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Friends and fellow
citizens, I stand before you tonight under
indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at
the last presidential election, without having a
lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this
evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not
only committed no crime but, instead, simply
exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed to me
and all United States citizens by the National
Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny.
The preamble of the
federal Constitution says: "We, the people of
the United States, in order to form a more perfect union establish
justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for
the common defence, promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our
posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America."
It was we, the
people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we,
the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who
formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the
blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the
half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but
to the whole people men as well as men. And it is a
downright mockery to talk to women of their
enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are
denied the use of the only means of securing them
provided by this democratic –republican
government-the ballot.
For any state to make
sex a qualification that must ever result in the
disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is
to pass a bill of attainder or an ex post facto law,
and is therefore a violation of the supreme law the
land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever
withheld from women and their female posterity. To
them this government has no just powers derived from
the consent of the governed. To them this government
is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an
odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful
aristocracy ever established on the face of the
globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern
the poor.
An oligarchy of
learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or
even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the
African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of
sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons,
the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife
and daughters, of every household-which ordains all
men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries
dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home
of the nation.
Webster, Worcester,
and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in
the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.
The only question
left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I
hardly believe any of our opponents will have the
hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then,
women are citizens; and no state has a right to make
any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall
abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every
discrimination against women in the constitutions
and laws of the several states is today null and
void, precisely as is every one against Negroes.
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