Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Address to the New York Legislature

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Gentlemen, in republican America, in the 19th century, we, the daughters of the revolutionary heroes of ’76, demand at your hands the redress of our grievances—a revision of your state constitution—a new code of laws. Permit us then … to call your attention to the legal disabilities under which we labor.

1st. Look at the position of woman as woman. It is not enough for us that by your laws we are permitted to live and breathe, to claim the necessaries of life from our legal protectors … we demand the full recognition of all our rights as citizens of the Empire State. We are … native, free-born citizens; property-holders, tax-payers; yet are we denied the exercise of our right to the elective franchise. We support ourselves, and, in part, your schools, colleges, churches, your poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the navy, the whole machinery of government, and yet we have no voice in your councils. We have every qualification required by the constitution, necessary to the legal voter, but the one of sex. We are moral, virtuous and intelligent, and in all respects quite equal to the proud white man himself, and yet by your laws we are classed with idiots, lunatics and negroes;… in fact, our legal position is lower than that of either; for the negro can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of $250; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool; but we, who have guided great movements of charity, established missions, edited journals, published works on history, economy and statistics; who have governed nations, led armies, filled the professor’s chair, taught philosophy and mathematics to the savans of our age, discovered planets, piloted ships across the sea, are denied the most sacred rights of citizens, because … we came not into this republic crowned with the dignity of manhood! Woman is theoretically absolved from all allegiance to the laws of the state.…

Now, gentlemen, we would fain know by what authority you have disfranchised one-half the people of this state?… Can it be that here, where are acknowledged no royal blood, that you, who have declared that all men were created equal—that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, would willingly build up an aristocracy that places the ignorant and vulgar above the educated and refined— … an aristocracy that would raise sons above the mothers that bore them?…

We demand, in criminal cases, that most sacred of all rights, trial by a jury of our own peers. The … right of trial by a jury of one’s own peers is a great, progressive step of advanced civilization. No rank of men have ever been satisfied with being tried by jurors higher or lower in the civil or political scale than themselves. … The nobleman cannot make just laws for the peasant; the slaveholder for the slave; neither can man make and execute just laws for woman, because in each case, the one in power fails to apply the immutable principles of right to any grade but his own. Shall an erring woman be dragged before a bar of grim-visaged judges, lawyers and jurors, there to be grossly questioned in public on subjects which women scarce breathe in secret to one another?… At this moment among the hundreds of women who are shut up in prisons in this state, not one has enjoyed that most sacred of all rights—that right which you would die to defend for yourselves—trial by a jury of one’s peers.

2d. Look at the position of woman as wife. Your laws relating to marriage … are in open violation of our enlightened ideas of justice … If you take the highest view of marriage, as a Divine relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only recognize it. Man can neither bind nor loose its ties, for that prerogative belongs to God alone. … But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws which control all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human, half-divine institution, which you may build up but cannot regulate.…

So long as … the parties in all mere civil contracts retain their identity and all the power and independence they had before contracting, with the full right to dissolve all partnerships and contracts for any reason, … upon what principle of civil jurisprudence do you permit the boy of fourteen and the girl of twelve, … to make a contract more momentous in importance than any other, and then hold them to it, … the whole of their natural lives, in spite of disappointment, deception and misery? … The signing of this contract is instant civil death to one of the parties. … The wife who inherits no property holds about the same legal position that does the slave on the southern plantation. She can own nothing, sell nothing. She has no right even to the wages she earns; her person, her time, her services are the property of another.…

There is nothing that an unruly wife might do against which the husband has not sufficient protection in the law. But not so with the wife. If she have a worthless husband, a confirmed drunkard, a villain or a vagrant, he has still all the rights of a man, a husband and a father.…

3d. Look at the position of woman as widow. … Behold the magnanimity of the law in allowing the widow to retain a life interest in one-third the landed estate, and one-half the personal property of her husband, and taking the lion’s share to itself! Had she died first, the house and land would all have been the husband’s.…

4th. Look at the position of woman as mother. … Behold how cruel and ruthless are your laws touching this most sacred relation.

Nature has clearly made the mother the guardian of the child; but man, in his inordinate love of power, does continually set nature and nature’s laws at open defiance. The father may apprentice his child, bind him out to a trade or labor, without the mother’s consent—yea, in direct opposition to her most earnest entreaties.…

He may apprentice his son to a gamester or rum-seller, and thus cancel his debts of honor. By the abuse of this absolute power, he may bind his daughter to the owner of a brothel, and, by the degradation of his child, supply his daily wants. … Moreover, the father, about to die, may bind out all his children wherever and to whomsoever he may see fit, and thus, in fact, will away the guardianship of all his children from the mother.…

Thus, by your laws, the child is the absolute property of the father, wholly at his disposal in life or at death.

In case of separation, the law gives the children to the father; no matter what his character or condition. At this very time we can point you to noble, virtuous, well educated mothers in this state, who have abandoned their husbands for their profligacy and confirmed drunkenness. All these have been robbed of their children, who are in the custody of the husband, … whilst the mothers are permitted to see them but at stated intervals.…

By your laws, all these abominable resorts are permitted. … But when woman’s moral power shall speak through the ballot-box, then shall her influence be seen and felt.…

Many have manifested a laudable curiosity to know what the wives and daughters could complain of in republican America, where their sires and sons have so bravely fought for freedom and gloriously secured their independence, trampling all tyranny, bigotry and caste in the dust, and declaring to a waiting world the divine truth that all men are created equal. … Here, gentlemen, is our difficulty: When we plead our cause before the law makers … of the republic, they cannot take in the idea that men and women are alike; and so long as the mass rest in this delusion, the public mind will not be so much startled by the revelation made of the injustice and degradation of woman’s position as by the fact that she should at length wake up to a sense of it.…

But if, gentlemen, you take the ground that the sexes are alike, … then why all these special laws for woman? Would not one code answer for all of like needs and wants?… We ask no better laws than those you have made for yourselves. We need no other protection than that which yourself present law secure to you.…

You may say that the mass of the women of this state do not make the demand; it comes from a few sour, disappointed old maids and childless women. You are mistaken; the mass speak through us. … Do you candidly think these wives do not wish to control the wages they earn—to own the land they buy—the houses they build? To have at their disposal their own children, without being subject to the constant interference and tyranny of an idle, worthless profligate?…

For all these, then, we speak. If to this long list you add all the laboring women, who are loudly demanding remuneration for their unending toil—those women who teach in our seminaries, academies and common schools for a miserable pittance; the widows, who are taxed without mercy; the unfortunate ones in our work houses, poor houses and prisons; who are they that we do not now represent? But a small class of fashionable butterflies, who, through the short summer days, seek the sunshine and the flowers; but the cool breezes of autumn and the hoary frosts of winter will soon chase all these away; then, they too will need and seek protection, and through other lips demand, in their turn, justice and equity at your hands.