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WOMEN'S
RIGHTS DECLARATIONS AND CONVENTION RESOLUTIONS:
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NATIONAL CONVENTION RESOLUTIONS, AMERICAN EQUAL RIGHTS ASSOCIATION CHURCH OF THE PURITAN, NEW YORK CITY, MAY 1867. RESOLVED, That as republican institutions are based on individual rights, and not on the rights of races or sexes, the first question for the American people to settle in the reconstruction of the government, is the RIGHTS OF INDIVIDUALS. RESOLVED, That the present claim for "manhood suffrage," marked with the words "equal," "impartial," "universal," is a cruel abandonment of the slave women of the South, a fraud on the tax paying women of the North, and an insult to the civilization of the nineteenth century. RESOLVED, That the [Republican Party] proposal to reconstruct our government on the basis of manhood suffrage ... [which] has received the recent sanction of the American Anti-Slavery Society, is but a continuation of the old system of class and caste legislation, always cruel and proscriptive in itself, and ending in all ages in national degradation and revolution. Memorial of the American Equal Rights Association to Congress The undersigned ... respectfully but earnestly protest against any change in the Constitution of the United States, or legislation by Congress, which shall longer violate the principle of Republican Govemment, by proscriptive distinctions in rights of suffrage or citizenship, on account of color or sex. Your Memorialists would respectfully represent, that neither the colored man's loyalty, bravery on the battle field and general good conduct, nor woman's heroic devotion to liberty and her country, in peace and war, have yet availed to admit them to equal citizenship ... We believe that humanity is one in all those intellectual, moral and spiritual attributes, out of which grow human responsibilities. The Scripture declaration is, "so God created man in his own image: male and female created he them." And all divine legislation throughout the realm of nature recognizes the perfect equality of the two conditions. For male and female are but different conditions. neither color nor sex is ever discharged from obedience to law, natural or moral; written or unwritten. The commands, thou shalt not steal, nor kill, nor commit adultery, know nothing of sex in their demands; nothing in their penalty. And hence we believe that all human legislation which is at variance with the divine code, is essentially unrighteous and unjust. Woman and the colored man are taxed .... Woman has been fined, whipped, branded with red-hot irons, imprisoned and hung; but when was woman ever tried by a jury of her peers? *** Woman and the colored man are loyal, patriotic, property-holding, tax-paying, liberty-loving citizens; and we can not believe that sex or complexion should be any ground for civil or political degradation. In our government, one-half the citizens are disfranchised by their sex, and about one-eighth by the color of their skin; and thus a large majority have no voice in enacting or executing the laws they are taxed to support and compelled to obey .... Against such outrages on the very name of republican freedoms, your memorialists do and must ever protest. And is not our protest pre-eminently as just against the tyranny of "taxation witho~ representation," as was that thundered from Bunker Hill ... ? And your Memorialists especially remember ... that our country is still reeling [from] ... a terrible civil war .... [I]n restoring the foundations of our nationality, [we] ... pray that all discriminations on account of sex or race may be removed; and that our Government may be republican in fact as well as form; A GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE, AND THE WHOLE PEOPLE; FOR THE PEOPLE, AND THE WHOLE PEOPLE.... [Signed by Theodore Tilton, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony].
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