Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
bill is now pending in congress to disfranchise the women of
Utah, thus interfering to deprive United States citizens of
the same rights which the Supreme Court has declared the
national government powerless to protect anywhere. Laws
passed after years of untiring effort, guaranteeing married
women certain rights of property, and mothers the custody of
their children, have been repealed in States where we
supposed all was safe. Thus have our most sacred rights been
made the football of legislative caprice, proving that a
power which grants as a privilege what by nature is a right,
may withhold the same as a penalty when deeming it necessary
for its own perpetuation.
_Representation of woman_ has had no place in the nation's
thought. Since the incorporation of the thirteen original
States, twenty-four have been admitted to the Union, not one
of which has recognized woman's right of self-government. On
this birthday of our national liberties, July Fourth, 1876,
Colorado, like all her elder sisters, comes into the Union
with the invidious word "male" in her constitution.
_Universal manhood suffrage_, by establishing an aristocracy
of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more
absolute and cruel depotism than monarchy; in that, woman
finds a political master in her father, husband, brother,
son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon
birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds
of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute
force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above
education, and the son above the mother who bore him.
_The judiciary above the nation_ has proved itself but the
echo of the party in power, by upholding and enforcing laws
that are opposed to the spirit and letter of the
constitution. When the slave power was dominant, the Supreme
Court decided that a black man was not a citizen, because he
had not the right to vote; and when the constitution was so
amended as to make all persons citizens, the same high
tribunal decided that a woman, though a citizen, had not the
right to vote. Such vacillating interpretations of
constitutional law unsettle our faith in judicial authority,
and undermine the liberties of the whole people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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