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 second count in the list of political grievances runs: "He has
compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she had no
voice." This was not true, for the women who wrote that sentence were free
to use their voices in regard to every law they desired to affect, and
circumstances have proved that they were sure of being heard, and, if the
law were just, and for the general good, of assisting materially to
establish it. At the very time when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia
Mott were writing that indictment against the United States Government,
Dorothea Dix was presenting a memorial to the National Congress asking for
an appropriation of five hundred thousand acres of the public lands to
endow hospitals for the indigent insane. That bill failed to pass, but in
1850 another bill, which she presented, asking for ten millions of acres,
passed the House and failed in the Senate merely for want of time to
consider it. Four years later a bill making appropriations of the ten
millions of acres to the separate States passed both houses, and President
Pierce vetoed it, because he believed the general Government had no
constitutional power to make such appropriations. She then went to the
Legislatures of the States, with the result that is so well known. Rhode
Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, and North
Carolina founded lunatic asylums, and the work was begun which is
culminating in the separation of the insane from the criminal, the women
from the men, in every town and county of the land. The right of petition
is not only as open to women as to men, but because of the non-partisan
character of their claims and suggestions they find quicker hearing. Miss
Louise Lee Schuyler has been more successful in securing the enactment of
laws for which she presented the need than any one politician in the State
of New York, before whose Legislature they have both pleaded,--he with a
vote which had to contend against other votes, she with a voice that spoke
the united mind of a body of philanthropic women. There was no unjust law
which the Suffrage Association could not have changed during these fifty
years, had it cared to try, and indeed its members make the boast that
many of the changes are their own. Change and improvement of laws was not
their aim. It was a vote upon changing or not changing laws that they
sought for. The difference is world-wide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account