Thus may all married women and widows, by the laws of the several

States, be technically included in the Fifteenth Amendment's

specification of "condition of servitude," present or previous. The

facts also prove that, by all the great fundamental principles of our

free government, not only married women but the entire womanhood of the

nation are in a "condition of servitude" as surely as were our

Revolutionary fathers when they rebelled against King George. Women are

taxed without representation, governed without their consent, tried,

convicted and punished without a jury of their peers. Is all this

tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women under our

democratic-republican government today than it was to men under their

aristocratic, monarchial government one hundred years ago? There is not

an utterance of John Adams, John Hancock or Patrick Henry, but finds a

living response in the soul of every intelligent, patriotic woman of the

nation. Show me a justice-loving woman property-holder, and I will show

you one whose soul is fired with all the indignation of 1776 every time

the tax-collector presents himself at her door. You will not find one

such but feels her condition of servitude as galling as did James Otis

when he said:

The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not represented

appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential

rights, and if continued seems to be in effect an entire

disfranchisement of every civil right. For what one civil right is

worth a rush after a man's property is subject to be taken from him

at pleasure without his consent? If a man is not his own assessor

in person, or by deputy, his liberty is gone, for he is wholly at

the mercy of others.

What was the three-penny tax on tea or the paltry tax on paper and sugar

to which our Revolutionary fathers were subjected, when compared with

the taxation of the women of this republic? And again, to show that

disfranchisement was precisely the slavery of which the fathers

complained, allow me to cite Benjamin Franklin, who in those olden times

was admitted to be good authority, not merely in domestic but also in

political economy:

Every man of the commonalty, except infants, insane persons and

criminals, is, of common right and the law of God, a freeman and

entitled to the free enjoyment of liberty. That liberty or freedom

consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who

are to frame the laws, and who are to be the guardians of every

man's life, property and peace. For the all of one man is as dear

to him as the all of another; and the poor man has an equal right,

but more need, to have representatives in the legislature than the

rich one. They who have no voice or vote in the electing of

representatives do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved

to those who have votes and to their representatives; for to be

enslaved is to have governors whom other men have set over us, and

to be subject to laws made by the representatives of others,

without having had representatives of our own to give consent in

our behalf.

Suppose I read it with the feminine gender:

Women who have no voice or vote in the electing of representatives

do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to men who have

votes and to their representatives; for to be enslaved is to have

governors whom men have set over us, and to be subject to the laws

made by the representatives of men, without having representatives

of our own to give consent in our behalf.

And yet one more authority, that of Thomas Paine, than whom not one of

the Revolutionary patriots more ably vindicated the principles upon

which our government is founded:

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by

which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to

reduce man to a state of slavery; for slavery consists in being

subject to the will of another; and he that has not a vote in the

election of representatives is in this case. The proposal,

therefore, to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the

proposal to take away property.

Is anything further needed to prove woman's condition of servitude

sufficient to entitle her to the guarantees of the Fifteenth Amendment?

Is there a man who will not agree with me that to talk of freedom

without the ballot is mockery to the women of this republic, precisely

as New England's orator, Wendell Phillips, at the close of the late war

declared it to be to the newly emancipated black man? I admit that,

prior to the rebellion, by common consent, the right to enslave, as well

as to disfranchise both native and foreign born persons, was conceded to

the States. But the one grand principle settled by the war and the

reconstruction legislation, is the supremacy of the national government

to protect the citizens of the United States in their right to freedom

and the elective franchise, against any and every interference on the

part of the several States; and again and again have the American people

asserted the triumph of this principle by their overwhelming majorities

for Lincoln and Grant.

The one issue of the last two presidential elections was whether the

Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments should be considered the irrevocable

will of the people; and the decision was that they should be, and that

it is not only the right, but the duty of the national government to

protect all United States citizens in the full enjoyment and free

exercise of their privileges and immunities against the attempt of any

State to deny or abridge. In this conclusion Republicans and Democrats

alike agree. Senator Frelinghuysen said: "The heresy of State rights has

been completely buried in these amendments, and as amended, the

Constitution confers not only National but State citizenship upon all

persons born or naturalized within our limits."

The call for the National Republican Convention of 1872 said: "Equal

suffrage has been engrafted on the National Constitution; the privileges

and immunities of American citizenship have become a part of the organic

law." The National Republican platform said: "Complete liberty and exact

equality in the enjoyment of all civil, political and public rights,

should be established and maintained throughout the Union by efficient

and appropriate State and Federal legislation."

If that means anything it is that Congress should pass a law to protect

women in their equal political rights, and that the States should enact

laws making it the duty of inspectors of elections to receive the votes

of women on precisely the same conditions as they do those of men.

Judge Stanley Matthews, a substantial Ohio Democrat, in his preliminary

speech at the Cincinnati Liberal Convention, said most emphatically:

"The constitutional amendments have established the political equality

of all citizens before the law."

President Grant, in his message to Congress, March 30, 1870, on the

adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, said, "A measure which makes at

once four millions of people voters, is indeed a measure of greater

importance than any act of the kind from the foundation of the

government to the present time."

How could _four_ million negroes be made voters if two million out of

the four were women?

The California Republican platform of 1872 said:

Among the many practical and substantial triumphs of the principles

achieved by the Republican party during the past twelve years, it

enumerates with pride and pleasure the prohibiting of any State

from abridging the privileges of any citizen of the republic, the

declaring the civil and political equality of every citizen, and

the establishing all these principles in the Federal Constitution,

by amendments thereto, as the permanent law.

Benjamin F. Butler, in a recent letter to me, said: "I do not believe

anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of

women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other

like rights guaranteed to citizens."

It is upon this just interpretation of the United States Constitution

that our National Woman Suffrage Association, which celebrates the

twenty-fifth anniversary of the woman's rights movement next May in New

York City, has based all its arguments and action since the passage of

these amendments. We no longer petition legislature or Congress to give

us the right to vote, but appeal to women everywhere to exercise their

too long neglected "citizen's right." We appeal to the inspectors of

election to receive the votes of all United States citizens, as it is

their duty to do. We appeal to United States commissioners and marshals

to arrest, as is their duty, the inspectors who reject the votes of

United States citizens, and leave alone those who perform their duties

and accept these votes. We ask the juries to return verdicts of "not

guilty" in the cases of law-abiding United States citizens who cast

their votes, and inspectors of election who receive and count them.

We ask the judges to render unprejudiced opinions of the law, and

whereever there is room for doubt to give the benefit to the side of

liberty and equal rights for women, remembering that, as Sumner says,

"The true rule of interpretation under our National Constitution,

especially since its amendments, is that anything _for_ human rights is

constitutional, everything _against_ human rights unconstitutional." It

is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the

ballot--peaceably but nevertheless persistently--until we achieve

complete triumph and all United States citizens, men and women alike,

are recognized as equals in the government.

CHAPTER XXV--PAGE 436

NEWSPAPER COMMENT ON MISS ANTHONY'S TRIAL.

It is perhaps needless to say that whoever listens candidly to Susan B.

Anthony, no matter how he previously regarded her and her sentiments, is

certain to respect her and them afterwards.--Geneva Courier.

* * * * *

Miss Susan B. Anthony is sharp enough for a successful politician. She

is under arrest in Rochester for voting illegally, and is conducting her

case in a way which beats even lawyers. She stumped the county of Monroe

and spoke in every post-office district so powerfully that she has

actually converted nearly the entire male population to the woman

suffrage doctrine. The sentiment is so universal that the United States

district-attorney dare not trust his case to a jury drawn from that

county, and has changed the venue to Ontario. Now Miss Anthony proposes

to stump Ontario immediately, and has procured the services of Matilda

Joslyn Gage, of Fayetteville, to assist her. By the time the case comes

on, Miss Anthony will have Ontario county converted to her

doctrine.--Syracuse Standard.

* * * * *

If Miss Anthony has converted every man in Monroe county to her views of

the suffrage question, as the district-attorney intimates in his recent

efforts to have her case adjourned, it is pretty good evidence--unless

every man in Monroe county is a fool--that the lady has done no wrong.

"Her case," remarks the Auburn Bulletin, "will probably be carried over

to another term, and all she has to do is to canvass and convert another

county. A shrewd woman that! Again we say she ought to vote."--Rochester

Democrat and Chronicle.

* * * * *

There is perplexity in the northern district of New York. It was in that

jurisdiction that Miss Susan B. Anthony and sundry "erring sisters"

voted at the November election. For this they were arrested and

indicted. The venue was laid in Monroe county and there the trial was to

take place. Miss Anthony then proceeded to stump Monroe county and every

town and village thereof, asking her bucolic hearers the solemn

conundrum, "Is it a crime for a United States citizen to vote?" The

answer is supposed generally to be in the negative, and so convincing is

Sister Anthony's rhetoric regarded that it is supposed no jury can be

found to convict her. Her case has gone to the jurymen of Monroe, in her

own persuasive pleadings, before they are summoned. The

district-attorney has, therefore, postponed the trial to another term of

the court, and changed the place thereof to Ontario county; whereupon

the brave Susan takes the stump in Ontario, and personally makes known

her woes and wants. It is a regular St. Anthony's dance she leads the

district-attorney; and, in spite of winter cold or summer heat, she

will carry her case from county to county precisely as fast as the venue

is changed. One must rise very early in the morning to get the start of

this active apostle of the sisterhood.--New York Commercial Advertiser.

* * * * *

It seems likely that the decision of the court will be in Miss Anthony's

favor. If such be the result the advocates of woman suffrage will change

places with the public. They will no longer be forced to obtain hearings

from congressional and legislative committees for their claims, but will

exercise their right to vote by the authority of a legal precedent

against which positive laws forbidding them from voting will be the only

remedy. It is a question whether such laws can be passed in this

country. A careful examination of the subject must precede any such

legislation, and the inference from the result of Judge Selden's

investigation is that the more the subject is studied the less likely

will any legislative body be to forbid those women who want to vote from

so doing.--New York Evening Post.

* * * * *

Miss Susan B. Anthony, whatever else she may be, is evidently of the

right stuff for a reformer. Of all the woman suffragists she has the

most courage and resource, and fights her own and her sisters' battle

with the most wonderful energy, resolution and hopefulness. It is well

known that she is now under indictment for voting illegally in Rochester

last November. Voting illegally in her case means simply voting, for it

is held that women can not lawfully vote at all. She is to be tried

soon, but in the meantime, while at large on bail, she has devoted her

time to missionary work on behalf of woman suffrage, and has spoken, it

is said, in every post-office district in Monroe county, where her trial

would have been held in the natural course of things. She has argued her

cause so well that almost all the male population of the county have

been converted to her views on this subject. The district-attorney is

afraid to trust the case to a jury from that county, and has obtained a

change of venue to Ontario on the ground that a fair trial can not be

had in Monroe.

Miss Anthony, rather cheered than discouraged by this unwilling

testimony to the strength of her cause and her powers of persuasion, has

made arrangements to canvass Ontario county as thoroughly as Monroe.

Some foolish and bigoted people who edit newspapers are complaining that

Miss Anthony's proceedings are highly improper, inasmuch as they are

intended to influence the decision of a cause pending in the courts.

They even talk about contempt of court, and declare that Miss Anthony

should be compelled to desist from making these invidious harangues. We

suspect that the courts will not venture to interfere with this lady's

speech-making tour, but will be of the opinion that she has the same

right which other people, male or female, have to explain her political

views and make converts to them if she can. We have never known it

claimed before that a person accused of an offense was thereby deprived

of the common right of free speech on political and other

questions.--Worcester Spy.

* * * * *

The vapid efforts of a part of the newspaper press to entertain the

public, of late, by descriptions, criticisms and comments, founded upon

pretended interviews with Miss Anthony, reveal a standard of courtesy

and truth discreditable to the American press, and a meagerness of

interesting matter suggesting the propriety of the suspension of such

sheets altogether. The Pittsburg Leader, among others, disgraces itself

by a scurrilous report of what "the gay old girl said to a reporter;"

and the New York World, of course, waxed very funny in its account of

the late convention. These gibes at Miss Anthony's personal appearance,

unwillingness to tell her age, "fishy eyes," etc., are read by her

friends in Rochester with indignation and with contempt for the press

which will publish such misrepresentations as truth.

All Rochester will assert--at least all of it worth heeding--that Miss

Anthony holds here the position of a refined and estimable woman,

thoroughly respected and beloved by the large circle of staunch friends

who swear by her common sense and loyalty, if not by her peculiar views.

As for her age, she tells it often enough unsolicited, whenever the

famous silk dress is alluded to; the dear old dress that a New York

reporter held up as such perfection of taste and fashion! Anna Dickinson

gave that dress to Miss Anthony upon her fiftieth birthday a number of

years ago, and the news was in all the papers. That dress is going into

history with Commissioner Storrs, Judge Selden and the illustrious rest.

It has always been worn by a lady--a genuine lady--no pretense nor

sham--but good Quaker metal. She is no "sour old maid," our Miss

Anthony, nor are the young men shy of her when she can find time to

accept an invitation out; genial, cheery, warm-hearted, overflowing with

stories and reminiscences, utterly fearless and regardless of mere

public opinion, yet having a woman's delicate sensitiveness as to

anything outre in dress or appearance.

Our Susan B. Anthony will work up into a charming bit of biography some

day without a dull page within the covers, providing, of course,

stupidity does not have the writing of it. Never mind what she has been

fighting for, and will fight for till the victory is sure, we must all

own hers a brave record, and she has already accomplished for her sex

much that their scorn and contumely did not prevent her striving for. We

heard a lady remark after attending the suffrage convention: "No, I am

not converted to what these women advocate, I am too cowardly for that;

but I am converted to Susan B. Anthony."--Rochester Evening Express.

CHAPTER XXVII--PAGE 472.

WOMAN WANTS BREAD, NOT THE BALLOT!

_Delivered in most of the large cities of the United States, between

1870 and 1880. The speech never was written, and this abstract was

prepared from scattered notes and newspaper reports._

My purpose tonight is to demonstrate the great historical fact that

disfranchisement is not only political degradation, but also moral,

social, educational and industrial degradation; and that it does not

matter whether the disfranchised class live under a monarchial or a

republican form of government, or whether it be white workingmen of

England, negroes on our southern plantations, serfs of Russia, Chinamen

on our Pacific coast, or native born, tax-paying women of this republic.

Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show

me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.

Disfranchisement means inability to make, shape or control one's own

circumstances. The disfranchised must always do the work, accept the

wages, occupy the position the enfranchised assign to them. The

disfranchised are in the position of the pauper. You remember the old

adage, "Beggars must not be choosers;" they must take what they can get

or nothing! That is exactly the position of women in the world of work

today; they can not choose. If they could, do you for a moment believe

they would take the subordinate places and the inferior pay? Nor is it a

"new thing under the sun" for the disfranchised, the inferior classes

weighed down with wrongs, to declare they "do not want to vote." The

rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for

themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.

Years ago in England when the workingmen, starving in the mines and

factories, gathered in mobs and took bread wherever they could get it,

their friends tried to educate them into a knowledge of the causes of

their poverty and degradation. At one of these "monster bread meetings,"

held in Manchester, John Bright said to them, "Workingmen, what you need

to bring to you cheap bread and plenty of it, is the franchise;" but

those ignorant men shouted back to Mr. Bright, precisely as the women of

America do to us today, "It is not the vote we want, it is bread;" and

they broke up the meeting, refusing to allow him, their best friend, to

explain to them the powers of the franchise. The condition of those

workingmen was very little above that of slavery. Some of you may

remember when George Thompson came over to this country and rebuked us

for our crime and our curse of slavery, how the slaveholders and their

abettors shouted back to Mr. Thompson, "Look at home, look into your

mines and your factories, you have slavery in England."

You recollect a book published at that time entitled, "The Glory and

Shame of England." Her glory was the emancipation of slaves in the

British West Indies, and her shame the degraded and outraged condition

of those very miners and factory men. In their desperation, they

organized trades unions, went on strike, fought terrible battles, often

destroying property and sometimes even killing their employers. Those

who have read Charles Reade's novel, "Put Yourself in his Place," have

not forgotten the terrible scenes depicted. While those starving men

sometimes bettered their condition financially, they never made a ripple

on the surface of political thought. No member ever championed their

cause on the floor of Parliament. If spoken of at all, it was as our

politicians used to speak of the negroes before the war, or as they

speak of the Chinese today--as nuisances that ought to be suppressed.

But at length, through the persistent demands of a little handful of

reformers, there was introduced into the British Parliament the

"household suffrage" bill of 1867. John Stuart Mill not only championed

that bill as it was presented, but moved an amendment to strike out the

word "man" and substitute therefor the word "person," so that the bill

should read, "every person who shall pay a seven-pound rental per annum

shall be entitled to the franchise." You will see that Mr. Mill's motive

was to extend the suffrage to women as well as men. But when the vote

was taken, only seventy-four, out of the nearly seven hundred members of

the British Parliament, voted in its favor.

During the discussion of the original bill, the opposition was

championed by Robert Lowe, who presented all the stock objections to the

extension of the franchise to "those ignorant, degraded workingmen," as

he called them, that ever were presented in this country against giving

the ballot to the negroes, and that are today being urged against the

enfranchisement of women. Is it not a little remarkable that no matter

who the class may be that it is proposed to enfranchise, the objections

are always the same? "The ballot in the hands of this new class will

make their condition worse than before, and the introduction of this new

class into the political arena will degrade politics to a lower level."

But notwithstanding Mr. Lowe's persistent opposition, the bill became a

law; and before the session closed, that same individual moved that

Parliament, having enfranchised these men, should now make an

appropriation for the establishment and support of schools for the

education of them and their sons. Now, mark you his reason why! "Unless

they are educated," said he, "they will be the means of overturning the

throne of England." So long as these poor men in the mines and factories

had not the right to vote, the power to make and unmake the laws and

law-makers, to help or hurt the government, no measure ever had been

proposed for their benefit although they were ground under the heel of

the capitalist to a condition of abject slavery. But the moment this

power is placed in their hands, before they have used it even once, this

bitterest enemy to their possessing it is the first man to spring to his

feet and make this motion for the most beneficent measure possible in

their behalf--public schools for the education of themselves and their

children.

From that day to this, there never has been a session of the British

Parliament that has not had before it some measure for the benefit of

the working classes. Parliament has enacted laws compelling employers

to cut down the number of hours for a day's work, to pay better wages,

to build decent houses for their employes, and has prohibited the

employment of very young children in the mines and factories. The

history of those olden times records that not infrequently children were

born in the mines and passed their lives there, scarcely seeing the

sunlight from the day of their birth to the day of their death.

Sad as is the condition of the workingmen of England today, it is

infinitely better than it was twenty years ago. At first the votes of

the workingmen were given to the Liberal party, because it was the

leaders of that party who secured their enfranchisement; but soon the

leaders of the Conservative party, seeing the power the workingmen had,

began to vie with the Liberals by going into their meetings and pledging

that if they would vote the Tory ticket and bring that party into

control, it would give them more and better laws even than the Liberals.

In 1874 enough workingmen did go over to bring that party to the front,

with Disraeli at its head, where it stood till 1880 when the rank and

file of the workingmen of England, dissatisfied with Disraeli's policy,

both domestic and foreign, turned and again voted the Liberal ticket,

putting that party in power with Gladstone as its leader. This is the

way in which the ballot in the hands of the masses of wage-earners, even

under a monarchial form of government, makes of them a tremendous

balance of power whose wants and wishes the instinct of self-interest

compels the political leaders to study and obey.

The great distinctive advantage possessed by the workingmen of this

republic is that the son of the humblest citizen, black or white, has

equal chances with the son of the richest in the land if he take

advantage of the public schools, the colleges and the many opportunities

freely offered. It is this equality of rights which makes our nation a

home for the oppressed of all the monarchies of the old world.

And yet, notwithstanding the declaration of our Revolutionary fathers,

"all men created equal," "governments derive their just powers from

the consent of the governed," "taxation and representation

inseparable"--notwithstanding all these grand enunciations, our

government was founded upon the blood and bones of half a million human

beings, bought and sold as chattels in the market. Nearly all the

original thirteen States had property qualifications which disfranchised

poor white men as well as women and negroes. Thomas Jefferson, at the

head of the old Democratic party, took the lead in advocating the

removal of all property qualifications, as so many violations of the

fundamental principle of our government--"the right of consent." In New

York the qualification was $250. Martin Van Buren, the chief of the

Democracy, was a member of the Constitutional Convention held in Buffalo

in 1821, which wiped out that qualification so far as white men were

concerned. He declared, "The poor man has as good a right to a voice in

the government as the rich man, and a vastly greater need to possess it

as a means of protection to himself and his family." It was because the

Democrats enfranchised poor white men, both native and foreign, that

that strong old party held absolute sway in this country for almost

forty years, with only now and then a one-term Whig administration.

In those olden days Horace Greeley, at the head of the Whig party and

his glorious New York Tribune, used to write long editorials showing the

workingmen that they had a mistaken idea about the Democratic party;

that it was not so much the friend of the poor man as was the Whig, and

if they would but vote the Whig ticket and put that party in power, they

would find that it would give them better laws than the Democrats had

done. At length, after many, many years of such education and

persuasion, the workingmen's vote, native and foreign, was divided, and

in 1860 there came to the front a new party which, though not called

Whig, was largely made up of the old Whig elements. In its turn this new

party enfranchised another degraded class of labor. Because the

Republicans gave the ballot to negroes, they have been allied to that

party and have held it solid in power from the ratification of the

Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, to the present day. Until the Democrats

convince them that they will do more and better for them than the

Republicans are doing, there will be no appreciable division of the

negro vote.

The vast numbers of wage-earning men coming from Europe to this country,

where manhood suffrage prevails with no limitations, find themselves

invested at once with immense political power. They organize their

trades unions, but not being able to use the franchise intelligently,

they continue to strike and to fight their battles with the capitalists

just as they did in the old countries. Neither press nor politicians

dare to condemn these strikes or to demand their suppression because the

workingmen hold the balance of power and can use it for the success or

defeat of either party.

[Miss Anthony here related various timely instances of strikes

where force was used to prevent non-union men from taking the

places of the strikers, and neither the newspapers nor political

leaders ventured to sustain the officials in the necessary steps to

preserve law and order, or if they did they were defeated at the

next election.]

It is said women do not need the ballot for their protection because

they are supported by men. Statistics show that there are 3,000,000

women in this nation supporting themselves. In the crowded cities of the

East they are compelled to work in shops, stores and factories for the

merest pittance. In New York alone, there are over 50,000 of these women

receiving less than fifty cents a day. Women wage-earners in different

occupations have organized themselves into trades unions, from time to

time, and made their strikes to get justice at the hands of their

employers just as men have done, but I have yet to learn of a successful

strike of any body of women. The best organized one I ever knew was that

of the collar laundry women of the city of Troy, N. Y., the great

emporium for the manufacture of shirts, collars and cuffs. They formed a

trades union of several hundred members and demanded an increase of

wages. It was refused. So one May morning in 1867, each woman threw down

her scissors and her needle, her starch-pan and flat-iron, and for three

long months not one returned to the factories. At the end of that time

they were literally starved out, and the majority of them were compelled

to go back, but not at their old wages, for their employers cut them

down to even a lower figure.

In the winter following I met the president of this union, a bright

young Irish girl, and asked her, "Do you not think if you had been 500

carpenters or 500 masons, you would have succeeded?" "Certainly," she

said, and then she told me of 200 bricklayers who had the year before

been on strike and gained every point with their employers. "What could

have made the difference? Their 200 were but a fraction of that trade,

while your 500 absolutely controlled yours." Finally she said, "It was

because the editors ridiculed and denounced us." "Did they ridicule and

denounce the bricklayers?" "No." "What did they say about you?" "Why,

that our wages were good enough now, better than those of any other

workingwomen except teachers; and if we weren't satisfied, we had better

go and get married." "What then do you think made this difference?"

After studying over the question awhile she concluded, "It must have

been because our employers bribed the editors." "Couldn't the employers

of the bricklayers have bribed the editors?" She had never thought of

that. Most people never do think; they see one thing totally unlike

another, but the person who stops to inquire into the cause that

produces the one or the other is the exception. So this young Irish girl

was simply not an exception, but followed the general rule of people,

whether men or women; she hadn't thought. In the case of the

bricklayers, no editor, either Democrat or Republican, would have

accepted the proffer of a bribe, because he would have known that if he

denounced or ridiculed those men, not only they but all the trades union

men of the city at the next election would vote solidly against the

nominees advocated by that editor. If those collar laundry women had

been voters, they would have held, in that little city of Troy, the

"balance of political power" and the editor or the politician who

ignored or insulted them would have turned that balance over to the

opposing party.

My friends, the condition of those collar laundry women but represents

the utter helplessness of disfranchisement. The question with you, as

men, is not whether you want your wives and daughters to vote, nor with

you, as women, whether you yourselves want to vote; but whether you will

help to put this power of the ballot into the hands of the 3,000,000

wage-earning women, so that they may be able to compel politicians to

legislate in their favor and employers to grant them justice.

The law of capital is to extort the greatest amount of work for the

least amount of money; the rule of labor is to do the smallest amount of

work for the largest amount of money. Hence there is, and in the nature

of things must continue to be, antagonism between the two classes;

therefore, neither should be left wholly at the mercy of the other.

It was cruel, under the old regime, to give rich men the right to rule

poor men. It was wicked to allow white men absolute power over black

men. It is vastly more cruel, more wicked to give to all men--rich and

poor, white and black, native and foreign, educated and ignorant,

virtuous and vicious--this absolute control over women. Men talk of the

injustice of monopolies. There never was, there never can be, a monopoly

so fraught with injustice, tyranny and degradation as this monopoly of

sex, of all men over all women. Therefore I not only agree with Abraham

Lincoln that, "No man is good enough to govern another man without his

consent;" but I say also that no man is good enough to govern a woman

without her consent, and still further, that all men combined in

government are not good enough to govern all women without their

consent. There might have been some plausible excuse for the rich

governing the poor, the educated governing the ignorant, the Saxon

governing the African; but there can be none for making the husband the

ruler of the wife, the brother of the sister, the man of the woman, his

peer in birth, in education, in social position, in all that stands for

the best and highest in humanity.

I believe that by nature men are no more unjust than women. If from the

beginning women had maintained the right to rule not only themselves but

men also, the latter today doubtless would be occupying the subordinate

places with inferior pay in the world of work; women would be holding

the higher positions with the big salaries; widowers would be doomed to

a "life interest of one-third of the family estate;" husbands would "owe

service" to their wives, so that every one of you men would be begging

your good wives, "Please be so kind as to 'give me' ten cents for a

cigar." The principle of self-government can not be violated with

impunity. The individual's right to it is sacred--regardless of class,

caste, race, color, sex or any other accident or incident of birth. What

we ask is that you shall cease to imagine that women are outside this

law, and that you shall come into the knowledge that disfranchisement

means the same degradation to your daughters as to your sons.

Governments can not afford to ignore the rights of those holding the

ballot, who make and unmake every law and law-maker. It is not because

the members of Congress are tyrants that women receive only half pay and

are admitted only to inferior positions in the departments. It is simply

in obedience to a law of political economy which makes it impossible for

a government to do as much for the disfranchised as for the

enfranchised. Women are no exception to the general rule. As

disfranchisement always has degraded men, socially, morally and

industrially, so today it is disfranchisement that degrades women in the

same spheres.

Again men say it is not votes, but the law of supply and demand which

regulates wages. The law of gravity is that water shall run down hill,

but when men build a dam across the stream, the force of gravity is

stopped and the water held back. The law of supply and demand regulates

free and enfranchised labor, but disfranchisement estops its operation.

What we ask is the removal of the dam, that women, like men, may reap

the benefit of the law. Did the law of supply and demand regulate work

and wages in the olden days of slavery? This law can no more reach the

disfranchised than it did the enslaved. There is scarcely a place where

a woman can earn a single dollar without a man's consent.

There are many women equally well qualified with men for principals and

superintendents of schools, and yet, while three-fourths of the teachers

are women, nearly all of them are relegated to subordinate positions on

half or at most two-thirds the salaries paid to men. The law of supply

and demand is ignored, and that of sex alone settles the question. If a

business man should advertise for a book-keeper and ten young men,

equally well qualified, should present themselves and, after looking

them over, he should say, "To you who have red hair, we will pay full

wages, while to you with black hair we will pay half the regular price;"

that would not be a more flagrant violation of the law of supply and

demand than is that now perpetrated upon women because of their sex.

And then again you say, "Capital, not the vote, regulates labor."

Granted, for the sake of the argument, that capital does control the

labor of women, Chinamen and slaves; but no one with eyes to see and

ears to hear, will concede for a moment that capital absolutely

dominates the work and wages of the free and enfranchised men of this

republic. It is in order to lift the millions of our wage-earning women

into a position of as much power over their own labor as men possess

that they should be invested with the franchise. This ought to be done

not only for the sake of justice to the women, but to the men with whom

they compete; for, just so long as there is a degraded class of labor in

the market, it always will be used by the capitalists to checkmate and

undermine the superior classes.

Now that as a result of the agitation for equality of chances, and

through the invention of machinery, there has come a great revolution in

the world of economics, so that wherever a man may go to earn an honest

dollar a woman may go also, there is no escape from the conclusion that

she must be clothed with equal power to protect herself. That power is

the ballot, the symbol of freedom and equality, without which no citizen

is sure of keeping even that which he hath, much less of getting that

which he hath not. Women are today the peers of men in education, in the

arts and sciences, in the industries and professions, and there is no

escape from the conclusion that the next step must be to make them the

peers of men in the government--city, State and national--to give them

an equal voice in the framing, interpreting and administering of the

codes and constitutions.

We recognize that the ballot is a two-edged, nay, a many-edged sword,

which may be made to cut in every direction. If wily politicians and

sordid capitalists may wield it for mere party and personal greed; if

oppressed wage-earners may invoke it to wring justice from legislators

and extort material advantages from employers; if the lowest and most

degraded classes of men may use it to open wide the sluice-ways of vice

and crime; if it may be the instrumentality by which the narrow,

selfish, corrupt and corrupting men and measures rule--it is quite as

true that noble-minded statesmen, philanthropists and reformers may make

it the weapon with which to reverse the above order of things, as soon

as they can have added to their now small numbers the immensely larger

ratio of what men so love to call "the better half of the people." When

women vote, they will make a new balance of power that must be weighed

and measured and calculated in its effect upon every social and moral

question which goes to the arbitrament of the ballot-box. Who can doubt

that when the representative women of thought and culture, who are today

the moral backbone of our nation, sit in counsel with the best men of

the country, higher conditions will be the result?

Insurrectionary and revolutionary methods of righting wrongs, imaginary

or real, are pardonable only in the enslaved and disfranchised. The

moment any class of men possess the ballot, it is their weapon and their

shield. Men with a vote have no valid excuse for resorting to the use of

illegal means to fight their battles. When the masses of wage-earning

men are educated into a knowledge of their own rights and of their

duties to others, so that they are able to vote intelligently, they can

carry their measures through the ballot-box and will have no need to

resort to force. But so long as they remain in ignorance and are

manipulated by the political bosses they will continue to vote against

their own interests and turn again to violence to right their wrongs.

If men possessing the power of the ballot are driven to desperate means

to gain their ends, what shall be done by disfranchised women? There are

grave questions of moral, as well as of material interest in which women

are most deeply concerned. Denied the ballot, the legitimate means with

which to exert their influence, and, as a rule, being lovers of peace,

they have recourse to prayers and tears, those potent weapons of women

and children, and, when they fail, must tamely submit to wrong or rise

in rebellion against the powers that be. Women's crusades against

saloons, brothels and gambling-dens, emptying kegs and bottles into the

streets, breaking doors and windows and burning houses, all go to prove

that disfranchisement, the denial of lawful means to gain desired ends,

may drive even women to violations of law and order. Hence to secure

both national and "domestic tranquillity," to "establish justice," to

carry out the spirit of our Constitution, put into the hands of all

women, as you have into those of all men, the ballot, that symbol of

perfect equality, that right protective of all other rights.

CHAPTER XXVII--PAGE 468.

SOCIAL PURITY.

_First delivered at Chicago in the Spring of 1875, in the Sunday

afternoon Dime lecture course._

Though women, as a class, are much less addicted to drunkenness and

licentiousness than men, it is universally conceded that they are by far

the greater sufferers from these evils. Compelled by their position in

society to depend on men for subsistence, for food, clothes, shelter,

for every chance even to earn a dollar, they have no way of escape from

the besotted victims of appetite and passion with whom their lot is

cast. They must endure, if not endorse, these twin vices, embodied, as

they so often are, in the person of father, brother, husband, son,

employer. No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous

woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral

husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical

abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man

himself can not possibly comprehend.

It is not my purpose to harrow your feelings by any attempt at depicting

the horrible agonies of mind and body that grow out of these monster

social evils. They are already but too well known. Scarce a family

throughout our broad land but has had its peace and happiness marred by

one or the other, or both. That these evils exist, we all know; that

something must be done, we as well know; that the old methods have

failed, that man, alone, has proved himself incompetent to eradicate, or

even regulate them, is equally evident. It shall be my endeavor,

therefore, to prove to you that we must now adopt new measures and bring

to our aid new forces to accomplish the desired end.

Forty years' efforts by men alone to suppress the evil of intemperance

give us the following appalling figures: 600,000 common drunkards!

Which, reckoning our population to be 40,000,000, gives us one drunkard

to every seventeen moderate drinking and total-abstinence men. Granting

to each of these 600,000 drunkards a wife and four children, we have

3,000,000 of the women and children of this nation helplessly,

hopelessly bound to this vast army of irresponsible victims of appetite.

[Reference was here made to woman's helplessness under the laws.]

The roots of the giant evil, intemperance, are not merely moral and

social; they extend deep and wide into the financial and political

structure of the government; and whenever women, or men, shall

intelligently and seriously set themselves about the work of uprooting

the liquor traffic, they will find something more than tears and prayers

needful to the task. Financial and political power must be combined

with moral and social influence, all bound together in one earnest,

energetic, persistent force.

[Statistics given of pauperism, lunacy, idiocy and crime growing

out of intemperance.]

The prosecutions in our courts for breach of promise, divorce, adultery,

bigamy, seduction, rape; the newspaper reports every day of every year

of scandals and outrages, of wife murders and paramour shootings, of

abortions and infanticides, are perpetual reminders of men's incapacity

to cope successfully with this monster evil of society.

The statistics of New York show the number of professional prostitutes

in that city to be over twenty thousand. Add to these the thousands and

tens of thousands of Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, New Orleans, St.

Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and all our cities, great and small, from

ocean to ocean, and what a holocaust of the womanhood of this nation is

sacrificed to the insatiate Moloch of lust. And yet more: those myriads

of wretched women, publicly known as prostitutes, constitute but a small

portion of the numbers who actually tread the paths of vice and crime.

For, as the oft-broken ranks of the vast army of common drunkards are

steadily filled by the boasted moderate drinkers, so are the ranks of

professional prostitution continually replenished by discouraged,

seduced, deserted unfortunates, who can no longer hide the terrible

secret of their lives.

The Albany Law Journal, of December, 1876, says: "The laws of

infanticide must be a dead letter in the District of Columbia. According

to the reports of the local officials, the dead bodies of infants,

still-born and murdered, which have been found during the past year,

scattered over parks and vacant lots in the city of Washington, are to

be numbered by hundreds."

In 1869 the Catholics established a Foundling Hospital in New York City.

At the close of the first six months Sister Irene reported thirteen

hundred little waifs laid in the basket at her door. That meant thirteen

hundred of the daughters of New York, with trembling hands and breaking

hearts, trying to bury their sorrow and their shame from the world's

cruel gaze. That meant thirteen hundred mothers' hopes blighted and

blasted. Thirteen hundred Rachels weeping for their children because

they were not!

Nor is it womanhood alone that is thus fearfully sacrificed. For every

betrayed woman, there is always the betrayer, man. For every abandoned

woman, there is always _one_ abandoned man and oftener many more. It is

estimated that there are 50,000 professional prostitutes in London, and

Dr. Ryan calculates that there are 400,000 men in that city directly or

indirectly connected with them, and that this vice causes the city an

annual expenditure of $40,000,000.

All attempts to describe the loathsome and contagious disease which it

engenders defy human language. The Rev. Wm. G. Eliot, of St. Louis, says

of it: "Few know of the terrible nature of the disease in question and

its fearful ravages, not only among the guilty, but the innocent. Since

its first recognized appearance in Europe in the fifteenth century, it

has been a desolation and a scourge. In its worst forms it is so subtle,

that its course can with difficulty be traced. It poisons the

constitution, and may be imparted to others by those who have no outward

or distinguishable marks of it themselves. It may be propagated months

and years after it seems to have been cured. The purity of womanhood and

the helplessness of infancy afford no certainty of escape."

[Medical testimony given from cities in Europe.]

Man's legislative attempts to set back this fearful tide of social

corruption have proved even more futile and disastrous than have those

for the suppression of intemperance--as witness the Contagious Diseases

Acts of England and the St. Louis experiment. And yet efforts to

establish similar laws are constantly made in our large cities, New York

and Washington barely escaping last winter.

To license certain persons to keep brothels and saloons is but to throw

around them and their traffic the shield of law, and thereby to blunt

the edge of all moral and social efforts against them. Nevertheless, in

every large city, brothels are virtually licensed. When "Maggie Smith"

is made to appear before the police court at the close of each quarter,

to pay her fine of $10, $25 or $100, as an inmate or a keeper of a

brothel, and allowed to continue her vocation, so long as she pays her

fine, _that is license_. When a grand jury fails to find cause for

indictment against a well-known keeper of a house of ill-fame, that,

too, is _permission_ for her and all of her class to follow their trade,

against the statute laws of the State, and that with impunity.

The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the

penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this

violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it. These causes

are said to be wholly different with the sexes. The acknowledged

incentive to this vice on the part of man is his own abnormal passion;

while on the part of woman, in the great majority of cases, it is

conceded to be destitution--absolute want of the necessaries of life.

Lecky, the famous historian of European morals, says: "The statistics of

prostitution show that a great proportion of those women who have fallen

into it have been impelled by the most extreme poverty, in many

instances verging on starvation." All other conscientious students of

this terrible problem, on both continents, agree with Mr. Lecky. Hence,

there is no escape from the conclusion that, while woman's want of bread

induces her to pursue this vice, man's love of the vice itself leads him

into it and holds him there. While statistics show no lessening of the

passional demand on the part of man, they reveal a most frightful

increase of the temptations, the necessities, on the part of woman.

In the olden times, when the daughters of the family, as well as the

wife, were occupied with useful and profitable work in the household,

getting the meals and washing the dishes three times in every day of

every year, doing the baking, the brewing, the washing and the ironing,

the whitewashing, the butter and cheese and soap making, the mending and

the making of clothes for the entire family, the carding, spinning and

weaving of the cloth--when everything to eat, to drink and to wear was

manufactured in the home, almost no young women "went out to work." But

now, when nearly all these handicrafts are turned over to men and to

machinery, tens of thousands, nay, millions, of the women of both

hemispheres are thrust into the world's outer market of work to earn

their own subsistence. Society, ever slow to change its conditions,

presents to these millions but few and meager chances. Only the barest

necessaries, and oftentimes not even those, can be purchased with the

proceeds of the most excessive and exhausting labor.

Hence, the reward of virtue for the homeless, friendless, penniless

woman is ever a scanty larder, a pinched, patched, faded wardrobe, a

dank basement or rickety garret, with the colder, shabbier scorn and

neglect of the more fortunate of her sex. Nightly, as weary and worn

from her day's toil she wends her way through the dark alleys toward her

still darker abode, where only cold and hunger await her, she sees on

every side and at every turn the gilded hand of vice and crime

outstretched, beckoning her to food and clothes and shelter; hears the

whisper in softest accents, "Come with me and I will give you all the

comforts, pleasures and luxuries that love and wealth can bestow." Since

the vast multitudes of human beings, women like men, are not born to the

courage or conscience of the martyr, can we wonder that so many poor

girls fall, that so many accept material ease and comfort at the expense

of spiritual purity and peace? Should we not wonder, rather, that so

many escape the sad fate?

Clearly, then, the first step toward solving this problem is to lift

this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above

the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves, in marriage or out,

for bread and shelter. To do that, girls, like boys, must be educated to

some lucrative employment; women, like men, must have equal chances to

earn a living. If the plea that poverty is the cause of woman's

prostitution be not true, perfect equality of chances to earn honest

bread will demonstrate the falsehood by removing that pretext and

placing her on the same plane with man. Then, if she is found in the

ranks of vice and crime, she will be there for the same reason that man

is and, from an object of pity, she, like him, will become a fit subject

of contempt. From being the party sinned against, she will become an

equal sinner, if not the greater of the two. Women, like men, must not

only have "fair play" in the world of work and self-support, but, like

men, must be eligible to all the honors and emoluments of society and

government. Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a

necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way

to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the

making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life. That

equality of rights and privileges is vested in the ballot, the symbol of

power in a republic. Hence, our first and most urgent demand--that women

shall be protected in the exercise of their inherent, personal,

citizen's right to a voice in the government, municipal, state,

national.

Alexander Hamilton said one hundred years ago, "Give to a man the right

over my subsistence, and he has power over my whole moral being." No one

doubts the truth of this assertion as between man and man; while, as

between man and woman, not only does almost no one believe it, but the

masses of people deny it. And yet it is the fact of man's possession of

this right over woman's subsistence which gives to him the power to

dictate to her a moral code vastly higher and purer than the one he

chooses for himself. Not less true is it, that the fact of woman's

dependence on man for her subsistence renders her utterly powerless to

exact from him the same high moral code she chooses for herself.

Of the 8,000,000 women over twenty-one years of age in the United

States, 800,000, one out of every ten, are unmarried, and fully one-half

of the entire number, or 4,000,000, support themselves wholly or in part

by the industry of their own hands and brains. All of these, married or

single, have to ask man, as an individual, a corporation, or a

government, to grant to them even the privilege of hard work and small

pay. The tens of thousands of poor but respectable young girls

soliciting copying, clerkships, shop work, teaching, must ask of men,

and not seldom receive in response, "Why work for a living? There are

other ways!"

Whoever controls work and wages, controls morals. Therefore, we must

have women employers, superintendents, committees, legislators; wherever

girls go to seek the means of subsistence, there must be some woman.

Nay, more; we must have women preachers, lawyers, doctors--that wherever

women go to seek counsel--spiritual, legal, physical--there, too, they

will be sure to find the best and noblest of their own sex to minister

to them.

Independence is happiness. "No man should depend upon another; not even

upon his own father. By depend I mean, obey without examination--to the

will of any one whomsoever." This is the conclusion to which Pierre, the

hero of Madame Sand's "Monsieur Sylvestre," arrives, after running away

from the uncle who had determined to marry him to a woman he did not

choose to wed. In freedom he discovers that, though deprived of all the

luxuries to which he had been accustomed, he is happy, and writes his

friend that "without having realized it, he had been unhappy all his

life; had suffered from his dependent condition; that nothing in his

life, his pleasures, his occupations, had been of his own choice." And

is not this the precise condition of what men call the "better half" of

the human family?

In one of our western cities I once met a beautiful young woman, a

successful teacher in its public schools, an only daughter who had left

her New England home and all its comforts and luxuries and culture. Her

father was a member of Congress and could bring to her all the

attractions of Washington society. That young girl said to me, "The

happiest moment of my life was when I received into my hand my first

month's salary for teaching." Not long after, I met her father in

Washington, spoke to him of his noble daughter, and he said: "Yes, you

woman's rights people have robbed me of my only child and left the home

of my old age sad and desolate. Would to God that the notion of

supporting herself had never entered her head!" Had that same lovely,

cultured, energetic young girl left the love, the luxury, the protection

of that New England home for marriage, instead of self-support; had she

gone out to be the light and joy of a husband's life, instead of her

own; had she but chosen another man, instead of her father, to decide

for her all her pleasures and occupations; had she but taken another

position of dependence, instead of one of independence, neither her

father nor the world would have felt the change one to be condemned....

Fathers should be most particular about the men who visit their

daughters, and, to further this reform, pure women not only must refuse

to meet intimately and to marry impure men, but, finding themselves

deceived in their husbands, they must refuse to continue in the

marriage relation with them. We have had quite enough of the sickly

sentimentalism which counts the woman a heroine and a saint for

remaining the wife of a drunken, immoral husband, incurring the risk of

her own health and poisoning the life-blood of the young beings that

result from this unholy alliance. Such company as ye keep, such ye are!

must be the maxim of married, as well as unmarried, women....

[Numerous instances cited of the unjust discrimination against

women where men were equally guilty.]

So long as the wife is held innocent in continuing to live with a

libertine, and every girl whom he inveigles and betrays becomes an

outcast whom no other wife will tolerate in her house, there is, there

can be, no hope of solving the problem of prostitution. As long

experience has shown, these poor, homeless girls of the world can not be

relied on, as a police force, to hold all husbands true to their

marriage vows. Here and there, they will fail and, where they do, wives

must make not the girls alone, but their husbands also suffer for their

infidelity, as husbands never fail to do when their wives weakly or

wickedly yield to the blandishments of other men.

[Examples given to prove this point.]

In a western city the wives conspired to burn down a house of ill-fame

in which their husbands had placed a half-dozen of the demi-monde. Would

it not have shown much more womanly wisdom and virtue for those legal

wives to have refused to recognize their husbands, instead of wreaking

their vengeance on the heads of those wretched women? But how could they

without finding themselves, as a result, penniless and homeless? The

person, the services, the children, the subsistence, of each and every

one of those women belonged by law, not to herself, but to her

unfaithful husband.

Now, why is it that man can hold woman to this high code of morals, like

Caesar's wife--not only pure but above suspicion--and so surely and

severely punish her for every departure, while she is so helpless, so

powerless to check him in his license, or to extricate herself from his

presence and control? His power grows out of his right over her

subsistence. Her lack of power grows out of her dependence on him for

her food, her clothes, her shelter.

Marriage never will cease to be a wholly unequal partnership until the

law recognizes the equal ownership in the joint earnings and

possessions. The true relation of the sexes never can be attained until

woman is free and equal with man. Neither in the making nor executing of

the laws regulating these relations has woman ever had the slightest

voice. The statutes for marriage and divorce, for adultery, breach of

promise, seduction, rape, bigamy, abortion, infanticide--all were made

by men. They, alone, decide who are guilty of violating these laws and

what shall be their punishment, with judge, jury and advocate all men,

with no woman's voice heard in our courts, save as accused or witness,

and in many cases the married woman is denied the poor privilege of

testifying as to her own guilt or innocence of the crime charged against

her.

Since the days of Moses and the prophets, men and ministers have

preached the law of "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the

children and the children's children, to the third and fourth

generations." But with absolute power over woman and all the conditions

of life for the whole 6,000 years, man has proved his utter inability

either to put away his own iniquities, or to cease to hand them down

from generation to generation; hence, the only hope of reform is in

sharing this absolute power with some other than himself, and that other

must be woman. When no longer a subject, but an equal--a free and

independent sovereign, believing herself created primarily for her own

individual happiness and development and secondarily for man's,

precisely as man believes himself created first for his own enjoyment

and second for that of woman--she will constitute herself sole umpire in

the sacred domain of motherhood. Then, instead of feeling it her

Christian duty to live with a drunken, profligate husband, handing down

to her children his depraved appetites and passions, she will _know_

that God's curse will be upon her and her children if she flee not from

him as from a pestilence.

It is worse than folly, it is madness, for women to delude themselves

with the idea that their children will escape the terrible penalty of

the law. The taint of their birth will surely follow them. For pure

women to continue to devote themselves to their man-appointed mission of

visiting the dark purlieus of society and struggling to reclaim the

myriads of badly-born human beings swarming there, is as hopeless as

would be an attempt to ladle the ocean with a teaspoon; as

unphilosophical as was the undertaking of the old American Colonization

Society, which, with great labor and pains and money, redeemed from

slavery and transported to Liberia annually 400 negroes; or the Fugitive

Slave Societies, which succeeded in running off to Canada, on their

"under-ground railroads," some 40,000 in a whole quarter of a century.

While those good men were thus toiling to rescue the 400 or the 40,000

individual victims of slavery, each day saw hundreds and each year

thousands of human beings born into the terrible condition of

chattelism. All see and admit now what none but the Abolitionists saw

then, that the only effectual work was the entire overthrow of the

system of slavery; the abrogation of the law which sanctioned the right

of property in man.

In answer to my proposal to speak in one of the cities of Iowa, an

earnest woman replied, "It is impossible to get you an audience; all of

our best women are at present engaged in an effort to establish a 'Home

for the Friendless.' All the churches are calling for the entire time of

their members to get up fairs, dinners, concerts, etc., to raise money.

In fact, even our woman suffragists are losing themselves in devotion to

some institution."

Thus, wherever you go, you find the best women, in and out of the

churches, all absorbed in establishing or maintaining benevolent or

reform institutions; charitable societies, soup-houses, ragged schools,

industrial schools, mite societies, mission schools--at home and

abroad--homes and hospitals for the sick, the aged, the friendless, the

foundling, the fallen; asylums for the orphans, the blind, the deaf and

dumb, the insane, the inebriate, the idiot. The women of this century

are neither idle nor indifferent. They are working with might and main

to mitigate the evils which stare them in the face on every side, but

much of their work is without knowledge. It is aimed at the effects, not

the cause; it is plucking the spoiled fruit; it is lopping off the

poisonous branches of the deadly upas tree, which but makes the root

more vigorous in sending out new shoots in every direction. A right

understanding of physiological law teaches us that the cause must be

removed; the tree must be girdled; the tap-root must be severed.

The tap-root of our social upas lies deep down at the very foundations

of society. It is woman's dependence. It is woman's subjection. Hence,

the first and only efficient work must be to emancipate woman from her

enslavement. The wife must no longer echo the poet Milton's ideal Eve,

when she adoringly said to Adam, "God, thy law; thou, mine!" She must

feel herself accountable to God alone for every act, fearing and obeying

no man, save where his will is in line with her own highest idea of

divine law.

The president of the Howard Mission School, New York, said, "Miss

Anthony, it is a marvel to me that, with so much brain and common sense,

you should always devote yourself to mere abstractions. Why is it that

you never set yourself about some practical work?"

"Like the Howard Mission?" said I. "How many less children have you now

than ten years ago?"

"Oh, no less, but many, many more."

"Would it not be a practical work, then, to make it possible for every

mother to support her own children? That is my aim and my work; while

yours is simply to pick up the poor children, leaving every girl-child

to the mother's heritage of helpless poverty and vice. My aim is to

change the condition of women to self-help; yours, simply to ameliorate

the ills that must inevitably grow out of dependence. My work is to

lessen the numbers of the poor; yours, merely to lessen the sufferings

of their tenfold increase."

If the divine law visits the sins of the fathers upon the children,

equally so does it transmit to them their virtues. Therefore, if it is

through woman's ignorant subjection to the tyranny of man's appetites

and passions that the life-current of the race is corrupted, then must

it be through her intelligent emancipation that the race shall be

redeemed from the curse, and her children and children's children rise

up to call her blessed. When the mother of Christ shall be made the true

model of womanhood and motherhood, when the office of maternity shall be

held sacred and the mother shall consecrate herself, as did Mary, to the

one idea of bringing forth the Christ-child, then, and not till then,

will this earth see a new order of men and women, prone to good rather

than evil.

I am a full and firm believer in the revelation that it is through woman

that the race is to be redeemed. And it is because of this faith that I

ask for her immediate and unconditional emancipation from all political,

industrial, social and religious subjection.

"What is most needed to ensure the future greatness of the empire?"

inquired Madame Campan of the great Napoleon. "Mothers!" was the terse

and suggestive reply. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Men are what their

mothers made them." But I say, to hold mothers responsible for the

character of their sons while you deny them any control over the

surroundings of their lives, is worse than mockery, it is cruelty!

Responsibilities grow out of rights and powers. Therefore, before

mothers can be held responsible for the vices and crimes, the wholesale

demoralization of men, they must possess all possible rights and powers

to control the conditions and circumstances of their own and their

children's lives.

A minister of Chicago sums up the infamies of that great metropolis of

the West as follows: 3,000 licensed dram-shops and myriad patrons; 300

gambling houses and countless frequenters, many of them young men from

the best families of the city; 79 obscene theatres, with their thousands

of degraded men and boys nightly in attendance; 500 brothels, with their

thousands of poor girls, bodies and souls sacrificed to the 20,000 or

30,000 depraved men--young and old, married and single--who visit them.

While all the participants in all these forms of iniquity, victims and

victimizers alike--the women excepted--may go to the polls on every

election day and vote for the mayor and members of the common council,

who will either continue to license these places, or fail to enforce the

laws which would practically close them--not a single woman in that city

may record her vote against those wretched blots on civilization. The

profane, tobacco-chewing, whiskey-drinking, gambling libertines may

vote, but not their virtuous, intelligent, sober, law-abiding wives and

mothers!

You remember the petition of 18,000 of the best women of Chicago, a year

ago, asking the common council not to repeal the Sunday Liquor Law? Why

were they treated with ridicule and contempt? Why was their prayer

unheeded? Was it because the honorable gentlemen had no respect for

those women or their demand? No; on the contrary, many of them,

doubtless, were men possessed of high regard for women, who would have

been glad to aid them in their noble efforts; but the power that placed

those men in office, the representatives of the saloons, brothels and

obscene shows, crowded the council chamber and its corridors,

threatening political death to the man who should dare give his voice or

his vote for the maintenance of that law. Could those 18,000 women, with

the tens of thousands whom they represented, have gone to the ballot-box

at the next election and voted to re-elect the men who championed their

petition, and defeat those who opposed it, does any one doubt that it

would have been heeded by the common council?

As the fountain can rise no higher than the spring that feeds it, so a

legislative body will enact or enforce no law above the average

sentiment of the people who created it. Any and every reform work is

sure to lead women to the ballot-box. It is idle for them to hope to

battle successfully against the monster evils of society until they

shall be armed with weapons equal to those of the enemy--votes and

money. Archimedes said, "Give to me a fulcrum on which to plant my

lever, and I will move the world." And I say, give to woman the ballot,

the political fulcrum, on which to plant her moral lever, and she will

lift the world into a nobler and purer atmosphere.

Two great necessities forced this nation to extend justice and equality

to the negro:

First, Military necessity, which compelled the abolition of the crime

and curse of slavery, before the rebellion could be overcome.

Second, Political necessity, which required the enfranchisement of the

newly-freed men, before the work of reconstruction could begin.

The third is now pressing, Moral necessity--to emancipate woman, before

Social Purity, the nation's safeguard, ever can be established.

CHAPTER XXXV--PAGE 642.

OPEN LETTER TO BENJAMIN HARRISON,

_Republican Nominee for President._

INDIANAPOLIS, IND., June 30, 1888.

DEAR SIR: We, representatives of the National Woman Suffrage

Association, respectfully ask you to consider the following facts:

The first plank in the platform adopted by the Republican convention

recently held in Chicago, entitled "The Purity of the Ballot," reaffirms

the unswerving devotion of the Republican party to the personal rights

and liberties of citizens in all the States and Territories of the

Union, and especially to "the supreme and sovereign right of every

lawful citizen, rich or poor, native or foreign, white or black, to cast

one free ballot in public elections and to have that ballot duly

counted." And again the platform says: "We hold the free and honest

popular ballot, and the just and equal representation of all the people,

to be the foundation of our republican government."

These declarations place the Republican party in its original attitude

as the defender of the personal freedom and political liberties of all

citizens of the United States. These sentiments, even the phraseology in

which they are here expressed, may be found in every series of

resolutions adopted by the National Woman Suffrage Association since its

organization.

The advocates of woman suffrage would have been glad to see the phrase

"male or female" inserted after the phrase "white or black" in the

resolution above quoted, because this would be a fitting conclusion to

the enumeration by antithesis of the classes into which citizens are

divided. However, no enumeration of classes was necessary to explain or

to enforce the declaration of the party's devotion to "the supreme and

sovereign right of every lawful citizen to cast one free ballot in

public elections and to have that ballot duly counted." It is the

unimpeded exercise of this "supreme and sovereign right of every lawful

citizen" which the women we represent demand.

That women are "lawful citizens" is undeniable, since the law recognizes

them as such through the visits of the assessor and tax-gatherer; since

it recognizes them as such in the police stations, the jails, the courts

and the prisons. Only at the ballot-box is the lawful citizenship of

women challenged! Only at the ballot-box, which is declared to be the

sole safe-guard of the citizen's liberty--only there is the liberty of

the female citizen denied.

But reverting to the first resolution in the Republican platform, so

satisfactory in its sentiments, we beg to suggest that its value will

depend solely upon its interpretation, and that its authoritative

interpretation must be given by the leaders of the Republican party.

Therefore to you, the chosen head of that party, we address ourselves,

asking that your letter of acceptance of the nomination to the

presidency of the United States be so framed as to indicate clearly your

recognition of the fact that the Republican party has pledged itself to

protect _every citizen_ in the free exercise of "the supreme and

sovereign right" to vote at public elections.

It appears to us that the application of Republican principles which we

seek must be in harmony with your own inherited tendencies. One familiar

with the history of the English-speaking people, during the last two and

a half centuries, with their struggles for conscience, and freedom's

sake, must deem it a matter of course that by this time the sense of

individual responsibility has become strong even in the hearts of women;

and the descendant of one who in the name of individual liberty stood

with Cromwell against the "divine right of kings" and the tyranny

consequent upon that obnoxious doctrine, can not be surprised to find

himself appealed to by his country-women, in that same sacred name, to

stand with the most enlightened portion of his party--with such men as

Morton, Sumner and Lincoln--against the divine right of sex and the

political tyranny involved in this doctrine, which in a republic

presents such an anomaly.

Hoping that the question suggested by this appeal will command from you

the attention which its importance merits, we subscribe ourselves,

Yours with high esteem,

SUSAN B. ANTHONY,

_Vice-President-at-Large N. W. S. A._

MAY WRIGHT SEWALL,

_Chairman Executive Committee N. W. S. A._

CHAPTER XLIII--PAGE 785.

DEMAND FOR PARTY RECOGNITION.

_Delivered in Kansas City at the opening of the campaign, May 4, 1894._

I come to you tonight not as a stranger, not as an outsider but, in

spirit and in every sense, as one of you. I have been connected with you

by the ties of relationship for nearly forty years. Twenty-seven years

ago I canvassed this entire State of Kansas in your first woman suffrage

campaign. During the last decade I have made a speaking tour of your

congressional districts over and over again. Now I come once more to

appeal to you for justice to the women of your State.

To preface, I want to say that when the rebellion broke out in this

country, we of the woman suffrage movement postponed our meetings, and

organized ourselves into a great National Women's Loyal League with

headquarters in the city of New York. We sent out thousands of petitions

praying Congress to abolish slavery, as a war measure, and to these

petitions we obtained 365,000 signatures. They were presented by Charles

Sumner, that noblest Republican of them all, and it took two stalwart

negroes to carry them into the Senate chamber. We did our work

faithfully all those years. Other women scraped lint, made jellies,

ministered to sick and suffering soldiers and in every way worked for

the help of the government in putting down that rebellion. No man, no

Republican leader, worked more faithfully or loyally than did the women

of this nation in every city and county of the North to aid the

government.

In 1865 I made my first visit to Kansas and, on the 2d of July, went by

stage from Leavenworth to Topeka. O, how I remember those first acres

and miles of cornfields I ever had seen; how I remember that ride to

Topeka and from there in an open mail wagon to Ottumwa, where I was one

of the speakers at the Fourth of July celebration. Those were the days,

as you recollect, just after the murder of Lincoln and the accession to

the presidential chair of Andrew Johnson, who had issued his

proclamation for the reconstruction of Mississippi. So the question of

the negro's enfranchisement was uppermost in the minds of leading

Republicans, though no one save Charles Sumner had dared to speak it

aloud. In that speech, I clearly stated that the government never would

be reconstructed, that peace never would reign and justice never be

uppermost until not only the black men were enfranchised but also the

women of the entire nation. The men congratulated me upon my speech, the

first part of it, every word I said about negro suffrage, but declared

that I should not have mentioned woman suffrage at so critical an hour.

A little later the Associated Press dispatch came that motions had been

made on the floor of the House of Representatives at Washington to

insert the word "male" in the second clause of the Fourteenth

Amendment. You remember the first clause, "All persons born or

naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction

thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they

reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the

privileges and immunities of citizens." That was magnificent. Every

woman of us saw that it included the women of the nation as well as

black men. The second section, as Thaddeus Stevens drew it, said, "If

any State shall disfranchise any of its citizens on account of color,

all that class shall be counted out of the basis of representation;" but

at once the enemy asked, "Do you mean that if any State shall

disfranchise its negro women, you are going to count all of the black

race out of the basis of representation?" And weak-kneed Republicans,

after having fought such a glorious battle, surrendered; they could not

stand the taunt. Charles Sumner said he wrote over nineteen pages of

foolscap in order to keep the word "male" out of the Constitution; but

he could not do it so he with the rest subscribed to the amendment: "If

any State shall disfranchise any of its MALE citizens all of that class

shall be counted out of the basis of representation."

There was the first great surrender and, in all those years of

reconstruction, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great leader of our woman

suffrage movement, declared that because the Republicans were willing to

sacrifice the enfranchisement of the women of the nation they would lose

eventually the power to protect the black man in his right to vote. But

the leaders of the Republican party shouted back to us, "Keep silence,

this is the negro's hour." Even our glorious Wendell Phillips, who said,

"To talk to a black man of freedom without the ballot is mockery,"

joined in the cry, "This is the negro's hour;" but we never yielded the

point that, "To talk to women of freedom without the ballot is mockery

also." But timidity, cowardice and want of principle carried forward the

reconstruction of the government with the women left out.

Then came in 1867 the submission by your Kansas legislature of three

amendments to your constitution: That all men who had served in the

rebel army should be disfranchised; that all black men should be

enfranchised; and that all women should be enfranchised. The Democrats

held their State convention and resolved they would have nothing to do

with that "modern fanaticism of woman's rights." The Germans held a

meeting in Lawrence, and denounced this "new-fangled idea." The

Republicans held their State convention and resolved to be "neutral."

And they were neutral precisely as England was neutral in the rebellion.

While England declared neutrality, she allowed the _Shenandoah_, the

_Alabama_ and other pirate ships to be fitted up in her ports to maraud

the seas and capture American vessels. The fact was not a single stump

speaker appointed by the Republican committee advocated the woman

suffrage amendment and, more than this, all spoke against it.

Then, of course, we had to make a woman suffrage campaign through the

months of September and October. We did our best. Everywhere we had

splendid audiences and I think we had a larger ratio of men in those

olden times than we have nowadays. Election day came, that 5th day of

November, 1867, when 9,070 men voted yes, and over 18,000 voted no. On

the negro suffrage amendment, 10,500 voted yes and the remainder voted

no. Both amendments were lost. All the political power of the national

and State Republican party was brought to bear to induce every man to

vote for negro suffrage; on the other hand, all the enginery and power

of the Republican, as well as of the Democratic party, were against us;

and many were so ignorant they absolutely believed that to vote for

woman suffrage was to vote against the negro. It was exactly like

declaring here tonight that if every woman in this house should fill her

lungs with oxygen, she would rob all you men of enough to fill yours.

Nobody is robbed by letting everybody have equal rights.

Since 1867 seven other States have submitted the question. Let me run

them over.

[Miss Anthony then gave a graphic description of the campaigns in

Michigan, 1874; Colorado, 1877; Nebraska, 1882; Oregon, 1884; Rhode

Island, 1886; Washington, 1889; South Dakota, 1890; all of which

failed for lack of support from the political platforms, editors

and speakers.]

But at last in Colorado, in the second campaign, we won by the popular

vote, _gained through party endorsement_, the enfranchisement of women.

During the summer of 1893 nearly every Republican and Populist and not a

few Democratic county conventions put approving planks in their

platforms. When the fall campaign opened every stump orator was

authorized to speak favorably upon the subject; no man could oppose it

unless he ran counter to the principles laid down in his party platform.

That made it a truly educational campaign to all the voters of the

State. A word to the wise is sufficient. Let every man who wants the

suffrage amendment carried, demand a full and hearty endorsement of the

measure by his political party, be it Democrat, Republican, Populist or

Prohibition, so that Kansas shall win as did her neighbor State,

Colorado.

The Republicans of Kansas made the Prohibition amendment a party measure

in 1880. After they secured the law they had planks in their platform

for its enforcement from year to year, until they were tired of fighting

the liquor dealers, backed by the Democrats in the State and on the

borders. They wearied of being taunted with the fact that they had not

the power to enforce the law. Then in 1887 they gave municipal suffrage

to women as a sheer party necessity. Just as much as it was a necessity

of the Republicans in reconstruction days to enfranchise the negroes, so

was it a political necessity in the State of Kansas to enfranchise the

women, because they needed a new balance of power to help them elect and

re-elect officers who would enforce the law. Where else could they go to

get that balance? Every man in the State, native and foreign, drunk and

sober, outside of the penitentiary, the idiot and lunatic asylums,

already had the right to vote. They had nobody left but the women. As a

last resort the Republicans, by a straight party vote, extended

municipal suffrage to women.

This political power was put into the hands of the women of this State

by the old Republican party with its magnificent majorities--82,000, you

remember, the last time you bragged. It was before you had the quarrel

and division in the family; it was by that grand old party, solid as it

was in those bygone days!

Last year, and two years ago, after the People's party was organized,

when their State convention was held, and also when the Republican

convention was held, each put a plank in its platform declaring that the

time had come for the submission of a proposition for full suffrage to

women. What then could the women infer but that such action meant

political help in carrying this amendment? If I had not believed this I

never would have come to the State and given my voice in twenty-five or

thirty political meetings, reminding the Republicans what a grand and

glorious record they had made, not only in the enfranchisement of the

black men but in furnishing all the votes on the floor of Congress ever

given for women's enfranchisement there, and in extending municipal

suffrage to the women of Kansas. I have vowed, from the time I began to

see that woman suffrage could be carried only through party help, that I

never would lend my influence to either of the two dominant parties that

did not have a woman suffrage plank in its platform.

I consider, by every pledge of the past, by the passage of the

resolution through the legislature when the representatives of the two

parties, the People's and Republican, vied with each other to see who

would give the largest majority, that both promised to make this a party

measure and I speak tonight to the two parties as the old Republican

party. You are not the same men altogether, but you are the descendants,

the children, of that party; and I am here tonight, and have come all

the way from my home, to beg you to stand by the principles which have

made you great and strong, and to finish the work you have so nobly

begun.

The Republicans are to have their State convention the 6th of June. I

shall be ashamed if the telegraph wires flash the word over the country,

"No pledge for the amendment," as was flashed from the Republican League

the other day. Should this happen, as I have heard intimated, and there

is a woman in the State of Kansas who has any affiliation with the

Republican party, any sympathy with it, who will float its banner after

it shall have thus failed to redeem its pledge, I will disown her; she

is not one of my sort.

The Populist convention is to be held the 12th of June. If it should

shirk its responsibility, and not put a strong suffrage plank in its

platform, pledging itself to use all its educational powers and all its

party machinery to carry the amendment, then I shall have no respect for

any woman who will speak or work for its success.

The Democrats have declared their purpose. They are going to fight us.

What does the good Book say? "He that is not for me is against me." We

know where the Democratic party is, it is against us. If the Republican

and People's parties say nothing for us, they say and do everything

against us. No plank will be equivalent to saying to every woman

suffrage Republican and Populist speaker, "You must not advocate this

amendment, for to do so will lose us the whisky vote, it will lose us

the foreign vote." Hence, no plank means no word for us, and no word for

us means no vote for us. But while no word can be spoken in favor, every

campaign orator, as in 1867, is free to speak in opposition.

Men of the Republican party, it comes your time first to choose whom

you will have for your future constituents, to make up the bone and

sinew of your party; whether you will have the most ignorant foreigners,

just landed on our shores, who have not learned a single principle of

free government--or the women of your own households; whether you will

lose to-day a few votes of the high license or the low license

Republicans, foreign or native, black or white, as the case may be, and

gain to yourselves hereafter the votes of the women of the State. These

are the alternatives. It has been stated that you can not have a

suffrage plank in the Republican platform in Saline county because it

would lose the votes of the Scandinavians. Will those 1,000 Scandinavian

men be of more value to the Republicans than will be the votes of their

own wives, mothers, daughters and sisters in all the years to come?

The crucial moment is upon you now, and I say unto you, men of both

parties, you will have driven the last nail in the coffin of this

amendment and banished all hope of carrying it at the ballot-box if you

do not incorporate woman suffrage in your platforms. I know what the

party managers will say, I have talked with and heard from many of them.

I read Mr. Morrill's statement that "this question should go to the

ballot-box on its merits and should not be spoken of in the political

meetings or made a party measure."

The masses are rooted and grounded in the old beliefs in the inferiority

and subjection of women, and consider them born merely to help man carry

out his plans and not to have any of their own. Now, friends, because

this is true, because no man believes in political equality for woman,

except he is educated out of every bigotry, every prejudice and every

usage that he was born into, in the family, in the church and in the

state, so there can be no hope of the rank and file of men voting for

this amendment, until they are taught the principles of justice and

right; and there is no possibility that these men can be reached, can be

educated, through any other instrumentality than that of the campaign

meetings and campaign papers of the political parties. Therefore, when

you say this is not to be a political question, not to be in your

platform, not to be discussed in your meetings, not to be advocated in

your papers, you make it impossible for its merits to be brought before

the voters.

Who are the men that come to our women's meetings? We have just finished

the tour of the sixty counties in the State of New York. We had

magnificent gatherings, composed of people from the farthest townships

in the county, and in many of them from every township, with the largest

opera houses packed, hundreds going away who could not get in. Our

audiences have been five-sixths women, and the one man out of the six,

who was he? A man who already believed there was but one means of

salvation for the race or the country, and that was through the

political equality of women, making them the peers of men in every

department of life. How are we going to reach the other five-sixths of

the men who never come to women's meetings? There is no way except

through the political rallies which are attended by all men. Now if you

shut out of these the discussion of this question, then I say the fate

of this amendment is sealed.

Even if it were possible to reach the men through separate meetings,

the women of Kansas can not carry on a fall campaign. They can not get

the money to do it unless you men furnish it. Our eastern friends have

already contributed to the extent of their ability to hold these spring

meetings, and you very well know that after the husbands shall have paid

their party assessments there will be nothing left for them to "give to

their wives" to defray the expenses of a woman suffrage campaign.

Therefore, no discussion in the regular political meetings means no

discussion anywhere. But suppose there were plenty of money, and there

could be a most thorough fall campaign, what then? Why, the same old

story of "women talking to women," not one of whom can vote on the

question.

Again, with what decency can either of the parties ask women to come to

their political meetings to expound Populist or Republican doctrines

after they have set their heels on the amendment? Do you not see that if

it will lose votes to the parties to have the plank, it will lose votes

to allow women to advocate the amendment on their platforms? And what a

spectacle it would be to see women pleading with men to vote for the one

or the other party, while their tongues were tied on the question of

their own right to vote! Heaven and the Republican and Populist State

Conventions spare us such a dire humiliation!

But should the Republicans refuse to insert the plank on June 6 and the

Populists put a good solid one in their platform on June 12, what then?

Do you suppose all the women in the State would shout for the

Republicans and against the Populists? Would they pack the Republican

meetings, where no word could be spoken for their liberty, and leave the

benches empty in the Populist meetings where at every one hearty appeals

were made to vote for woman's enfranchisement? My dear friends, woman

surely will be able to see that her highest interest, her liberty, her

right to a voice in government, is the great issue of this campaign, and

overtops, outweighs, all material questions which are now pending

between the parties.

I know you think your Kansas men are going to vote on this amendment

independently of party endorsement. You are no more sanguine today than

were the men and women, myself included, in 1867, that those Free State

men, who had given up every comfort which human beings prize for the

sake of liberty, who had fought not only through the border ruffian

warfare but through the four years of the rebellion, would vote freedom

to the heroic women of Kansas. Where would you ever expect to find a

majority more ready to grant to women equal rights than among those old

Free State men? You have not as glorious a generation of men in Kansas

today as you had in 1867. I do not wish to speak disparagingly, but in

the nature of things there can not be another race of men as brave as

those. If you had told me then that a majority of those men would have

gone to the ballot-box and voted against equal rights for women, I

should have defended them with all my power; but they did it, two to

one.

Do you mean to repeat the experiment of 1867? If so, do not put a plank

in your platform; just have a "still hunt." Think of a "still hunt" when

it must be necessarily a work of education! My friends, I know enough of

this State, to feel that it is worth saving. I have given more time and

money and effort to Kansas than to any other State in the Union, because

I wanted it to be the first to make its women free. Women of Kansas,

all is lost if you sit down and supinely listen to politicians and

candidates. Both reckon what they will lose or what they will gain. They

study expediency rather than principle. I appeal to you, men and women,

make the demand imperative: "The amendment must be endorsed by the

parties and advocated on the platform and in the press." Let me propose

a resolution:

WHEREAS, From the standpoint of justice, political expediency and

grateful appreciation of their wise and practical use of school

suffrage from the organization of the State, and of municipal

suffrage for the past eight years, we, Republicans and Populists,

descendants of that grand old party of splendid majorities which

extended these rights to the women of Kansas, in mass meeting

assembled do hereby

_Resolve_, That we urgently request our delegates in their

approaching State conventions to endorse the woman suffrage

amendment in their respective platforms.

[The resolution was adopted by a unanimous vote.]

That vote fills my soul with joy and hope. Now I want to say to you, my

good friends, I never would have made a 1,500 mile journey hither to

appeal to the thinking, justice-loving men of Kansas. They already are

converted, but they are a minority. We have to consider those whose

votes can be obtained only by that party influence and machinery which

politicians alone know how to use. This hearty response is a pledge that

you will demand of your State conventions that the full power of this

political machinery shall be used to carry the woman suffrage amendment

to victory.

INDEX.[137]

AARON, RABBI, addresses suff. con., 762.

ABBE, MRS. ROBT., petit. for wom. suff., 764.

ABBOTT, REV. LYMAN, opp. wom. suff., 766.

ABBOTT, MRS. LYMAN, remonstrant agnst. wom. suff., 766.

ADAMS, ABIGAIL, demands ballot, 475.

ALBRO, ATTILIA, 71.

ALCOTT, A. BRONSON, approves wom. suff., 251;

at A.'s lect. in Chicago, 468;

sends A. compli. ticket to Concord School Philos., 510;

spks. at suff. con., 533; 563;

death, 645.

ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY, 645.

ALDRIDGE, GEO. W., orders A.'s face carved in Capitol at Albany, 949.

ALFORD, MR., signs minority res. for wom. suff., 873.

ALLEN, MR. and MRS., 404.

ALLEN, ETHAN, 4.

ALLEN, JOHN B., SEN., introd. suff. res., 718.

ALMY, MARTHA R., work for wom. suff. amend., 760.

AMES, BLANCHE BUTLER, 381.

AMES, REV. CHARLES G., 394;

welcomes suff. con. Phil., 541; 547.

AMES, MRS. CHAS. G., 394.

AMES, OAKES, endorses suffrage, 284.

AMES, SARAH FISHER, 342.

ANDERSON, MARY, 733.

ANDERSON, PRESIDENT M. B., tribute to A., 471; 558.

ANDERSON, NAOMI, spks. for wom. suff., 875.

ANDREWS, STEPHEN PEARL, res. at con., 384.

ANGLE, JAMES L., favors legal rights for women, 110.

ANNEKE, MME. MATHILDE, first appearance in suff. work, 103; 327; 446.

ANTHONY, ALBERT, 940.

ANTHONY, ANCESTORS, William, Derrick, Francis, John, John, Jr.,

Abraham, William, William, Jr., David, 3.

ANTHONY, ANNA O., 552.

ANTHONY, CHARLES, 71.

ANTHONY, D., father of Susan B., born, 4;

sent to "Nine Partners'" school, testimonials, 8;

teaches home school, 9;

falls in love, 10;

marries, Quakers forgive, wedding trip, builds home and cotton

factory, 11;

removes to Battenville, N. Y., 17;

refuses to sell liquor or allow employes to use it, 18;

looks after welfare of employes, 19;

criticised by Quakers for dress, 20;

liberal family discipline, 21;

objects to music, 23;

wealth, 24;

advises daughters to teach, 24;

postmaster, 25;

letters on financ. panic, VanBuren, Wash., New York, agony over

business failure, 33;

removes to Hardscrabble (Center Falls), strug. for existence, 35;

allows dancing school to meet in his house, 36;

turned out of Quaker Soc., grows more liberal, refuses to pay taxes,

supports the Union, 37;

cuts timber in mountains, wife stays with him, goes to Virginia,

Mich., N. Y., looking for new location, buys farm near Roch., 45;

arrives in Roch., takes family out to farm, house put in order, 47;

neighbors, abolition meet., Sunday morning work, farm work, goes

into N. Y. Life Ins. Co., 48;

did not vote till 1860, 61;

signs call for wom. temp. con., 67;

on woman's need of ballot, 85;

advises A. to preserve press notices, 125;

sustains A. in defending wronged mother, 204;

death, love of family, character, 223;

belonged to Henry Clay sch. of protect., 793;

site of old mill, 947.

ANTHONY, D. R., born, 12;

clerking at Lenox, 46;

makes first speech, 121;

letters from Kan. in 1857, 157;

elect. mayor Leav., 231;

marriage, 235;

on plat, at G. F. Train's sp. in Leav., 287;

praises Train, 290;

offers to assist Revolution, but urges A. to provide for own

future, 355;

shot, 470;

strug. for life, 471;

gives A. R. R. passes, 492;

schoolmate Pres. Arthur, 538;

farewell tele. to A. on depart. for Europe, 548;

loses children, nominated for mayor, 649;

defeat, 650; 672;

present to A., 707; 711;

demands wom. suff. pl. in Kan. Rep. plat., 786;

furnishes passes to A. 30 yrs., 796;

at Berk. Hist, meet., grandmother stopped cotton looms by rinsing

mop, 944;

Anthony reunion, 946;

to A. on 50th birthday, 974.

ANTHONY, MRS. D. R., 649; 711.

ANTHONY, D. R., JR., describes A. in Ann Arbor, 658;

A. sends tele. on wed. day, 923.

ANTHONY, ELIZA TEFFT, 12; 23.

ANTHONY, GUELMA (see McLean).

ANTHONY, HANNAH, 1st (see Hoxie).

ANTHONY, HANNAH, 2d (see Mosher).

ANTHONY, HANNAH LAPHAM, 4;

religion, dowry, dress, 6;

domestic qualities, 7.

ANTHONY, SENATOR HENRY B., reports in favor wom. suff., 543;

reports in favor wom. suff., 590, 591;

praises Hist. Wom. Suff., 614.

ANTHONY, HUMPHREY, business ambition, 4;

objects to brother's taking father away, 7;

thinks higher education unnecessary, 8;

at A.'s lecture, 129.

ANTHONY, J. MERRITT, born, 12;

A. advises shd. have own money, 133;

fights at Osawatomie, 144;

nurses brother, 471;

Anthony reunion, 946.

ANTHONY, JUDITH HICKS, 3.

ANTHONY, LOTTIE B., registers and votes, 424.

ANTHONY, LUCY E., childhood, 214;

lives in home of A., 513; 552; 659;

present to A., 812;

Miss Shaw's sec., arranges county cons. in Calif. campn., 863;

successful results, 864;

at wom. suff. headqrs., 875; 916.

ANTHONY, LUCY READ, mother of Susan B., born, 4;

early training, 6;

playmate and pupil of Daniel Anthony, 9;

hesitates to marry Quaker, fond of music, learns to love Friends'

religion, 10;

birth of children, life's realities, modesty, 12;

entertains Quaker preachers, boards employes, 19;

shut out of Quaker business meet., 20;

cares for father and mother, 23;

grief at losing child, parents and home, 35;

sorrow over sale of farm home, 231;

lends A. money for Rev., 355;

death, 512;

characteristics, 513:

old spin. wheel and wed. furniture, 934;

site of childhood home, 948.

ANTHONY, MARY LUTHER, 122.

ANTHONY, MARY S., born, 12;

attends first W. R. Con., 59;

let. on raspberry experiment, 159;

stands for wom. rights in schools, 191, 192;

lends A. money for Revolution, 355;

helps on paper, urges A. to abandon it, 356;

upholds A. in defending Laura D. Fair, 392;

registers and votes, 424;

tends mother, 459;

educates nieces, 513;

devotion to mother and sister, 517;

sees A. start for Europe, 550;

let. from A. 562;

only one left, 623; 672;

stays with Mrs. Avery, 678;

realized A.'s age, 696;

prep. home for self and A., 706;

Roch. Pol. Eq. Club present desk, 707;

com. of ways and means in new home, 711;

work for wom. suff. amend. in N. Y. campn., declines salary, 760;

canvasses, Roch., entertains speak., 761; 812;

urges A. to stand by her post, 855;

opposes res. agnst. Wom. Bible, 854; 896;

goes to Des Moines con. 901;

70th birthday, 914;

acct. Roch. Herald, suff. pioneer, teacher, pres. Pol. Equal. Club,

helper to sister, Chron. description recep., 915;

presents, trib. Rev. W. C. Gannett, 916;

financial respons. of household, 933; 934; 935;

Anthony reunion, 946;

let. to A. on 50th birthday, 976.

ANTHONY, MAUDE, 552;

trip with A., 653.

ANTHONY, SARAH (see Burtis).

ANTHONY, MAJOR SCOTT, 247.