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
Wifehood and motherhood 'incidental relations.' They are incidental!
Incidental not only to the continuance of the race in civilization, but to
all that is best and holiest in that continuance. The mothers of the
Rebellion say: "The love of offspring, common to all orders of women and
all forms of animal life, tender and beautiful as it is, cannot as a
sentiment rank with conjugal love. The one calls out only the negative
virtues that belong to the apathetic classes, such as patience, endurance,
self-sacrifice, exhausting the brain forces, ever giving, asking nothing
in return; the other, the outgrowth of the two supreme powers in nature,
the positive and negative magnetism, the centrifugal and centripetal
forces, the masculine and feminine elements, possessing the divine power
of creation in the universe of thought and action. Two pure souls fused
into one by an impassioned love. This is marriage, and this is the only
corner-stone of an enduring home."
The "homes" built solely upon this cornerstone have not endured in this
country. The children born under such principles are taken care of by the
"Community" in a building apart from that occupied by the "pure souls."
The "institutional" bringing up of children was lately advocated in this
city by Mrs. Stanton Blatch at Suffrage meetings.
The virtues that the Suffrage leaders denounce as "apathetic" are those
that Christ signalized as the heavenly virtues, and are those which heroes
emulate, whether they be women or men.
Dr. Jacobi says the Suffrage movement, "aims only to regulate and define
the revolution already effected, and which leaves the family intact." I
think it has been proven from words and acts that it does aim at just such
a "sexual revolution" as threatens the family with dissolution. It aimed
to accomplish this by every means in its power, by an industrialism which
it desired should make woman independent of man, by divorce laws, and by
the use of the ballot. Who has shorn man of all his portentous rights? Man
himself, through the influence of woman. Is it likely, then, that he was
taking steps in the direction of the destruction of his own home? He was
endeavoring to build it on those sure foundations that make it what it is.
He can build if woman occupies, but he cannot both fight for the home and
against it. Circumstances, and not Suffrage cries, have forced or enticed
woman into the trades and professions. She has gone farther afield for her
work, partly because the Aegis of home is more broadly spread than it
formerly could be on account of the very strength of the marriage tie,
which makes honor, home, and woman more secure. So far as she has gone to
help the home, and because of love of it, such causes have not hurt the
family life, and will not. But when we come to Suffrage we have met a
different matter. The vote is not an affair of feeling or opinion, like
religious belief. The fact that the men of the family are the natural
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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