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Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The Destructive Male
1868
 Women's
rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) gave this powerful speech
in 1868 at the Women's Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C., twenty
years after she helped launch the American women's rights movement at
Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton worked tirelessly over half a century
to obtain the right to vote for women and also questioned the social and
political norms which excluded women.
I urge a sixteenth amendment, because 'manhood
suffrage,' or a man's government, is civil, religious, and social
disorganization. The male element is a destructive force, stern,
selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition,
breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder,
disease, and death. See what a record of blood and cruelty the
pages of history reveal! Through what slavery, slaughter, and
sacrifice, through what inquisitions and imprisonments, pains
and persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds, the soul of
humanity has struggled for the centuries, while mercy has veiled
her face and all hearts have been dead alike to love and hope!
The male element has held high carnival thus
far; it has fairly run riot from the beginning, overpowering
the feminine element everywhere, crushing out all the diviner
qualities in human nature, until we know but little of true
manhood and womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing,
for it has scarce been recognized as a power until within the
last century. Society is but the reflection of man himself,
untempered by woman's thought; the hard iron rule we feel alike
in the church, the state, and the home. No one need wonder at
the disorganization, at the fragmentary condition of everything,
when we remember that man, who represents but half a complete
being, with but half an idea on every subject, has undertaken
the absolute control of all sublunary matters.
People object to the demands of those whom
they choose to call the strong-minded, because they say 'the
right of suffrage will make the women masculine.' That is just
the difficulty in which we are involved today. Though disfranchised,
we have few women in the best sense; we have simply so many
reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine gender.
The strong, natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed
and ignored in dependence, for so long as man feeds woman she
will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his condition.
To keep a foothold in society, woman must be as near like man
as possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues, motives,
prejudices, and vices. She must respect his statutes, though
they strip her of every inalienable right, and conflict with
that higher law written by the finger of God on her own soul.
She must look at everything from its dollar-and-cent
point of view, or she is a mere romancer. She must accept things
as they are and make the best of them. To mourn over the miseries
of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jails,
prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality
in every form, all this would be mere sentimentalizing. To protest
against the intrigue, bribery, and corruption of public life,
to desire that her sons might follow some business that did
not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding selfishness,
would be arrant nonsense.
In this way man has been molding woman to his
ideas by direct and positive influences, while she, if not a
negation, has used indirect means to control him, and in most
cases developed the very characteristics both in him and herself
that needed repression. And now man himself stands appalled
at the results of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness
that falsehood, selfishness, and violence are the law of life.
The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railroads,
or specie payments but a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt
purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into
the higher realms of thought and action.
We ask woman's enfranchisement, as the first
step toward the recognition of that essential element in government
that can only secure the health, strength, and prosperity of
the nation. Whatever is done to lift woman to her true position
will help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for
the race.
In speaking of the masculine element, I do
not wish to be understood to say that all men are hard, selfish,
and brutal, for many of the most beautiful spirits the world
has known have been clothed with manhood; but I refer to those
characteristics, though often marked in woman, that distinguish
what is called the stronger sex. For example, the love of acquisition
and conquest, the very pioneers of civilization, when expended
on the earth, the sea, the elements, the riches and forces of
nature, are powers of destruction when used to subjugate one
man to another or to sacrifice nations to ambition.
Here that great conservator of woman's love,
if permitted to assert itself, as it naturally would in freedom
against oppression, violence, and war, would hold all these
destructive forces in check, for woman knows the cost of life
better than man does, and not with her consent would one drop
of blood ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain.
With violence and disturbance in the natural
world, we see a constant effort to maintain an equilibrium of
forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep
land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush
the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and
cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may
reign supreme. There is a striking analogy between matter and
mind, and the present disorganization of society warns us that
in the dethronement of woman we have let loose the elements
of violence and ruin that she only has the power to curb. If
the civilization of the age calls for an extension of the suffrage,
surely a government of the most virtuous educated men and women
would better represent the whole and protect the interests of
all than could the representation of either sex alone.
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