The Destructive Male
Delivered at the Women's Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C. in 1868, arguing that a society governed purely by masculine elements leads to violence, oppression, and destruction.
Full Transcript
I urge a sixteen amendment, because ‘manhood suffrage’ or a man’s government, is Civil, Religious, and Social disorganization. The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease, and death.
See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages of history reveal! Through what slavery, slaughter, and ruin, through what inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds, the soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries!
The male element has held high carnival thus far; it has crushed out the divine qualities of human nature, making force, power, and glory the supreme ideals of the state. Society is but the reflection of man himself, untempered by woman’s thought.
The need of this hour is a higher type of manhood and womanhood, an equal balance of the masculine and feminine elements in the council chambers of the nation.
Defining Key Excerpts
"The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition."
"The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railroads... but a higher type of manhood and womanhood."
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