committee, respectfully present to you a protest against
that clause of the anti-polygamy measure passed by congress,
which, whether in the Edmunds bill of the senate or the Tucker
substitute of the house, disfranchises the non-polygamous
women of Utah.
The clause relating to the disfranchisement of women has no
bearing on the general merits of the end sought to be attained
by the measure, since Mormon men are the majority of the
voters of the territory.
The non-polygamous women of Utah have committed no crime.
Disfranchisement is reserved by the United States government
for arch traitors. Justice forbids that such a penalty should
be inflicted on innocent women.
Non-polygamous Mormon women and the Christian women of Utah
being thus disfranchised—the former for their opinions and
the latter for the opinions of the former—a precedent is
established subversive of the fundamental principles of our
government, and threatening the security of all citizens.
If congress deems it necessary to disfranchise citizens
because of injurious beliefs, discrimination between sexes is
manifestly unjust.
It has been held by the foremost statesmen of the nation that
the right of suffrage once exercised, becomes a vested right
which cannot be taken away. Gratz Brown once said, in the
senate of the United States, that if the idea that suffrage
could be taken away at pleasure once crystallized in the minds
of the people, it would “ring the death knell of American
liberty.” Mr. Vest, of Missouri, on the 25th day of this
month, said, on the floor of the senate: “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 fraction of the community is once invested with this
privilege it is fixed, accomplished and eternal.”
Thus every argument for justice, equal legislation and the
safety of our republican form of government calls for the
defeat of this clause.
We, therefore, respectfully urge you, as guardian of the
rights of all American citizens, to veto any measure coming
before you which disfranchises the women of Utah.
Lillie Devereux Blake,
Matilda Joslyn Gage,
Caroline Gilkey Rogers,
Mary Seymour Howell,
Clara B. Colby,
Sarah Miller,
Elizabeth Boynton Harbert,
Harriette R. Shattuck,
Louisa Southworth,
Committee
This memorial, supplemented by personal argument from the committee
demonstrating the political dangers connected with such a denial of
vested rights, together with the greater injustice of punishing women
for the crimes of men, was met by reply of the President that as great
changes were frequently made in bills before their final passage, he
had as yet not given the subject much thought; promising, however to
give it his fullest attention whenever brought before him. The method
taken by the president to avoid responsibility of decision, is notable
as he neither signed nor vetoed the bill, but allowed it to become law
through such non-action. Crimes of omission being parallel with those
of commission, the women of the United States can but hold Grover
Cleveland equally guilty with the XLIX Congress in punishing women for
the crimes of men.
The Code of England, from which that of the United States is largely
borrowed, was the outgrowth of Christianity, based upon a belief
in man’s superiority and woman’s subordination to him as entering
every relation of life. All legislation was class; the line was
sex. During the early and middle ages man exhibited an antagonism
towards woman,[60] which if not wholly created by religious belief
was strenuously fostered by the church. Man’s basest passion, love
of power, was appealed to and he was assured by what he had been
trained to regard as indisputable authority, that God had ordained
his rule over woman. A quick response met all such priestly teaching.
Christianity has ever been a religion of the emotions rather than of
the reason. The former was cultivated; the latter bitterly condemned.
The church has ever found its most powerful enemy in reason, hence the
exercise of reason has ever been a crime in her eyes.
During the Christian ages the different code of morals for man and
woman has created infinite wrong. Open and notorious vice among both
churchmen and laymen passed unreproved, but an heiress forfeited her
possessions by unchastity, and wily plans were laid to thus gain
possession of her property, the betrayer receiving payment from the
guardian, whose tool he was, for his perfidy.[61] To this moral code we
trace the present legal condition of girls, daughters having no status
in the courts in case of betrayal. The father alone, as master and
owner, can sue for loss of her services, while the injury to herself
is passed by, even upon so momentous a question as the paternity of a
child born out of wedlock.
Many of the most flagrant wrongs perpetrated against woman can be
traced to a denial of a right of ownership, beginning with the denial
of her right to herself. Even the Salic law which in France was used
to bar the succession of woman to the throne, was not specifically
or primarily in favor of males; it was a property law growing out
of the patriarchal idea of property in woman. Under Christian form
of marriage, woman was transferred to another family whose name she
took. She not only became the property of her husband but all real or
personal estate which she possessed, also became his. Thus her property
went to the enrichment of another family. Her home was no longer with
her own people, but where her husband chose to make it. Salic law
derived its name from Sala, a house. Salic land, said Montesquieu, was
the land belonging to the house.[62] At time of its adoption the line
of descent was male. Under it during the middle ages when a daughter
married, she received merely a chaplet of roses. Thenceforth, her
interests were elsewhere, and her children became part of another
family; she was entirely lost to the family of her birth. As she was
no longer a part of it she did not receive inheritance. “It was not a
subject of affection but gens.”
Guizot with a fine sense of irony, termed Salic law essentially a penal
code. Its application to woman was incontestibly penal. In France its
action has been most pronounced. Robertson speaks of the Salic law as
the most venerable monument of French jurisprudence, although the real
period of its birth has never yet been fully acknowledged. While during
the struggle of Phillippa de Valours, and Edward III for the crown of
France, this law was invoked to prevent the succession of Phillippa,
yet we know that in Gaul during the time of Caesar, mothers had sole
authority over their children, even boys remaining in entire charge
of the mother until old enough for instruction in arms. Wives also
possessed property rights, upon marriage the husband adding the same
amount of property he had received with his wife. This was kept as a
separate fund, the survivor taking the whole. Hallum designated the
contest between Phillippa and Edward as in every way remarkable, but
especially on account of its result in the exclusion of woman from the
succession,[63] then first suggested. It was the Latin races rather
than the Scandinavian or Teutonic that first essentially degraded
woman. The Riparian Franks, pre-eminent as lovers of liberty, were the
first who broke away from the rule of this law. Both the Scandinavians
and Teutons possessed prophetic women or priestesses to whom the
highest deference was shown. The Teutonic races were early noted for
the high respect in which they held women, a respect closely bordering
upon veneration. The greatest deference was shown to their opinions
even upon war, the chief business of men’s lives. Victoria received the
title of “Mother of Camps,” and was an especially venerated person.
Veleda by superior genius, directed the counsels of the nation and for
nine years prevented the progress of the imperial armies of Rome. The
most momentous questions of state and of religion were submitted to
woman’s divine judgment.
The relation between the wrongs of woman and her non-ownership of
property, and of herself, are very complicated. The custom of Marquette
originated from the theory of property in woman; the Suzerain or lord
possessing not only a certain property right in his male vassals, but
a double right to the woman who as a bride became the property of his
vassal. Thus Marquette was the outgrowth of the husband’s property
right in his wife, and a secondary result of man’s assumed right of
property in woman. In France, where the Salic law possessed greatest
strength we find the custom of marquette most prevalent. Next to
marquette, the law known as “Mund” or “Mundium” offered the greatest
indignity to woman, and in some respects may be called more vile. While
the baseness of marquette took its victims from a class beneath the
lord in social standing, Mundium entered the family, the father selling
his daughter to such wooer as he chose, or from whom he received the
greatest payment, entirely regardless of the wishes of the daughter
herself. The Salic law seemed to have been founded on the principle
of the Mund, as under it a sum was paid by the husband to the family
of the bride in consideration of the transference of the authority
they possessed over her, to the husband, and this payment was known
as “Mundium” and the bride as a “Mund” bought woman. In Denmark, to
which country the custom of mundium extended, her appellation was
“mundikeypt-krom,” signifying a mund bought woman. At that period
descent was reckoned from the father, to whom alone the children were
held to be related, and his relinquishment of authority by sale of his
daughter, transferred her relationship from her father to her husband,
and she thus became a component part of another family. She no longer
belonged to the family of her birth, but to that of her purchaser. The
Franks were the first to break Salic customs and to permit a father to
settle an estate upon his daughter and her children.[64] Under the law
of Gavelkind as it existed in Great Britain, daughters never inherited,
although the rights of even an illegitimate son was recognized as equal
to those of legitimate sons. By the laws of gavelkind, property could
not descend to women, but the County of Kent possessed more freedom
than in any other part of England. There was a custom of privilege
annexed to all lands of this kind in Kent, among them, that the wife
should be endowed with a moiety; gavelkind land was devisable by will.
Ordinarily in gavelkind, property was kept in male hands, descending
from father to son. The very name gavelkind is said to bear this
signification, the word _Kynd_ is dutch signifying a male child, thus
_gife eal cyn_, means give all to the son. Its modern signification is
the custom of partition of property among males alone, or the greatest
share to the oldest son.
Lord Coke looked upon the practice of gavelkind among the Irish as a
mark of their descent from the ancient Britons. At this period wives
were not entitled to dower, thus in respect to property, all women
of the family were equally disinherited. But it was the opinion of
Lord Holt that by the Common Law, both before and after the conquest,
all the children, both male and female inherited both the real and
the personal estate, and in like proportion. But in the reign of
Henry I daughters, in case there were sons, began to be excluded from
the real estate. These laws, so essentially Salic, it can readily
be seen, originated in the mundium. Passing as a mund woman, into
another family, the succession of property to her under this slave[65]
condition, was contrary to sound domestic policy. To bestow property
upon a daughter was to enrich another family at the expense of the one
from whom the slave-wife was purchased, and her disinheritance was but
a logical result of her legal condition. If we admit the premises we
must admit the wisdom of her exclusion from succession.
It is curious to note the difference in woman’s position which
possession of property has ever made. This difference especially
noticeable during Feudalism in case of an heiress with fiefs, is no
less so at the present day. It is a mark of an unripe civilization that
the rights of property have ever been regarded before those of person.
Walker[66] over sixty years since, recognized the power of property
in ameliorating woman’s condition, then declaring that the first step
toward an acknowledgment of her equality, must be a recognition of her
rights of property; his broad knowledge of ancient law having taught
him the close connection of property rights and personal rights. During
many ages battle was done for possessions and the protection of what
a man owned. Even the war of the American Revolution was begun for
property rights rather than for those of person. The Stamp Act and the
tax on tea roused the Colonies to resistance. A woman first spoke the
words “inherent rights,” and by the time nationality was proclaimed
the colonists had learned far enough to say that “governments derive
their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consent is an
important consideration in all questions affecting humanity, and is
one in which woman is most deeply concerned. At close of the civil war
Frederick Douglass advised colored men to get property. He had not
failed to learn the connection between property and personal rights.
Since Mississippi, in 1839,[67] Pennsylvania and New York in 1848, and
Rhode Island about the same period, secured property rights to married
women, there has been a great and rapidly increasing change in woman’s
position, and as she constantly enters new industries, earning and
controlling money, we find her as constantly more free and respected.
When the English “Married Women’s Property Bill,” based upon that of
New York, became a law a few years since, the _London Times_, with the
perspicuity of our great thinker, Walker, said:
It probably portends indirect social effects much greater
than the disposition of property, and it may in the end
pulverize some ideas which have been at the basis of English
life. Measures which affect the family economy are apt to be
“epoch making”; and probably when the most talked of bills of
the session are clean forgotten this obscure measure may be
bearing fruit.
The exception of married women in the demand for political rights by
the women of England, owes its origin to the old monkish theory that
marriage is debasement, and celibate life in either man or woman a much
higher condition. After the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation,
during the civil war, John Stuart Mill declared that married women were
the only class of slaves remaining on earth. As long as a condition
of religious or political subjection continues for her, a belief in
the sanctity of womanhood cannot exist and crimes against her will
be lightly punished. The most debased men of England and the United
States, if arrested for cruelty to wives, agree in the indignant
questioning protest: “Is she not my own that I should punish her as I
please?”
Such has been the power of the priesthood over the consciences and
lives of men, that we find whatever is bad in the laws either directly
or indirectly traceable to their influence.[68] Our Anglo Saxon
forefathers were early amenable to religious authority and for a period
of many hundred years clerical influence was exceedingly powerful
over them.[69] The church is responsible for the severity with which
the simplest infraction of law was visited upon the most humble and
helpless classes, and the greater penalty awarded to those least
capable of resistance. It was for the free man of low estate, for the
slave, and for woman that the greatest atrocities were reserved. If
a free woman stole she was to be thrown down a precipice or drowned,
which Pike regards as the origin of dragging witches through a pond.
If the thief was a slave and stole from any but her own master, she
was condemned to be burnt alive, and her fellow slaves were compelled
to assist at the incineration.[70] None dared to speak a good word for
women in opposition to church teachings. All her instincts were held
as evil. As the law and the father robbed the daughter, so the law and
the church alike robbed the family. By ancient English law, as before
noted, every person who made a will was bound to remember his lord with
the best thing he possessed, and afterwards the church with the next
best thing, but as the church gained power it took supreme place in
the testament.[71] The peasant was looked upon as but slightly above
the cattle he cared for. A certain degree of sameness in material and
intellectual conditions everywhere existed. The masses over christendom
were alike under bondage of the thought and modes of action; social
life showed no marked change for many hundred years. Freedom was an
unknown word, or if by chance spoken, found itself under the ban of
the church and the state. Justice was unthought of; the only question
being, “has the church ordered it?” A complete system of espionage
existed under both church and state. As late as the time of Alfred,
in England, every nine men were under charge of a tenth. No man could
work outside of his father’s employment to which he was bound; at
nine o’clock curfew bell, all fires and lights were extinguished. A
mechanic could not find work outside of his own village; monasteries
and castles contained all there was of power and comfort. As late
as the reformation we find the condition of English society lax and
immoral. Henry the VIII was a fair type of the nation; the court, the
camp, the church were all in line moulding the sentiment of community.
Although Henry had declared the church to be an entire and perfect body
within itself, possessing authority to regulate and decide all things
without dependence upon any foreign power—meaning the pope,—he did not
fail to generally define the supremacy of the church as united with and
dependent upon the temporal government of the realm; the king, instead
of the pope, becoming its spiritual head. Many new and restrictive
canons were promulgated. Under Henry the prohibitory laws regarding
nearness of relationship in marriage exceeded those of the Catholic
Church. It is but a few decades since these prohibitions commencing
with “a man shall not marry his grandmother;” “a woman shall not marry
her grandfather;” and extending down to remote cousinship,—were to be
found printed upon the fly leaves of every New Testament.[72]
For a long period after the reformation, English women were not
permitted to read the Bible, a statute of the Eighth Henry prohibiting
“women and others of low degree,” from its use.[73] Apparently for the
purpose of preventing conversation among women regarding the tyranny
under which they were kept, a law was passed forbidding the residence
of more than one woman in a cottage, and this after the Protestant
religion had been confirmed as that of the realm. As late as Elizabeth,
31-2, it was held a “heinous offence” for a cottager to give a home to
his own widowed mother or homeless sister. The especial criminality of
thus “harboring” one’s female relatives lay in the fact of their being
“masterless.” As late as the XVI century the law still entered houses,
and magistrates bound out to servile labor all women between eleven and
forty years of age.[74] The degradation of women under the reformation
was still more gross than under catholicism. The worship of the Virgin
Mary, and the canonization of many women as saints in the Romish
Calendar, threw a certain halo about womankind that is impossible to
discover in the Protestant Church, or since the reformation.
The church of whatever name taught woman’s innate depravity was so
great that forcible restraint alone prevented her from plunging into
vice. While Christian women outside the Levant were not confined in
a harem under watch and ward, yet various methods of restraint have
been used in christian lands within the past few centuries. Among the
most noted of these, the “Chastity Belt,” three are yet known to be in
existence. One is preserved in the museum at Cluny, France, another
is in keeping of the Castle of Rosenburg, Copenhagen; the third was
exhibited in the United States, 1884, by Dr. Heidmann’s traveling
museum. According to tradition the one persevered at Cluny was in use
during the XVI Century, in reign of Francis I, who ascended the throne
January 1, 1515; the remaining two in Denmark under Christian IV in the
seventeenth century. At this period Denmark was greatly agitated by a
religious war, which however, did not include woman’s freedom in its
demands. These belts are hideous proofs of the low estimate in which
woman’s moral character was held, and equally striking evidence of
man’s freedom and immorality.
The disrespect shown by the clergy towards marriage as compared with
the celibate condition, has influenced thought in many singular
directions. England’s married women under the combined influence of
church and state deprecate the claim of suffrage for themselves,
although asking it for single women and widows.[75]
The bill referred to in the Memorial, 49 Vic., extended Parliamentary
franchise to single women alone.
Second Sec. For all purposes of and incidental to the voting
for members to serve in Parliament, women shall have the same
rights as men, and all enactments relating to, or concerned
in such election shall be construed accordingly. Provided
that nothing in this Act contained shall enable women under
coverture to be registered or to vote at such elections.
The word “coverture” expresses a married woman’s subordinate condition,
both civilly and religiously.[76] It means, under the power of the
husband; controlled by the husband; possessing neither personal nor
individual rights; a being not allowed to use her own judgment unless
such judgment is ratified by the husband. Under coverture, the wife can
make no contract without the husband’s consent, the law holding her
incompetent. A woman under coverture is an irresponsible being except
in case of crime. When married women refuse to seek the same freedom
for themselves they ask for single women, they practically endorse
the judgment of church and state in favor of celibacy. When married
women thus ignore their equality with single women, they practically
condemn that relation, practically affirm the superior purity of
a celibate condition.[77] The low estimate of women in England as
late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is shown in its
literature, especially that emanating from its great universities. The
betrayal of women formed the basis of story and song; not content with
portraying their own vices, these men did not hesitate to put a plea
against chastity in the mouths of mere children. Of such character is
“A Ballad” emanating from this source, but professing to have been
“composed by Miss Nelly Pentwenzle, a young lady of 15,” to be sung to
the tune of “Scraps of Pudding.”
A periodical entitled _The Old Woman’s Magazine_ printed in London,
without date, but from internal evidence shown to belong to the
latter part of the eighteenth century, forcibly protests against the
destruction of innocence, which was the chief amusement of the men of
this period. It asks:
Why should it be less a crime to deceive an inexperienced girl
whose youth renders it impossible that she should know the
world, than it would be to lead a blind man to the brink of a
precipice?
Thus the laws and customs of family and social life, the literature
of different periods, the habits of thought, the entire civilization
of christian centuries, has tended to the debasement of woman and the
consequent destruction of moral life. The world stands where it does
today upon all these great questions, biased by a non-recognition
through the ages of the sanctity of womanhood, and a disbelief in her
rights of person within the marriage relation, or without; taught, as
this lesson has been, by the church, and emphasized by the laws of the
state.