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 great step made by woman was in the generation preceding this
one of restlessness--the restlessness that has come through the
first feeling of great power. It was made in the time when women
learned physiology, that they might rear and nurse their families
and help their neighborhoods understandingly; science, that they
might teach and answer little children, and share the joy of
knowledge that was spreading swiftly in the earth; political
history and economy, that they might listen and talk to their
brothers and husbands and sons, and leaven the life of the age as
the bread in the mixing; business figures, rules, and principles,
that they might sympathize, counsel, help, and prudentially work
with and honestly strengthen the bread-winners. The good work was
begun in the schools where girls were first told, as George B.
Emerson used to tell us Boston girls, that we were learning
everything he could teach us, in order to be women: wives,
mothers, friends, social influencers, in the best and largest way
possible. Women grew strong and capable under such instruction and
motive. Are their daughters and grand-daughters about to leap
the fence, leave their own realm little cared for--or doomed to
be--undertake the whole scheme of outside creation, or contest
it with the men? Then God help the men! God save the Commonwealth!
We are past the point already where homes are suffering, or liable
to suffer, neglect or injury; they are already left unmade. Shall
this go on? Between frivolities and ambitions, between social
vanities, and shows, and public meddling's and mixings--for where
one woman is needed and doing really brave, true work, there are
a hundred rushing forth for the mere sake of rushing--is the
primitive home, the power of heaven upon earth to slip away from
among us? Let us not build outsides which have no insides, let us
not put a face upon things which has no reality behind it. Beware
lest we make the confusion that we need the suffrage to help us
unmake; lest we tear to pieces that we may patch again. Crazy
patchwork that would be, indeed!
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