Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

Then, again, men say, “She is so different from man that God did not mean she should vote.” Is she? Then I do not know how to vote for her. [Applause.] One of two things is true: She is either exactly like man,--exactly like him, teetotally like him,--and if she is, then a ballot-box based upon brains belongs to her as well as him; or she is different, and then I do not know how to vote for her. If she is like me, so much like me, that I know just as well how to vote for her as she knows how to vote for herself, then,--the very basis of the ballot-box being capacity,--she, being the same as I, has the same right to vote; and if she is so different that she has a different range of avocations and powers and capacities, then it is necessary she should go into the legislature, and with her own voice say what she wants, and write her wishes into statute-books, because nobody is able to interpret her. Choose which horn of the dilemma you please, for on the one or the other, the question of the right of woman to vote must hang.

It is exactly the question of races. You might as well say that the Irishman is not like the Saxon; that the Hindoo is not like the Englishman,--the world admits that they are not. Races are different; therefore, the German may well say, “You are a Yankee, with a soul curbed in a sixpence; you are not capable of voting for me. Your whole past and present are different from mine, and when I come to be an element in your civilization, I must shoot up my peaks into the highest land of legislative and civil life, because I want to be represented there as well as you.”

I do not think woman is identical with man. I think if she was, marriage would be a very stupid state. God made the races and sexes the complement one of the