The History of the Women's Suffrage: The Flame Ignites. Susan B. Anthony
woman suffragists of this country ask us now to admit them? Is it to be the director of a hospital? Is it to the presidency of a board of visitors of an eleemosynary institution? Oh, no; they want to be President, to be Senators and Members of the House of Representatives and, God save the mark, ministerial and executive officers, sheriffs, constables and marshals. Of course, this lady is found on this board of directors. Where else should a true woman be found? Where else has she always been found but by the fevered brow, the palsied hand, the erring intellect, aye, God bless them, from the cradle to the grave the guide and support of the faltering steps of childhood and the weakening steps of old age.58
Oh, no, Mr. President, this will not do. If we are to tear down all the blessed traditions, if we are to desolate our homes and firesides, if we are to unsex our mothers and wives and sisters and turn our blessed temples of domestic peace into ward political-assembly rooms, pass this joint resolution. But for one I thank God that I am so old-fashioned that I would not give one memory of my grandmother or of my mother for all the arguments that could be piled, Pelion upon Ossa, in favor of this political monstrosity.
I now present a pamphlet sent to me by a lady. I do not know whether she be wife or mother. She signs this pamphlet as Adeline D. T. Whitney. I have read it twice, and read it to pure and gentle and intellectual women. I shall not read it today for my strength does not suffice.59 ... There is not one impure, unintellectual aspiration or thought throughout the whole of it. Would to God that I knew her, that I could thank her on behalf of the society and politics of the United States for this production. She says to her own sex: "After all, men work for women; or, if they think they do not, it would leave them but sorry satisfaction to abandon them to such existence as they could arrange without us."
Oh, how true that is, how true!
This pamphlet of over five thousand words which began, "What is the law of woman-life? What was she made woman for, and not man?"—might be described as the apotheosis of the sentimental effusions of Senators Brown and Vest.
During the discussion Senator George F. Hoar (Mass.) said:
Mr. President, I do not propose to make a speech at this late hour of the day, it would be cruel to the Senate, and I had not expected that this measure would be here this afternoon. I was absent on a public duty and came in just at the close of the speech of my honorable friend from Missouri. I wish, however, to say one word in regard to what seemed to be the burden of his speech.
He says that the women who ask this change in our political organization are not simply seeking to be put upon school boards and upon boards of health and charity and to fulfil all the large number of duties of a political nature for which he must confess they are fit, but he says they will want to be President of the United States, and Senators and marshals and sheriffs, and that seems to him supremely ridiculous. Now I do not understand that this is the proposition. What they want is simply to be eligible to such public duty as a majority of their fellow-citizens may think they are fitted for. The most of the public duties in this country do not require robust, physical health, or exposure to what is base or unhealthy; and when those duties are imposed upon anybody it will be only upon such persons as are fit for them.
My honorable friend spoke of the French revolution and the horrors in which the women of Paris took part, and from that he would argue that American wives and mothers and sisters are not fit for the calm and temperate management of our American republican life. His argument would require him by the same logic to agree that republicanism itself is not fit for human society. The argument is against popular government, whether by men or women, and the Senator only applies to this new phase of the claim of equal rights what his predecessors would have argued against the rights which men now enjoy.
But the Senator thought it was unspeakably absurd that woman with her sentiment and emotional nature and liability to be moved by passion and feeling should hold the office of Senator. Why, Mr. President, the Senator's own speech is a refutation of its own argument. Everybody knows that my honorable friend from Missouri is one of the most brilliant men in this country. He is a logician, he is an orator, he is a man of wide experience, he is a lawyer entrusted with large interests; yet when he was called upon to put forth this great effort of his, this afternoon, and to argue this question which he thinks so clear, what did he do? He furnished the gush and the emotion and the eloquence, but when he wanted an argument he had to call upon two women to supply it. If Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Whitney have to make the argument in the Senate of the United States for the distinguished Senator from Missouri, it does not seem to me so absolutely ridiculous that they should have, or that women like them should have, seats in this body to make arguments of their own.
Senator Blair closed the debate by saying in part:
I appeal to Senators not to decide this question upon the arguments which have been offered here today for or against the merits of the proposition. I appeal to them to decide it upon that other principle to which I have adverted, whether one-half of the American people shall be permitted to go into the arena of public discussion in the various States, and before their Legislatures be heard upon the issue, "Shall the Federal Constitution be so amended as to extend this right of suffrage?" If, with this opportunity, those who believe in woman suffrage shall fail, then they must be content; for I agree with the Senators upon the opposite side of the chamber and with all who hold that if the suffrage is to be extended at all, it must be by the operation of existing law. I believe it to be an innate right; yet even an innate right must be exercised only by the consent of the controlling forces of the State. That is all woman asks—that an amendment be submitted.
The opposition had presented three documents, each representing the views of one woman, and one of these anonymous. Senator Blair presented a petition for the suffrage from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of 200,000 members, signed by Miss Frances E. Willard, president, and the entire official board. This was accompanied by a strong personal appeal from a number of distinguished women, and hundreds of thousands of petitions had been previously sent. The Senator also received permission to have printed in the Congressional Record the arguments made by the representatives of the suffrage movement before the Senate committee in 1880 and 1884.60
A vote was then taken on the resolution to submit to the State Legislatures an amendment to the Federal Constitution forbidding the disfranchisement of United States citizens on account of sex, which resulted in 16 yeas, 34 nays, 26 absent.61 Of the absentees Senators Chace, Dawes, Plumb and Stanford announced that they would have voted "yea;" Jones of Arkansas and Butler that they would have voted "nay."
Thus on January 25, 1887, occurred the first and only discussion and vote in the United States Senate on the submission of an amendment to the Federal Constitution which should forbid disfranchisement on account of sex, that took place up to the end of the nineteenth century.
31 The only time the direct question of woman suffrage ever had been discussed and voted on in the U. S. Senate was in December, 1866, on the Bill to Regulate the Franchise for the District of Columbia—History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 102; and in May, 1874, on the Bill to Establish the Territory of Pembina—the same, p. 545; but these were entirely distinct from the submission of a constitutional amendment.
32 Extended space is accorded this discussion, as it might reasonably be expected that on the floor of the United States Senate would be made the most exhaustive arguments possible on both sides of this important question.
33 This report had been presented Mar. 28, 1884, by Senators T. W. Palmer, H. W. Blair, E. G. Lapham and H. B. Anthony.
34 The italics are made by