In asking for laws that carried out these claims, or some of them, Mrs. Stanton said, in addressing the New York Legislature in 1854: "If you take the highest view of marriage as a Divine relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only recognize it.... But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws that control all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human, half-divine institution, which you may build up but cannot regulate."
These doctrines--from those of Frances Wright to those of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony--were put forth in the name of social purity and true marriage. A great body of Suffragists never have accepted them. They were repugnant, in this form, to a majority who were demanding "equal rights." In January, 1871, Mr. Hooker (husband of Isabella Beecher Hooker), said in the New York Evening Post: "The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement. The two have no necessary connection. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments in favor of Woman Suffrage is, that the marriage relation will be safer with women to vote and legislate upon it than where the voting and legislation are left wholly to men. Women will always be wives and mothers, above all things else. This law of nature cannot be changed, and I know of nobody who desires to change it." As he had just been referring to "persons who advocated easy divorce," and who originated the Suffrage movement, his statement that he knew of nobody who desired to change marriage seems funny.
It was one of the matters remarked upon with satisfaction by Suffrage leaders during our Constitutional Convention Suffrage campaign, that such a large number of speakers advocated Suffrage because of its advantage to the home. Mrs. Cora Seabury said: "Where woman is, homes naturally exist, and not without her. The 'divine veracity in nature,' which in her case has survived the chaos of ages and the varying civilization of six thousand years, is not now to be disproved by an incident comparatively so trivial as that of taking the ballot." Dr. Jacobi puts the idea in this way: "Mr. Goldwin Smith declares that woman suffrage aims at such a 'sexual revolution' as must cause the 'dissolution of the family.' The Suffrage claim does not aim at this; it seeks only to formulate, recognize, and define the revolution already effected, yet which leaves the family intact. The _Patria Potestas_ is gone. A man has lost, first, the right to kill his own son, then the right to order the marriage of his daughter, then the right to absorb the property of his wife. Nevertheless, he survives, and the family, shorn of its portentous rights, bids fair in America to remain the happiest of all conceivable natural institutions; more profound than society, so immeasurably deeper than politics that the fortunate wife, daughter, or sister is puzzled when the two are mentioned in the same breath."