Questions 33-42 are based on the following
passage.
This passage is adapted from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s address to the 1869 Woman Suffrage Convention in Washington ,DC.
I urge a sixteenth 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
5 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 sacrifice, through what
10 inquisition sand imprisonments, pains and
persecutions , black codes and gloomy creeds, the
soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries,
while mercy has veiled her face and all hearts have
been dead alike to love and hope!
15 The male element has held high carnival thus far;
it has fairly run riot from the beginning,
overpowering the feminine element everywhere,
crushing out all the diviner qualities in human
nature, until we know but little of true manhood and
20 womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing, for
it has scarce been recognized as a power until within
the last century. Society is but the reflection of man
himself, untempered by woman’s thought; the hard
iron rule we feel alike in the church, the state, and the
25 home.No one need wonder at the disorganization, at
the fragmentary condition of everything ,when we
remember that man ,who represents but half a
complete being, with but half an idea on every
subject, has undertaken the absolute control of all
30 sublunary matters.
People object to the demands of those whom they
choose to call the strong-minded, because they say
“ the right of suffrage will make the women
masculine .”That is just the difficulty in which we are
35 involved today. Though disfranchised, we have few
women in the best sense; we have simply so many
reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine
gender. The strong, natural characteristics of
womanhood are repressed and ignored in
40 dependence, for so long as man feeds woman she
will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his
condition. To keep a foothold in society, woman
must be as near like man as possible, reflect his ideas,
opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices, and vices. She
45 must respect his statutes, though they strip her of
every inalienable right, and conflict with that higher
law written by the finger of God on her own soul....
...[M]an has been molding woman to his ideas
by direct and positive influences , while she ,if not a
50 negation, has used indirect means to control him,
and in most cases developed the very characteristics
both in him and herself that needed repression.
And now man himself stands 30 appalled at the results
of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness that
55 falsehood, selfishness, and violence are the law of life.
The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines,
railroads, or specie payments but a new evangel of
womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true
religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of
60 thought and action.
We ask woman’s enfranchisement, as the first step
toward the recognition of that essential element in
government that can only secure the health, strength,
and prosperity of the nation. Whatever is done to lift
65 woman to her true position will help to usher in a
new day of peace and perfection for the race.
In speaking of the masculine element , I do not
wish to be understood to say that all men are hard,
selfish, and brutal, for many of the most beautiful
70 spirits the world has known have been clothed with
manhood; but I refer to those characteristics, though
often marked in woman, that distinguish what is
called the stronger sex. For example, the love of
acquisition and conquest, the very pioneers of
75 civilization, when expended on the earth, the sea, the
elements, the riches and forces of nature, are powers
of destruction when used to subjugate one man to
another or to sacrifice nations to ambition.
Here that great conservator of woman’s love, if
80 permitted to assert itself, as it naturally would in
freedom against oppression, violence, and war,
would hold all these destructive forces in check, for
woman knows the cost of life better than man does,
and not with her consent would one drop of blood
85 ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain.