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FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS: ELIZABETH CADY
STANTON & SUSAN B. ANTHONY
The Destructive Male
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
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Stanton's The Destructive Male speech.
It follows the full text transcript of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Destructive Male
speech, delivered at Washington D.C. - 1868.
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I urge a sixteenth
amendment, because 'manhood suffrage,' or a
man's government, is civil, religious, and
social disorganization. |
The male element
is a destructive force, stern, selfish,
aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest,
acquisition, breeding in the material and moral
world alike discord, disorder, disease, and
death. See what a record of blood and cruelty
the pages of history reveal! Through what
slavery, slaughter, and sacrifice, through what
inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and
persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds, the
soul of humanity has struggled for the
centuries, while mercy has veiled her face and
all hearts have been dead alike to love and
hope!
The male element
has held high carnival thus far; it has fairly
run riot from the beginning, overpowering the
feminine element everywhere, crushing out all
the diviner qualities in human nature, until we
know but little of true manhood and womanhood,
of the latter comparatively nothing, for it has
scarce been recognized as a power until within
the last century. Society is but the reflection
of man himself, untempered by woman's thought;
the hard iron rule we feel alike in the church,
the state, and the home. No one need wonder at
the disorganization, at the fragmentary
condition of everything, when we remember that
man, who represents but half a complete being,
with but half an idea on every subject, has
undertaken the absolute control of all sublunary
matters.
People object to
the demands of those whom they choose to call
the strong-minded, because they say 'the right
of suffrage will make the women masculine.' That
is just the difficulty in which we are involved
today. Though disfranchised, we have few women
in the best sense; we have simply so many
reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the
masculine gender. The strong, natural
characteristics of womanhood are repressed and
ignored in dependence, for so long as man feeds
woman she will try to please the giver and adapt
herself to his condition. To keep a foothold in
society, woman must be as near like man as
possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues,
motives, prejudices, and vices. She must respect
his statutes, though they strip her of every
inalienable right, and conflict with that higher
law written by the finger of God on her own
soul.
She must look at
everything from its dollar-and-cent point of
view, or she is a mere romancer. She must accept
things as they are and make the best of them. To
mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty
of the poor, their hardships in jails, prisons,
asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and
brutality in every form, all this would be mere
sentimentalizing. To protest against the
intrigue, bribery, and corruption of public
life, to desire that her sons might follow some
business that did not involve lying, cheating,
and a hard, grinding selfishness, would be
arrant nonsense.
In this way man
has been molding woman to his ideas by direct
and positive influences, while she, if not a
negation, has used indirect means to control
him, and in most cases developed the very
characteristics both in him and herself that
needed repression. And now man himself stands
appalled at the results of his own excesses, and
mourns in bitterness that falsehood,
selfishness, and violence are the law of life.
The need of this hour is not territory, gold
mines, railroads, or specie payments but a new
evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue,
morality, true religion, to lift man up into the
higher realms of thought and action.
We ask woman's
enfranchisement, as the first step toward the
recognition of that essential element in
government that can only secure the health,
strength, and prosperity of the nation. Whatever
is done to lift woman to her true position will
help to usher in a new day of peace and
perfection for the race.
In speaking of the
masculine element, I do not wish to be
understood to say that all men are hard,
selfish, and brutal, for many of the most
beautiful spirits the world has known have been
clothed with manhood; but I refer to those
characteristics, though often marked in woman,
that distinguish what is called the stronger
sex. For example, the love of acquisition and
conquest, the very pioneers of civilization,
when expended on the earth, the sea, the
elements, the riches and forces of nature, are
powers of destruction when used to subjugate one
man to another or to sacrifice nations to
ambition.
Here that great
conservator of woman's love, if permitted to
assert itself, as it naturally would in freedom
against oppression, violence, and war, would
hold all these destructive forces in check, for
woman knows the cost of life better than man
does, and not with her consent would one drop of
blood ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain.
With violence and
disturbance in the natural world, we see a
constant effort to maintain an equilibrium of
forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever
trying to keep land and sea, mountain and
valley, each in its place, to hush the angry
winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat
and cold, of rain and drought, that peace,
harmony, and beauty may reign supreme. There is
a striking analogy between matter and mind, and
the present disorganization of society warns us
that in the dethronement of woman we have let
loose the elements of violence and ruin that she
only has the power to curb. If the civilization
of the age calls for an extension of the
suffrage, surely a government of the most
virtuous educated men and women would better
represent the whole and protect the interests of
all than could the representation of either sex
alone.
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