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
So I ask you to loosen our hands. I ask you to let us join with
you in developing this science of human government. What is
politics after all but the science of government? We are
interested in these questions, and we are investigating them
already. We have our opinions. Recently an able man has said that
we have been grandly developed physically and mentally, but as a
nation we are a political infant. So we are, gentlemen; we are
to-day in America politically simply an infant. Why is it? It
is because we have not recognized God's family plan in
government--man and woman together. He created the male and
female, and gave them dominion together. We have dominion in every
other interest in society, and why shall we not stand shoulder
to shoulder and have dominion, in the science in government, in
making the laws under which we shall live?
We are taxed to support this Government--this immense Capitol
building is built largely from the industries of the tax-paying
women of this country--and yet we are denied the slightest voice
in distributing our taxes. Our foreparents did not object to
taxation, but they did object to taxation without representation,
and we, as thinking, industrious, active American women, object to
taxation without representation. We are willing to contribute our
share to the support of this Government, as we always have done,
but we have a right to ask for our little yes and no in the
form of the ballot so that we shall have a direct influence in
distributing the taxes.
Gentlemen, I am amenable to the gallows and the penitentiary, and
it is no more than right that I shall have a voice in framing the
laws under which I shall he rewarded or punished. Am I asking too
much of you as representative men of this great Government when I
ask you to let me have a voice in making the laws under which I
shall be rewarded or punished? It is written in the law of every
State in this Union that a person in the courts shall have a jury
of his peers, yet so long as the word "male" stands as it does in
the Constitutions of the United States and the States no woman in
any State of this Union can have a jury of her peers, I protest in
the name of justice against going into the court-room and
being compelled to run the gauntlet of the gutter and of the
saloon--yes, even of the police court and of the jail--as we are
compelled to do to select a male jury to try the interests of
women, whether relating to life, property, or reputation. So long
as the word "male" is in our constitutions just so long we can not
have a jury of our peers in any State in the Union.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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