Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States. Various
the performance of the function of primary legislation. 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 assemblies, been vested in individuals who have exercised it by reason of their physical powers. On the contrary, the physically weak have never for that reason been deprived of the suffrage nor of the privilege of service in the public councils so long as they possessed the necessary powers of locomotion and expression, of conscience and intelligence, which are common to all. The aged and the physically weak have, as a rule, by reason of superior wisdom and moral sense, far more than made good any bodily inferiority by which they have differed from the more robust members of the community in the discussion and decisions of the ballot-box and in councils of the state.
The executive power of itself is a mere physical instrumentality—an animal quality—and it is confided from necessity to those individuals who possess that quality, but always with danger, except so far as wisdom and virtue control its exercise. And it is obvious that the greater the mass of higher and spiritual forces, whether found in those to whom the execution of the law is assigned or in the great mass by whom the suffrage is exercised, and who direct the execution of the law, 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 great political issues (which are always primarily questions of conscience—questions of the intelligent application of the principles of right and of wrong in public and private affairs) and properly decide them at the polls. Indeed, so far as your committee are aware, the pretense is no longer advanced that woman should not vote by reason of her mental or moral unfitness to perform this legislative function; but the suffrage is denied to her because she can not hang criminals, suppress mobs, nor handle the enginery of war. We have already seen the untenable nature of this assumption, because those who make it bestow the suffrage upon very large classes 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 a military or other administrative duty, yet the rule so many set up against the right of women to vote would disfranchise nearly this whole body.
But it unnecessary to grant that woman can not fight. History is full of examples of her heroism in danger, of her endurance and fortitude in trial, and of her indispensable and supreme service in hospital and field; and in the handling of the deft and horrible machinery and infernal agencies which science and art have prepared and are preparing for human destruction in future wars, woman may perform her whole part in the common assault or the common defense. It is hardly worth while to consider this trivial objection that she is incompetent for purposes of national murder or of bloody self-defense as the basis of the denial of a great fundamental right, when we consider that if that right were given to her she would by its exercise almost certainly abolish this great crime of the nations, which has always inflicted upon her the chief burden of woe.
It will be admitted that the act of voting is operative in government only as a means of deciding upon the adoption or rejection of measures or of the selection of officers to enact, administer, and execute the laws.
In the discharge of these functions it also must be admitted that intelligence and conscience are the faculties requisite to secure their proper performance.
In this day when woman has demonstrated that she is fully the intellectual equal of man in the profound as well as in the politer walks of learning—in art, science, literature, and, considering her opportunities, that she is not his inferior in any of the professions or in the great mass of useful occupations, while she is, in fact, becoming the chief educator of the race and is the acknowledged support of the great ministrations of charity and religion; when in such great organizations as the suffrage associations, missionary societies, the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and even upon the still larger scale of international action, she has exhibited her power by mere moral influences and the inspiration of great purposes, without the aid of legal penalties or even of tangible inconveniences, to mold and direct the discordant thought and action of thousands and millions of people scattered over separate States, and sometimes even living in countries hostile to each other to the accomplishment of great earthly or heavenly ends, it is unreasonable to deny to woman the suffrage in political affairs upon the false allegation that she is wanting in the very qualities most indispensable and requisite for the proper exercise of this great right.
The advocates of universal male suffrage have long since ceased to deny the ballot to woman upon the ground that she is unfit or incompetent to exercise it.
There is a class of high-stepping objectors, like Ouida, who decry the sound judgment and moral excellence of woman as compared with man, but in the same breath these people deny the suffrage to the masses of men and advocate "the just supremacy of the fittest," so that no time need be wasted in refutation of those malignant and libelous aspersions upon our mothers, sisters, and wives, which, when carried to logical conclusions by their own authors, deny the fundamental principles of liberty to man and woman alike, and reassert in its baldest form the dogma that "the existing system of electoral power all over the world is absurd, and will remain so because in no nation is there the courage, perhaps in no nation is there the intellectual power, capable of putting forward and sustaining the logical doctrine of the just supremacy of the fittest."
In fact the minority of the committee, and this is true of all honest, intelligent men who believe in the republican system of government at all, concede that woman has the capacity and moral fitness requisite to exercise the ballot. That class of women represented by the author of "Letters from a Chimney Corner," whose work has been adopted by the minority as the basis of their report, speaking through the "fair authoress," say that "if women were to be considered in their highest and final estate as merely individual beings, and if the right to the ballot were to be conceded to man as an individual, it might perhaps he logically argued that women also possessed the inherent right to vote." Let me read from the views of the minority on page 1:
The undersigned minority of the Committee of the Senate on Woman Suffrage, to whom was referred Senate Resolution No. 5, proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to grant the right to vote to the women of the United States, beg leave to submit the following minority report, consisting of extracts from a little volume entitled, "Letters from a Chimney Corner," written by a highly cultivated lady, Mrs. –, of Chicago, This gifted lady has discussed the question with so much clearness and force that we make no apology to the Senate for substituting quotations from her book in place of anything we might produce. We quote first from chapter 3, which is entitled "The value of suffrage to women much overestimated."
The fair authoress says:
"If women were to be considered in their highest and final estate as merely individual beings, and if the right to the ballot were to be conceded to man as an individual, it might perhaps be logically argued that women also possessed the inherent right to vote. But from the oldest times, and through all the history of the race, has run the glimmer of an idea, more or less distinguishable in different ages and under different circumstances, that neither man nor woman is, as such, individual; that neither being is of itself a whole, a unit, but each requires to be supplemented by the other before its true structural integrity can be achieved. Of this idea, the science of botany furnishes the moat perfect illustration. The stamens on the one hand, and the ovary and pistil on the other, may indeed reside in one blossom, which then exists in a married or reproductive state. But equally well, the stamens or male organs may reside in one plant, and the ovary and pistil or female organs may reside in another. In that case, the two plants are required to make one structurally complete organization. Each is but half a plant, an incomplete individual by itself. The life principle of each must be united to that of the other; the twain must be indeed one flesh before the organization is either structurally or functionally complete."
This is a concession of the whole argument, unless the highest and final estate of woman is to be something else than a mere individual. It would also follow that if such be her destiny—that is, to be something else than a mere "individual being"—and if for that reason she is to be denied the suffrage, then man equally should be denied the ballot if his highest and final estate is to be something