Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/273

Rh States with greater jealousy than their absolute control over marriage and the relation between the sexes.

Another power of the States, deemed by the people when they assented to the Constitution of the United States most essential to the public welfare, was the right of each State to determine the qualifications of electors. Wherever the federal constitution speaks of elections for a federal office, it adopts the qualifications for electors prescribed by the State in which the election is to be held.

Nor has this fundamental rule been departed from in the fifteenth amendment. That impairs it only to the extent that race, color, or previous condition of servitude shall not be made a ground of exclusion from the right of suffrage. In all else that pertains to the qualifications of electors the absolute will of the State prevails. This amendment was inserted from considerations which pertain to no other part of the question of suffrage. The negro race had been recently emancipated; it was supposed that the antagonism between them and their old masters and the prejudice of race would be such as to obstruct the equal enjoyment of the rights of freedom conferred by the national forces, and would prevent the white race of the South from admitting the negro race, however deserving it might be, to equal political privileges. And, moreover, it was deemed by the North a point of honor that, having conferred freedom on the negro, he should be provided with the right of suffrage.

None of these considerations applies in the present case. It is not pretended that any such antagonism or prejudice exists between the sexes. It is not pretended that women have been redeemed from an intolerable slavery by the power of the government. It is not pretended that the sex in whose hands is the political power of the States is unwilling, from any cause, to do full justice to the other; for it is conceded that if the proposed amendment should be adopted, its incorporation into the constitution must result from the voluntary action of that sex in which is vested this political power. No good reason has been given why the congress of the United States should force or even hasten the States into such action, and no such reason can be given without a reversal of the theories on which our free institutions are based.

The history given by the majority, of the legislation of the several States in relation to the rights of persons and property of married women showing as it does a steady advance in the abolition of their common-law disabilities, conclusively demonstrates that this question may be safely left for solution where it now is and has always hitherto belonged. The public mind is now being agitated in many of the States as to the rights of women, not only as to suffrage, but as to their engaging in the various employments from which they have hitherto been excluded. This exclusion from certain employments has not been the result of municipal but of social laws—the strongest of all human regulations. As these social laws have been modified, so the sphere of woman's activities and usefulness has been enlarged. These social laws are in the main the groundwork of the exclusion of women from the right of suffrage. In the establishment of these laws, as in their modification, women them