mendment I offer is merely a prayer that
you will remove from women a disability, and secure to them the
same freedom of choice that we enjoy. If the instincts of sex, of
maternity, of domesticity, are not persuasive enough to keep them
in the truest sense women, it is the most serious defect yet
discovered in the divine order of nature. When, therefore, the
Committee declare that voting is at war with the distribution of
functions between the sexes, what do they mean? Are not women as
much interested in good government as men? There is fraud in the
Legislature; there is corruption in the courts; there are
hospitals, and tenement-houses, and prisons; there are
gambling-houses, and billiard-rooms, and brothels; there are
grog-shops at every corner, and I know not what enormous
proportion of crime in the State proceeds from them; there are
40,000 drunkards in the State, and their hundreds of thousands
of children--all these things are subjects of legislation, and
under the exclusive legislation of men the crime associated with
all these things becomes vast and complicated. Have the wives,
and mothers, and sisters of New York less vital interest in them,
less practical knowledge of them and their proper treatment, than
the husbands and fathers? No man is so insane as to pretend it.
Is there then any natural incapacity in women to understand
politics? It is not asserted. Are they lacking in the necessary
intelligence? But the moment that you erect a standard of
intelligence which is sufficient to exclude women as a sex, that
moment most of the male sex would be disfranchised. Is it that
they ought not to go to public political meetings? But we
earnestly invite them. Or that they should not go to the polls?
Some polls, I allow, in the larger cities, are dirty and
dangerous places; and those it is the duty of the police to
reform. But no decent man wishes to vote in a grog-shop, nor to
have his head broken while he is doing it, while the mere act of
dropping a ballot in a box is about the simplest, shortest, and
cleanest that can be done. Last winter Senator Frelinghuysen,
repeating, I am sure thoughtlessly, the common rhetoric of the
question, spoke of the high and holy mission of women. But if
people, with a high and holy mission, may innocently si