Page:Speech on Partial Suffrage by Laura Clay to the Kentucky Constitutional Convention, December 12, 1890.pdf/3

who belive that the right is not expedient; there may be some who believe that the time is not yet come for it. We do not ask it now; what we ask is, that when the time shall come, we shall be able to take it promptly. There was a respectable minority yesterday who thought it might be well to leave it in the power of the General Assembly to revise the work of this Constitution, or one important part of it, that relating to the manner of taking the votes of the people. Shall you be afraid to trust the General Assembly with the control of this, when the time comes when popular sentiment shall ripen? That secret ballot is a mode; this is a principle. Are you afraid to trust the principle in the hands of the General Assembly any more than the method? This is all we ask. It is a principle which will be laid before the General Assembly, a principle which can never be sustained by them until it is the voice of the people, for no evil manipulator will ever bring up woman’s suffrage for fraud. That is the thing I present to you, and ask your consideration of it. I am as true a patriot as any man in this country, and it is with rejoicing hope and courage that I see the unfeigned desire of this Constitutional Convention to maintain the rights of free government. But it occurred to me, could these men be speaking these lofty thoughts and not remember, with any thrill of sympathetic pain, that there were others besides men as patriotic and intelligent, as law-abiding, as peace-loving—others who give as many hostages for the honor and safety of the State as they? Can they utter these noble sentiments, and yet exclude from any share in them the women of their homes? Can it be that gentlemen utter thoughts which uplift the soul, express all this noble feeling, these patriotic and high motives, and then shut out from them forever the women in this Commonwealth by the organic law? Will the men forget that women also have rights, and that we have more right than simply to be governed for our good? That the highest right of a free woman, as well as of a free man, is self-government? That the people you are called on to govern, are not only men, but women? Women do not ever dream that they have more wisdom than man; but this we do say, that women have a different wisdom from men. Wisdom is not only manly but womanly; men are patriotic, women are patriotic. The laws touch women as they do men. I was about to say as much, but I am almost tempted to say more than men, for men have better means of self-defense than women. Women must look only to the law for defense. The appeal I make to you is not to give suffrage to us now, because we know the people might not sustain you and it might endanger your work; but this is what we do say, will you leave this House and allow no hope for women? Will you go from this hall and forget every appeal of the women who are here with hearts and feelings like yours, and all the sentiments of liberty and independence which is a manly quality, but none the less womanly. I ask you to give us hope. Show that your hearts are not entirely closed to the appeals of women who are just as earnest in their desire for liberty as our forefathers when they trod the snow with bleeding feet. These things are as dear to us as they are dear to you, and the love of liberty can not forever be maintained in the hears to men unless they are taught at the knees of their mothers the great rights of mankind; and shall those sons grow up and say to the mothers, “these rights are for me and not for you?” We ask nothing now to be given us, but we do ask that the women of this Commonwealth, as they think of this noble assembly, which, in all other respects, and I hope will in this, has so far answered their highest expectations, I do entreat that the women shall not close their labors without saying they are unwilling to forever tie up the hands of women, but that they shall share in the noblest privileges of the