deny that one citizen has just as much right as another. It may be stated as a rule applicable to every species of republic, that depriving any class of the right of Suffrage, invites contempt of that class, and in fact produces it. Secondly it is false that Woman is inferior [of lower rank] to Man...The truth is, we are a human race. Part of us are men, part of us are women; both equal, each superior, and each inferior; each is part and parcel of the same humanity. Excerpt from "Judge Bromwell's Minority Report on Suffrage: Read, Ordered Printed, and Laid on the Table for Future Consideration," 8 February 1876 For the principles of universal liberty and justice are rapidly supplanting in the minds of the people the selfishness and intolerance of past ages; and he who rides not triumphantly in the car of progress must stand aside, or be crushed by its steadily moving wheels. 1. They [woman suffrage opponents] have not the Constitution to uphold them--for not a word in that noble instrument can possibly be construed [interpreted] to mean that men alone shall rule. On the contrary there is evidently a most scrupulous avoidance of any such idea, the words "person" and "citizen" being used whenever practicable... Women are held responsible for all infringement [violation] of the laws which men make under this provision. And, further, do not all departments of public business and of government suffer from the withholding of the voice and the conscience of Woman? Is not the tender heart of the wife, the long-suffering and wise patience of the mother accustomed to govern her diverse family, -- the loyal affection and patriotism of the daughter needed in the affairs of government to-day? Excerpt from A. L. Washburn, "Minority Report of Committee on Woman Suffrage," 1 September 1877 A woman is just as much a thinking, feeling, and acting person after marriage as before. The emancipation of the women of the country simply means the dawn of a golden era. Better conditions for every [family]. By legal fiction, [husbands] are to represent women at the polls.... In much of their social and political action, they will pursue personal advantage as it presents itself to them, in the form of some immediate gain, and will only in rare instances consult that larger conception of the general good which holds that what is best for the community is also best for the individual.... Are they so wise that women should be satisfied of their ability to do it? We are taxed to support the very legislators, and judges, who make laws, and render decisions adverse to woman. Women of this country have never been granted a jury of their peers.

3 Susan B. Anthony Friends and Fellow-citizens: I stand before you tonight, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I cannot only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen s right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny. Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life liberty and property. And when 100 or 1, 000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each other in the enjoyment of them, through prescribed judicial and legislative tribunals. They agree to abandon the methods of brute force in the adjustment of their differences, and adopt those of civilization. Nor can you find a word in any of the grand documents left us by the fathers that assumes for government the power to create or to confer rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states and the organize laws of the territories; all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights. All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, or exclusion of any from their full and equal enjoyment. Here is pronounced the right of all men, and consequently, as the Quaker preacher said, of all women, to voice in their government. And here, in this very first paragraph of the declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for, how can the consent of the governed: be given, if the right to vote be denied. Again: That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute anew government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Surely, the right of the whole people to vote is here clearly implied. For however destructive in their happiness this government might become, a franchised class could neither alter nor abolish it, nor institute a new one, except by the old brute force method of insurrection and rebellion. One-half ot he people of this nation today are utterly powerless to blot from the statue books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation, that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent, that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers, that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of their own person, wages and children, are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers to this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all. By those declarations, kings, priest, popes, aristocrats, were all alike dethroned, and placed on a common level politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, me, as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule, and placed on a political level with women, By the practice of those declarations all class and caste distinction will abolished; and slave, serf, plebian, wife, women, all alike, bound from their subject position to the proud platform of equality. The preamble of the federal constitution says: We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and established this constitution for the United States of America. It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings or liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people-women as well as men. And it is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government, the ballot.... James Madison said:

4 Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the mass of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrate who are to administer them. Also, let is be remembered, finally, that it has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature. And these serrations of the framers of the United States Constitution of the equal and natural rights of all people to a voice in the government have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statement of the nation, throughout the entire history of our government.... But is urged, the use of the masculine pronouns he, his and him, in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent, and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government, and from penalties of the violation of laws. A year and a half ago I was at Walla, Walla, Washington Territory. I saw there a theatrical company, called the Pixley Sisters, playing before crowded houses, every night of the whole week of the territorial fair. The eldest of those three fatherless girls was scarce eighteen. Yet every night a United States officer stretched out is a long finger, and clutched sic dollars of the proceeds of the exhibition of those orphan girls, who, but a few years before, were half starvelings in the streets of Olympia, the capital of the far-off Northwest Territory. So the poor widow, who keeps a boarding house, manufactures shirts, or sells apples and peanuts on the street corners of our cities, is compelled to pay taxes from her scanty pittance. I would that the women of the republic, at once, resolve, never again to submit of taxation, until their right to vote be recognized. Amen.

5 Cult of Domesticity Jeanne Boydston The lives of nineteenth-century women were deeply shaped by the so-called cult of true womanhood a collection of attitudes that associated true womanhood with the home and family. In their homes, presumable safely guarded from the sullying influences of business and public affairs, women effortlessly directed their households and exerted a serene moral influence over their husbands and children. By both temperament and ability, so custom had it, women were ill-suited to hard labor, to the rough-and-tumble of political life, or the competitive individualism of the industrial economy. In fact, the cult of true womanhood seldom provided a very accurate description of women s daily experiences, even for relatively privileged women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony offers an especially striking example of the paradoxes of the cult of true womanhood. Like many other nineteenth-century women (Before the Civil War, but especially after it) Susan B. Anthony did not marry, did not have children, did not stay home, traveled constantly, and was self-supporting through most of her life. Ironically, the closest Anthony came to the domestic ideal was when she took over Stanton s household work to free Stanton to write and think for the movement. And work it was! Although advocates of female domesticity described households as if they took care of themselves, even in prosperous families wives cooked, cleaned, laundered, sewed, nursed sich family members, took care of their children, and performed a host of other labors. In 1864, author Lydia Maria Child (whose husband was a layer) used a diary entry to summarize her work for one year. In addition to writing 53 articles and correcting proofs for a new book, the long list included: Cooked 360 dinners; Cooked 362 breakfasts; Swept & dusted sitting room & kitchen 350 times; Filled lamps 362 times. Child also took care of sick friends and family members, made 83 items of clothing and assorted linens, preserved two peck of fruit, mended clothes, and accomplished other innumerable jobs too small to be mentioned. This work was vital to household economic survival. Only among the very wealthiest families were husbands incomes large enough to purchase everything a family needed to survive. In the poorest of families, wives scavenged the wharves and alleys for abandoned or unguarded food, fuel, and clothing. Even in middling families, a wife s labor in keeping a garden, making clothes, economizing with food, and even producing some of the family s furnishings (ottomans, pillows, mattresses) and equipment (like soap) enabled her household to maintain a comfortable standard of living on incomes that were often otherwise insufficient. But nineteenth-century Americans were eager to present the home as distinct from the increasingly exploitive work place. With economic value calculated more and more exclusively in terms of cash and men increasingly basing their claims to manhood on their role as breadwinners, women s unpaid household labor went largely unacknowledged. Also hidden by the cult of true womanhood was women s extensive participation in labor directly in the cash economy. The cult of true womanhood did not protect the millions of enslaved African-American women from the back-breaking labor that built the cotton economy of the South and propelled the industrial development of the North. Along with enslaved men, enslaved women planted, hoed, harvested, built fences and roads, and waded in snake-infested marshes to construct irrigation ditches. As Frederick Douglass pointed out to Elizabeth Cady Stanton during the debates of the 14 th Amendment, being a woman never saved a single female slave from hard labor, beatings, raped, family separation, and death. (Even free women had no legal right to their bodies, their children, their possessions, or, in fact their freedom of movement). Meanwhile, industrialization also forced free women in northern working-class households to labor for cash, as street vendors, tavern-keepers, boarding-house operators, paid domestic servants, garment workers, prostitutes, and a verity of other occupations. Young women from New England farms provided the nation s first factory labor force in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, beginning in A surprising number of middle-class families also depended on the paid labor of wives. Lydia Mari Child, whose earning as an editor and writer supported her family, is one example, although the most famous is probably Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose income as a writer far outstripped that of her college professor husband. In other ways, too, nineteenth century women were not in fact the fully domestic creatures, literally confined to their households, which the cult of true womanhood seemed to describe. Indeed, they were perhaps all too publicly visible for the tastes of some observers (which may help explain why critics were so insistent on the issue of women s proper place). Enslaved women in the South and working-class free women in the North were constantly visible on city streets, going about their jobs, selling goods in open air markets, or scavenging for food. Like Stanton and Anthony, tens of thousands of middle-class and elite women became involved in reform movements,

6 often spending year of their lives deeply engaged in very public affairs, writing for newspapers, giving speeches, raising money, found charitable intuitions, and lobbying political bodies. But if the cult of true womanhood obscured the daily labor and lives of all women to some extent, it nevertheless did not operate identical in all women s lives. Virtually by definition, women of color and poor white women were excluded from true womanhood. To the extent that white women from more prosperous households succeeded in embodying true womanhood in their own lives, they inevitable did so at the expense of other women, whose labor produced so many of the commodities and services of the perfectly domestic household. Here was the final paradox of nineteenth-century true womanhood.

7 Ten Reasons Why the Great Majority of Women Do Not Want the Ballot. BECAUSE they have not lost faith in their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers, who afford full protection to the community, there being no call for women to relieve them of the task. BECAUSE women realize that when they become voters they will in consequence have to serve as jurors, and be compelled to hear all the repugnant details incident to murder trials and trials for other crimes disclosing unspeakable wickedness. Jury service is abhorrent to every normal woman. BECAUSE in political activities there is constant strife, turmoil, contention and bitterness, producing conditions from which every normal woman naturally shrinks. BECAUSE the primary object of government is to protect persons and property. This duty is imposed by nature upon man, the women being by nature absolved from assuming a task to them impossible. BECAUSE when women noisily contest and scramble for public office woman pitted against woman they write an indictment of womankind against which all right-minded women strenuously protest. BECAUSE women can accomplish more through counseling than they ever can attain through commanding. BECAUSE woman suffrage will not enhance peace and harmony in the home, but, on the contrary, in the heat of a campaign, it is sure to bring about dissension and discord. BECAUSE Nebraska women are already enjoying a greater measure of protection and privilege under the laws than do women of any state where women vote. BECAUSE the woman worker wants rest and quietude not political excitement. BECAUSE every reason supporting the claim of women to vote supports also the right of women to be consulted as to whether they shall or shall not be given the ballot. Though strong-minded women who are not satisfied with the disposition of Providence and who wish to go beyond the condition of their sex, profess no doubt to be Christians, do they consult the Bible?--do they follow the Bible? I fear not. Had God intended to create a companion for man, capable of following the same pursuits, able to undertake the same labors, he would have created another man; but he created a woman, and she fell.... The class of women wanting suffrage are battalions of old maids disappointed in love--women separated from their husbands or divorced by men from their sacred obligations--women who, though married, wish to hold the reins of the family government, for there never was a woman happy in her home who wished for female suffrage... Who will take charge of those young children (if they consent to have any) while mothers as surgeons are operating indiscriminately upon the victims of a terrible railway disaster? No kind husband will refuse to nurse the baby on Sunday (when every kind of business is stopped) in order to let his wife attend church; but even then, as it is not his natural duty, he will soon be tired of it and perhaps get impatient waiting for the mother, chiefly when the baby is crying. Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, "Woman's Suffrage: A Lecture Delivered in the Catholic Church of Denver, Colorado," 6 February 1877

8 OTHER FEARS THE ANTIS HAD IF WOMEN WERE CONSIDERED EQUALS More strongly the Anti s conception of women s emotional composition aggravated their fears about women s suffrage. Whereas men were described as rational and emotionally stable, women were portrayed as high strung, tense, irritable, and potentially irrational. Their delicate emotional equilibrium would easily upset by a strain-like voting. When women generally vote and hold office, warned one Anti-group, nervous prostration, desire for publicity and love of the limelight will combine to produce a form of hysteria already increasing in the United States. Those women already involved in the suffrage movement were pointed to as case studies of hysteria. One male doctor who opposed woman suffrage declared that he could not shut his eyes to the fact that there is mixed up with the women s movement much mental disorder. Another Anti spoke of the insane craving of the suffragists to imitate men and of her pathological contempt for women s work. (Mayor, 67) Other Arguments that Anti s Stressed against Women and Voting 1. In addition to this, the Antis stressed that women were intellectually inferior and could not make educated decisions. Women did not have the intellectual capacity of men because their brains were smaller and more delicate. One Anti observed that the fiber of a woman s brain is likely to be as much finer as the phobia of her sin The other explanation to women s intellectual inferiority was related to the same basis for diagnosing hysteria. They argued that the women s thought process was less equpped to handle logical progressions than were men s. For example, an Anti said that women s mind arrived at conclusions on incomplete evidence; has a very imperfect sense of proportion; accepts the congenial as true and rejects the uncongenial as false; takes the imaginary which is desired for reality, and treats the undesired realty to which is out of sight as non-existent-building up for itself in this way... a very unreal picture of the external world. Another Anti said that while women s minds seemed to move rather in curves and circles, following lines more beautiful, perhaps, but irregular and disconcerting, men s minds seemed to move along in a straight line. (Mayor, 68) 3. Women in politics would mean corruption and irrationality. But this argument did not cease here; the Antis took this even farther for their own benefits. They warned that if women got the vote they would compete with men in the male sphere and lose the qualities which made them feminine. An Anti said, The question to be decided... is simply this: Is it desirable to have women become masculine, instead of retaining the characteristics of her own sex? Another Anti said that over time those changes would alter the very temperament of women. (Mayor 68) The Three Conclusions the Antis arose at due to Women s Emotional Behavior 1. Since all women suffragists boarded on hysteria there was no need to take their arguments seriously. 2. There was a real danger if other women came under the influence of the suffragists. As one Anti warned, all women are potentially hysterics. Men had an obligation to protect other women from contamination of the suffragists. 3. A women s emotional instability would make her a dangerous voter. She would let her feelings rather than her intellectual concern is her primary reason for voting. Since women obviously could not be trusted to behave rationally, they would be extremely dangers in a political setting. (May, 67) Other Mysogynist Ideologies behind the Arguments Against Suffrage and Threats It Posed 1. While women would become more masculine, Antis argued that men would become more effeminate. Male Antis saw women in politics as a threat to their masculinity. Giving women the vote was views as shirking rather than a sharing or responsibly, and therefore a resignation of manhood. 2. They predicted the shifting of gender roles as expressed their viewed quite bluntly. Woman suffrage would produce a nation of travesties. 3. Once traditional sex roles were tampered with the family structure would annihilate, argued Antis. The Antis argued that women had a separate but equal form of power. They could shape their children s growth. The Antis argued that giving women political power was not the solutions to women s dissatisfaction. They advocated that women use the power they had within the home to produce sons and husbands who were effective extension of themselves. (Mayor, 71)

9 Do Women Want the Vote? Issued by the National state association opposed to woman suffrage, 29 West 39th Street, New York (1894). Do women want the vote? Suffrage is not a natural right. It is a question to be determined by the community solely by a consideration of its effect upon the public welfare. The majority of the women do not want to assume the burden of government. A very small minority of women demand the ballot. It is unjust to force new duties upon a large body of women who are indifferent or opposed to woman suffrage. Voting is only a small part of government. If the duty of voting is laid upon women, the duty will also be laid upon them of taking an active part in the preliminaries necessary to voting, and in the consequences which result from voting. They must take part in political discussions and share in political campaigns, and see that the laws which they help to enact are enforced upon those that refuse to obey the laws. Would it promote the General Welfare? Woman suffrage would double the number of voters and double the expense of elections to the tax payer, without any corresponding gain. The need of America is not an increased quantity, but and improved quality of the vote, and there is no adequate reason to believe that Woman Suffrage, by doubling the vote, will improve its quality. Would it not impose Great Hardship on Many Women? Equality in character does not imply similarity in function; the duties and life of men and women are different in the State, as in the home. Women have many physical limitations which do not exist for men, and already, as a rule their strength is over-taxed. The energies of women are engrossed by their present duties and interests, from which men cannot relieve them, and it is better for the community that they devote their energies to better performances of their present work, than to divert them to new fields of activity. The ballot is not essential for the performance of woman s present duties. Are not the Interests of Women Safe in the Hands of Men? Quite as safe as in those of other women! The women suffragists always imply that men legislate only for their own interests. But in America men cannot be accused of indifference to the wishes and happiness of women. They would make any reasonable amendments in the laws affecting the welfare of women, if urged with half the force now brought to bear in favor of suffrage. Moreover, in general the interests of men and women are very much the same. Both desire good schools, god roads, good drainage, and good government. The prosperity of the town and of the State benefits both alike. Only in the common division of labor, certain duties are apportioned to each, according to their special conditions of strength and organization. These differences are not of human origin, and therefore cannot be changed by any so-called reform. Political equality will deprive women of special privileges hitherto accorded to her by law. Will Woman Suffrage Help the Cause of Temperance? No woman suffrage State is a prohibition State; no woman suffrage State is a high license State. Eight States where woman do not vote are prohibition States. Is the Ballot Essential to Woman s Public Usefulness? Woman Suffrage would force woman into the political arena. This would impair her usefulness which she exercises to-day as a disinterested, non-partisan worker for the public good. She would duplicate man s work and lose her special value if she went into party politics. What would happen to Legislation and Government? Behind law there must always be force to make it effective. Women, by the limitations of their sex, are unfitted for the stern work of enforcing law. It would be ill for any State where legislation was shaped by women over the heads of a majority of men. Under such conditions you would soon have, not government, but chaos.