When Abraham Lincoln penned the immortal emancipation proclamation he did not stop to inquire whether every man and every woman in Southern slavery did or did not want to be free. Whether women do or do not wish to vote does not affect the question of their right to do so.
ATTRIBUTION:
Mary E. Haggart, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902).
In a hearing on woman suffrage held by the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives on March 8, 1884. Haggart, who was from Indiana, was responding to the antisuffrage argument that some women did not wish to vote.
