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
The following thoughts are also from the same source: Is this
emancipation of woman, if that is the proper phrase for it, a final
end, or only the means to an end? Are women to be as the outcome of it
emancipated from their world-old sphere of marriage and motherhood,
and control of the moral and spiritual destinies of the race, or are
they to be emancipated, in order to the proper fulfillment of these
functions? It would seem that most of the advanced women of the day
would answer the first of these questions affirmatively. Women, I
think it has been authoritatively stated, are to be emancipated in
order that they may become fully developed human beings, something
broader and stronger, something higher and finer, more delicate,
more aesthetic, more generally rarefied and sublimated than the
old-fashioned type of womanhood, the wife and the mother.
And the result of the woman movement seems more or less in a line thus
far with this theoretic aim. Of advanced women a less proportion are
inclined to marry than of the old-fashioned type; of those who do
marry a great proportion are restless in marriage bonds or seek
release from them, while of those who do remain in married life many
bear no children, and few, indeed, become mothers of large families.
The woman's vitality is concentrated in the brain and fructifies more
in intellectual than in physical forms.
Now, women who do not marry are one of two things; either they belong
to a class which we shrink from naming or they become old maids.
An old maid may be in herself a very useful and commendable person and
a valuable member of society; many are all this. But she has still
this sad drawback, she can not perpetuate herself; and since all
history and observation go to prove that the great final end of
creation, whatever it may be, can only be achieved through the
perpetuity and increasing progress of the race, it follows that
unmarried woman is not the most necessary, the indispensable type of
woman. If there were no other class of females left upon the earth but
the women who do not bear children, then the world would be a failure,
creation would be nonplussed.
If, then, the movement for the emancipation of woman has for its final
end the making of never so fine a quality, never so sublimated a sort
of non-child-bearing women, it is an absurdity upon the face of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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