Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
History
Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
The repeated demand to "extend beyond" the sex relations of either sex
_is_ a demand to touch those relations, and whether it is a demand to
impair them depends upon the question whether it is true that disabilities
and subordination have been foisted upon the sex conditions. In olden
times they were. Men were subject to social disabilities, personal and
social subordination, and political non-existence. It followed that women
were also in the same subjection. As men threw off the yoke, the sex
relations began to assume their natural position. Man was the protector,
woman the protected. In the natural relations, the protector is at the
service of the protected, and that is the state of things to-day. In order
to be preserved in bodily, mental, and spiritual freedom, woman must yield
with grace to the hand that serves her. In order to protect, man must see
to it that this freedom he has won is kept sacred and inviolable. He
cannot be at once a tyrant and a guard. This freedom removes from woman
all disabilities save those of sex. The question then is, can all the
intelligence and all the weakness of women be represented for their own
welfare and their own defence, by the same methods as those by which men
attain that end, and yet leave these fundamental sex relations untouched
and unimpaired?
The Suffrage leaders did not expect or intend to leave them untouched, or
unimpaired, if complete change was impairment. In the "History" they say:
"It is often asked if political equality--would not arouse antagonism
between the sexes? If it could be proved that men and women had been
harmonious in all ages and countries, and that women were happy and
satisfied in their slavery, we might hesitate in proposing any change
whatever; but the apathy, the helpless, hopeless resignation of a subject
class, cannot be called happiness. A woman growing up under American ideas
of liberty in government and religion cannot brook any disability based on
sex alone, without a deep feeling of antagonism with the power that
creates it."
Dr. Jacobi says: "Manhood Suffrage in America may seem to result,
historically, from the general average equality of social conditions among
the inhabitants of the Thirteen States. But it may also be deduced as a
philosophical necessity from the Idea of Individualism, which became the
core of the Federal Union. This idea, at first suggested only for men,
has, little by little, spread to women also."
Individualism, in the sense of personal moral responsibility, became the
core, first of the Hebrew Theocracy, and last of the American National
life. But that republicanism which has come to rest on sex distinction is
the combined result of Individualism and Authority. Suffrage discussion
for years has turned upon the idea of Individualism _versus_ Authority.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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