Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States, · Chapter 5Woman Suffrage (5)
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I wish to say further that there is no connection whatever between jury service and the right of suffrage. The question as to who shall perform jury service, the question as to who shall perform military service, the question as to who shall perform civil official duty in a government is certainly a matter to be regulated by the community itself; but the question of the right to participate in the formation of a government which controls the life and the property and the destinies of its citizens, I contend is a question of right that goes back of these mere regulations for the protection of property and the punishment of offenses under the laws. It is a matter of right which it is tyranny to refuse to any citizen demanding it.
Now, Mr. President, I shall close by saying: God speed the day when not only in all the States of the Union and in all the Territories, but everywhere, woman shall stand before the law freed from the last shackle which has been riveted upon her by tyranny and the last disability which has been imposed upon her by ignorance, not only in respect to the right of suffrage, but in every other respect the peer and equal of her brother, man.
Mr. VEST. Mr. President, any measure of legislation which affects popular government based on the will of the people as expressed through their suffrage is not only important but vitally so. If this Government, which is based on the intelligence of the people, shall ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, immature, or corrupt suffrage. If the ship of state launched by our fathers shall ever be destroyed, it will be by striking the rock of universal, unprepared suffrage. Suffrage once given can never be taken away. Legislatures and conventions may do everything else; they never can do that. When any particular class or portion of the community is once invested with this privilege it is used, accomplished, and eternal.
The Senator who last spoke on this question refers to the successful experiment in regard to woman-suffrage in the Territories of Wyoming and Washington. Mr. President, it is not upon the plains of the sparsely-settled Territories of the West that woman suffrage can be tested. Suffrage in the rural districts and sparsely settled regions of this country must from the very nature of things remain pure when corrupt everywhere else. The danger of corrupt suffrage is in the cities, and those masses of population to which civilization tends everywhere in all history. Whilst the country has been pure and patriotic, the cities have been the first cancers to appear upon the body-politic in all ages of the world.
Wyoming Territory! Washington Territory! Where are their large cities? Where are the localities in these Territories where the strain upon popular government must come? The Senator from New Hampshire, who is so conspicuous in this movement, appalled the country some months since by his ghastly array of illiteracy in the Southern States. He proposes that $77,000,000 of the people's money be taken in order to strike down the great foe to republican government, illiteracy. How was that illiteracy brought upon this country? It was by giving the suffrage to unprepared voters. It is not my purpose to go back into the past and make any partisan or sectional appeal, but it is a fact known to every intelligent man that in one single act the right of suffrage was given without preparation to hundreds of thousands of voters who to-day can scarcely read. That Senator proposes now to double, and more than double, that illiteracy. He proposes to give the negro women of the South this right of suffrage, utterly unprepared as they are for it.
In a convention some two years and a half ago in the city of Louisville an intelligent negro from the South said the negro men could not vote the Democratic ticket because the women would not live with them if they did. The negro men go out in the hotels and upon the railroad cars. They go to the cities and by attrition they wear away the prejudice of race; but the women remain at home, and their emotional natures aggregate and compound the race-prejudice, and when suffrage is given them what must be the result?
Mr. President, it is not my purpose to speak of the inconveniences, for they are nothing more, of woman suffrage. I trust that as a gentleman I respect the feelings of the ladies and their advocates. I am not here to ridicule. My purpose only is to use legitimate argument as to a movement which commands respectful consideration, if for no other reason than because it comes from women. But it is impossible to divest ourselves of a certain degree of sentiment when considering this question.
I pity the man who can consider any question affecting the influence of woman with the cold, dry logic of business. What man can, without aversion, turn from the blessed memory of that dear old grandmother, or the gentle words and caressing hand of that blessed mother gone to the unknown world, to face in its stead the idea of a female justice of the peace or township constable? For my part I want when I go to my home—when I turn from the arena where man contends with man for what we call the prizes of this paltry world—I want to go back, not to be received in the masculine embrace of some female ward politician, but to the earnest, loving look and touch of a true woman. I want to go back to the jurisdiction of the wife, the mother; and instead of a lecture upon finance or the tariff, or upon the construction of the Constitution, I want those blessed, loving details of domestic life and domestic love.
I have said I would not speak of the inconveniences to arise from woman suffrage—I care not—whether the mother is called upon to decide as a juryman or jury-woman rights of property or rights of life, whilst her baby is "mewling and puking" in solitary confinement at home. There are other considerations more important, and one of them to my mind is insuperable. I speak now respecting women as a sex. I believe that they are better than men, but I do not believe they are adapted to the political work of this world. I do not believe that the Great Intelligence ever intended them to invade the sphere of work given to men, tearing down and destroying all the best influences for which God has intended them.
The great evil in this country to-day is in emotional suffrage. The great danger to-day is in excitable suffrage. If the voters of this country could think always coolly, and if they could deliberate, if they could go by judgment and not by passion, our institutions would survive forever, eternal as the foundations of the continent itself; but massed together, subject to the excitements of mobs and of these terrible political contests that come upon us from year to year under the autonomy of our Government, what would be the result if suffrage were given to the women of the United States?
Women are essentially emotional. It is no disparagement to them they are so. It is no more insulting to say that women are emotional than to say that they are delicately constructed physically and unfitted to become soldiers or workmen under the sterner, harder pursuits of life.
What we want in this country is to avoid emotional suffrage, and what we need is to put more logic into public affairs and less feeling. There are spheres in which feeling should be paramount. There are kingdoms in which the heart should reign supreme. That kingdom belongs to woman. The realm of sentiment, the realm of love, the realm of the gentler and the holier and kindlier attributes that make the name of wife, mother, and sister next to that of God himself.
I would not, and I say it deliberately, degrade woman by giving her the right of suffrage. I mean the word in its full signification, because I believe that woman as she is to-day, the queen of home and of hearts, is above the political collisions of this world, and should always be kept above them.
Sir, if it be said to us that this is a natural right belonging to women, I deny it. The right of suffrage is one to be determined by expediency and by policy, and given by the State to whom it pleases. It is not a natural right; it is a right that comes from the state.
It is claimed that if the suffrage be given to women it is to protect them. Protect them from whom? The brute that would invade their rights would coerce the suffrage of his wife, or sister, or mother as he would wring from her the hard earnings of her toil to gratify his own beastly appetites and passions.
It is said that the suffrage is to be given to enlarge the sphere of woman's influence. Mr. President, it would destroy her influence. It would take her down from that pedestal where she is to-day, influencing as a mother the minds of her offspring, influencing by her gentle and kindly caress the action of her husband toward the good and pure.
But I rise not to discuss this question, but to discharge a request. I know that when a man attacks this claim for woman suffrage he is sneered at and ridiculed as afraid to meet women in the contests for political honor and supremacy. If so, I oppose to the request of these ladies the arguments of their own sex; but first, I ask the Secretary to read a paper which has been sent to me with a request that I place it before the Senate.
The Chief Clerk read as follows:
To the honorable Senate and House of Representatives:
We, the undersigned, respectfully remonstrate against the further extension of suffrage to women.
H.P. Kidder. O.W. Peabody. R.M. Morse, jr. Charles A. Welch. Augustus Lowell. Francis Parkman, LL.D. Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Edmund Dwight. Charles H. Dalton. Henry Lee. W. Endicott, jr. Samuel Wells. Hon. John Lowell. William G. Russell. John C. Ropes. Robert D. Smith. George A. Gardner. F. Haven, jr. W. Powell Mason. B.F. Stevens. Charles Marsh. Charles W. Eliot, president, Harvard University. Prof. C.F. Dunbar. Prof. J.P. Cook. Prof. J. Lovering. Prof. W.W. Goodwin. Prof. Francis Bowen. Prof. Wolcott Gibbs. Prof. F.J. Child. Prof. John Trowbridge. Prof. G.I. Goodale. Prof. J.B. Greenough. Prof. H.W. Torrey. Prof. J.H. Thayer. Prof. E.W. Gurney. Justin Winsor. H.W. Paine. Hon. W.E. Russell. James C. Fiske. George Putnam. C.A. Curtis. T. Jefferson Coolidge. T.K. Lothrop. Augustus P. Loring. W.F. Draper. George Draper. Francis Brooks. Rev. J.P. Bodfish, chancellor, Cathedral Holy Cross. Rt. Rev. B.H. Paddock, bishop of Massachusetts. Rev. Henry M. Dexter. Rev. H. Brooke Herford. Rev. O.B. Frothingham. Rev. Ellis Wendell. Rev. Geo. F. Staunton. Rev. A.H. Heath. Rev. W.H. Dowden. Rev. J.B. Seabury. Rev. C. Woodworth. Rev. Leonard K. Storrs. Rev. Howard N. Brown. Rev. Edward J. Young. Rev. Andrew P. Peabody. Rev. George Z. Gray. Rev. William Lawrence. Rev. E.H. Hall. Rev. Nicholas Hoppin. Rev. David G. Haskins. Rev. L.S. Crawford. Rev. J.I.T. Coolidge. Rev. Henry A. Hazen. Rev. F.H. Hedge. Rev. H.A. Parker. Rev. Asa Bullard. Rev. Alexander McKenzie. Rev. J.F. Spaulding. Rev. S.K. Lothrop. Rev. E. Osborne, S.S.J.E. Rev. Leighton Parks. Rev. H.W. Foote. Rev. Morton Dexter. Rev. David H. Brewer. Rev. Judson Smith. Rev. L.W. Shearman. Rev. Charles F. Dole. Rev. George M. Boynton. Rev. D.W. Waldron. Rev. John A. Hamilton. Rev. Isaac P. Langworthy. Rev. E.K. Alden. Rev. E.E. Strong. Rev. M.D. Bisbee. Rev. Oliver S. Dean. Henry Parkman. W.H. Sayward. Charles A. Cummings. Hon. S.C. Cobb. Sidney Bartlett. John C. Gray. Louis Brandeis. Hon. George G. Crocker. John Bartlett. John Fiske. J.T.G. Nichols, M.D. C.E. Vaughan, M.D. John Homans, M.D. Chauncey Smith. Benj. Vaughan. Charles F. Walcott. J.B. Warner. Walter Dean. S.H. Kennard. E. Whitney. W.P.P. Longfellow. H.O. Houghton. J.M. Spelman. J.C. Dodge. E.S. Dixwell. L.S. Jones. G.W.C. Noble. Charles Theodore Russell. Clement L. Smith. Ezra Farnsworth. H.H. Edes. Hon. R.R. Bishop. H.H. Sprague. Charles R. Codman. Darwin E. Ware. Arthur E. Thayer. C.F. Choate. Richard H. Dana. O.D. Forbes. Edward L. Geddings. William V. Hutchings. John L. Gardner. L.M. Sargent. H.L. Hallett. E.P. Brown. W.A. Tower. J. Edwards. G.H. Campbell. Samuel Carr, jr. Edward Brooks. J. Randolph Coolidge. J. Eliot Cabot. Fred. Law Olmstead. Charles S. Sargent. C.A. Richardson. Charles F. Shimmin. Edward Bangs. J.G. Freeman. H.H. Coolidge. David Hunt. Alfred D. Hurd. Edward I. Brown. W.G. Saltonstall. Thomas Weston, jr. Richard M. Hodges, M.D. Henry J. Bigelow, M.D. Charles D. Homans, M.D. George H. Lyman, M.D. John Dixwell, M.D. R.M. Pulsifer. Edward L. Beard. Solomon Lincoln. G.B. Haskell. John Boyle O'Reilly. Arlo Bates. Horace P. Chandler. George O. Shattuck. Hon. Alex. H. Rice. Henry Cabot Lodge. Francis Peabody, jr. Harcourt Amory. F.E. Parker. A.S. Wheeler. Jacob C. Rogers. S.G. Snelling. C.H. Barker. J.H. Walker. Forrest E. Barker. John D. Wasbburn. Martin Brimmer. Fred L. Ames. Hon. A.P. Martin.
Mr. DOLPH. If the Senator from Missouri will permit me, those names sounded very much like the names of men.
Mr. VEST. They are men's names. I did not say that the petition was signed by ladies. I referred to the papers in my hand, which I shall proceed to lay before the Senate.
I hold in my hand an argument against woman suffrage by a lady very well known in the United States, and well known to the Senators from Massachusetts, a lady whose philanthropy, whose exertions in behalf of the oppressed and poor and afflicted have given her a national reputation. I refer to Mrs. Clara T. Leonard, the wife of a distinguished lawyer, and whose words of themselves will command the attention of the public.
The Chief Clerk read as follows:
[Letter from Mrs. Clara T. Leonard.]
The following letter was read by Thornton K. Lothrop, esq., at the hearing before the Legislative committee on woman suffrage, January 29, 1884:
The principal reasons assigned for giving suffrage to women are these:
That the right to vote is a natural and inherent right of which women are deprived by the tyranny of men.
That the fact that the majority of women do not wish for the right or privilege to vote is not a reason for depriving the minority of an inborn right.
That women are taxed but not represented, contrary to the principles of free government.
That society would gain by the participation of women in government, because women are purer and more conscientious than men, and especially that the cause of temperance would be promoted by women's votes.
Those women who are averse to female suffrage hold differing opinions on all these points, and are entitled to be heard fairly and without unjust reproach and contempt on the part of "suffragists," so called.
The right to vote is not an inherent right, but, like the right to hold land, is conferred upon individuals by general consent, with certain limitations, and for the general good of all.
It is as true to say that the earth was made for all its inhabitants, and that human has a right to appropriate a portion of its surface, as to say that all persons have a right to participate in government. Many persons can be found to hold both these opinions. Experience has proved that the general good is promoted by ownership of the soil, with the resultant inducement to its improvement.
Voting is simply a mathematical test of strength. Uncivilized nations strive for mastery by physical combat, thus wasting life and resources. Enlightened societies agree to determine the relative strength of opposing parties by actual count. God has made women weaker than men, incapable of taking part in battles, indisposed to make riot and political disturbance.
The vote which, in the hand of a man, is a "possible bayonet," would not, when thrown by a woman, represent any physical power to enforce her will. If all the women in the State voted in one way, and all the men in the opposite one, the women, even if in the majority, would not carry the day, because the vote would not be an estimate of material strength and the power to enforce the will of the majority. When one considers the strong passions and conflicts excited in elections, it is vain to suppose that the really stronger would yield to the weaker party.
It is no more unjust to deprive women of the ballot than to deprive minors, who outnumber those above the age of majority, and who might well claim, many of them, to be as well able to decide political questions as their elders.
If the majority of women are either not desirous to vote or are strongly opposed to voting, the minority should yield in this, as they are obliged to do in all other public matters. In fact, they will be obliged to yield, so long as the present state of opinion exists among women in general, for legislators will naturally consult the wishes of the women of their own families and neighborhood, and be governed by them. There can be no doubt that in this State, where women are highly respected and have great influence, the ballot would be readily granted to them by men, if they desired it, or generally approved of woman suffrage. Women are taxed, it is true; so are minors, without the ballot; it is untrue, to say that either class is not represented. The thousand ties of relationship and friendship cause the identity of interest between the sexes. What is good in a community for men, is good also for their wives and sisters, daughters and friends. The laws of Massachusetts discriminate much in favor of women, by exempting unmarried women of small estate from taxation; by allowing women, and not men, to acquire a settlement without paying a tax; by compelling husbands to support their wives, but exempting the wife, even when rich, from supporting an indigent husband; by making men liable for debts of wives, and not vice versa. In the days of the American Revolution, the first cause of complaint was, that a whole people were taxed but not represented.
To-day there is not a single interest of woman which is not shared and defended by men, not a subject in which she takes an intelligent interest in which she cannot exert an influence in the community proportional to her character and ability. It is because the men who govern live not in a remote country, with separate interests, but in the closest relations of family and neighborhood, and bound by the tenderest ties to the other sex, who are fully and well represented by relations, friends, and neighbors in every locality. That women are purer and more conscientious than men, as a sex, is exceedingly doubtful when applied to politics. The faults of the sexes are different, according to their constitution and habits of life. Men are more violent and open in their misdeeds, but any person who knows human nature well and has examined it in its various phases knows that each sex is open to its peculiar temptation and sin; that the human heart is weak and prone to evil without distinction of sex.
It seems certain that, were women admitted to vote and to hold political office, all the intrigue, corruption, and selfishness displayed by men in political life would also be found among women. In the temperance cause we should gain little or nothing by admitting women to vote, for two reasons: first, that experience has proved that the strictest laws can not be enforced if a great number of people determine to drink liquor; secondly, because among women voters we should find in our cities thousands of foreign birth who habitually drink beer and spirits daily without intoxication, and who regard license or prohibitory laws as an infringement of their liberty. It has been said that municipal suffrage for women in England has proved a political success. Even if this is true, it offers no parallel to the condition of things in our own cities. First, because there is in England a property qualification required to vote, which excludes the more ignorant and irresponsible classes, and makes women voters few and generally intelligent; secondly, because England is an old, conservative country, with much emigration and but little immigration.
Here is a constant influx of foreigners: illiterate, without love of our country or interest in, or knowledge of, the history of our liberties, to whom, after a short residence, we give a full share in our government. The result begins to be alarming—enormous taxation, purchasable votes, demagogism,—all these alarm the more thoughtful, and we are not yet sure of the end. It is a wise thought that the possible bayonet or ruder weapon in the hands of our new citizens would be even worse than the ballot, and our safer course is to give the immigrants a stake and interest in the government. But when we learn that on an average one thousand immigrants per week landed at the port of Boston in the past calendar year, is it not well to consider carefully how we double, and more than double, the popular vote, with all its dangers and its ingredients of ignorance and irresponsibility. Last of all, it must be considered that the lives of men and women are essentially different.
One sex lives in public, in constant conflict with the world; the other sex must live chiefly in private and domestic life, or the race will be without homes and gradually die out. If nearly one-half of the male voters of our State forego their duty or privilege, as is the fact, what proportion of women would exercise the suffrage? Probably a very small one. The heaviest vote would be in the cities, as now, and the ignorant and unfit women would be the ready prey of the unscrupulous demagogue. Women do not hold a position inferior to men. In this land they have the softer side of life—the best of everything. There are, of course, exceptions—individuals—whose struggle in life is hard, whose husbands and fathers are tyrants instead of protectors; so there are bad wives, and men ruined and disheartened by selfish, idle women.
The best work that a woman can do for the purifying of politics is by her influence over men, by the wise training of her children, by her intelligent, unselfish counsel to husband, brother, or friend, by a thorough knowledge and discussion of the needs of her community. Many laws on the statute-books of our own and other States have been the work of women. More might be added.
It is the opinion of many of us that woman's power is greater without the ballot or possibility of office-holding for gain. When standing outside of politics she discusses great questions upon their merit. Much has been achieved by women in the anti-slavery cause, the temperance cause, the improvement of public and private charities, the reformation of criminals, all by intelligent discussion and influence upon men. Our legislators have been ready to listen to women and carry out their plans when well framed.
Women can do much useful public service upon boards of education, school committees, and public charities, and are beginning to do such work. It is of vital importance to the integrity of our charitable and educational administration that it be kept out of politics. Is it not well that we should have one sex who have no political ends to serve who can fill responsible positions of public trust? Voting alone can easily be exercised by women without rude contact, but to attain any political power women must affiliate themselves with men; because women will differ on public questions, must attend primary meetings and caucuses, will inevitably hold public office and strive for it; in short, women must enter the political arena. This result will be repulsive to a large portion of the sex, and would tend to make women unfeminine and combative, which would be a detriment to society.
It is well that men after the burden and heat of the day should return to homes where the quiet side of life is presented to them. In these peaceful New England homes of ours, great and noble men have been raised by wise and pious mothers, who instructed them, not in politics, but in those general principles of justice, integrity, and unselfishness which belong to and will insure statesmanship in the men who are true to them. Here is the stronghold of the sex, weakest in body, powerful for good or evil over the stronger one, whom women sway and govern, not by the ballot and by greater numbers but by those gentle influences designed by the Creator to soften and subdue man's ruder nature.
CLARA T. LEONARD.
Mr. HOAR. The Senator from Missouri has alluded to me in connection with the name of this lady. Perhaps he will allow me to make an additional statement to that which I furnished him, in order that the statement about her may be complete.
All that the Senator from Missouri has said of the character and worth of Mrs. Leonard is true. I do not know her personally. Her husband is my respected personal friend, a lawyer of high standing and character. All that the Senator has said of her ability is proved better than by any other testimony, by the very able and powerful letter which has just been read. But Mrs. Leonard herself is the strongest refutation of her own argument.
Politics, the political arena, political influence, political action in this country consists, I suppose, in two things: one of them the being intrusted with the administration of public affairs, and second, having the vote counted in determining who shall be public servants, and what public measures shall prevail in the commonwealth. Now, this lady was intrusted for years with one of the most important public functions ever exercised by any human being in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. We have a board, called the board of lunacy and charity, which controls the large charities for which Massachusetts is famous and in many of which she was the first among civilized communities, for the care of the pauper and the insane and the criminal woman, and the friendless and the poor child. It is one of the most important things, except the education of youth, which Massachusetts does.
A little while ago a political campaign in Massachusetts turned upon a charge which her governor made against the people of the commonwealth in regard to the conduct of the great hospital at Tewksbury, where she was charged by her chief executive magistrate with making sale of human bodies, with cruelty to the poor and defenseless; and not only the whole country, but especially the whole people of Massachusetts, were stirred to the very depths of their souls by that accusation. Mrs. Clara T. Leonard, the writer of this letter, came forward and informed the people that she had been one of the board who had managed that institution for years, that she knew all about it through and through, that the accusation was false and a slander; and before her word and her character the charge of that distinguished governor went down and sunk into merited obscurity and ignominy.
Now, the question is whether the lady who can be intrusted with the charge of one of the most important departments of government, and whose judgment in regard to its character or proper administration is to be taken as gospel by the people where her reputation extends, is not fit to be trusted to have her vote counted when the question is who is to be the next person who is to be trusted with that administration. Mrs. Leonard's mistake is not in misunderstanding the nature either of woman or of man, which she understands perfectly; it is in misunderstanding the nature of politics, that is, the political arena; and this lady has been in the political arena for the last ten years of her life, one of the most important and potent forces therein.
It is true, as she says, that the wife and the mother educate the child and the man, and when the great function of the state, as we hold in our State and as is fast being held everywhere, is also the education of the child and the man, how does it degrade that wife and mother, whose important function it is to do this thing, to utter her voice and have her vote counted in regard to the methods and the policies by which that education shall be conducted?
Why, Mr. President, Mrs. Leonard says in that letter that woman, the wife and the maiden and the daughter, has no political ends to serve. If political ends be to desire office for the greed of gain, if political ends be to get an unjust power over other men, if political ends be to get political office by bribery or by mob violence or by voting through the shutter of a beer-house, that is true: but the persons who are in favor of this measure believe that those very things that Mrs. Leonard holds up as the proper ends in the life of women are political ends and nothing else; that the education of the child, that the preservation of the purity of the home, that the care for the insane and the idiot and the blind and the deaf and the ruined and deserted, are not only political ends but are the chief political ends for which this political body, the state, is created: and those who desire the help of women in the administration of the state desire it because of the ability which could write such a letter as that on the wrong side, and because the qualities of heart and brain which God has given to understand this class of political ends better than He has given it to the masculine heart and brain are needed for their administration.