Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States,: 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, and January 25, 1887Various
History
Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States,: 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, and January 25, 1887
Various
Women -- Suffrage -- United States
I am going to give you an illustration, not because I have any
disrespect for the person, because on many other questions he was
really a good deal better than a good many other men who had not
so bad a name in this nation. When, under the old _régime_, John
Morrissey, of my State, the king of gamblers, was a Representative
on the floor of Congress, it was humiliating enough for Lucretia
Mott, for Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for all of us to come down here
to Washington and beg at the feet of John Morrissey that he would
let intelligent, native-born women vote, and let us have as much
right in this Government and in the government of the city of New
York as he had. When John Morrissey was a member of the New York
State Legislature it would have been humiliating enough for us to
go to the New York State Legislature and pray of John Morrissey to
vote to ratify the sixteenth amendment, giving to us a right to
vote; but if instead of a sixteenth amendment you tell us to go
back to the popular-vote method, the old-time method, and go down
into John Morrissey's seventh Congressional district in the city
of New York, and there, in the sloughs and slums of that great
Sodom, in the grog-shops, the gambling-houses, and the brothels,
beg at the feet of each individual fisticuff of his constituency
to give the noble, educated, native-born, tax-paying women of
the State of New York as much right as he has, that would be too
bitter a pill for a native-born woman to swallow any longer.
I beg you, gentlemen, to save us from the mortification and the
humiliation of appealing to the rabble. We already have on our
side the vast majority of the better educated--the best classes of
men. You will remember that Senator Christiancy, of Michigan, two
years ago, said on the floor of the Senate that of the 40,000 men
who voted for woman suffrage in Michigan it was said that there
was not a drunkard, not a libertine, not a gambler, not a
depraved, low man among them. Is not that something that tells
for us, and for our right? It is the fact, in every State of the
Union, that we have the intelligent lawyers and the most liberal
ministers of all the sects, not excepting the Roman Catholics. A
Roman Catholic priest preached a sermon the other day, in which he
said, "God grant that there were a thousand Susan B. Anthonys in
this city to vote and work for temperance." When a Catholic priest
says that there is a great moral necessity pressing down upon this
nation demanding the enfranchisement of women. I ask you that you
shall not drive us back to beg our rights at the feet of the
most ignorant and depraved men of the nation, but that you, the
representative men of the nation, will hold the question in the
hollow of your hands. We ask you to lift this question out of the
hands of the rabble.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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