Here are two final, extended excerpts from Esther Lovejoy's suffrage speech on August 17, 1912.
The first highlights Lovejoy's belief
that the vote would empower women to enact legislation and policies for
healthy communities:
"Women are members –
mighty important members of society. They pay taxes and are amenable to the
laws of the land but they have no vote regarding the dispensation of those
taxes or regarding the laws under which they live. If a woman fails to pay her
taxes – which are mighty high at times because of a wasteful, inefficient
administration – if she fails to pay for her street improvement – which may
have been put in because some powerful asphalt company needed a job, or to
subsidize some suburban real estate enterprise – the government will see her
home over her head to satisfy that lien against it. If a woman commits a crime
against the commonwealth is she not punished? If she is compelled to
drink infected water because the city in which she lives empties is sewage into
the river at one point and takes its drinking water out of it at another is she
not just as apt to die from Typhoid as the man who approves of the system? If
she is too poor to pay the water rate fixed by the city government the water is
promptly turned off though she may have a half dozen thirsty children waiting
at the faucet. Now since women pay taxes and are obliged to abide by the laws
of the land why should they not have a voice in dispensing those taxes and
making those laws?"
The second represents Lovejoy's
frustration with opponents of suffrage who, she felt, framed the entire
suffrage question as a danger to women's role as mothers.
"And now we come to the mooted question of Woman’s Sphere. It
is delightfully entertaining to listen to a gentleman anti-suffragist –
especially if he happens to be a Doctor of Divinity – rhapsodize upon Woman’s
Sphere. The woman that he conjures up is a poetic creation of the imagination.
How she does rock the cradle! It’s a wonder her baby doesn’t die of
sea-sickness! She never washes dishes or peals [sic] potatoes, or feeds the chickens, or goes to market or engages
in any gross and material occupation. She just rocks the cradle from morning
until night! That is her strong suit. It is her one manifestation of life! She
is a woman of one instinct – one idea – one possibility – and it is easy to
believe any Right Reverend Doctor of Divinity who predicts that such a creature
will forsake that over-worked cradle on the first opportunity and rush to the
polls with a ballot in her hand and vote and vote and vote and do nothing else
for the rest of her life but vote.
"But the normal woman in her natural sphere – the home – who
lets her baby sleep while she does her house-work will find time on election
day to vote for the things that will influence the welfare of that home and
that baby. A pure water and food supply if she lives in the city."
