THE SOUTHERN WOMAN BECOMES A “CLUBABLE” BEING.
In every individual life there enter events which in their enlarged
influence are analogous to epoch-making periods in the nation’s history.
Such, surely, was my meeting with Susan B. Anthony, when she visited the
New Orleans Exposition in 1885. I had long kept a vivid and dear picture
of her in the inner sanctuary of my mind; had become acquainted through
the press with the vigor of her intellect and the native independence and
integrity of her character; had known she was a woman “born out of due
season,” who had already spent fifty years of her life trying to make “the
rank and file” of women and men see that the human race in all its social
relations is in bondage, while woman occupies a position less than free. I
had so long been one with her in spirit and principles that I was not
prepared to feel so like a little chicken looking into the shell out of
which it has just stepped, as I did feel on coming face to face with all
the expansiveness her many years of service for women had wrought her own
justice-loving personality.
New Orleans stretched out a friendly hand to Miss Anthony. The surprise of
finding her a simple, motherly, gentle-mannered woman instead of the
typical woman’s-rights exponent, disarmed and warmed their hearts, so that
press and people received her cordially. She was invited to address the
city public schools, and spoke to many appreciative audiences during the
few weeks New Orleans had the uplift of her presence. In a private letter
of that date she said to me: “I remember my visit to the Crescent City
with a great deal of pleasure, and cherish the friendships I made there.
We are finding out quite a good many fine things about women in the Gulf
States, so that I think you may feel proud that so much true growth went
on--even while that other problem of freedom was being settled.
“SUSAN B. ANTHONY.”
Miss Anthony’s work here made a permanent impression on public thought;
the personal hospitality of the people meant a certain sort of receptivity
of her cause, for which the war era and the more trying decade following
it was a period of incubation; for unquestionably all times of stress and
effort and experience of soul are seasons of enlargement, of suggestion,
and form the matrix of a new life. If movement be once started in original
cell structures, reforming is sure, and the new species depends on the
character of the environment. Heart-rending and irremediable as were the
personal effects of the war to thousands, there is little doubt but that
it has resulted in definite gain to the whole people, by establishing a
system of self-reliance in place of reliance upon the labor of others; and
even more through the liberation of the general mind from captivity to
the belief in the ethical rectitude of human slavery.
But it takes the North a long time to come to any true understanding of
the Southern people. Certain transient, exterior features--which are as
impermanent as the conditions that created them--have been mistaken for
their real character, which depends upon indwelling ideals--and these have
always been thoroughly American. The leisure for thought and study which
ante-bellum ease allowed to many molded a high-thinking type that was true
to the best intellectual and Christian models, as the character of
Southern public men has evidenced. The simple integrity of the Southern
ideal has had no match in national life except in the rigid standard of
New England. Puritan and Huguenot--far apart as they seem--were like
founders of the rugged righteousness of American principles; and in so far
as we have forgotten our origin, has the national character lost its
purity.
The love of freedom is ingrained in the ideals of the South. Its apparent
conservatism is not hostility to the new nor intense devotion to the old;
it is more an inevitable result of thin population scattered over wide
areas, with little opportunity for the frequent and direct contact which
is indispensable to the rapid and general development of a common idea. It
is not true that Southern men are more opposed than others to the freedom
of women. The several Codes show that the Southern States were the first
to remove the inequality of women as to property rights. It must also be
remembered that a vigorous propaganda for the enfranchisement of women
has been conducted for fifty years, at great expense of time and talent,
all over the North, while it may be said to have just begun in the South.
If in 1890 any effort had been made by the National American Woman
Suffrage Association to influence the Constitutional Convention then in
session in Mississippi, the woman’s ballot on an educational basis might
have been secured. Henry Blackwell was the only prominent Northern
suffragist who seemed to have a wide-open eye on that convention. What he
could he did, gratis, to help the cause, and won the friendship and
gratitude of many in that State. The leading women who were applied to
offered not one word of appreciation of the situation--doubtless because
they were accustomed to expecting nothing good out of Nazareth; perhaps
also because they would not aid what seemed an unrighteous effort to
eliminate the negro vote.
It is not the first time in suffrage history that the white woman has been
sacrificed to the brother in black. A political necessity brought within a
few votes the political equality of woman. If Mississippi had then settled
the race question on the only statesmanlike and just plan--by
enfranchising intelligence and disfranchising ignorance--other States
would have followed; for the South generally desires a model for a just
and legal white supremacy--without the patent subterfuge of “grandfather
clauses.” The heartbreak of any human soul or cause is not to have been
equal to its opportunity. The whole woman’s movement is yet bearing the
consequences of that eclipse of vision ten years ago.
The first ground broken in the cultivation of greater privileges for
Louisiana women was the organization of the Woman’s Club of New Orleans.
In 1884--as narrated in its history prepared for the World’s Columbian
Exposition--in response to a notice in the _New Orleans Times-Democrat_,
twelve women met in the parlor of the Young Men’s Christian Association
and organized the first Woman’s Club in the South.
Miss Elizabeth Bisland, now Mrs. Charles W. Wetmore of New York, was its
first president. Miss Bisland had already earned fair fame in literature,
and the South was justly proud of her. She afterwards challenged the
world’s notice by her swift girdling of the globe in the interest of the
_Cosmopolitan Magazine_. The charter members of the pioneer club were of
the heroic type, and amid fluctuations of hope and despair, forced on by
the irresistible spirit of the age, founded a society which numbered its
members by hundreds, and which secured and retained the sympathy and
respect of the people.
The Constitution provided at first only for working women, but afterward
eliminated this restriction. It stated that, evolved as it was from a
progressive civilization, its movements must be elastic, its work
versatile and comprehensive. It estimated its own scope as follows: “The
vital and influential work of our club must always be along sociological
lines. The term embraces pursuits of study and pastime, our labors and
relaxations. In the aggregate we are breaking down and removing barriers
of local prejudice; we are assisting intellectual growth and spiritual
ambition in the community of which we are a dignified and effective
body--for the immense economy of moral force made possible by a permanent
organization such as ours, is well understood by the thoughtful.” It
extended hospitality in the public recognition of extraordinary
achievements by women, and helped to bring aspirants in art, literature
and sociology before appreciative audiences, and introduced to New Orleans
many world-renowned women and men.
Being the first woman’s club in the South it was the subject of peculiar
interest and attention from other organizations of women, and was wise
enough, from the beginning, to ally itself with the general movement. Its
delegate was a conspicuous part of the National Convention of Women’s
Clubs, held in New York in 1889, under the auspices of Sorosis; in 1892 it
was represented in the Convention of Federated Clubs, in Chicago, by its
president and delegate, and was present in the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs in 1894. It was the host, in connection with Portia Club, in
1895, of the “Association for the Advancement of Women,” which enjoyed for
a week the novelty of the Crescent City and its environs.
Through its initiation, matrons were placed in station houses and a bed
was furnished in the “Women’s and Children’s Hospital.” It petitioned for
a revocation of Mrs. Maybrick’s sentence, and distributed rations to the
sufferers in the great overflows of the Mississippi and Texas rivers. It
is clearly manifest from the foregoing that the Woman’s Club was the
initial step of whatever progression women have made through subsequent
organizations.
Following the enlarging influence of the New Orleans Exposition in
1885-86, there came the great contest to overthrow the Louisiana State
Lottery. The whole energy of the church and every citizen was called into
action all over the State. Women’s Lottery Leagues were formed in every
town,--that in New Orleans numbering 900 members; it was denominated “the
crowning influence that resulted in victory.” It is impossible to
overestimate the liberative value for woman of this struggle brought to a
successful issue; or to reckon how far back into inertia she would have
been thrown by defeat; for the first time in our post-bellum history it
united women of all classes and ages in a common moral and political
battle-ground. The federal anti-lottery law which has secured the results
of this victory may prove to be an invaluable precedent for anti-trust
legislation.
In 1892, in response to my invitation, some of the strong, progressive and
intellectual women of New Orleans were ready to meet at my house and
organize the first suffrage association in Louisiana. It was formed with
nine members, and was called the “Portia Club.” The officers were Mrs.
Caroline E. Merrick, president; Mrs. Jas. M. Ferguson, vice-president;
Mrs. Evelyn Ordway, treasurer. Through its influence Governor Foster
appointed four women on the school boards of some of the Northern parishes
of Louisiana. It has done excellent educational work by the discussion of
such subjects as “Is the Woman in the Wage-earning World a Benefit to
Civilization?” “Is Organization Beneficial to Labor?” “Has the State of
Wyoming been Benefited by Woman Suffrage?” “Would Municipal Suffrage for
Women be a Benefit in New Orleans?” “The Initiative and Referendum;” “The
Republic of Venice;” “Disabilities of Women in Louisiana.” The Portias
have maintained a leading part in all public causes that have enlisted
women, and in the interests of full suffrage were heard by the Suffrage
Committee of the Constitutional Convention of 1898.
On the occasion of Miss Susan B. Anthony’s seventieth birthday, a
reception at my house brought together not only those favorable to our
undertaking but many whom it was desirable to enlist. When that
gentle-faced, lion-hearted pioneer, Lucy Stone, yielded up her beautiful,
self-effacing life, the Portia Club held a fitting memorial service. Mrs.
Clara C. Hoffman made a most memorable suffrage address for the Portias in
this city, which aroused tremendous enthusiasm. She lectured extensively
elsewhere in the State, and wrote to me as follows after her visit here:
“It is generally claimed that Southern people are conservative and
bitterly opposed to any mention of equal suffrage. In my recent tour I
found them not only willing but anxious to hear the subject discussed. I
came into Louisiana at the request of the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union Convention, and had been informed that I must not say anything about
suffrage, as the people would not bear it. In my first address I reviewed
the hindering causes that delay and prevent the establishment of needed
reforms, and showed the danger of enfranchising all the vice and ignorance
in the land without seeking to counteract it; but I said not a word about
what the counteractant might be. The convention closed with Sunday
services; but before the day was gone I received an invitation from
leading citizens--professional and business men--to speak in the Opera
House in Shreveport at their expense, on Monday night, on woman suffrage.
A packed audience greeted me when I was cordially introduced by a
prominent lawyer. I presented arguments, answered objections. Round after
round of applause interrupted, and many crowded about at the close,
expressing themselves with utmost warmth. How is that for Shreveport, and
Louisiana?”
Later Mrs. Hoffman spoke at Monroe and Lake Charles with equal acceptance.
One of our city papers said of her: “Mrs. Hoffman entered bravely upon her
subject, interspersing her remarks with delicious bits of witticism. She
is a forcible and brilliant speaker, a radical of the radicals, but
disarms by her clear, genial manner of presenting truth.”
Besides the women’s societies in the various churches, which have done so
much to widen the field of woman’s thought and endeavor, the Arena Club of
New Orleans, under the leadership of Mrs. James M. Ferguson, has been a
vital force. While tacitly endorsing suffrage, it advances social,
political and economic questions of the day. Its latest efforts have been
to create sentiment for anti-trust legislation.
There has been a valuable period of training through Auxiliaries. Every
great movement, social and religious, had its Woman’s Auxiliary. These
helped to reveal to woman her own capacities and her utter want of power.
But the day of the Auxiliary is done. If some of the auxiliary women have
not yet found out what woman ought to do, they have discovered the next
best thing--what not to do!
In 1895 an amicable division of the Portia Club was made, the offshoot
becoming the Era Club--Equal Rights Association. It was a vigorous child,
full of progressive energy, and soon outgrew its mother. Its original
members, like the Portia, were nine, as follows: Mmes. Ferguson, Ordway,
Hereford, Pierce, Misses Brewer, Brown, Koppel, Nobles, Van Horn. At this
juncture Miss Anthony, accompanied by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt,
strengthened our hearts and cause by her presence. It was again my
privilege to entertain her in my home. She spoke to an enthusiastic
audience and Mrs. Catt was complimented in the same way. The next morning
the following letter from a leading member of the New Orleans bar was
brought to Miss Anthony by a member of the Portia Club: “That was a great
meeting last night. When people are willing to stand for three long hours
and listen to speakers it means something. There were ten or twelve men
and a score of women standing within ten feet of me, and not one of them
who did not remain to the end. There are few men who can hold an audience
in that way. I looked around the Assembly Hall and counted near me eight
of my legal confrères. One of the most distinguished lawyers in the State
told me in court this morning that Mrs. Catt’s argument was one of the
finest speeches he had ever listened to. Yesterday I was asked at dinner
to define the word ‘oratory.’ Mrs. Catt is an exponent of ‘the art of
moving human hearts to beat in unison with her own’--which is the end and
aim of oratory,--and was that quality which made the Athenians who heard
Demosthenes declare that they would ‘fight Philip.’ Give the speaker a
lawyer’s compliments.”
Miss Anthony was much moved by this letter. “All this,” she said, “is so
much sweeter than the ridicule that used to come to me in those early days
when I stood alone.”
Committees from the Portia and Era Clubs met in November, 1896, in the
parlors of the Woman’s Club, and organized a State Woman Suffrage
Association, with Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, president; Mrs. Eveleyn
Ordway, vice-president; Miss Matilda P. Hero, corresponding secretary;
Miss Belle Van Horn, recording secretary; Mrs. Boseley, treasurer; Mrs.
Helen Behrens, an ardent and able pioneer and present worker in the cause,
being made our first delegate to a National Convention.
In 1898, the Era Club, in the name of Louisiana women, presented to the
Suffrage Committee of the Constitutional Convention, then in session in
New Orleans, the following petition: “In view of the fact that one of the
purposes of this Convention is to provide an educational qualification for
the exercise of the franchise by which to guard more carefully the welfare
of the State, we, the undersigned, believing that still another change
would likewise conduce greatly to the welfare of our people, pray that
your honorable body will, after deciding upon the qualifications deemed
necessary, extend the franchise with the same qualifications to the women
of this State.”
Mrs. Evelyn Ordway, one of the most efficient and public-spirited women of
New Orleans, as president of the Era Club, wisely and bravely led the
women’s campaign. Owing to a rain which flooded the city, the most of the
woman’s contingent were prisoners in their homes on the day the petition
was procured. Mrs. Lewis S. Graham, and Misses Katharine Nobles, Kate and
Jennie Gordon alone were able to cross the submerged streets to the
Committee room. Mrs. Graham made the leading address, and was ably
supported by her colleagues. Mrs. Carrie Chapman-Catt, aided by Misses
Laura Clay, Mary Hay and Frances Griffin, had been busy creating public
sentiment by means of brilliant addresses both in and out of the
Convention. Dr. Dickson Bruns should be ever held in grateful memory for
his constant and unflinching efforts in behalf of the woman’s petition,
which was presented in Convention by the Hon. Anthony W. Faulkner of
Monroe.
There were many women and a few noble men who were deeply stirred over the
fate of our memorial. I wrote to Miss Belle Kearney just after this
hearing: “You are needed right here, this very day, to speak what the
women want said for them now that the other speakers are gone away. I am
so dead tired and heart-sore that I almost wish I were lying quiet in my
grave waiting for the resurrection! God help all women, young and old!
They are a man-neglected, God-forgotten lot, here in Louisiana, when they
ask simply for a reasonable recognition, and justice under the
Constitution now being constructed, and under which they must be governed
and pay taxes. We pray in vain, work always in vain. How that grand old
martyr, Susan Anthony, can still hold out is a marvel. The Convention has
apparently forgotten the women. They discuss the needs of every man and
his qualification for the ballot. Yet, good women brought such men into
the world to keep other women in subjection and minority forever!--still,
they love that sinner, man, better than their own souls--and I know they
will continue that way to the end. But it is hard lines to be kept
waiting. The dead can wait, but we cannot! Oh, Lord, how long!”
Once again, however, it was proven that nothing is ever quite so bad as it
seems, for the convention did give the right to vote to all taxpaying
women--a mere crumb--but a prophetic-crumb. This much being gained led, in
1899, to the organization, through the initiative of the Era Club, of the
“Woman’s League for Sewerage and Drainage.” That variable and imponderable
quantity, “influence,” now had added to its much invoked “womanly
sweetness”--_power_--a power which could not only be felt but which would
have to be counted.
Mrs. Ordway tells in a little review of the movement, that several months
previous to the election many of those who voted would have scouted the
idea that they should do so unwomanly a deed;--voting belonged to men.
Many did not even know that they had a right to vote. The question
proposed to them was one affecting the health and prosperity of New
Orleans--whether or not they were willing to be additionally taxed in
order to secure pure water and an effective system of drainage. There were
about 10,000 taxpaying women in the city, many of them small householders,
owning the little homes in which they dwelt. Owing to New Orleans being
peculiarly situated below the level of the Mississippi river, and to the
fact that there is no underground drainage, many parts of the city are
inundated during heavy rains. There was much at stake. No wonder the women
were interested, and that parlor and mass meetings were held, in which
women were not only invited but urged--even by the mayor and other
prominent men--to come forward with their votes. When election day
arrived, women found that they did want the franchise, one-third of the
votes cast being contributed by them. After months of hard work and a
house-to-house canvass for signatures of taxpaying women, who would vote
personally or by proxy, the battle was won, as was universally conceded,
by the energy of the woman’s ballot.
Very many men and women soon realized the need of full suffrage for women,
in a quickly succeeding campaign for the election of municipal officers
who would properly carry out the people’s intent for sewerage and
drainage. Though they could not vote every courtesy and respect was
accorded the women, and their influence was appealed to by the respective
sides. The day has dawned for woman’s full enfranchisement in Louisiana.
In her farewell address after the victory the president of the Woman’s
League, Miss Kate M. Gordon,--president of the Era Club,--who had led the
women’s forces with an intelligent courage and dignity that won universal
admiration, stated as follows: “At one time the success of this great work
was seriously threatened by an element of conservatism raising the cry,
‘It is simply suffrage movement!’ While it is hard to disassociate
suffrage from any work which depends on a vote for success, and while the
word, defined by Worcester, means ‘a vote, the act of voting,’ yet it
seems a poor commentary on the intelligence, patriotism and even sagacity
of that conservatism to raise the question when the life of a city was
trembling in the balance, and that city their home.
“In justice to women holding suffrage views, I ask are they to be treated
as a class apart because they believe intelligence and not sex should be
the determining power in government? Is there any wrong in believing that
power added to influence would be a factor in creating and enforcing laws
for a higher moral standard? Where is the woman, who, holding the power,
would not use it to enforce the laws for the protection of minors, and to
give to character at least the same protection given to property? Where is
the woman who would withhold her power from creating and enforcing a law
to read; ‘Equal pay for equal work’? Is it unwomanly to believe the wife’s
wages should belong to the wife who earned them? Is it unnatural to resent
being classed with idiots, insane, criminal and minors--and so on, _ad
infinitum_?
“The Woman’s League contributed with no sacrifice of womanliness, but with
a sacrifice of personal comfort, to an education against apathy and
indifference, to the Godlike charity of helping men to help
themselves--the keynote of physical as well as moral regeneration. As
women throw the power of your influence against the dangers of proxies.
The proxy vote is not a personal expression; it is giving manifold power
into the hands of one individual, and therefore un-American.”
This wide-awake Era Club has now a petition before the trustees of Tulane
University praying that this progressive institution will no longer refuse
to open its Medical School to women. It also memorialized its last
legislature for the right to be accorded to women to witness a legal
document; for, incredible as it may seem, there still remains among
Louisiana statutes, as a survival of the French habit of thought, toward
females, the disability of a woman to sign a paper as a witness.
Soon after the New Orleans Exposition, Miss Susan B. Anthony wrote me,
while I was president of the Louisiana Woman’s Christian Temperance Union:
“I long to see the grand hosts of the Temperance women of this nation
standing as a unit demanding the one and only weapon that can smite to the
heart the liquor-traffic. The Kansas women’s first vote has sent worse
terror to the soul of the whisky alliance of the nation than it ever knew
before.” The temperance hosts through bitter defeats long ago learned that
they cannot carry their cause without the ballot, and “as a unit” they may
be said to desire it and to work for it. They know Miss Anthony spoke
words of soberness and experience. The first day there was a great debate,
in the Constitutional Convention of our neighbor State, on methods of
suffrage, about the middle of the day some one met a pale, haggard prince
of liquor dealers rushing excitedly from the gates of the Capital. “My
God!” he exclaimed, “if they let the women in our business is dead! We
must do something!”--and he hurried to convene his partners in iniquity.
What they did is not proclaimed; but immediately nearly every newspaper in
the State began to pour in gatling-gun volleys against enfranchising
women.
About the time Miss Anthony wrote me respecting Mrs. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton coming to lecture. “I do not want her,” she said, “to be
translated before all of your splendid New Orleans women have seen and
heard her.” And so I feel about Miss Anthony, I do not want her “to be
translated” until she has seen the Louisiana woman vote as unrestrictedly
as the Louisiana man.
But I should like to ask this question of those men and women--and there
are many such--who are convinced of the righteousness of the women’s
ballot, but who do not come forward and strengthen the struggling vanguard
of a great movement,--
“Why is it that you choose to blow
Your bugle in the rear?
The helper is the man divine
Who tells us something new;--
The man who tells us something new
And points the road ahead;
Whose tent is with the forward few--
And not among the dead.
You spy not what the future holds,
A-bugling in the rear.
You’re harking back to times outworn,
A-bugling in the rear.”