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Cassius M. Clay's
Views, from The Illustrated Kentuckian Having
shown that the family is the order of the Benevolent Creator of the
Universe, that the man and woman in marriage are one in the largest
metaphorical sense--and that the man is leader, provider and
protector--we return to the proposed issue--shall woman suffrage, equal
political rights, be established in our civilization?
Will human happiness be advanced by this radical change?
I object:
1. Because it
destroys the family, and man's leadership, provision and defense.
2. Because it
overthrows the Christian Religion.
3. Because it leads
to atheism and paganism.
4. Because its trend
id to communism of the sexes. I
think the foregoing numbers of Icarus prove it the ruin of the family.
That it leads to paganism is plain, from the fact that the
woman-suffragists, so far as I am informed, do not deny it.
"Pagan Bob" is the cherished pet name of his followers;
and a late English Woman's Suffrage Journal in London boldly takes the
name of the "Pagan Review."
And in the history of the world, when the one Omnipotent God is
ignored, a multitude of idols spring up, as wide as the field of
human-desires, passions and appetites.
So
we pass to the third issue, to which the second is intimately allied.
That it overthrows the Christian religion, which as an ethical
system, is based upon the laws of Nature and of God, is too well known
to be controverted. The
church, both Catholic and Protestant, being from necessity,
conservative, opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States.
But the best hearts and heads, male and female, went with the law
of God and Nature, with justice and liberty.
As a general thing, the Friends, the purest men and women in the
world, were ardently in favor of the liberty of the African.
Those outside of the Society of the Christian Friends, who were
leaders in the liberation movement, were also chaste women, and had all
the virtues of our Christian civilization.
But when the theologians dragged the banners of Jesus in the mud
and attempted, falsely, to claim slavery as of his teaching, these women
were compelled by reason and the eternal laws of justice and
civilization, to repudiate the church.
Some went into atheism and some into rational deism.
Such intellectual women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone,
Susan B. Anthony and others, when the slave was made free forever,
having donned the pantaloons and being politically in the saddle, were
joined by ascetic old maids, by the unhappy wives of weak husbands, and
by the unbridled hot bloods of passion; all took the field astride,
booted and spurred, in demand for "Woman's Suffrage."...
To
ignore all these restraints is to destroy the girl or boy.
And it is logical to assume that if the authority of the man is
lost in politics, it is lost everywhere!
It is well known that political partyism and sympathy are almost
the strongest of humanities. For
party, like money, commands most other possibilities--ambition, social
rank, luxuries, and necessaries, and in these times--money which
covers so many human wants and even immunity from crime.
If the passions can even now scarcely allow the safety of
chastity, how can woman fail to go down when are added all the other
seductions of the suffrage! ...
I
put, however, the denial of suffrage to women upon the more definite
ground that, though holding property taxed by the state, they should not
have equal rights in the suffrage--the government of the state--because
they cannot perform the duties of the citizens and voters--the man, who
own the state. In the Greek
republics, no orator could be heard on war and peace unless he was ready
to lead the armies to the battle field. As women could not do that, it was held to be just that they
could neither advise nor be the generals of the army.
One
of the most distinguished families of my time was Revedy Johnson's, of
Baltimore, Maryland. He was
lawyer, statesman and diplomatist.
Mrs. Johnson was one of the most lovely women I ever saw; and, if
I remember right she had thirteen children, some of them daughters, and
she was the most beautiful woman of the family.
Now, suppose she reached maturity and married at twenty, and was
forty years old when I saw her. In
these twenty years, she had blessed the world with thirteen children,
revelations and co-creaters from the "Great Spirit."
That would have been one child for eighteen months during her
whole best years of life! She
had not an hour to give the state as general, like the Greek--not an
hour for law, statesmanship or diplomacy!
What right had she then to an equal vote with her husband, in the
state, which by nature, she was utterly incapable of serving in any
other capacity than as mother of the race!
That is woman's greatness. So
Napoleon said to Mde. de Stael--"She is the greatest woman who has
borne the most children to the state."
This
cutting reply of Napoleon was a censure upon those who attempted to sink
the woman into the sphere of man and thus degrade her.
All the culture of man should be laid open to woman, in all the
lines laid down on the ground they claim--but nothing allowed which
interferes with her normal duties, where God has made her our mother.
And,
though Mde. de Stael was an accomplished woman, common sense declares
that she was no more fit to mount Napoleon's war-horse, booted and
spurred, to break the revolution, than was he to don petticoats and play
the Eve of the human race in the economy of the Cosmos!
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