Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States Part 9

And here again come allowance and exception for what women can always do when this world-mothering forces an appeal to the strength and authority of man. Women have never been prevented from doing their real errands in the world, even outside the domestic boundary. They have defended their husbands' castles in the old chivalrous times, when the male chivalry was away at the crusades. They have headed armies when Heaven called them; only Heaven never called all the women at once; but when the king was crowned, the mission done, they have turned back with desire to their sheltered, gentle, un.o.btrusive life again. There has no business to be a standing army of women; not even a standing political army. Women have navigated and brought home ships when commanders have died or been stricken helpless upon the ocean; they have done true, intelligent, patient work for science, art, religion; and those have done the most who have never stopped to contend first, whether a woman, as such, may do it or not.

Look at what Dorothea Dix has done, single-handed, single-mouthed, in asylums and before legislatures. Women have sat on thrones, and governed kingdoms well, when that was the station in life to which G.o.d called them. If Victoria of England has been anything, she has been the mother of her land; she has been queen and protecting genius of its womanhood and homes. And when a woman does these things, as called of G.o.d--not talks of them, as to whether she may make claim to do them--she carries a weight from the very sanct.i.ty out of which she steps, as woman, that moves men unlike the moving of any other power. Shall she resign the chance of doing really great things, of meeting grand crises, by making herself common in ward-rooms and at street-corners, and abolishing the perfect idea of home by no longer consecrating herself to it?

If individual woman, as has been said, may gain and influence individual man, and so the man-power in affairs--a body of women, purely as such, with cause, and plea, and reason, can always have the ear and attention of bodies of men; but to do this they must come straight from their home sanct.i.ties, as representing them--as able to represent them otherwise than men, because of their hearth-priestesshood; not as politicians, bred and hardened in the public arenas.

That the family is the heart of the state, and that the state is but the widened family, is the fact which the old vestal consecration, power, and honor set forth and kept in mind.

The voice which has of late been so generally conceded to women in town, decisions as regarding public schools, is an instance of the fittingness of relegating to them certain interests of which they should know more than men, because--applying the key-test with which we have started--it has direct relation to and springs from their motherhood. But can one help suggesting that if the movement had been to place women, merely and directly, upon the committees, by votes of men who saw that this work might be in great part best done by them; if women had asked and offered for the place without the jostle of the town-meeting, or putting in that wedge for the ballot--the thing might have been as readily done, and the objection, or political precedent, avoided.

It is not the real opportunity, when that arises or shows itself in the line of her life-law, that is to be refused for woman. It is the taking from internal power to add to external complication of machinery and to the friction of strife. Let us just touch upon some of the current arguments concerning these external impositions which one set is demanding and the other entreating against.

If voting is to be the chief power in woman's hands, or even a power of half the moment that is contended for it, it will grow to be the motive and end, the all-absorbing object, with women that it is with men.

The gubernatorial canva.s.s, the presidential year, these will interrupt and clog all home business, suspend decisions, paralyze plans, as they do with men, or else we shall not be much, as thorough politicians, after all. And if we talk of mending all that, of putting politics in their right place, and governing by pure principle instead of party trick, and stumping and electioneering, we go back in effect to the acknowledgment that only in the interior work, and behind politics, can women do better things at all; which, precisely, was to be demonstrated.

Think, simply, of election day for women.

Would it be so invariably easy a thing for a home-keeper to do, at the one opportunity of the year, or the four years, on a particular day, her duty in this matter? It is easy to say that it takes no more time than a hundred other things that some do; but setting apart all the argument that previous time and strength must have been spent in properly qualifying, how many of the hundred other things are done now without interruption, postponement, hindrance, through domestic contingencies? or are there a hundred other things done when the home contingencies are really met by a woman? A woman's life is not like a man's. That a man's life may be--that he may transact his out-door business; keep his hours and appointments; may cast his vote on election day; may represent wife and children in all wherein the community cares for, or might injure him and them--the woman, some woman, must be at the home post, that the home order may go on, from which he derives that command of time, and freedom from hindering necessities, which leave him to his work. And so, as the old proverb says, while man's work is from sun to sun--made definite, a matter to which he can go forth, and from which he can come in--a woman's work, of keeping the place of the forthgoing and incoming, is never done, from the very nature and ceaseless importance of it.

Must she go to the polls, sick or well, baby or no baby, servant or no servant, strength or no strength, desire or no desire? If she have cook and housemaid they are to go also, and number her two to one, anyway; probably on election day, which they would make a holiday, they would--as at other crises, of birth, sickness, death, house-cleaning, which should occur in no first-cla.s.s families--come down upon her with their appropriate _coup d'etat_, and "leave;" making the State-stroke, in this instance, of scoring three votes, two dropped and one lost, for the irrepressible side.

How will it be when Norah, and Maggie, and Katie have not only their ma.s.s and confession, their Fourth-of-July and Christmas, their mission-weeks, their social engagements and family plans, and their appointments with their dress-makers, to curtail your claims upon their bargained time and service, but their share in the primary meetings and caucuses, committees, and torch-light processions, and ma.s.s meetings? For what shall prevent the excitements, the pleasurings, the runnings. .h.i.ther and thither, that men delight in from following in the train of politics and parties with the common woman? Perhaps it may even be discovered, to the still further detriment of our already painfully hampered and perplexed domestic system, that the pursuit of fun, votes, offices, is more remunerative, as well as gentlewomanly--as Micawber might express it--than the cleansing of pots and pans, the weekly wash, or the watching of the roast. Perhaps in that enfranchised day there will be no Katies and Maggies' and the Norahs will know their place no more. Then the enlightened womanhood may have to begin at the foundation and glorify the kitchen again. And good enough for her, in the wide as well as primitive sense of the phrase, and a grand turn in the history that repeats itself toward the old, forgotten, peaceful side of the cycle it may be!

But the argument does not rest upon any such points as these. It rests upon the inside nature of a woman's work; upon the need there is to begin again to-day at the heart of things and make that right; upon the evident fact that this can be done none too soon or earnestly, if the community and the country are not to keep on in the broad way to a threatened destruction; and upon the certainty that it can never be done unless it is done by woman, and with all of woman's might. Not by struggles for new and different place, but by the better, more loving, more intelligent, deep-seeing, and deep-feeling filling of her own place, that none will dispute and none can take from her. We are not where woman was in the old brutal days that are so often quoted; and we shall not, need not, return to that. Christianity has disposed of that sort of argument. We are on a vantage ground for the doing of our real, essential work better than it has been done ever before in the history of the world; and we are madly leaving our work and our vantage together.

The great step made by woman was in the generation preceding this one of restlessness--the restlessness that has come through the first feeling of great power. It was made in the time when women learned physiology, that they might rear and nurse their families and help their neighborhoods understandingly; science, that they might teach and answer little children, and share the joy of knowledge that was spreading swiftly in the earth; political history and economy, that they might listen and talk to their brothers and husbands and sons, and leaven the life of the age as the bread in the mixing; business figures, rules, and principles, that they might sympathize, counsel, help, and prudentially work with and honestly strengthen the bread-winners. The good work was begun in the schools where girls were first told, as George B.

Emerson used to tell us Boston girls, that we were learning everything he could teach us, in order to be women: wives, mothers, friends, social influencers, in the best and largest way possible. Women grew strong and capable under such instruction and motive. Are their daughters and grand-daughters about to leap the fence, leave their own realm little cared for--or doomed to be--undertake the whole scheme of outside creation, or contest it with the men? Then G.o.d help the men! G.o.d save the Commonwealth!

We are past the point already where homes are suffering, or liable to suffer, neglect or injury; they are already left unmade. Shall this go on? Between frivolities and ambitions, between social vanities, and shows, and public meddling's and mixings--for where one woman is needed and doing really brave, true work, there are a hundred rushing forth for the mere sake of rushing--is the primitive home, the power of heaven upon earth to slip away from among us? Let us not build outsides which have no insides, let us not put a face upon things which has no reality behind it. Beware lest we make the confusion that we need the suffrage to help us unmake; lest we tear to pieces that we may patch again. Crazy patchwork that would be, indeed!

Are women's votes required because men will not legislate away evils that they do not heartily wish away? Is government corrupted because men desire shield and opportunity for dishonest speculation; authority and countenance for nefarious combinations?

The more need to go to work at the beginning rather than to plunge into the pitch and be defiled; more need to make haste and educate a better generation of men, if it be so we can not, except _vi et armis_, influence the generation that is. But do you think that if women are in earnest--enough in earnest to give up, as they seem to be to demand--they might not bring their real power to bear even upon these evil things, in their root and inception, and even now? Suppose women would not live in houses, or wear jewels and gowns, that are bought for them out of wicked millions made upon the stock exchange?

Suppose they would stop decorating their dwellings to an agony, crowding them hurriedly with this and that of the last and newest, just because it is last and new, making a show and rivalry of what is not a true-grown beauty of a home at all, but a mere meretriciousness; suppose they would so set to work and change society that displays and feastings, which use up at every separate one a year's comfortable support for a quiet, modest family, should be given up as vulgarities; that people should care for, and be ready for, a true interchange of life and thought, and simple, uncrowded opportunities for these; suppose women would say, "No; I will not blaze at Newport, or run through Europe dropping American eagles or English sovereigns after me like the trail of a comet, or the crumbs that Hop-'o-my-thumb let fall from his pocket that the people at home might track the way he had gone; because if I have money, there is better work to be done with it; and I will not have the money that is made by gambling manipulations and cheats."

Do you think this would have no influence? More than that, and further back, and lowlier down, suppose they should say, every one, "I will not have the new, convenient house, the fresh carpetings, the pretty curtains, or even the least, most fitting freshness, until I know the means are earned for me with honest service to the world, and by no lucky turn of even a small speculation." Further back yet, suppose them to declare, "I will not have the home at all, nor my own happiness, unless it can be based and builded on the kind of life-work that helps to make a real prosperity; that really goes to the building and safe-keeping of a whole nation of such homes." Would there be no power in that? Would it not be a kind of woman-suffrage to settle the very initials of all that ever bears upon the public question? And to bring that sort of woman on the stage, and to the front, is there not enough work to do, and enough "higher education" to insist on and secure?

After all, men work for women; or, if they think they do not, it would leave them but sorry satisfaction to abandon them to such existence as they could arrange without us. In blessed homes, or in scattered dissipations of show, amus.e.m.e.nt, or the worse which these shows and amus.e.m.e.nts are but terribly akin to, women give purpose to and direct the results of all men's work. If the false standards of living first urge them, until at length the horrible intoxication of the game itself drives them on further and deeper, are we less responsible for the last state of those men than for the first?

Do you say, if good women refused these things and tried for a simpler and truer living, there are plenty of bad ones who would take them anyhow, and supply the motive to deeper and more unmitigated evil? Ah, there come both answer and errand again.

Raise the fallen--at least save the growing womanhood--stop the destruction that rushes accelerating on, before you challenge new difficulty and danger with an indiscriminate franchise. Are not these bad women the very "plenty" that would out-balance you at the polls, if you persist in trying the "patch-and-plaster" remedy of suffrage and legislation?

Recognize the fact, the law, that your power, your high commission, is inward--vital--formative, and casual. Bring all questions of choice or duty to this test, will it work at the heart of things, among the realities and forces? Try your own life by this; remember that mere external is falsehood and death. The letter killeth. Give up all that is only of the appearance--or even chiefly so, in conscious delight and motive--in person, surrounding pursuit. Let your self-presentation, your home-making and adorning, your social effort and interest, your occupation and use of talent, all shape and issue for the things that are essentially and integrally good, and that the world needs to have prevail. Until you can do this, and induce such doing, it is of little use to clamor for mere outward right, or to contend that it would be rightly applied.

Work as you will, and widely as you can, for schools, in a.s.sociations, in everything whose end is to teach, enlighten, enlarge women, and so the world. Help and protect the industries of women; but keep those industries within the guiding law of woman-life. Do not throw down barriers that take down safeguards with them; that make threatening breaches in the very social structure. If women must serve in shops, demand and care for it that it shall be in a less mixed, a more shielded way than now.

The great caravansaries of trade are perilous by their throng, publicity, and weariness. There used to be women's shops; choice places, where a woman's care and taste had ruled before the counters were spread; where women could quietly purchase things that were sure to be beautiful or of good service; there were not the tumult and ransacking that kill both shop-girl and shopper now.

This is one instance, and but one, of the rescuing that ought to be attempted. There ought at least to be distinct women's departments, presided over by women of good, motherly tone and character, in the places of business which women so frequent, and where the thoughtful are aware of much that makes them tremble.

And surely a great many of the girls and women who choose shop-work, because they like its excitement, ought rather to be in homes, rendering womanly service, and preparing to serve in homes of their own--leaving their present places to young men who might perhaps begin so to earn the homes to offer them. Will not this apply all the way up, into the arts and the professions even?

There must needs be exceptional women perhaps; there are, and will be, time and errand and place for them; but Heaven forbid that they should all become exceptional.

Once more, work for these things that are behind, and underlie; believing that woman's place is behind and within, not of repression, but of power; and that if she do not fill this place it will be empty; there will be no main spring. Meanwhile she will get her rights as she rises to them, and her defenses where she needs them; everything that helps, defends, uplifts the woman uplifts man and the whole fabric, and man has begun to find it out. If he "will give the suffrage if women want it," as is said, why shall he not as well give them the things that they want suffrage for and that they are capable of representing? Believe me, this work, and the representation which grows out of it, can no longer be done if we attempt the handling of political machinery--the making of platforms, the judging of candidates, the measuring and disputation of party plans and issues, and all the tortuous following up of public and personal political history.

Do you say, men have their individual work in the world, and all this beside and of it, and that therefore we may? Exactly here comes in again the law of the interior. Their work is "of it"--falls in the way. They rub against it as they go along. Men meet each other in the business thoroughfares, at the offices and the street corners; we are in the dear depths of home. We are with the little ones, of whom is not this kingdom, but the kingdom of heaven, which we, through them, may help to come. This is just where we must abandon our work, if we attempt the doing of theirs.

And here is where our prestige will desert us, whenever great cause calls us to speak from out our seclusions, and show men, from our insights and our place, the occasion and desire that look unto their rule. They will not listen then; they will remand us to the ballot-box.

"Inside politics" is a good word. That is just where woman ought to be, as she ought to be inside everything, insisting upon and implanting the truth and right that are to conquer. And she can not be inside and outside both. She can not do the mothering and the home-making, the watching and ministry, the earning and maintaining hold and privilege and motive influence behind and through the acts of men--and all the world-wide execution of act beside. Therefore, we say, do not give up the substance which you might seize, for the shadow which you could not hold fast if you were to seem to grasp it. Work on at the foundations. Insist on truth and right; put them into all your own life, taking all the beam out of your own eye before demanding--well, we will say the mote, for generosity's sake, and for the holy authority of the word--out of the brother's eyes.

Establish pure, honest, lovely things--things of good report--in the nurseries, the schools, the social circles where you reign, and the outside world and issue will take form and heed for themselves. The nation, of which the family is the root, will be made, and built, and saved accordingly. Every seed hath its own body. The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent-head of evil, and shall rise triumphant to become the enn.o.bled, recreated commonwealth. Then shall pour forth the double paean that thrills through the glorious final chorus of Schumann's Faust--men and women answering in antiphons--

"The indescribable, Here it is done; The ever-womanly Beckons us on!"

Then shall Mary--the fulfilled, enn.o.bled womanhood--sing her Magnificat; standing to receive from the Lord, and to give the living word to the nations:

"My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in G.o.d, my Saviour.

For He hath looked upon the low estate of His handmaiden; For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed, For He that is mighty hath done to me great things; And holy is His name.

And His mercy is unto generations and generations."

The coming new version of the Old Testament gives us, we are told, among other more perfect renderings, this one, which fitly utters charge and promise:

"The Lord gave the word; Great was the company Of those That published it."

"The Lord giveth the word; And the women that bring Glad tidings Are a great host."

ADELINE D.T. WHITNEY.

Mr. BLAIR. Mr. President, before the vote is taken I desire to say but a word. Early in the session I had the opportunity of addressing the Senate upon the general merits of the question. I said then all that I cared to say; but I wish to remind the Senate before the vote is taken that the question to be decided is not whether upon the whole the suffrage should be extended to women, but whether in the proper arena for the amendment of the Const.i.tution ordained by the Const.i.tution itself one-third of the American people shall have the opportunity to be heard in the discussion of such a proposed amendment--whether they shall have the opportunity of the exercise of the first right of republican government and of the American and of any free citizen, the submission to the popular tribunal, which has alone the power to decide the question whether on the whole, upon a comparison of the arguments pro and con bearing one way and the other upon this great subject, the American people will extend the suffrage to those who are now deprived of it.

That is the real question for the Senate to consider. It is not whether the Senate would, itself, extend the suffrage to women, but whether those men who believe that women should have the suffrage shall be heard, so that there may be a decision and an end made of this great subject, which has now been under discussion more than a quarter of a century, and to-day for the first time even in the legislative body which is to submit the proposition to the country for consideration has there been a prospect of reaching a vote.

I appeal to Senators not to decide this question upon the arguments which have been offered here to-day for or against the merits of the proposition. I appeal to them to decide this question upon that other principle to which I have adverted, whether one-third of the American people shall be permitted to go into the arena of public discussion of the States, among the people of the States, and before the Legislatures of the States, and be heard upon the issue, shall the general Const.i.tution be so amended as to extend this right of suffrage? If, with this opportunity, those who believe in woman suffrage fail, they must be content; for I agree with the Senators upon the opposite side of the Chamber and with all who hold that if the suffrage is to be extended at all, it must be extended by the operation of existing law. I believe it to be an innate right; yet an innate right must be exercised only by the consent of the controling forces of the State. That is all that woman asks. That is all that any one asks who believes in this right belonging to her s.e.x.

As bearing simply upon the question whether there is a demand by a respectable number of people to be heard on this issue, I desire to read one or two doc.u.ments in my possession. I offer in this connection, in addition to the innumerable pet.i.tions which have been placed before the Senate and before the other House, the pet.i.tion of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. I take it that no Senator will raise the question whether this organization be or be not composed of the very _elite_ of the women of America. At least two hundred thousand of the Christian women of this country are represented in this organization. It is national in its character and scope; it is international, and it exists in every State and in every Territory of the Union. By their officers, Miss Frances E. Willard, the president; Mrs. Caroline B. Buell, corresponding secretary; Mrs. Mary A.

Woodbridge, recording secretary; Mrs. L.M.N. Stevens, a.s.sistant recording secretary; Miss Esther Pugh, treasurer; Mrs. Zerelda G.

Wallace, superintendent of department of franchise, and Mrs. Henrietta B. Wall, secretary of department of franchise, they bring this pet.i.tion to the Senate. It has been indorsed by the action of the body at large. They say:

Believing that governments can be just only when deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, and that in a government professing to be a government of the people, all the people of a mature age should have a voice, and that all cla.s.s-legislation and unjust discrimination against the rights and privileges of any citizen is fraught with danger to the republic, and inasmuch as the ballot in popular governments is a most potent element in all moral and social reforms:

We, therefore, on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Christian women engaged in philanthropic effort, pray you to use your influence, and vote for the pa.s.sage of a sixteenth amendment to the Const.i.tution of the United States, prohibiting the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of any citizen on the ground of s.e.x.

I have also just received, in addition to other matter before the Senate, the pet.i.tion of the Indianapolis Suffrage a.s.sociation, or of that department of the Women's Christian Temperance Union which has the control of the discussion and management of the operations of the union with reference to the suffrage. I shall not take the time of the Senate to read it. The letter transmitting the pet.i.tion is as follows:

INDIANAPOLIS, IND., _January_ 12, 1886.

DEAR SIR: I have sent the inclosed pet.i.tions and arguments to every member on the Committee on Woman Suffrage, hoping if they are read they may have some influence in securing a favorable report for the pa.s.sage of a sixteenth amendment, giving the ballot to women.

Will you urge upon the members of the committee the importance of their perusal?

Respectfully,