THE ANTISUFFRAGISTS

Selected Papers, 1852-1887

Editorial, New York Herald (1852)
The farce at Syracuse has been played out. . .
Who are these women? What do they want? What are the motives that impel
them to this course of action? The dramatis personae of the farce enacted at Syra-
cuse present a curious conglomeration of both sexes. Some of them are old maids,
whose personal charms were never very attractive, and who have been sadly slighted
by the masculine gender in general; some of them women who have been badly
mated, whose own temper, or their husbands', has made life anything but agree-
able to them, and they are therefore down upon the whole of the opposite sex;
some, having so much of the virago in their disposition, that nature appears to have
made a mistake in their gendermannish women, like hens that crow; some of
boundlesii vanity and egotism, who believe that they are superior in intellectual
ability to "all the world and the rest of mankind," and delight to see their speeches
and addresses in print; and man shall be consigned to his proper spherenursing
the babies, washing the dishes, mending stockings, and sweeping the house. This
is "the good time coming." Besides the classes we have enumerated, there is a class
of wild enthusiasts and visionariesvery sincere, but very madhaving the same
vein as the fanatical Abolitionists, and the majority, if not all of them, being, in
point of fact, deeply imbued with the anti-slavery sentiment. Of the male sex who
attend these Conventions for the purpoSe of taking part in them, the majority are
henpecked husbands, and all of them ought to wear petticoats. .
How did woman first become subject to man as she now is all over the world?
By her nature, her sex, just as the negro is and always will be, to the end of time,
inferior to the white race, and, therefore, doomed to subjection; but happier than
she would be in any other condition, just because it is the law of her nature. The
women themselves would not have this law reversed. . . .
What do the leaders of the Woman's Rights Convention want? They want to
vote, and to hustle with the rowdies at the polls. They want to be members of Con-
gress, and in the heat of debate to subject themselves to coarse jests and indecent
language, .. . They want to fill all other posts which men are ambitious to occupy
From 'The Woman's Rights ConventionThe Last Act of the Drama," editorial, New York I-Jerald,
September 12, 1852.
515
516 Part V II How It Happened: Race and Gender Issu es in U.S. Law
to be lawyers, doctors, captains of vessels, and generals in the field. How funny it
would sound in the newspapers, that Lucy Stone, pleading a cause, took suddenly ill
in the pains of parturition, and perhaps gave birth to a fine bouncing boy in court!
Or that Rev. Antoinette Brown was arrested in the middle of her sermon in the pul-
pit from the same cause, and presented a "pledge" to her husband and the congre-
gation; or, that Dr. Harriot K. Hunt, while attending a gentleman patient for a fit of
the gout or fistu la in ano, found it necessary to send for a doctor, there and then, and
to be delivered of a man or woman childperhaps twins. A: imilar event might hap-
pen on the floor of Congress, in a storm at sea, or in the raging tempest of battle,
and then what is to become of the woman legislator?
New York State Legislative Report (1856)*
Mr. Foote, from the Judiciary Committee, made a report on Women's rights that
set the whole House in roars of laughter:
"The Committee is composed of married and single gentlemen. The bachelors
on the Committee, with becoming diffidence, having left the subject pretty much
to the married gentlemen, they have considered it with the aid of the light they
have before them and the experience married life has given them. Thus aided, they
are enabled to state that the ladies always have the best place and choicest titbit at
the table. They have the best seat in the cars, carriages, and sleighs; the warmest
place in the winter, and the coolest place in the summer. They have their choice
on which side of the bed they will lie, front or back. A lady's dress costs three times
as much as that of a gentleman; and, at the present time. with the prevailing fash-
ion, one lady occupies three times as much space in the world as a gentleman.
"It has thus appeared to the married gentlemen of your Committee, being a
majority (the bachelors being silent for the reason mentioned, and also probably
for the further reason that they are still suitors for the favors of the gentler sex), that,
if there is any inequality or oppression in the case, the gentlemen are the suffer-
ers. They, however, have presented no petitions for redress; having, doubtless,
made up their minds to yield to an inevitable destiny. . ."
Orestes A. Brownson, The Woman Question
(1869 and 1873)t
The conclusive objection to the political enfranchisement of women is, that it
would weaken and finally break up and destroy the Christian family. The social
*This Report on Woman's Rights, made to the New York State Legislature and concerning a petition
for political equality for women, was printed in an Albany paper in March 1856.
/This document consists of two articles by Orestes A. Browns= "The Woman Question. Article I
[from the Catholic World, May 18691," in Henry F. Brownson, ed., The Works of Orestes A. Brownson,
XVIII (Detroit, 1885), 388-89; and "The Wonsan Question. Article II [a review of Horace Bushnell,
Women's Su ffrage: The Reform against Natu re (New York, 1869), from Browoson's Qu arterly Review
for October 1873]," in Henry F. Brownson, op. cit., p. 403.
6 The Antisuffragist& 517
unit is the family, not the individual; and the greatest danger to American society
is, that we are rapidly becoming a nation of isolated individuals, without family ties
or affections. The family has already been much weakened, and is fast disappear-
ing. We have broken away from the old homestead, have lost the restraining and
purifying associations that gathered around it, and live away from home in hotels
and boarding-houses. We are daily losing the faith, the virtues, the habits, and the
manners without which the family cannot be sustained; and when the family goes,
the nation goes too, or ceases to be worth preserving... .
Extend now to women suffrage and eligibility; give them the political right to
vote and to be voted for; render it feasible for them to enter the arena of political
strife, to become canvassers in elections and candidates for office, and what re-
mains of family union will soon be dissolved. The wife may espouse one political
party, and the husband another, and it may well happen that the husband and wife
may be rival candidates for the same office, and one or the other doomed to the
mortification of defeat. Will the husband like to see his wife enter the lists against
him, and triumph over him? Will the wife, fired with political ambition for place
or power, be pleased to see her own husband enter the lists against her, and suc-
ceed at her expense? Will political rivalry and the passions it never fails to engen-
der increase the mutual affection of husband and wife for each other, and promote
domestic union and peace, or will it not carry into the bosom of the family all the
strife, discord, anger, and division of the political canvass? .
Woman was created to be a wife and a mother; that is her destiny. To that des-
tiny all her instincts point, and for it nature has specially qualified her. Her proper
sphere is home, and her proper function is the care of the household, to manage
a family, to take care of children, and attend to their early training. For this she is
endowed with patience, endurance, passive courage, quick sensibilities, a sympa-
thetic nature, and great executive and administrative ability. She was born to be a
queen in her own household, and to make home cheerful, bright, and happy.
We do not believe women, unless we acknowledge individual exceptions, are
fit to have their own head. The most degraded of the savage tribes are those in
which women rule, and descent is reckoned from the mother instead of the father.
Revelation asserts, and universal experience proves that the man is the head of the
woman, and that the woman is for the man, not the man for the woman; and his
greatest error, as well as the primal curse of society is that he abdicates his head-
ship, and allows himself to be governed, we might almost say, deprived of his rea-
son, by woman. It was through the seductions of the woman, herself seduced by
the serpent, that man fell, and brought sin and all our woe into the world. She has
all the qualities that fit her to be a help-meet of man, to be the mother of his chil-
dren, to be their nurse, their early instructress, their guardian, their life-long friend;
to be his companion, his comforter, his consoler in sorrow, his friend in trouble,
his ministering angel in sickness; but as an independent existence, free to follow
her own fancies and vague longings, her own ambition and natural love of power.
without masculine direction or control, she is out of her element. and a social
anomaly, sometimes a hideous monster, which men seldom are, excepting through
518 Part V II How It Happened: Race and Gender Issu es in (LS. Law
a woman's influence. This is no excuse for men, but it proves that women need a
head, and the restraint of father, husband, or the priest of God.
Remarks of Senator George G. Vest
in Congress (1887)*
MR. ......If this Government, which is based on the intelligence of the peo-
ple, shall ever be destroyed it will be by injudicious, Miniature, 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. . . .
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 set-
tled 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, cities have been the first cancers to ap-
pear upon the body-politic in all ages of the world.
Wyoming Territory! Washington Territory! Where are their large cities? Where
are the localities in those Territories where the strain upon popular government
must come? The Senator from New Hampshire [Henry W. BlairEd.], who is so
conspicuous in this movement, appalled the country some months since by his
ghastly array of illiteracy in the Southern States.. . That Senator proposes now to
double, and more than double, that illiteracy. He proposes now 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 in-
telligent 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 attri-
tion 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? . .
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 caress-
ing hand of that dear 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 homewhen I turn from the arena where man contends
with man for what we call the prizes of this paltry worldI want to go back, not
'The remarks of Senator George G. Vest (Democrat, Missouri) may be found in the Congressional
Record, 49th Cong., 2d mess., January 25, 1887, p. 986.
6 The Antisu ffragists >19
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 junk-
diction 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 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 clown 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 cor.)11v,
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 po
litical 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 the home and of hearts, is above the political colli-
sions of this world, and should always be kept above them... .
It is said that the suffrage is to be given to enlarge the sphere of woman's influ-
ence. 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 off-
spring, influencing by her gentle and kindly caress the action of her husband to-
ward the good and pure.