[1.] Women demand the right to vote as a right.
Why should I first have to prove that I have a right to this?
I am a human being, I think, I feel, I am a (female) citizen of the state; I do not belong to the caste of criminals, I do not live on alms; this constitutes all the evidence I have to furnish in support of my claim.
In order to exercise his right to vote, a man requires a certain place of residence, a certain age, and some property; why should a woman require more?
Why is woman put on the same level with idiots and criminals?
No, strictly speaking, not criminals in fact. A criminal only loses political rights temporarily, so actually only women and idiots belong to the same political category.
Society is not authorized to deprive me of my natural political right, unless this right would prove incompatible with the welfare of the body politic. We must call for proof of that antagonism between the body politic and women’s rights. One will probably let us wait until Judgment Day, and in the meantime refer to the divine judgment that has characterized woman as an apolitical being because she lacks a beard.
In the long term, the prerequisite that one class of people carry the burdens of citizenry without having the right to shape these burdens in any decisive manner, the prerequisite that one class of people be subject to laws in whose formulation they do not participate, makes sense and is possible only within a despotic state. Permitting a principle like this spells tyranny in all the world’s languages and for both of the sexes, for any man and woman alike.
The claim to political equality of the sexes in the parliamentary chamber and the spectators’ gallery seems to men a moral outrage and exposes them to the danger of violent fits of laughter. They readily acknowledge one type of political equality, however: equality before the scaffold.
Why did you not laugh, dear gentlemen, when Marie Antoinette’s and Madame Roland’s head fell under the guillotine?
“In a state,” says Mme. de Stael, “where a woman gets her head cut off in the interest of
the state, shouldn’t she at least know why?”
Men never give answers to such know-it-all questions.
And why should they?
The voices of the dispossessed and the powerless are swallowed by the wave of the great stream of life – without any echo. Only when women have gained the right to vote, will their wishes, their happiness, and their opinion carry any weight in those places where the fortunes of classes and nations are weighed.
Men derive their rights vis-à-vis women from their power over them. But the mere fact of dominance is not a right. By law, they determine all of the measures, customs, and hierarchies that serve the suppression of the female sex, and afterwards they call these arrangements a legal order. Yet injustice does not shrink after a law has sanctioned it; oppression is no less despicable, but rather all the more horrible, when it has such a universal character in world history. [ . . . ]
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