Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
With these examples in two widely-separated parts of the country, the
old and the new, representing not only crystallized prejudice in the
one but inborn opposition in both to any step toward enfranchising
women, and with this depending absolutely on the will of the voters,
is it a matter of wonder that its progress has been so slow? If the
question were submitted in any State to-day whether, for instance, all
who did not pay taxes should be disfranchised, and only taxpayers were
allowed to vote upon it, it would be carried by a large majority. If
it were submitted whether all owning property above a certain amount
should be disfranchised, and only those who owned less than this, or
nothing, were allowed to vote, it would be carried unanimously. No
class of men could get any electoral right whatever if it depended
wholly on the consent of another class whose interests supposedly lay
in withholding it. Political, not moral influence removed the property
restrictions from the suffrage in order to build up a great party--the
Democratic--which because of its enfranchisement of wage-earning men
has received their support for eighty years. After the Civil War,
although the Republican party was in absolute control, amendments to
the State constitutions for striking out the word "white," in order
to enfranchise colored men, were defeated in one after another of the
Northern States, even in Kansas, the most radical of them all in its
anti-slavery sentiment. It finally became so evident that this
concession would not be granted by the voters that Congress was
obliged to submit first one and then a second amendment to the Federal
Constitution to secure it. But even then the ratification of the
necessary three-fourths of the Legislatures could be obtained only
because it was positively certain that through this action an immense
addition would be made to the Republican electorate. Now after a lapse
of thirty years this same party looks on unmoved at the violation of
these amendments in every Southern State because it is believed that
thus there can be, through white suffrage, the building up of the
party in that section which the colored vote has not been able to
accomplish.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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