TO THE HON. THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEES OF THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES OF THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES:
The undersigned, VICTORIA C. WOODHULL, having most respectfully
memorialized Congress for the passage of such laws as in its wisdom
shall seem necessary and proper to carry into effect the rights vested
by the Constitution of the United States in the citizens to vote,
without regard to sex, begs leave to submit to your honorable body the
following in favor of her prayer in said Memorial which has been
referred to your Committee:
The public law of the world is founded upon the conceded fact that
sovereignty cannot be forfeited or renounced. The sovereign power of
this country is perpetual in the politically-organized people of the
United States, and can neither be relinquished nor abandoned by any
portion of them. The people in this Republic who confer sovereignty are
its citizens: in a monarchy the people are the subjects of sovereignty.
All citizens of a republic by rightful act or implication confer
sovereign power. All people of a monarchy are subjects who exist under
its supreme shield and enjoy its immunities.
The subject of a monarch takes municipal immunities from the sovereign
as a gracious favor; but the woman citizen of this country has the
inalienable “sovereign” right of self-government in _her own proper
person_. Those who look upon woman’s status by the dim light of the
common law, which unfolded itself under the feudal and military
institutions that establish right upon physical power, cannot find any
analogy in the status of the woman citizen of this country, _where the
broad sunshine of our Constitution has enfranchised all_.
As sovereignty cannot be forfeited, relinquished or abandoned, those
from whom it flows—the citizens—are equal in conferring the power, and
should be equal in the enjoyment of its benefits and in the exercise of
its rights and privileges.
One portion of citizens have no power to deprive another portion of
rights and privileges such as are possessed and exercised by themselves.
The male citizen has no more right to deprive the female citizen of the
free, public, political expression of opinion than the female citizen
has to deprive the male citizen thereof.
The sovereign will of the people is expressed in our written
Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. The Constitution
makes no distinction of sex. The Constitution defines a woman born or
naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, to be a citizen. It recognizes the right of citizens to vote.
It declares that the right of citizens of the United States to vote
shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on
account of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”
Women, white and black, belong to races; although to different races. A
race of people comprises all the people, male and female. The right to
vote cannot be denied on account of race. All people included in the
term race have the right to vote, unless otherwise prohibited.
Women of all races are white, black or some intermediate color. Color
comprises all people, of all races and both sexes. The right to vote
cannot be denied on account of color. All people included in the term
color have the right to vote unless otherwise prohibited.
With the right to vote sex has nothing to do. Race and color include all
people of both sexes. All people of both sexes have the right to vote,
unless prohibited by special limiting terms less comprehensive than race
or color. No such limiting terms exist in the Constitution.
Women, white and black, have from time immemorial groaned under what is
properly termed in the Constitution “previous condition of servitude.”
Women are the equals of men before the law, and are equal in all their
rights as citizens.
Women are debarred from voting in some parts of the United States,
although they are allowed to exercise that right elsewhere.
Women were formerly permitted to vote in places where they are now
debarred therefrom.
The Naturalization Laws of the United States expressly provide for the
naturalization of women.
But the right to vote has only lately been distinctly declared by the
Constitution to be inalienable, under three distinct conditions—in all
of which woman is distinctly embraced.
The citizen who is taxed should also have a voice in the subject matter
of taxation. “No taxation without representation” is a right which was
fundamentally established at the very birth of our country’s
independence; and by what ethics does any free government impose taxes
on women without giving them a voice upon the subject or a participation
in the public declaration as to how and by whom these taxes shall be
applied for common public use?
Women are free to own and to control property, separate and apart from
males, and they are held responsible in their own proper persons, in
every particular, as well as men, in and out of court.
Women have the same inalienable right to life, liberty and the _pursuit
of_ happiness that men have. Why have they not this right politically,
as well as men?
Women constitute a majority of the people of this country—they hold vast
portions of the nation’s wealth and pay a proportionate share of the
taxes. They are intrusted with the most holy duties and the most vital
responsibilities of society; they bear, rear and educate men; they train
and mould their characters; they inspire the noblest impulses in men;
they often hold the accumulated fortunes of a man’s life for the safety
of the family and as guardians of the infants, and yet they are debarred
from uttering any opinion, by public vote, as to the management by
public servants of these interests; they are the secret counsellors, the
best advisers, the most devoted aids in the most trying periods of men’s
lives, and yet men shrink from trusting them in the common questions of
ordinary politics. Men trust women in the market, in the shop, on the
highway and the railroad, and in all other public places and assemblies,
but when they propose to carry a slip of paper with a name upon it to
the polls, they fear them. Nevertheless, as citizens women have the
right to vote; they are part and parcel of that great element in which
the sovereign power of the land had birth: and it is by usurpation only
that men debar them from their right to vote. The American nation, in
its march onward and upward, cannot publicly choke the intellectual and
political activity of half its citizens by narrow statutes. The will of
the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free
expression of that will by the public vote of all citizens, without
distinctions of race, color, occupation or sex, is the only means by
which that will can be ascertained. As the world has advanced in
civilization and culture; as mind has risen in its dominion over matter;
as the principle of justice and moral right has gained sway, and merely
physically organized power has yielded thereto; as the might of right
has supplanted the right of might, so have the rights of women become
more fully recognized, and that recognition is the result of the
development of the minds of men, which through the ages she has
polished, and thereby heightened the lustre of civilization.
It was reserved for our great country to recognize by constitutional
enactment that political equality of all citizens which religion,
affection, and common sense should have long since accorded; it was
reserved for America to sweep away the mist of prejudice and ignorance,
and that chivalric condescension of a darker age, for in the language of
Holy Writ, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand, let us therefore
cast off the work of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let
us walk honestly as in the day.”
It may be argued against the proposition that there still remains upon
the statute books of some States the word “male” to an exclusion, but as
the Constitution in its paramount character can only be read by the
light of the established principle, _ita lex Scripta est_; and as the
subject of sex is not mentioned and the Constitution is not limited
either in terms or by necessary implication in the general rights of
citizens to vote, this right cannot be limited on account of anything in
the spirit of inferior or previous enactments upon a subject which is
not mentioned in the supreme law. A different construction would destroy
a vested right in a portion of the citizens, and this no legislature has
a right to do without compensation, and nothing can compensate a citizen
for the loss of his or her suffrage—its value is equal to the value of
life. Neither can it be presumed that women are to be kept from the
polls as a mere police regulation: it is to be hoped, at least, that
police regulations in their case need not be very active. The effect of
the amendments to the Constitution must be to annul the power over this
subject in the States whether past, present or future, which is contrary
to the amendments. The amendments would even arrest the action of the
Supreme Court in cases pending before it prior to their adoption, and
operate as an absolute prohibition to the exercise of any other
jurisdiction than merely to dismiss the suit.