Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
You ask, would you have woman, by engaging in political party
bickerings and noisy strife, sacrifice her integrity and purity?
No, neither would we have men do it.... We hold that whatever is
essentially wrong for woman to do, can not be right for man. If
deception and intrigue, the elements of political craft, be
degrading to woman, can they be ennobling to man? If patience and
forbearance adorn a woman, are they not equally essential to a
manly character? If anger and turbulence disgrace woman, what can
they add to the dignity of man? Nothing; because nothing can be
morally right for man, that is morally wrong for woman. Woman, by
becoming the executioner of man's vengeance on his fellow-man,
could inflict no greater wrong on society than the same done by
man; but it would create an intenser feeling of shuddering
horror, and would, we conceive, rouse to more healthful activity
man's torpid feelings of justice, mercy, and clemency. And so,
also, if woman had free scope for the full exercise of the
heavenly graces that men so gallantly award her, truth, love, and
mercy would be invested with a more sacred charm. But while they
continue to enforce obedience to arbitrary commands, to encourage
love of admiration and a desire for frivolous amusements; while
they crush the powers of the mind, by opposing authority and
precedent to reason and progress; while they arrogate to
themselves the right to point us to the path of duty, while they
close the avenues of knowledge through public institutions, and
monopolize the profits of labor, mediocrity and inferiority must
be our portion. Shall we accept it, or shall we strive against
it?
Men are not destitute of justice or humanity; and let it be
remembered that there are hosts of noble and truthful ones among
them who deprecate the tyranny that enslaves us; and none among
ourselves can be more ready than they to remove the mountain of
injustice which the savagism of ages has heaped upon our sex. If,
therefore, we remain enslaved and degraded, the cause may justly
be traced to our own apathy and timidity. We have at our disposal
the means of moral agitation and influence, that can arouse our
country to a saving sense of the wickedness and folly of
disfranchising half the people. Let us no longer delay to use
them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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