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
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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
A proof that "women will not always be wives and mothers above all things
else," is to be found in the story of the women who have engaged in
intrigue from the days of ancient Egypt. A woman State senator-elect says:
"I am a Mormon, and believe in polygamy." The organizations that are first
to proclaim the so-called freedom of woman from the marriage bond, are the
same that would repudiate all government, human and divine.
But man has no more set the bounds of woman's life than woman has set
those of man's. It is false to say that man has "usurped the prerogative
of Jehovah," in assigning her a sphere of action. He has assigned neither
her sphere nor his own. Their spheres have been worked out from the
conditions that made them male and female. The ideal that faith could
picture was presented in the Old Testament, and when Christ said, "For the
hardness of your hearts Moses commanded to write a bill of divorcement,
but in the beginning it was not so," he spoke the ultimate word. Save for
adultery, the family was not to be broken, and the laws of modern life,
which grow freer in every other respect, are approaching nearer to this
model as society progresses, and most rapidly so in the most progressive
states.
There is a fine bit of unconscious humor in Miss Anthony's remark that
"Woman must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all." Man is at
present blinded by the belief that he must proffer marriage as woman will
accept it, or not at all. Society has lodged with her what Mrs. Stanton
calls "only the veto power." Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton apparently wish
the women to do the proffering, the accepting, and the rejecting. With so
insignificant a part assigned him, it would seem a pity that there should
be a sort of necessity for man to play in the marriage role at all. When
Suffrage leaders have so arranged matters that the bride retains her
maiden name, she can spend her summers in Europe and her winters in
Florida, while her husband works all the year round in New York to support
her, without her being subjected to the mortification of seeming to desert
the man whose name she bears.
You cannot teach this untruth to the girl without teaching it to the boy.
The struggle of civilization has been to teach that manhood was not the
great fact of man's life, and he has learned it through the chivalry and
tenderness that appealed to and developed his higher nature. But if once
he understands that woman does not hold herself in need of his chivalry
and tenderness, the husbandhood and fatherhood that now bind him to one
sacred vow of married love, and tame the savage within him, will not long
prevent him from seeing his own advantage in the new order.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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