History of Woman Suffrage Volume II Part 84

Those who advocated the equality of suffrage took the matter up on the original principles of government; that the reason why each individual man in forming a State government should have an equal vote, is because each individual, before he enters into government, is equally free and equally independent.

James Madison said:

Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the ma.s.s of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who are to administer them.

Also,

Let it be remembered, finally, that it has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature.

And these a.s.sertions of the framers of the United States Const.i.tution of the equal and natural rights of all the people to a voice in the government, have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statesmen of the nation, throughout the entire history of our Government.

Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, said in 1866:

I have made up my mind that the elective franchise is one of the inalienable rights meant to be secured by the Declaration of Independence.

B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three days' discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan's motion to strike "male" from the District of Columbia suffrage bill, said:

Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I stand for universal suffrage; and as a matter of fundamental principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any ground of race or s.e.x. I will go farther, and say that I recognize the right of franchise as being intrinsically a natural right. I do not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitations upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social state itself.

Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the XIV. and XV.

Amendments, insisted that, so soon as by the XIII. Amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United States Const.i.tution guaranteed to them equal rights--the right to vote and to be voted for:

I do not hesitate to say that when the slaves of our country became "citizens," they took their place in the body politic as a component part of the "people," ent.i.tled to equal rights, and under the protection of these two guardian principles: First, that all just governments stand on the consent of the governed; and second, that taxation without representation is tyranny; and these rights it is the duty of Congress to guarantee as essential to the idea of a Republic.

The preamble of the Const.i.tution of the State of New York declares:

We, the people of the State of New York, grateful to Almighty G.o.d for our freedom, in order to secure its blessings, do establish this Const.i.tution.

Here is not the slightest intimation, either of receiving freedom from the United States Const.i.tution, or of the State conferring the blessings of liberty upon the people; and the same is true of every one of the thirty-six State Const.i.tutions. Each and all alike declare rights G.o.d-given, and that to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights, is their one and only object in ordaining and establishing government. And all of the State const.i.tutions are equally emphatic in their recognition of the ballot as the means of securing the people in the enjoyment of these rights. Article 1 of the New York State Const.i.tution says:

No member of this State shall be disfranchised or deprived of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers.

And so carefully guarded is the citizen's right to vote, that the Const.i.tution makes special mention of all who may not vote:

Laws may be pa.s.sed excluding from the right of suffrage all persons who have been or may be convicted of bribery, larceny, or any infamous crime.

In naming the various employments that shall not affect the residence of voters, the 3d section of Article 2d says

That being kept at any almshouse or other asylum, at public expense, nor being confined at any public prison, shall deprive a person of his residence,

and hence his vote. Thus is the right of voting most sacredly hedged about. The only seeming permission in our const.i.tution for the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women is in section 1st of Article 2d:

Every male citizen of the age of twenty-one years, etc., shall be ent.i.tled to vote.

But I insist that in view of the explicit a.s.sertions of the equal right of the whole people, both in the preamble and previous article of the const.i.tution, this omission of the adjective "female" in the second, should not be construed into a denial; but, instead, counted as of no effect. Mark the direct prohibition:

"No member of this State shall be disfranchised, unless by the 'law of the land,' or the judgment of his peers."

"The law of the land," is the United States Const.i.tution; and there is no provision in that doc.u.ment that can be fairly construed into a permission to the States to deprive any cla.s.s of their citizens of their right to vote. Hence New York can get no power from that source to disfranchise one entire half of her members. Nor has "the judgment of their peers" been p.r.o.nounced against women exercising their right to vote. No disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror--and none but disfranchised persons can be women's peers; nor has the Legislature pa.s.sed laws excluding them on account of idiocy or lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny, or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no const.i.tutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers whatever stand to-day between women and the exercise of their right to vote save those of precedent and prejudice.

The clauses of the United States Const.i.tution, cited by our opponents as giving power to the States to disfranchise any cla.s.ses of citizens they shall please, are contained in sections 2d and 4th of article 1st. The second says:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several States; and the electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature.

This can not be construed into a concession to the States of the power to destroy the right to become an elector, but simply to prescribe what shall be the qualifications, such as competency of intellect, maturity of age, length of residence, that shall be deemed necessary to enable them to make an intelligent choice of candidates. If, as our opponents a.s.sert, the last clause of this section makes it the duty of the United States to protect citizens in the several States against higher or different qualifications for electors for Representatives in Congress, than for members of a.s.sembly, then must the first clause make it equally imperative for the national government to interfere with the States, and forbid them from arbitrarily cutting off the right of one half of the people to become electors altogether.

Section 4th says:

The times, places, and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.

Here is conceded the power only to prescribe times, places, and manner of holding the elections; and even with these Congress may interfere, with all excepting the mere place of choosing Senators. Thus you see, there is not the slightest permission in either section for the States to discriminate against the right of any cla.s.s of citizens to vote. Surely to regulate can not be to annihilate! nor to qualify to wholly deprive! And to this principle every true Democrat and Republican said amen, when applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches for EQUAL RIGHTS TO ALL from 1865 to 1869; and when, in 1871, I asked that Senator to declare the power of the United States Const.i.tution to protect women in their right to vote--as he had done for black men--he handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, saying:

Miss Anthony, put "s.e.x" where I have "race" or "color," and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a doubt but women have the const.i.tutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a XVI. Amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the XIV. and XV. under protest; would never have done it but for the pressing emergency of that hour; would have insisted that the power of the original Const.i.tution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly made freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth, nor time to wait that slow process. Women possess all these in an eminent degree; and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them establish the powers of our American _magna charta_, to protect every citizen of the Republic.

But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner's counsel, I went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen's right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them--they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally. Senator Sumner, putting s.e.x where he did color, would have said:

Qualifications can not be in their nature permanent or insurmountable. s.e.x can not be a qualification any more than size, race, color, or previous condition of servitude. A permanent or insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a deprivation of the suffrage. In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without representation, against which our revolutionary mothers, as well as fathers, rebelled.

For any State to make s.e.x a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of one entire half of the people, is to pa.s.s a bill of attainder, or an _ex post facto_ law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it, the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them, this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy; the most hateful ever established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but surely this oligarchy of s.e.x, which makes the men of every household sovereigns, masters; the women subjects, slaves; carrying dissension, rebellion into every home of the Nation, can not be endured. And yet this odious aristocracy exists in the face of Section 4, of Article 4, which says:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of government.

What, I ask you, is the distinctive difference between the inhabitants of a Monarchical and those of a Republican form of government, save that in the Monarchical the people are subjects, helpless, powerless, bound to obey laws made by superiors--while in the Republican, the people are citizens, individual sovereigns, all clothed with equal power, to make and unmake both their laws and their law makers. And the moment you deprive a person of his right to a voice in the government, you degrade him from the status of a citizen to that of a subject, and it matters very little to him whether his monarch be an individual tyrant, as is the Czar of Russia, or a 15,000,000 headed monster, as here in the United States.

But, it is urged, the use of the masculine p.r.o.nouns he, his, and him, in all the const.i.tutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent, and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government, and from penalties for the violation of laws.

A year and a half ago I was at Walla Walla, Washington Territory.

I saw there a theatrical company, the "Pixley Sisters," playing before crowded houses every night of the whole week of the Territorial fair. The eldest of those three fatherless girls was scarce eighteen. Yet every night a United States officer stretched out his long fingers, and clutched six dollars of the proceeds of the exhibitions of those orphan girls, who, but a few years before, were starvelings in the streets of Olympia, the capital of that far-off north-west territory. So the poor widow, who keeps a boarding-house, manufactures shirts, or sells apples and peanuts on the street corners of our cities, is compelled to pay taxes from her scanty pittance. I would that the women of this republic at once resolve, never again to submit to taxation until their right to vote be recognized. Miss Sarah E. Wall, of Worcester, Ma.s.s., twenty years ago, took this position. For several years, the officers of the law distrained her property and sold it to meet the necessary amount; still she persisted, and would not yield an iota, though every foot of her lands should be struck off under the hammer. And now, for several years, the a.s.sessor has left her name off the tax list, and the collector pa.s.sed her by without a call. Mrs. J. S. Weeden, of Viroqua, Wis., for the past six years has refused to pay her taxes, though the annual a.s.sessment is $75. Mrs. Ellen Van Valkenburg, of Santa Cruz, Cal., who sued the County Clerk for refusing to register her name, declares she will never pay another dollar of tax until allowed to vote; and all over the country, women property holders are waking up to the injustice of taxation without representation, and ere long will refuse, _en ma.s.se_, to submit to the imposition.

There is no she, or her, or hers, in the tax laws. The statute of New York reads:

Every person shall be a.s.sessed in the town or ward where he resides when the a.s.sessment is made, for the lands owned by him, etc. Every collector shall call at least once on the person taxed, or at his usual place of residence, and shall demand payment of the taxes charged on him. If any one shall refuse to pay the tax imposed on him, the collector shall levy the same by distress and sale of his property.

The same is true of all the criminal laws:

No person shall be compelled to be a witness against himself, etc.

In the law of May 31, 1870, the 19th section of which I am charged with having violated; not only are all the p.r.o.nouns masculine, but everybody knows that that particular section was intended expressly to hinder the rebels from voting. It reads:

If any person shall knowingly vote without his having a lawful right, etc.

Precisely so with all the papers served on me--the U. S.

Marshal's warrant, the bail-bond, the pet.i.tion for habeas corpus, the bill of indictment--not one of them had a feminine p.r.o.noun printed in it; but, to make them applicable to me, the Clerk of the Court made a little carat at the left of "he" and placed an "s" over it, thus making she out of he. Then the letters "is"

were scratched out, the little carat placed under and "er" over, to make her out of his, and I insist if government officials may thus manipulate the p.r.o.nouns to tax, fine, imprison, and hang women, women may take the same liberty with them to secure to themselves their right to a voice in the government.

So long as any cla.s.ses of men were denied their right to vote, the government made a show of consistency, by exempting them from taxation. When a property qualification of $250 was required of black men in New York, they were not compelled to pay taxes, so long as they were content to report themselves worth less than that sum; but the moment the black man died, and his property fell to his widow, the black woman's name would be put on the a.s.sessor's list, and she be compelled to pay taxes on the same property exempted to her husband. The same is true of ministers in New York. So long as the minister lives, he is exempted from taxation on $1,500 of property, but the moment the breath goes out of his body, his widow's name will go down on the a.s.sessor's list, and she will have to pay taxes on the $1,500. So much for the special legislation in favor of women. In all the penalties and burdens of the government (except the military), women are reckoned as citizens, equally with men. Also, in all the privileges and immunities, save those of the jury-box and ballot-box, the two fundamental privileges on which rest all the others. The United States government not only taxes, fines, imprisons, and hangs women, but it allows them to pre-empt lands, register ships, and take out pa.s.sport and naturalization papers.

Not only does the law permit single women and widows to the right of naturalization, but Section 2 says:

A married woman may be naturalized without the concurrence of her husband. (I wonder the fathers were not afraid of creating discord in the families of foreigners); and again: When an alien, having complied with the law, and declared his intention to become a citizen, dies before he is actually naturalized, his widow and children shall be considered citizens, ent.i.tled to all rights and privileges as such, on taking the required oath.