I urge a sixteenth amendment, because 'manhood suffrage,' or a man's
government, is civil, religious, and social disorganization. The male element is
a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence,
conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord,
disorder, disease, and death. See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages
of history reveal! Through what slavery, slaughter, and sacrifice, through what
inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and persecutions, black codes and gloomy
creeds, the soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries, while mercy has
veiled her face and all hearts have been dead alike to love and hope!
The male element has held high carnival thus far; it has fairly run riot from
the beginning, overpowering the feminine element everywhere, crushing out all
the diviner qualities in human nature, until we know but little of true manhood
and womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing, for it has scarce been
recognized as a power until within the last century. Society is but the
reflection of man himself, untempered by woman's thought; the hard iron rule we
feel alike in the church, the state, and the home. No one need wonder at the
disorganization, at the fragmentary condition of everything, when we remember
that man, who represents but half a complete being, with but half an idea on
every subject, has undertaken the absolute control of all sublunary matters.
People object to the demands of those whom they choose to call the
strong-minded, because they say 'the right of suffrage will make the women
masculine.' That is just the difficulty in which we are involved today. Though
disfranchised, we have few women in the best sense; we have simply so many
reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine gender. The strong,
natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed and ignored in dependence,
for so long as man feeds woman she will try to please the giver and adapt
herself to his condition. To keep a foothold in society, woman must be as near
like man as possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices,
and vices. She must respect his statutes, though they strip her of every
inalienable right, and conflict with that higher law written by the finger of
God on her own soul.
She must look at everything from its dollar-and-cent point of view, or she is
a mere romancer. She must accept things as they are and make the best of them.
To mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships
in jails, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every
form, all this would be mere sentimentalizing. To protest against the intrigue,
bribery, and corruption of public life, to desire that her sons might follow
some business that did not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding
selfishness, would be arrant nonsense.
In this way man has been molding woman to his ideas by direct and positive
influences, while she, if not a negation, has used indirect means to control
him, and in most cases developed the very characteristics both in him and
herself that needed repression. And now man himself stands appalled at the
results of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness that falsehood,
selfishness, and violence are the law of life. The need of this hour is not
territory, gold mines, railroads, or specie payments but a new evangel of
womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into
the higher realms of thought and action.
We ask woman's enfranchisement, as the first step toward the recognition of
that essential element in government that can only secure the health, strength,
and prosperity of the nation. Whatever is done to lift woman to her true
position will help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for the
race.
In speaking of the masculine element, I do not wish to be understood to say
that all men are hard, selfish, and brutal, for many of the most beautiful
spirits the world has known have been clothed with manhood; but I refer to those
characteristics, though often marked in woman, that distinguish what is called
the stronger sex. For example, the love of acquisition and conquest, the very
pioneers of civilization, when expended on the earth, the sea, the elements, the
riches and forces of nature, are powers of destruction when used to subjugate
one man to another or to sacrifice nations to ambition.
Here that great conservator of woman's love, if permitted to assert itself,
as it naturally would in freedom against oppression, violence, and war, would
hold all these destructive forces in check, for woman knows the cost of life
better than man does, and not with her consent would one drop of blood ever be
shed, one life sacrificed in vain.
With violence and disturbance in the natural world, we see a constant effort
to maintain an equilibrium of forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever
trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the
angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and
drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may reign supreme. There is a striking
analogy between matter and mind, and the present disorganization of society
warns us that in the dethronement of woman we have let loose the elements of
violence and ruin that she only has the power to curb. If the civilization of
the age calls for an extension of the suffrage, surely a government of the most
virtuous educated men and women would better represent the whole and protect the
interests of all than could the representation of either sex alone.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton - 1868
