susan b. anthony speech :: essays research papers

"Fellow people in this here world" I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged umbrage 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 me thus voting, I not exactly committed no crime, only when, instead, simply exercised my citizens rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the matter paper, 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 than really knotty union, get justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the ordinary defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of emancipation to ourselves and our expresserity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." It was we, the people not we, the white male citizens nor notwithstanding we, the male citizens but we, the intac t people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to make water the blessings of liberty, but to secure them not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as women. And it is a downright bad to talk to wmen of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the exactly means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government - the ballot. For any state to make bring up a qualification that must of all time result in the disfranchisement of wholeness 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 swallow of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious nobility 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 educate govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured but this oligarchy of sex, which