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 resolutions were carried and recorded, and are published to this day,
with added testimony to the same effect from a hundred Suffrage sources.
We turn back to trace one of the lines through which this teaching has
come down. The Suffrage leaders mention as special inspirers of their
movement besides Ernestine Rose (who seconded Mrs. Stanton's resolutions)
and Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the
writings of those women we find the same sentiments set forth with
delicacy or vulgarity, according to the nature of the writer. Margaret
Fuller, in her Dial essay, published in 1843, "The Great Lawsuit--Man
Versus Woman, Woman Versus Man," says: "It is the fault of marriage, and
of the present relation between the sexes, that the woman belongs to the
man, instead of forming a whole with him. It is a vulgar error to suppose
that love--a love--is to woman her whole existence. She is also born for
Truth and Love in their universal energy. Would she but assume her
inheritance, Mary would not be the only virgin mother." Mary
Wollstonecraft believed that marriage consisted solely of mutual
affection, and that there should be no outward promise or tie to bind. If
love were to die, the heart should seek other affinity. The licentious
words of Frances Wright need not be repeated. With Mephistophelian
promptings, Ernestine Rose stood forever a-tip-toe, whispering in the ear
of the purer American feeling that would often have faltered. At the time
of the passing of Mrs. Stanton's resolutions she said: "But what is
marriage? A human institution, called out by the needs of the social,
affectional human nature for human purposes.... If it is demonstrated that
the real objects are frustrated, I ask, in the name of individual
happiness and social morality and well-being, why should such a marriage
be binding for life?... I ask that personal cruelty to the wife may be
made a State's-prison offence, for which divorce shall be granted. Wilful
desertion for one year should be a sufficient cause for divorce....
Habitual intemperance, or any other vice which makes the husband or wife
intolerable and abhorrent to the other, ought to be sufficient cause for
divorce." Essentially the same idea was repeated by Dr. Hulda Gunn in a
recent Suffrage meeting.
In asking for laws that carried out these claims, or some of them, Mrs.
Stanton said, in addressing the New York Legislature in 1854: "If you take
the highest view of marriage as a Divine relation, which love alone can
constitute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only
recognize it.... But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let
it be subject to the same laws that control all other contracts. Do not
make it a kind of half-human, half-divine institution, which you may build
up but cannot regulate."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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