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
All these writers agree in demanding the ballot in order to make some
essential change in woman's condition. Some of them hold that this change
cannot be made unless the relations of wife and mother can be set aside
when the individual considers them detrimental; others hold that it can be
made and leave the relations intact; and one believes that this change is
already so far made, while the relations are still intact, that nothing
need be feared from further change. It reduces itself to matter of opinion
and prophecy on the part of those who agree with the early leaders that
essential change is needed, but do not agree with them as to the steps
necessary. The appeal must be to facts.
The originators of the movement ought to know what the movement meant. The
marriage laws were the first attacked, and are still being hammered at in
favor of divorce, although legislation has outrun their demand in changing
the outgrown laws in regard to property and contracts. Mr. Hooker said:
"The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly
if there was no Suffrage movement." How can that be, when the women who
inspired the Suffrage movement, and who began it and still carry it on,
proclaimed this as a necessary part? But, this question aside, it may be
said that the marriage relation has been the most unsafe in the hands of
the women whose idea of equality either repudiates it outright or inveighs
against its present status. From the revolutionary and infidel portion of
France, from which it sprang, to the recently dead Oneida Community, who
but women who imbibed the doctrine that marriage was bondage, have
sustained the various forms of license which called itself freedom?
Transcendentalism and Libertinism worked together, and both found women
who could be fitted to the task of destroying the home.
Mrs. Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes
have not existed "naturally." There was a long, long time in human history
when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal
life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last, through mighty
struggles, the family was evolved--the final grouping of the race--the
social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the
rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has
been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving
compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and
next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has
so well progressed that to-day the man's family is dearer to him than his
own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who
proclaim that man is woman's enemy, are the assassins of their own peace
and of the growing peace of home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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