Sex cannot be a qualification any more than size,
race, color, or previous condition of servitude. A permanent or
insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a deprivation of the
suffrage. In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without
representation, against which our revolutionary mothers, as well as
fathers, rebelled."
For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the
disfranchisement of one 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 consent of the governed. To them
this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an
odious aristocracy; a hateful obligarchy of sex. The most hateful
aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe. An obligarchy of
wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an obligarchy of learning, where
the educated govern the ignorant; or even an obligarchy of race, where
the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this obligarchy of
sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the obligarchs over
the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which
ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension,
discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
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