take place that men must become women. So I suppose we are to have women for public officers, women to do military duty, women to work the roads, women to fight the battles of the country, and men to wash the dishes, men to nurse the children, men to stay at home while the ladies go out and make stump speeches in canvasses. .... Mr. President, when the Almighty created men and women He made them for different purposes, and six thousand years of experience have recognized the wisdom and justice of the Almighty in this arrangement. It is only latterly that people have got wiser than their Creator and wiser than all the generations which have preceded them. .... The constitution of society, the necessity for the existence of society, the necessity of home government, which is the most important of all the parts of government, can only be preserved and perpetuated by keeping men in their sphere and women in their sphere.
It is a wholesome thing to reflect that after a hard day's struggle and of rough contacts which men must have with each other, they can go to a home presided over by one there who soothes the passions of the day by the sweetness of her temper, the gentleness of her disposition and the happiness which she brings around the family circle. But if the wife and the husband are both out in the bitter contests of the day, making speeches, electioneering with voters, pushing their way to the polls, they will both be apt to go home in a bad humor, and there will not be much happiness in a family during the remainder of the day which follows such a scene. And while they are both out what will become of the children? Are they to take care of themselves?
What rights can women expect to have that they do not have now? They are clothed with the protection of law.[1] In my judgment, Mr. President, the day that the floodgate of female suffrage is opened upon this country, the social organism will have reached the point at which decay and ruin begin. .... Why, sir, what is the advantage? If the head of the family votes he is apt to reflect the views of the family. It is more convenient than to have all the family going out to vote.Wilbur F. Sanders of Montana interrupted Senator Reagan to ask if the law should not be an expression of the intellectual and moral sense of all the people, and whether governments did not derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
John T. Morgan of Alabama entered into a long and sarcastic argument to prove that if a woman could vote in Wyoming she might be sent to Congress and then she could not be admitted because the law says a senator or representative "must be an inhabitant of the State in which he is chosen." He ignored the
- ↑ See laws for women in Texas chapter.
