Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/1076

 fact that all legal papers are made out with this pronoun, which presents no difficulty in their application to women.

Henry B. Payne of Ohio said that he was not in favor of woman suffrage, and that no woman in England ever had been permitted to exercise the elective franchise. (Women then had been voting in England for twenty-one years, the same length of time as in Wyoming.) He asked, however, if these little technical objections would not be more than overcome by the moral influence that a woman Representative might exert in the committee rooms and on the floor of the House.

Mr. Morgan at once launched forth into a panegyric on the moral influence of woman which certainly demonstrated that if sentimentalism were a bar to voting, as Senators Vest and Reagan had insisted it should be, the senator from Alabama would have to be disfranchised. Part of it ran as follows:

It is not the moral influence of woman upon the ballot that I am objecting to, and it is not to get rid of that or to silence or destroy such influence that I oppose it, but it is the immoral influence of the ballot upon woman that I deprecate and would avoid. I do not want to see her drawn into contact with the rude things of this world, where the delicacy of her senses and sensibilities would be constantly wounded by the attrition with bad and desperate and foul politicians and men. Such is not her function and is not her office; and if we degrade her from the high station that God has placed her in to put her at the ballot-box, at political or other elections, we unman ourselves and refuse to do the duties that God has assigned to us.

I can say for myself and for those who are dearest to me of all the objects in this life, that I would leave a country where it was necessary that my wife and daughters should go to the polls to protect my liberties. I would just as soon see them shoulder their guns and go like Amazons into the field and fight beneath the flag for my liberties, as to see them muster on election day for any such purpose.

James K. Jones of Arkansas based his argument on the estimate of an equal number of men and women in Wyoming, and assumed that all the women had voted in favor of the suffrage clause and that therefore it did not represent the wishes of men, thus denying wholly the right of women to a voice in a matter which so vitally concerned themselves. In reality women formed considerably less than one-third of the adult population, while the constitution was adopted by more than a three-fourths vote.