Elizabeth Cady Stanton Speeches & Writings Article: "The Man Marriage" The Revolution, April 8, 1869 211 [Two articles in the Revolution. (The Revolution was founded in 1868.] 212 The Revolution (April 8, 1869.) 217 The Man Marriage In reply to many letters asking if The Revolution is opposed to marriage, I desire to state my objections as briefly as possible to our present system, which I call the "man marriage," because to the creeds and codes and customs which govern the present institution woman has never given her consent. 1st. I object to the teachings of the church on this question. Its interpretation of the Bible, making man the head of woman, and its forms of marriage, by which she is given away as an article of merchandize, and made to vow obedience as a slave to a master, are all alike degrading to my sex. When our pulpits declare that the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the church, they simply reflect the opinions of a dark and barbarous age, for every one knows that morally and spiritually woman is superior to man, and in purity and principle more perfectly represents Christ in his life of sacrifice, while man, with his metaphysics and materialism, is more like the church in its bloody struggles from authority to individualism. Take the multitudes of drunkards, licentious men, and criminals, married to sober, virtuous, refined women, and consider in what single point of view their relation to their wives can correspond to that of Christ and the church. The self-sacrificing mother in such households, who, by constant toil, feeds and clothes her children, and brings them up in habits of industry, who, in rain and sleet and snow, follows her wretched husband to his haunts of vice, at the midnight hour, and, with a divine love and patience, guides his unsteady feet to their far off home, surely, she is the Christ that smooths the rough road and illumines life's dark journey all through. There is no one heresy that has wrought such evil on the earth as that of making the mother of the race subservient to any power this side the throne of God, and when puny man, with narrow views, so interprets the Bible as to make woman his lawful slave, he not only degrades her but the law of God also. Hitherto we have had the "white male" interpretation of the Bible, making it wise and just and good to enslave the black man to his avarice, and the woman to his lust. The late war gave a new interpretation to the Bible on slavery, and we shall hear no more of sending back Onesimus. But the negro is not the only class set free by the discussions of the last century. Women have been listening, thinking, studying Philosophy, Hebrew, Greek, first principles, and when they translate the Bible for themselves we shall have a new evangel of womanhood, wifehood and motherhood. When woman understands the science of life, she will see the wisdom of the command, "Be ye not unequally yoked," and of the solemn warning given mid the thunders of Mount Sinai, "The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children." If the Bible teaches one lesson, it is a pure and holy marriage, in which weakness and vice, rum, tobacco, disease and lust can have no part whatsoever. But we see dawnings of a better day in the church. Many of its most profound thinkers are giving to the inspired pages a higher and holier interpretation of woman's mission. The Methodist church, among the first in every step of progress, has already dropped the word "obey" from its marriage service, and the orthodox clergy, more generally than those called liberal, are now taking part, with pen and tongue, in the grand discussion for the enfranchisement of woman and everywhere crowding the platform in our conventions. Henry Ward Beecher who, since the war, has steadily demanded the recognition of woman in the reconstruction, begun long ago to treat her as an equal in the marriage service. In Plymouth church women are deaconesses, have a voice in its business matters, speak, and pray in the weekly meetings. 2d. The position of the state on this question is quite as objectionable as that of the church. Whoever reads our laws on Marriage and Divorce will see that the wife is fully as degraded in our codes as in our creeds. We published an abstract of these laws in THE REVOLUTION a few months since, which no woman of any pride or self-respect could read without a feeling of disgust and indignation. There is not a man in this nation, who, knowing what the laws are, but would repudiate for himself a relation that would so wholly merge his individual existence in that of another human being. Suppose the law should say, "The husband and wife are one, and that one the wife." How many men would go to the hymenial altar and vow obedience to that idea? Here and there one might do so for a fortune, but most men would choose freedom and equality to gilded slavery. No sensible man would put his head into a noose that stripped him of personal and property rights, of children, wages, name, moral responsibility and the right of locomotion. The laws for married women in some states are exactly parallel with those of the slave code on the southern plantations. Husbands, as well as slaveholders, have availed themselves of this absolute power of the old common law. To-day hundreds of wives in their right mind are shut up in insane asylums, or dragging out miserable, dependent lives in those living sepulchres called home, where the light of love has all gone out. What should we think of Frederick Douglass, a voter, a property holder, a free man, in the State of New York, if, before the war, he had gone down to Georgia to live where a black man had no rights that any one was bound to respect, where a black man could read, talk politics, make a contract, sue in his own name, marry a wife, or protect his own children? We should say he was either a fool, or ignorant of the laws of Georgia. What shall we say of a widow who, like Douglass, having tried the land of slavery, who has the absolute right to-day to her own property, person, wages, children, who can make contracts, sue and be sued, keep a bank account in her own name, go whither she listeth, when she voluntarily again puts herself under the marriage laws of Blackstone, Story and Kent? Why we say of her just what we would say of Douglass in the case supposed--she is either a fool, or ignorant of the laws under which she binds herself. Woman, as woman, asks nothing to-day but the elective franchise; it is only as wife that 218 The Revolution. these infamous laws affect her. When a wife has a civil and political existence, we may talk of a dignified legal marriage relation, but no one, fresh from the reading of even our revised statutes of to-day, can feel a very profound respect for an institution in which a woman is a "femme covert, "sub potestate viri." 3d. The social customs that are the outgrowths of these false creeds and codes are alike degrading to woman, demoralizing to the race, and dangerous to the state. Marriage, today, is in no way viewed as an equal partnership, intended for the equal advantage and happiness of both parties. Nearly every man feels that his wife is his property, whose first duty under all circumstances, is to gratify his passions, without the least reference to her own health and happiness, or the welfare of their offspring; and so enfeebled is woman's judgment and moral sense from long abuse, that she believes so too, and quotes from the Bible to prove her own degradation. A physical union which should be the consummation merely of a spiritual or intellectual sympathy, respect and friendship, in far too many cases constitutes all there is of marriage, and woman consents to hand down, with no feelings of guilt or sin, the odious moral and physical deformities and diseases of any man whom accident or necessity may have induced her to marry. The evils that flow from the immorality of such a position--from these feeble, indifferent, joyless, discordant unions--we see on all sides in disease, vice, crime; in the idiot, the lunatic, the blind, the deaf, the dumb; in the melancholy dissatisfaction of the mass of the people who make up the world. Alas! how few healthy, happy parents and children we meet to-day, under our present marriage system! Is our social state so perfect that we should fear any change, any new light, discussion and improvement? But how, say you, can the relations of the sexes be improved? Exalt woman, make her the sovereign and not the slave of the fireside. Blot out all your infamous creeds and codes that degrade her in her own eyes, as well as in the estimation of the man by her side. Help her to be an independent, virtuous, self-supporting being, by giving her a free pass in the world of work and thought wherever she has the power to stand. Then she will no longer degrade marriage, by accepting it as a pecuniary necessity, but, in freedom, will choose the father of her children more widely than she does to-day. When she understands the science of life, the laws of reproduction, that like begets like, the lower orders of mankind will be at a discount. When women demand health, virtue, and brains in men instead of a long purse, the supply will equal the demand. "You can't make a soldier," said Napoleon, "out of a sick man." Neither can you make happy marriages out of sick men and women. We cannot have unions, " says Emerson, "until we first have units." The primal conditions of true marriage are moral and physical health. Equality, self-respect, independence, are as necessary to the health of the mind as freedom of locomotion is to the body. Until men and women view each other as equals, and are wise enough to apply the same laws of science to themselves that have already so greatly improved the lower animals, we shall have infanticide, prostitution, divorce, celibacy, and marriage will be, in most cases, a long, hard struggle to make the best of a bad bargain. E. C. S. 213 WHAT POSSIBLE VALUE WOULD SUFFRAGE BE TO WOMAN? We are often asked the question, "On what do you base your assertion that the ballot can achieve so much for woman. It has not," say they, "done much for man; in this country all white men vote, yet the masses are wretchedly fed, housed, clothed and poorly paid for their labor. Ignorant alike of social and political economy, their voting is a mere form; practically they have no more to do with the government than the masses in the old world who have no representation whatever." These wholesale philosophers, and we meet them every day, are incapable of any patient process of analytical reasoning. If the moment a man is endowed with the Suffrage he does not spring up into knowledge, virtue, wealth and position, then the right amounts to nothing. If a generation of ignorant, degraded men, whose noses have been held to the grind-stone all their days, do not vote at once with the wisdom of statesmen, then Universal Suffrage is a failure, and the despot and the dagger the true government. The careful reader of history will see that with every new extension of rights a new step in civilization has been taken, and that uniformly those nations have been most prosperous where the greatest number of people have been recognized in the government. Contrast China with Russia, England with the United States. Where the few govern, the legislation is for the advantage of the few. Where the many govern the legislation will gradually become more and more for the advantage of the many, as fast as the many know enough to demand laws for their own benefit. This knowledge comes from an education in politics; and a ballot in a man's hand and the responsibility of using it, is the first step in this education. Even if a man sells his ballot, there is power in possessing something that a politician must have or perish. The Southern states must have acquired a new dignity in the scale of being when Judge Kelley and Senator Wilson travelled all through the south to preach to them on political questions. The thinking men of England, as they philosophize on the abuses of their government, see plainly that the only way to abolish an order of nobility, a law of primogeniture and an established church, is to give the masses a right by their votes to pitch this triple power into the channel; for all the bulwarks of aristocracy will, one by one, be swept away with the education and enfranchisement of the people. Gladstone, John Bright and John Stuart Mill see clearly that the privileges of the few can be extended to the many only by the legislation of the many. All the beneficial results of the broad principles they are advocating to-day, may not be fully realized in a generation, but, to the philosophical mind, they are as true now as if already achieved. The greatest minds in the country too, have made most exhaustive arguments to prove the power of the ballot and recognized the equality of all citizens, in our Declaration of Rights, in extending suffrage to all white men, and in the proposition to farther extend it to all black men. The great republican party (which are many of the ablest men in the nation) declare that emancipation to the black man is a mockery, without the Suffrage. When the thinking minds on both continents are agreed as to the power of the ballot in the hand of every man it is surprising to hear educated Americans ask, "What possible value would Suffrage be to woman?" When, in the British Parliament, the suffrage was extended to a million new voters, even Lord Darby and Disraeli, who were opposed to the measure, said at once, now, if this class are to vote, we must establish schools for their education, showing the increased importance of every man who has a voice in the government, and the new interest of the rulers in his education. Where all vote all must be educated; our public school system is the result of this principle in our government. When women vote, Harvard, Yale and Princeton will throw wide open their doors. Women are not anomalous beings outside all law, that one need make any special arguments to prove that what elevates and dignifies man will educate and dignify woman also. When she exercises her right of Suffrage, she will study the science of government, gain new importance in the eyes of politicians, and have a free pass in the world of work. If the masses knew their power, they could turn the whole legislation of this country to their own advantage and drive poverty, rags and ignorance into the Pacific Ocean. If they would learn wisdom [?] National Labor Conventions and not sell their votes to political tricksters, a system of [?], Trade and Commerce, and Co-operation could soon be established that would [secure] the rights of Labor and put an end to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. Labor holds the ballot now, let it learn how to use it. Educated women know how to use it now, let them have it. E. C. S. Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.