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
In a government like ours, where all the intelligence and all the weakness
_are_ represented for their own welfare and defence, authority must to a
certain extent hold a stern hand over individualism, because freedom for
all means license for not a single one, be it man or woman. Mrs. Fanny
Ames says: "Any argument [against Suffrage] worth anything at all, comes
down to this--an argument against American democracy--and must rest
there." Many arguments have been adduced against Woman Suffrage that were
also arguments against democracy; because there are always people, and
wise people too, who fear the test of the ultimate experiment. To this
fear the Suffragists catered when, in contradiction to their own dictum of
universal suffrage, they asked Congress for a sixteenth amendment that
should require an educational qualification for all, both men and women.
But, guided by the statesmanship that seeks to form a true and enduring
democracy, this Republic has come to the sex basis.
Dr. Jacobi says: "The complex contradictions in the present distributions
of sovereign power are further intensified by the vulgarization of the
general ideal. It is one thing to say, 'Some men shall rule,' quite
another to declare, 'All men shall rule,' and that in virtue of the most
primitive and rudimentary attribute they possess,--that, namely, of sex.
If the original contempt for masses of men has ever diminished, and the
conception of mankind been ennobled, it is because, upon the primitive
animal foundation, human imagination has built a fair structure of mental
and moral attribute and possibility, and habitually deals with that. This
indeed is no new thing to do; for it was to this moral man that Pericles
addressed his funeral oration, and of whom Lincoln thought in his speech
at Gettysburg. Of this moral man, women--the sex hitherto so despised--are
now recognized to constitute an integral part. It is useless, therefore,
to attempt to throw them out by an appeal to the primitive conditions of a
physical force to which no one appeals for any other purpose."
The immortal orator at Gettysburg was commander-in-chief of an army and
navy whose physical power was then in the very act of saving the nation
and redeeming it from the sin of slavery. The soldier-statesman of Greece,
in his funeral oration, was addressing an army. The fair structure of
mental and moral attribute and possibility has not been built by human
imagination. The conception of the moral man that has ennobled mankind is
older than any man who has embodied it. It is as old as mankind itself,
upon whose primitive animal foundation God implanted side by side the
conception of the moral man, woman--and of the governing man, man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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