Part 12 (1/2)

In asking for laws that carried out these claims, or some of them, Mrs.

Stanton said, in addressing the New York Legislature in 1854: ”If you take the highest view of marriage as a Divine relation, which love alone can const.i.tute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only recognize it.... But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws that control all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human, half-divine inst.i.tution, which you may build up but cannot regulate.”

These doctrines--from those of Frances Wright to those of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony--were put forth in the name of social purity and true marriage. A great body of Suffragists never have accepted them. They were repugnant, in this form, to a majority who were demanding ”equal rights.”

In January, 1871, Mr. Hooker (husband of Isabella Beecher Hooker), said in the New York Evening Post: ”The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement. The two have no necessary connection. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments in favor of Woman Suffrage is, that the marriage relation will be safer with women to vote and legislate upon it than where the voting and legislation are left wholly to men. Women will always be wives and mothers, above all things else. This law of nature cannot be changed, and I know of n.o.body who desires to change it.” As he had just been referring to ”persons who advocated easy divorce,” and who originated the Suffrage movement, his statement that he knew of n.o.body who desired to change marriage seems funny.

It was one of the matters remarked upon with satisfaction by Suffrage leaders during our Const.i.tutional Convention Suffrage campaign, that such a large number of speakers advocated Suffrage because of its advantage to the home. Mrs. Cora Seabury said: ”Where woman is, homes naturally exist, and not without her. The 'divine veracity in nature,' which in her case has survived the chaos of ages and the varying civilization of six thousand years, is not now to be disproved by an incident comparatively so trivial as that of taking the ballot.” Dr. Jacobi puts the idea in this way: ”Mr. Goldwin Smith declares that woman suffrage aims at such a 's.e.xual revolution' as must cause the 'dissolution of the family.' The Suffrage claim does not aim at this; it seeks only to formulate, recognize, and define the revolution already effected, yet which leaves the family intact. The _Patria Potestas_ is gone. A man has lost, first, the right to kill his own son, then the right to order the marriage of his daughter, then the right to absorb the property of his wife. Nevertheless, he survives, and the family, shorn of its portentous rights, bids fair in America to remain the happiest of all conceivable natural inst.i.tutions; more profound than society, so immeasurably deeper than politics that the fortunate wife, daughter, or sister is puzzled when the two are mentioned in the same breath.”

All these writers agree in demanding the ballot in order to make some essential change in woman's condition. Some of them hold that this change cannot be made unless the relations of wife and mother can be set aside when the individual considers them detrimental; others hold that it can be made and leave the relations intact; and one believes that this change is already so far made, while the relations are still intact, that nothing need be feared from further change. It reduces itself to matter of opinion and prophecy on the part of those who agree with the early leaders that essential change is needed, but do not agree with them as to the steps necessary. The appeal must be to facts.

The originators of the movement ought to know what the movement meant. The marriage laws were the first attacked, and are still being hammered at in favor of divorce, although legislation has outrun their demand in changing the outgrown laws in regard to property and contracts. Mr. Hooker said: ”The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement.” How can that be, when the women who inspired the Suffrage movement, and who began it and still carry it on, proclaimed this as a necessary part? But, this question aside, it may be said that the marriage relation has been the most unsafe in the hands of the women whose idea of equality either repudiates it outright or inveighs against its present status. From the revolutionary and infidel portion of France, from which it sprang, to the recently dead Oneida Community, who but women who imbibed the doctrine that marriage was bondage, have sustained the various forms of license which called itself freedom?

Transcendentalism and Libertinism worked together, and both found women who could be fitted to the task of destroying the home.

Mrs. Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes have not existed ”naturally.” There was a long, long time in human history when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last, through mighty struggles, the family was evolved--the final grouping of the race--the social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has so well progressed that to-day the man's family is dearer to him than his own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who proclaim that man is woman's enemy, are the a.s.sa.s.sins of their own peace and of the growing peace of home.

A proof that ”women will not always be wives and mothers above all things else,” is to be found in the story of the women who have engaged in intrigue from the days of ancient Egypt. A woman State senator-elect says: ”I am a Mormon, and believe in polygamy.” The organizations that are first to proclaim the so-called freedom of woman from the marriage bond, are the same that would repudiate all government, human and divine.

But man has no more set the bounds of woman's life than woman has set those of man's. It is false to say that man has ”usurped the prerogative of Jehovah,” in a.s.signing her a sphere of action. He has a.s.signed neither her sphere nor his own. Their spheres have been worked out from the conditions that made them male and female. The ideal that faith could picture was presented in the Old Testament, and when Christ said, ”For the hardness of your hearts Moses commanded to write a bill of divorcement, but in the beginning it was not so,” he spoke the ultimate word. Save for adultery, the family was not to be broken, and the laws of modern life, which grow freer in every other respect, are approaching nearer to this model as society progresses, and most rapidly so in the most progressive states.

There is a fine bit of unconscious humor in Miss Anthony's remark that ”Woman must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all.” Man is at present blinded by the belief that he must proffer marriage as woman will accept it, or not at all. Society has lodged with her what Mrs. Stanton calls ”only the veto power.” Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton apparently wish the women to do the proffering, the accepting, and the rejecting. With so insignificant a part a.s.signed him, it would seem a pity that there should be a sort of necessity for man to play in the marriage role at all. When Suffrage leaders have so arranged matters that the bride retains her maiden name, she can spend her summers in Europe and her winters in Florida, while her husband works all the year round in New York to support her, without her being subjected to the mortification of seeming to desert the man whose name she bears.

You cannot teach this untruth to the girl without teaching it to the boy.

The struggle of civilization has been to teach that manhood was not the great fact of man's life, and he has learned it through the chivalry and tenderness that appealed to and developed his higher nature. But if once he understands that woman does not hold herself in need of his chivalry and tenderness, the husbandhood and fatherhood that now bind him to one sacred vow of married love, and tame the savage within him, will not long prevent him from seeing his own advantage in the new order.

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 cla.s.ses, 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 impa.s.sioned 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 ”inst.i.tutional” 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 ”s.e.xual 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. Circ.u.mstances, 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 defenders of law, and the women are not, is seen at close quarters in the home, and in case of opposite votes and any serious resulting action, the father and son must stand in the att.i.tude of actual physical as well as political antagonism to the mother and daughter. If it came to an issue, man would have to decide whether he would defend his own opinion, expressed in his ballot, or the opposite opinion expressed by his wife in her ballot. And the mere suggestion of difference in family opinion, final action upon which could only be taken by a resort to that in which the men must always be superior, would not only endanger family life and peace, but would develop a fatal inequality between the s.e.xes. If the women of the family vote with the men, they only double the vote and the expense, without changing the result; if they vote against the men, they stand in the ridiculous att.i.tude of opposing them where they cannot do more than pull hair, or inviting a revolution which they cannot stay.

As to the possibility of this, there are a few striking and suggestive facts at hand. The sound judgment and law-abiding element of this country expressed itself in no uncertain tones at the late election. After the defeat of Mr. Bryan, he was given a tremendous demonstration of approval at Denver, in which the women played a conspicuous part. Mrs. Bradford said: ”The women tried to welcome you to the White House. When a few more stars have been added to the Equal Suffrage banner, the women _will_ welcome you to the White House.” Mrs. Patterson, President of the Equal Suffrage League, said in seconding the address of welcome: ”Women of Colorado, I present to you the first president of the twentieth century-- William Jennings Bryan.” An invalid of whom I know, travelled from California to her home in Colorado in order to cast her vote for Bryan, while her husband cast his for McKinley in California. Mrs. Cannon, of Utah, was elected on the Free-Silver ticket, against her husband on the Gold-Standard ticket. Mrs. Cronine, a Populist member of the legislature of Colorado, is reported as saying: ”It hurt my husband, a lifelong Republican, to see me vote against his party and carry both our children with me.” Should there be political disturbance in Colorado and Utah, in 1900, here are three husbands on record who might be called upon by the United States authorities to put down by force, perhaps to kill, those whose lawlessness their wives had instigated and abetted. In one instance the man's own sons may fight against him, impelled to do so by the lessons taught by their mother. It requires no stretch of fancy to see the possibility of civil war brought to the doors of every home, when women vote. And the occasion that would bring it would not be the saving of the Nation's life, but its overthrow; not freedom for an oppressed cla.s.s, but mingled bondage and license for a s.e.x now free; not the preservation of home, but its destruction. The Suffrage women who here among us are talking so foolishly about arbitration and universal peace, seem to have no conception that with their next breath they are endeavoring to establish the conditions for the most horrible of conflicts--that of s.e.x.

So far from the ”taking of the ballot” being ”trivial,” it is the most serious and dangerous business in which a woman can engage.

The home is not a natural inst.i.tution unless it is maintained by natural means, and woman suffrage and the home are incompatible. John Bright, in reply to Mr. Theodore Stanton's question why he opposed suffrage, said, ”I cannot give you all the reasons for the view I take, but I act from the belief that to introduce women into the strife of political life would be a great evil to them, and that to our own s.e.x no possible good could arise. When women are not safe under the charge or care of fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, it is the fault of our non-civilization, and not of our laws. As civilization founded on Christian principles advances, women will gain all that is right for them to have, though they are not seen contending in the strife of political parties. In my experience I have observed evil results to many women who have entered hotly into political conflict and discussion. I would save them from it.”

How true this is, and how wise are the fears expressed by Mr. Bright, we realize afresh at every study of the exciting campaign of November, 1896.