"TO WARN AMERICANS… WOMAN SUFFRAGE BECAME HIS PROVERBIAL LINE IN THE SAND": FIRST EDITION OF BROCKETT'S WOMAN: HER RIGHTS, 1869, DENYING FULL RIGHTS OF CITIZENSHIP FOR WOMEN & ARGUING AGAINST JOHN STUART MILL'S SUBJECTION OF WOMEN, ISSUED THAT SAME YEAR

(MILL, John Stuart) BROCKETT, L.P. Woman: Her Rights, Wrongs, Privileges, and Responsibilities… Woman Suffrage, Its Folly and Inexpediency… Demonstrated. Hartford: L. Stebbins, 1869. Thick octavo, original blind- and gilt-stamped brown cloth.

First edition of Brockett's influential "anti-suffrage polemic" opposing Mill's Subjection of Women, issued the same year, and warning that woman suffrage would cause America to "go down to swift destruction," charting a path for the Supreme Court decision against woman suffrage in Minor v. Happersett (1875), with frontispiece and 20 full-page illustrations.

Upon the same year's publication of John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women, America's Linus P. Brockett countered with his expansive history of Woman: Her Rights. Brockett, who co-authored with Mary Vaughan an 1867 history of women in the Civil War, here "seized on the woman suffrage issue to warn Americans about their indiscriminate approach to the ballot… Under the 'pending (15th) amendment,' he noted, 'negroes and persons of African descent will gain the right of suffrage'… woman suffrage became his proverbial line in the sand." Brockett was a leading and influential voice in the movement to rethink "suffrage and democratic citizenship in Reconstruction America. Voting, in this rethinking, must be understood as a particular privilege or right, and therefore not one of the 'absolute rights of citizenship.' This was the position the Supreme Court ultimately took in Minor v. Happersett (1875), the woman suffrage case that contributed to the narrowing construal of the 14th Amendment in the 1870s. For those uneasy about the major social changes Reconstruction and democratic expansion promised, woman suffrage provided a way to arrest the momentum" (Preston & Rossinow, eds., Outside In, 64-66).

Brockett supports his wide-ranging argument by citing the Bible, Greek and Roman history, English common law, American federal and state laws, and much more. It is an "anti-suffrage polemic… unequivocal in its condemnation of feminist claims to political equality" (Attie, Patriotic Toll, 273). Above all, John Stuart Mill looms "over the entire book as Brockett's major interlocutor and antagonist" (Outside In, 72n). Brockett claims that Mill, "as a professed deist, ignores the scriptural account of the creation of woman," and fails to understand that "as the other part of himself, woman can have no claim to a separate representation… she votes through him." Brockett also warns that if suffrage is also granted to "the more ignorant and stupid of the negroes…[and] ignorant women of the dependent classes—servants, factory girls… our peril would be almost infinitely increased; and if to these were to be added the Chinese, we should go down to swift destruction." He concludes the volume with a reprinting of Catherine Beecher's essay, "Something for Women Better than the Ballot," in which she continues to resist the call for woman suffrage. First edition: with title page imprint, "Hartford: Published by L. Stebbins, 1869."

Interior fresh with light scattered foxing, toning to spine of original cloth. An extremely good copy.