(1873)
Born in 1820, died in 1906; in early life a social reformer and advocate of the
suffrage and other civil rights for women, with which she remained through life
closely identified.
FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS:—I stand 1 before you to-night 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, in sure domestic tranquility, provide
for the common defense, 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
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 of 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
The only question left to be settled now
is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the
hard i hood 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 to-day null and
avoid, precisely as in every one against Negroes.
Note 1. Delivered in 1873 after she had
been arrested, put on trial, and fined one hundred dollars for voting at the
presidential election in 1872. She refused to pay the fine and never did pay it.
from "The World's Great
Orations" ed. by William Jennings Bryan, 1906, published in full by
bartelsby.com