Ormiston Chant, Mrs. Alice Scatcherd, Mrs. Ashton Dilke, Madame Zadel
B. Gustafson; Ireland, Mrs. Margaret Moore; France, Madame Isabella
Bogelot; Finland, Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg; Denmark, Madame Ada
M. Frederiksen; Norway, Madame Sophie Magelsson Groth; Italy, Madame
Fanny Zampini Salazar; India, Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati; Canada, Mrs.
Bessie Starr Keefer.
After all had acknowledged the introduction with brief remarks, Miss
Anthony presented, amid much applause, Lucy Stone, Frances E. Willard,
Julia Ward Howe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Clara
Barton--the most eminent galaxy of women ever assembled upon one
platform. Frederick Douglass and Robert Purvis were introduced as
pioneers in the movement for woman suffrage.
It would be impossible within the limits of one chapter to give even
the briefest synopsis of the addresses which swept through the week
like a grand procession. The program only could convey an idea of the
value of this intellectual entertainment which called together, day
after day and night after night, audiences that taxed the capacity of
the largest opera house in Washington.[70]
On the second Sunday afternoon, Easter Day, the services consisted of
a symposium conducted by sixteen women, of all religious faiths and of
none. In the evening, when as in the morning a vast and interested
audience was present, brief farewells were spoken by a number of the
foreign delegates. The leading address was by Mrs. Zerelda G. Wallace
on the Moral Power of the Ballot. Mrs. Stanton closed the meeting with
a great speech, and the following resolution was adopted:
It is the unanimous voice of this International Council that all
institutions of learning and of professional instruction,
including schools of theology, law and medicine, should, in the
interests of humanity, be as freely opened to women as to men,
and that opportunities for industrial training should be as
generally and as liberally provided for one sex as for the other.
The representatives of organized womanhood in this Council will
steadily demand that in all avocations in which both men and
women engage, equal wages shall be paid for equal work; and they
declare that an enlightened society should demand, as the only
adequate expression of the high civilization which it is its
office to establish and maintain, an identical standard of
personal purity and morality for men and women.
During the month of preparation for this International Council, the
idea came many times to Mrs. Sewall that it should result in a
permanent organization. The other members gave a cordial assent to
this proposition, and the necessary committees were appointed. Before
the delegates left Washington both a National and International
Council of Women were formed.[71]
Immediately following the Council the National Woman Suffrage
Association held its Twentieth annual convention in the Church of Our
Father, April 3, 4, 1888. As there had been eight days of continuous
speech-making this meeting was devoted principally to the presenting
of State reports and transacting of necessary business. There were,
however, a number of addresses from the distinguished women who
remained after the Council to attend this convention.
The Committee on National Enrollment, Mrs. Louisa Southworth of Ohio,
chairman, reported 40,000 names of adult citizens who favored equal
suffrage; 9,000 of these were from Ohio and 9,000 from Nebraska. Women
were urged to send petitions to members of Congress from their
respective States. Mrs. Stanton was requested to prepare a memorial to
be presented to each of the national political conventions to be held
during the year, and committees were appointed to visit each for the
purpose of securing in their platforms a recognition of woman
suffrage.
The most interesting feature was the hearing before the Senate
Committee on Woman Suffrage, which took place April 2.[72] Mrs.
Stanton made the opening address, in which she took up the provisions
of the Federal Constitution, one by one, and showed how they had been
violated in their application to women, saying:
Even the preamble of the Constitution is an argument for
self-government--"We, the people." You recognize women as people,
for you count them in the basis of representation. Half our
Congressmen hold their seats to-day as representatives of women.
We help to swell the figures by which you are here, and too many
of you, alas, are only figurative representatives, paying little
heed to our rights as citizens.
"No bill of attainder shall be passed." "No title of nobility
granted." So says the Constitution; and yet you have passed bills
of attainder in every State of the Union making sex a
disqualification for the franchise. You have granted titles of
nobility to every male voter, making all men rulers, governors,
sovereigns over all women.
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a
republican form of government." And yet you have not a republican
form of government in a single State. One-half the people have
never consented to one law under which they live. They have
rulers placed over them in whom they have no choice. They are
taxed without representation, tried in our courts by men for the
violation of laws made by men, with no appeal except to men, and
for some crimes over which men should have no jurisdiction....
Landing in New York one week ago, I saw 400 steerage passengers
leave the vessel. Dull-eyed, heavy-visaged, stooping with huge
burdens and the oppressions endured in the Old World, they stood
in painful contrast with the group of brilliant women on their
way to the International Council here in Washington. I thought,
as this long line passed by, of the speedy transformation the
genial influences of equality would effect in the appearance of
these men, of the new dignity they would acquire with a voice in
the laws under which they live, and I rejoiced for them; but
bitter reflections filled my mind when I thought that these men
are the future rulers of our daughters; these will interpret the
civil and criminal codes by which they will be governed; these
will be our future judges and jurors to try young girls in our
courts, for trial by a jury of her peers has never yet been
vouchsafed to woman. Here is a right so ancient that it is
difficult to trace its origin in history, a right so sacred that
the humblest criminal may choose his juror. But alas for the
daughters of the people, their judges, advocates, jurors, must be
men, and for them there is no appeal. But this is only one wrong
among many inevitable for a disfranchised class. It is
impossible for you, gentlemen, to appreciate the humiliations
women suffer at every turn....
You have now the power to settle this question by wise
legislation. But if you can not be aroused to its serious
consideration, like every other step in progress, it will
eventually be settled by violence. The wild enthusiasm of woman
can be used for evil as well as good. To-day you have the power
to guide and direct it into channels of true patriotism, but in
the future, with all the elements of discontent now gathering
from foreign countries, you will have the scenes of the French
Commune repeated in our land. What women, exasperated with a
sense of injustice, have done in dire extremities in the nations
of the Old World, they will do here....
I will leave it to your imagination to picture to yourselves how
you would feel if you had had a case in court, a bill before some
legislative body or a political aspiration for nearly half a
century, with a continual succession of adverse decisions, while
law and common justice were wholly on your side. Such, honorable
gentlemen, is our case....
In the history of the race there has been no struggle for liberty
like this. Whenever the interest of the ruling classes has
induced them to confer new rights on a subject class it has been
done with no effort on the part of the latter. Neither the
American slave nor the English laborer demanded the right of
suffrage. It was given in both cases to strengthen the Liberal
party. The philanthropy of the few may have entered into those
reforms, but political expediency carried both measures. Women,
on the contrary, have fought their own battles and in their
rebellion against existing conditions have inaugurated the most
fundamental revolution the world has ever witnessed. The
magnitude and multiplicity of the changes involved make the
obstacles in the way of success seem almost insurmountable....
Society is based on this fourfold bondage of woman--Church,
State, Capital and Society--making liberty and equality for her
antagonistic to every organized institution. Where, then, can we
rest the lever with which to lift one-half of humanity from these
depths of degradation, but on "that columbiad of our political
life--the ballot--which makes every citizen who holds it a full
armed monitor?"
Miss Anthony then introduced a number of the foreign delegates who had
been in attendance at the National Council. Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant
of England, in an eloquent address, said:
I stand here as the grandniece of one of the greatest orators and
clearest and wisest statesmen that Europe has known, Edmund
Burke. It seems to me an almost overwhelming humility that I
should be compelled to echo the magnificent impeachment that he
made against Warren Hastings, in our House of Commons, on behalf
of the oppressed women of Hindostan, in this my passionate appeal
on behalf of oppressed women all over the world....
By all you have held most sacred and beautiful in the women who
have loved you and made life possible for you--for their sake and
in their name--I do intreat that you will not allow your grandest
women to plead for another half century. Say rather "the past has
been a long night of wrong, but the day has come and the hour in
which justice shall conquer."
Mrs. Alice Scatcherd, delegate from the Liberal and the Suffrage
Associations of Leeds and neighboring cities, gave an interesting
account of the manner in which Englishwomen exercise the franchise and
the influence they wield in politics.
Miss Anthony then said, "I have the pleasure of introducing to you the
woman who, twenty-five years ago, wrote the Battle Hymn of the
Republic, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe." Mrs. Howe spoke briefly, saying: "My
heart has been full with the words of others which have been here
uttered; but a single word will enable me to cast in my voice with
theirs with all the emphasis that my life and such power as I have
will enable me to add. Gentlemen, what a voice you have here to-day
for universal suffrage. Think that not only we American women, your
own kindred, appear here--and you know what we represent--but these
foremost women from other countries, representing not alone the native
intelligence and character of those countries, but deep and careful
study and precious experience, and think that between them and us who
ask for suffrage, there is entire unanimity. We all say the same
words; we are all for the same thing...."
Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, wife of the former Chief Justice of
Louisiana, addressed the committee with that deep and touching
earnestness so characteristic of Southern women.
After saying that women were present from every State and Territory
who would add their pleadings if there were time, Miss Anthony
introduced Mrs. Bessie Starr Keefer of Canada, who told of the good
effects of woman suffrage in that country. Miss Anthony then said:
"Gentlemen of the committee, here stands before you one who is
commander-in-chief of an army of 250,000 women. It is said women do
not want to vote, but this woman has led this vast army to the
ballot-box, or to a wish to get there. I present to you Miss Frances
E. Willard."
This was the only time Miss Willard ever appeared before a Suffrage
Committee in the Capitol, and she was heard with much interest.
Beginning with the playful manner which rendered her speeches so
attractive, she closed with great seriousness:
I suppose these honorable gentlemen think that we women want the
earth, when we only want half of it. We call their attention to
the fact that our brethren have encroached upon the sphere of
woman. They have definitely marked out that sphere, and then they
have proceeded with their incursion by the power of invention.
They have taken away the loom and the spinning-jenny, and they
have obliged Jenny to seek her occupation somewhere else. They
have set even the tune of the old knitting-needle to humming by
steam. So that we women, full of vigor and desire to be active
and useful and to react upon the world around us, finding our
industrial occupations largely gone, have been obliged to seek
out a new territory and to pre-empt from the sphere of our
brothers some of that which they have hitherto considered their
own.
I know it is a sentiment of chivalry in some good men which
hinders them from giving us the ballot. They think we might not
be what they admire so much; they think we should be lacking in
womanliness of character. I ask you to notice if the women who
have been in this International Council, if the women who are
school teachers all over this nation, if these hundreds of
thousands are not a womanly set of women, and yet they have gone
outside of the old sphere. We believe that in the time of peace
women can come forward and with peaceful plans can use weapons
which are grand and womanly, and that their thoughts, winged with
hope and the force of the heart given to them, will have an
effect far mightier than physical power. For that reason we ask
you that they shall be allowed to stand at the ballot-box,
because we believe that there every person expresses his
individuality. The majesty or the meanness of a person comes out
at the ballot-box more than anywhere else. The ballot is the
compendium of all there is in civilization, and of all that
civilization has done for us. We believe that the mothers who had
the good sense to train noble men, like you who have achieved
high positions, had the good sense to train your sisters in the
same way, and that it is a pity the State has lost that other
half of the conservative power which comes from a Christian
rearing and a Christian character.
I have spoken thus on the principles which have made me, a
conservative woman, devoted to the idea of the ballot, and one in
heart with all these good and true suffrage women, though not one
in organic community. I represent before you the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union and not a suffrage society, but I
bring these principles to your sight, and I ask you, my brothers,
to be grand and chivalrous towards us in this new departure which
we now wish to make.
I ask you to remember that it is women who have given the
costliest hostages to fortune, and out into the battle of life
they have sent their best beloved into snares that have been
legalized on every hand. From the arms which held him long, the
boy has gone forever, for he will not come back again to the
home. Then let the world in the person of its womanhood go forth
and make a home in the State and in society. By all the pains and
dangers the mother has shared, by the hours of patient watching
over beds where little children tossed in fever and pain, by the
incense of ten thousand prayers wafted to God from earnest lips,
I charge you, gentlemen, give woman power to go forth, so that
when her son undertakes life's treacherous battle, his mother
will still walk beside him clad in the garments of power.
Miss Anthony, who knew better than anyone else when not another word
was needed, said at the close of Miss Willard's touching address:
"Now, gentlemen, we are greatly obliged to you. I feel very proud of
all my 'girls' who have come before you this morning, and you may
consider the meeting adjourned."
FOOTNOTES:
[64] The following report was prepared by Mrs. Parker: At a large and
influential gathering of the friends of woman suffrage, at Parliament
Terrace, Liverpool, November 16, 1883, convened by E. Whittle, M. D.,
to meet Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony prior to their return to
America, a resolution was proposed by Mrs. Parker of Penketh, seconded
by Mrs. McLaren of Edinburgh, and unanimously passed: "Recognizing
that union is strength and that the time has come when women all over
the world should unite in the just demand for their political
enfranchisement; therefore
"_Resolved_, That we do here appoint a committee of correspondence,
preparatory to forming an International Woman Suffrage Association.
"_Resolved_, That the committee consist of the following friends, with
power to add to their number.
"For the American Center--Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Miss Susan B.
Anthony, Miss Rachel G. Foster. For Foreign Centers--(An extended
committee was named of prominent persons in Great Britain, Ireland and
France)."
[65] There were printed and distributed by mail 10,000 Calls (four
pages each); 10,000 Appeals (two pages each); sketches were prepared
of the lives and work of a number of the delegates and circulated by
means of a Press Committee of over ninety persons in various cities of
many States. On March 10, the first edition (5,000) of the
sixteen-page program was issued; this was followed by five other
editions of 5,000 each and a final seventh edition of 7,000 copies.
Each edition required revision and the introduction of alterations
made necessary by changing conditions. There were written in
connection with the preparations about 4,000 letters. Including those
concerning railroad rates, there were not less than 10,000 more
circulars of various kinds printed and distributed. A low estimate of
the number of pages thus issued (circulars, calls, programs, etc.)
gives 672,000. During the week of the Council and the following
convention of the N. W. S. A., the _Woman's Tribune_ was published by
Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby eight times (four days sixteen pages, four
days twelve pages), the daily edition averaging 12,500 copies.
The receipts from contributions and memberships were in round numbers
$5,000; from sale of seats and boxes at opera-house $5,000, and from
sale of daily _Woman's Tribune_, photographs and badges, collections,
advertisements, etc., $1,500, making a total of nearly $12,000. The
largest sums were from Julia T. Foster, $400; Elizabeth Thompson,
$250; Mrs. Leland Stanford, $200; Rachel G. Foster, $200; and $100
each from Adeline Thomson, Ellen Clark Sargent, Emma J. Bartol,
Margaret Caine, Sarah Knox Goodrich, Mary Hamilton Williams, Lucy
Winslow Curtis, Mary Gray Dow, Jane S. Richards, George W. Childs and
Henry C. Parsons. The cost of the _Tribune_ (printing, stenographic
report, mailing, etc.) was over $3,600; hall rent, $1,800. When one
considers the entertainment of so many officers, speakers and
delegates, printing, postage, the salary of one clerk for a year
(whose board was a contribution from Miss Adeline Thomson and Miss
Julia Foster of Philadelphia), and the thousand et ceteras of such a
meeting, the total cost of about $12,000 is not surprising. An
international convention of men, held in Washington within the year,
cost in round numbers $50,000.
[66] After the Council Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony and Miss Foster
remained in Washington for six weeks preparing a complete report of
the addresses and proceedings which filled nearly 500 pages. Five
thousand copies of these were printed, a large number of which were
placed in the public libraries of the United States and foreign
countries.
[67] Anna Maria Haslam, Honorable Secretary Woman's Suffrage
Association; Mary Edmundson, Honorable Secretary Dublin Prison Gate
Mission; Hannah Maria Wigham, President Women's Temperance
Association, Dublin, and Member of Peace Committee; Wilhelmina Webb,
Member of Ladies' Sanitary Committee, Women's Suffrage, etc., Rose
McDowell, Honorable Secretary Women's Suffrage Committee, Isabella
Mulvany, Head Mistress Alexandra School, Dublin, Harriet W. Russell,
Member of Women's Temperance Association; Deborah Webb, late Honorable
Secretary Ladies' Dublin Contagious Diseases Act Repeal Association;
Lucy Smithson, Member of the Sanitary Committee and Women's Suffrage
Association; Emily Webb, Member of Women's Suffrage Association; Agnes
Mason, Medical Student and Member of the Women's Suffrage Committee;
Ellen Allen, Member of Women's Temperance and Peace Associations.
[68] Among these were Elizabeth Pease Nichol, Eliza Wigham, Edinburgh;
Mrs. Jacob Bright, Catherine Lucas Thomasson, Margaret E. Parker, Jane
Cobden, Margaret Bright Lucas, Caroline Ashurst Biggs, Frances Lord,
F. Henrietta Muller, England; Isabella M. S. Tod, Belfast, Caroline de
Barrau, Theodore Stanton, Hubertine Auclert, editor of _La Citoyenne_,
Maria Deraismes, Eugenie Potonie, M. Dupuis Vincent, France; Johanna
Frederika Wecket, Germany, Prince Kropotkin, Russia.
[69] John G. Whittier, T. W. Higginson, Oliver Johnson, George W.
Julian, Samuel E. Sewall, Amelia Bloomer, Dr. James C. Jackson,
Theodore D. Weld, Elizabeth Buffam Chace, Rev. T. De Witt Talmage,
Abigail Scott Dumway, Mrs. Frank Leslie, Dr. Laura Ross Wolcott,
Charlotte B. Wilbour, Dr. Agnes Kemp, Augusta Cooper Bristol, Dr. Seth
and Mrs. Hannah Rogers, Dr. Alida C. Avery, Harriet S. Brooks, Sarah
Burger Stearns, Helen M. Gougar, Caroline B. Buell, Lucy N. Colman.
[70] Among those not mentioned above who gave addresses were E.
Florence Barker, Susan H. Barney, Leonora M. Barry, Isabel C. Barrows,
Cora A. Benneson, Ada M. Bittenbender, Henry B. Blackwell, Lillie
Devereux Blake, Martha McClellan Brown, Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett, Helen
Campbell, Matilda B. Carse, Ednah D. Cheney, Sarah B. Cooper, "Jennie
June" Croly, Caroline H. Dall, Abby Morton Diaz, Mary F. Eastman,
Martha A. Everett, Martha R. Field, Alice Fletcher, J. Ellen Foster,
Caroline M. S. Frazer, Helen H. Gardiner, Anna Gordon, Elizabeth
Boynton Harbert, Frances E. W. Harper, Marilla M. Hills, Clara C.
Hoffman, Laura C. Holloway, John W. Hutchinson, Mary H. Hunt, Laura M.
Johns, Mary A. Livermore, Huldah B. Loud, Ella M. S. Marble, Marion
McBride, Laura McNeir, Prof. Rena A. Michaels, Harriet N. Morris,
Amelia Hadley Mohl, Mrs. John P. Newman, Clara Neymann, ex-U. S.
Senator S. C. Pomeroy, Anna Rice Powell, Amelia S. Quinton, Emily S.
Richards, Victoria Richardson, Harriet H. Robinson, Elizabeth Lisle
Saxon, Lita Barney Sayles, Harriette R. Shattuck, Hannah Whitall
Smith, Elizabeth G. Stuart, Prof. Louisa Reed Stowell, Dr. Sarah
Hackett Stevenson, M. Louise Thomas, Esther M. Warner, Dr. Caroline B.
Winslow, Jennie Fowler Willing, Dr. Ruth M. Wood, Anna M. Worden.
On Pioneers' Evening about forty of the most prominent of the old
workers were on the platform.
[71] The officers of the National Council were: President, Frances E.
Willard, Ill.; vice-president-at-large, Susan B. Anthony, N. Y.; cor.
sec., May Wright Sewall, Ind.; rec. sec., Mary F. Eastman, Mass.;
treas., M. Louise Thomas, N. Y. Officers of the International
Council: President, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, England;
vice-president-at-large, Clara Barton, United States; cor. sec. Rachel
G. Foster, United States; rec. sec., Kirstine Frederiksen, Denmark.
[72] This committee consisted of Senator Francis M. Cockrell, Mo.;
Joseph E. Brown, Ga.; Samuel Pasco, Fla.; Henry W. Blair, N. H.;
Thomas W. Palmer, Mich.; Jonathan Chace, R. I.; Thomas M. Bowen, Colo.
No hearing was held before the Judiciary Committee of the House, but
on April 24 Mrs. Sallie Clay Bennett of Kentucky obtained an audience
and made an extended and unanswerable argument from two points of
view, the Scriptural and the Constitutional. Her address is printed in
full in the _Woman's Tribune_ of April 28, 1888.
CHAPTER IX.
THE NATIONAL SUFFRAGE CONVENTION OF 1889.
The Twenty-first annual convention of the National Association met in
the Congregational Church at Washington, Jan. 21-23, 1889, in answer
to the official Call:
Neither among politicians, nor among women themselves, is this in
any sense a party movement. While the Prohibition party in Kansas
incorporated woman suffrage in its platform, the Republicans made
it a fact by extending municipal suffrage to the women of that
State. The Democrats of Connecticut on several occasions voted
for woman suffrage while Republicans voted against it. In the New
York Legislature Republicans and Democrats alike have advocated
and voted for the measure. In Congress the last vote in the House
stood eighty Republicans for woman suffrage and nearly every
Democrat against it, while not a single Democrat voted in favor
of it on the floor of the Senate. Both the Labor and Greenback
parties have uniformly recognized woman suffrage in their
platforms.... Our strength for future action lies in the fact
that woman suffrage has some advocates in all parties and that
we, as an association, are pledged to none.
The denial of the ballot to woman is the great political crime of
the century, before which tariff, finance, land monopoly,
temperance, labor and all economic questions sink into
insignificance; for the right of suffrage involves all questions
of person and of property.
While each party in power has refused to enfranchise woman, being
skeptical as to her moral influence in government, yet with
strange inconsistency they alike seek the aid of her voice and
pen in all important political struggles. While not morally bound
to obey the laws made without their consent, yet we find women
the most law-abiding class of citizens in the community. While
not recognized as a component part of the Government, they are
most active in all great movements for education, religion,
philanthropy and reform.
The magnificent convocation of women from the world over--held in
Washington last March--a Council more important than any since
the Diet of Worms--was proof of woman's marvelous power of
organization and her clear comprehension of the underlying
principles of all questions of government. With such evidence of
her keen insight and executive ability, we invite all interested
in good government to give us the inspiration of their presence
in the coming convention.
In the absence of Mrs. Stanton Miss Anthony presided, opening her
address with the sentence, "Here we have stood for the last twenty-one
years, demanding of Congress to take the necessary step to secure to
the women of this nation protection in the exercise of their
constitutional right to a voice in the government." She introduced the
Hon. Albert G. Riddle (D. C.), who in 1871 had made an argument before
the Joint Judiciary Committee in favor of woman's right to vote under
the Fourteenth Amendment; and later had argued before the Supreme
Court her right to vote in the District. In the course of his remarks
he said: "All the changes in favor of woman--everything indeed that
has been achieved--has been in consequence of this contest for woman
suffrage. Its advocates began it; they traveled along with it; and all
that has been gained in the statutes of the various States and of the
United States has been by their efforts; whatever has taken a
crystallized form of irrepealable law is because of this discussion,
because of this agitation."
Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) read the resolution demanding a
representation of women in the Centennial Celebration of the Adoption
of the United States Constitution soon to be held in New York City.
Miss Anthony then introduced Senator Henry W. Blair (N. H.), who was
received with much applause, as the unswerving champion of woman
suffrage. In an address considering the constitutional phase of the
question, he said:
There has been such progress in the formulation of the State and
the national law that it has become necessary for the Supreme
Court of the United States to decide that we are not a sovereign
people, that we have no nation at all, in order to prevent woman
from exercising the right of suffrage throughout this country. In
that decision which deprived Mrs. Virginia L. Minor of her right,
the Supreme Court was driven to the necessity of deciding in
express terms, "The United States has no voters of its own
creation." If the United States has no voters, then the old
doctrine of State sovereignty is the true one and there is no
nation. We are subservient and subordinate to the power of the
States to-day by virtue of this decision just exactly as it was
claimed we were prior to the recent war. We thought the war
established the fact that we were a nation; that the controversy
which led up to the war had been decided in favor of the
sovereignty of the nation. Under our republican form of
government the sovereignty is lodged in the masses of the people.
If, therefore, it is not in the man who votes by virtue of his
membership in the association of the people known as the United
States, then there is no sovereignty there....
As the law now is, in the Federal Constitution there must always
have been such a voter of the United States, for in the second
clause of the first article it is provided that there shall be a
House of Representatives "elected by the people in the States."
Where that provision is made it says that the electors shall have
the qualifications of the electors in the States. But it does not
say that they shall be the same individuals; it does not say that
they are to act in the same capacity. They might vary in
different portions of the country, in different States; but
nevertheless, in giving to the people of the States the right to
specify the qualifications which should belong to the electors of
the United States, the Constitution did not give up the power to
create electors itself....
Take the Fifteenth Amendment. There is the first instance in the
entire Constitution where we find the franchise declared to be a
"right," and in specific terms alluded to as such. And there it
is provided that a right already recognized as existing shall not
be abridged by the United States or by the States--a right
already _existing_, not _established_. And by virtue of that
amendment and the provision that this existing right shall not be
denied or abridged on account of "race, color or previous
condition of servitude," either by the United States or by the
States, the _national existence_ of the voter is established....
I think our great difficulty about this is that women perhaps do
not, to the extent that they should, place their cause upon the
platform that it is a right; that to uphold that it is not a
right is a wrong greater than any which has been perpetrated in
the past; that freedom to half the human race is a glorious
achievement which it still remains for mankind to accomplish....
There is no way in which you can do so much for this world as by
giving liberty to those who are the mothers of the generations
past and to come; so that freedom to think, freedom to formulate
opinions, freedom to decide by the majority of the whole of
mature human nature, shall be the universal boon as far as the
human race extends....
Miss Anthony then read a letter from Mrs. Stanton which embodied that
spirit of independence possessed by her almost beyond all other women:
I notice that in some of our conventions resolutions of thanks
are passed to senators, congressmen and legislators for
advocating some minor privileges which have been conceded to
women, such as admission to colleges and professions, limited
forms of suffrage, etc. Now I do not see any occasion for
gratitude to these honorable gentlemen who, after robbing us of
all our fundamental rights as citizens, propose to restore a few
minor privileges. There is not one impulse of gratitude in my
soul for any of the fragmentary privileges which by slow degrees
we have wrung out of our oppressors during the last half century,
nor will there be so long as woman is robbed of all the essential
rights of citizenship.
If strong appeals could induce the highway robber to return a
modicum of what he had stolen, it might mitigate the miseries of
his victim, but surely there would be no reason for gratitude,
and an expression of thanks to him would be quite as much out of
place as are complimentary resolutions passed in our conventions
to legislators for their concessions to women. They deserve
nothing at our hands until they make full restitution of all we
possessed in the original compact under the colonial
constitutions--rights over which in the nature of things men
could have no lawful jurisdiction whatever.... Woman has the same
right to a voice in this government that man has, and it is based
on the same natural desire and capacity for self-government and
self-protection....
Until woman is recognized as an equal factor in civilization, and
is possessed of her personal property, civil and political
rights, all minor privileges and concessions are but so many
added aggravations, and are insulting mockeries of that justice,
liberty and equality which are the birthright of every citizen of
a republic. "Universal suffrage," said Charles Sumner, "is the
first proof and only basis of a genuine republic."
Mrs. Stanton referred to the bravery of recent women writers in
attacking social problems, citing Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Margaret Deland,
Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird and Helen Gardiner. She closed with a
tribute to the co-laborers who had died during the past year, among
them the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, Judge Samuel E. Sewall, Dr.
Clemence S. Lozier, Dr. Mary F. Thomas, Miss Abby W. May and numerous
others.
During the second day's proceedings the Rev. Alexander Kent, of the
Church of Our Father (Universalist), addressed the convention, saying
in part:
It is not uncommon among writers on woman suffrage to find the
root of the trouble in those notions of the creation and fall set
forth in the ancient Jewish Scriptures--notions which have very
generally prevailed throughout Christendom until recently, and
which even yet have a large hold upon many people professing to
be Christians. In the account of the origin of evil given by the
ancient Hebrew writer, woman is the chief offender, and upon her
falls the burden of the penalty. In sorrow she is to bring forth
her children; her desire is to be to her husband and he is to
rule over her. Unquestionably this has tended to prolong the
reign of brute force in Christendom by perpetuating a belief in
the rightful headship of man in the family and State. But it is a
great mistake to see in this Scripture the root of the evil. It
is only the record of a theory offered to explain a fact--which
antedated both the theory and the record. We find the fact to-day
even where we do not find the record--the woman ruled by the man
in places where there is no knowledge whatever of the Hebrew
Scriptures. I doubt not that among the founders of our
Government--meaning the people generally--this doctrine of the
rightful headship of man and the subordination of woman was
sacredly held as a part of the revealed word of God, and that as
such it operated to keep the women as well as the men of that day
from perceiving the full significance, the comprehensive scope of
the principles affirmed by their leaders, in the Constitution and
the Declaration of Independence....
If the ballot in the hands of woman is to do a great work for
society, it will be first and foremost because of its wholesome
influence on herself--because it rouses in her more of hope, more
of laudable ambition, more of earnest purpose, more of
self-reliance, more independence of the fashions, frivolities and
conventionalities of society and the dictates of the church....
Praying for the speedy coming of this day, and hoping it may work
gradually toward a purer and happier social life, and a further
companionship in thought and feeling, in purpose and effort,
between men and women, and especially between husbands and wives
in the life of the home, I express my sympathy with the purpose
of this convention.
Mrs. Caroline Hallowell Miller (Md.) took the ground that, after fifty
years of argument, women now should unite in a continuous demand for
the rights of citizenship.
In introducing the Hon. William D. Kelley (Penn.) Miss Anthony said
that not only in Congress, where he was known as the Father of the
House, but years ago in his own State Legislature, he advocated the
political equality of women. After paying a tribute to his mother, to
Mary Wollstonecraft and to Frances Wright, he said: "I am here,
because I feel that I should again declare publicly the justice of the
enfranchisement of women, which, having cherished through youth and
early manhood, I asserted in a public address in Independence Hall, at
high noon on the Fourth of July, 1841, before there was any
organization for promoting woman's rights politically." He then
sketched results already achieved and urged women to keep the flame
burning for the benefits which would come to posterity.
The Rev. Olympia Brown (Wis.) spoke on Foreign Rule, and after
pointing out the glory of a country which offered a home to all, and
expressing a belief in universal suffrage, she continued:
In Wisconsin we have by the census of 1880 a population of
910,072 native-born, 405,425 foreign-born. Our last vote cast was
149,463 American, 189,469 foreign; thus you see nearly 1,000,000
native-born people are out-voted and out-governed by less than
half their number of foreigners. Is that fair to Americans? Is it
just to American men? Will they not, under this influence, in a
little while be driven to the wall and obliged to step down and
out? When the members of our Legislatures are the greater part
foreigners, when they sit in the office of mayor and in all the
offices of our city, and rule us with a rod of iron, it is time
that American men should inquire if we have any rights that
foreigners are bound to respect....
The last census shows, I think, that there are in the United
States three times as many American-born women as the whole
foreign population, men and women together, so that the votes of
women will eventually be the only means of overcoming this
foreign influence and maintaining our free institutions. There is
no possible safety for our free school, our free church or our
republican government, unless women are given the suffrage and
that right speedily.... The question in every political caucus,
in every political convention, is not what great principles shall
we announce, but what kind of a document can we draw up that will
please the foreigners?...
When we remember that the first foot to touch Plymouth Rock was a
woman's--that in the first settlement of this country women
endured trials and privations and stood bravely at the post of
duty, even fighting in the ranks that we might have a
republic--and that in our great Western world women came at an
early day to make the wilderness blossom as the rose, and rocked
their babies' cradles in the log cabins when the Indians'
war-whoop was heard on the prairies and the wolves howled around
their doors--when we remember that in the last war thousands of
women in the Northwest bravely took upon themselves the work of
the households and the fields that their husbands and sons might
fight the battles of liberty--when we recollect all this, and
then are told that loyal women, pioneer women, the descendants of
the Pilgrim Fathers, are not even to ask for the right of
suffrage lest the Scandinavians should be offended, it is time to
rise in indignation and ask, Whose country is this? Who made it?
Who have periled their lives for it?
Our American women are property holders and pay large taxes; but
the foreigner who has lived only one year in the State, and ten
days in the precinct, who does not own a foot of land, may vote
away their property in the form of taxes in the most reckless
manner, regardless of their interests and their rights. Women are
well-educated; they are graduating from our colleges; they are
reading and thinking and writing; and yet they are the political
inferiors of all the riff-raff of Europe that is poured upon our
shores. It is unbearable. There is no language that can express
the enormous injustice done to women....
We can not separate subjects and say we will vote on temperance
or on school matters, for all these questions are part of
government.... When women as well as men are voters, the church
will get some recognition. I marvel that all ministers are not in
favor of woman suffrage, when I consider that their audiences are
almost entirely composed of women and that the church to-day is
brought into disrepute because it is made up of disfranchised
members. The minister would stand a hundred-fold higher than he
does now if women had the suffrage. Everybody would want to know
what the minister was saying to those women voters.
We are in danger in this country of Catholic domination, not
because the Catholics are more numerous than we are, but because
the Catholic church is represented at the polls and the
Protestant church is not. The foreigners are Catholic--the
greater portion of them; the foreigners are men--the greater part
of them, and members of the Catholic church, and they work for it
and vote for it. The Protestant church is composed of women. Men
for the most part do not belong to it; they do not care much for
it except as something to interest the women of their household.
The consequence is the Protestant church is comparatively
unrepresented at the ballot-box....
I urge upon you, women, that you put suffrage first and foremost,
before every other consideration upon earth. Make it a religious
duty and work for the enfranchisement of your sex, which means
the growth and development of noble characters in your children;
for you can not educate your children well surrounded by men and
women who hold false doctrines of society, of politics, of
morals. Leave minor issues, leave your differences of opinion
about the Trinity, or the Holy Ghost, or endless misery; about
high license and low license; or Dorcas Societies and Chautauqua
Circles. Let them all go; they are of no consequence compared
with the enfranchisement of women.
Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell gave a humorous series of Suffrage Pictures
in New York, which was greatly relished by the audience. Mrs. Laura M.
Johns described Municipal Suffrage in Kansas in an enthusiastic and
interesting manner. The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw then delivered her
lecture, which has since become so famous, The Fate of Republics,
tracing the rise and fall of the republics of history, which grew
because of material prosperity and failed because of moral weakness.
All were in the hands of men, and women were excluded from any
share.[73]
Mrs. Harriette R. Shattuck gave an account of the recent school
election in Boston where 19,490 women voted, a much higher percentage
of those registered than of the men, and thus defeated the dangerous
attempt which had been made by the Church to interfere with the State.
Richard W. Blue, State Senator of Kansas, was called to the platform
by Mrs. Gougar as one who had greatly aided its Municipal Suffrage
Bill.
Mrs. May Wright Sewall (Ind.) spoke on Women in the Recent Campaign.
In the National Prohibition Convention they sat as delegates and
served on committees. In all parts of the country Republican and
Democratic women organized clubs and marched in processions; but she
called attention to the fact that these methods are not advocated by
the suffrage societies so long as women remain disfranchised. Over two
hundred clubs were formed for political study. All of the parties
placed women on their platforms to speak in behalf of the candidates.
A Central Republican Headquarters was opened in New York and put in
charge of a national committee of women who sent out hundreds of
thousands of campaign documents. When election day came not one of all
these women could put her opinion in the ballot-box.
At the evening session Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.) in her
trenchant way discussed Political Methods and pointed out the
inconsistent and illogical declarations of platforms and speakers when
applied to women, also the delight afforded to men by the tin horns
and fireworks. She suggested for President Harrison's Cabinet,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Secretary of State; Susan B. Anthony,
Secretary of War; May Wright Sewall, Secretary of the Treasury;
Zerelda G. Wallace, Secretary of the Navy; Clara Barton, Secretary of
the Interior; Laura de Force Gordon, Attorney-General.
Mrs. Sarah M. Perkins (O.) spoke on The Concentration of Forces,
showing how prone women are to organize for every object except
suffrage, and yet the majority of these workers would rejoice to have
the power which lies in the ballot and would be infinitely better
equipped for their work.
Mrs. Mary B. Clay (Ky.) opened the last day's session with a forcible
address entitled, Are American Women Civil and Political Slaves? She
proved the affirmative of her question by quoting the spoken and
written declarations of the greatest statesmen on the right of
individual representation and the exceptions made against women,
citing Walker, the legal writer: "This language applied to males would
be the exact definition of political slavery; applied to females,
custom does not so regard it."
Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway (Ore.) described the recent arbitrary and
unwarranted disfranchisement of the women of Washington Territory.
Frederick Douglass was loudly called for and in responding expressed
his gratitude to women, "who were chiefly instrumental in liberating
my people from actual chains of bondage," and declared his full belief
in their right to the franchise.
Mrs. Helen M. Gougar (Ind.) made a strong speech upon Partisan or
Patriot? In her address on Woman in Marriage Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby,
editor of the _Woman's Tribune_, said:
It is customary to regard marriage as of even more importance to
woman than to man, since the maternal, social and household
duties involved in it consume the greater portion of the time and
thought of a large majority. Love, it is commonly said, is an
incident in a man's life, but makes or mars a woman's whole
existence. This, however, is one of the many popular delusions
crystallized into opinion by apt phraseology. To one who believes
in the divinely intended equality of the sexes it is impossible
to consider that any mutual relation is an incident for the one
and the total of existence for the other. We may lay it down as a
premise upon which to base our whole reasoning that all mutual
relations of the sexes are not only divinely intended to, but
actually do bring equal joys, pains, pleasures and sacrifices to
both. Whatever mistake one has made has acted upon the other, and
reacted equally upon the first.
The one great mistake of the ages--since woman lost her primal
independence and supremacy--to which is due all the sins and
sorrows growing out of the association of the sexes, has been in
making woman a passive agent instead of an equal factor in
arranging the laws, customs and conditions of this mutual state.
Whether marriage be a purely business partnership for the care
and maintenance of children, or whether it be a sacrament to
which the benediction of the church gives peculiar sanctity and
perpetuity and makes the parties "no more twain but one flesh,"
in either case it is an absurdity, which we only tolerate because
of custom, for men alone to make all the regulations and
stipulations concerning it.
This unnatural and strained assumption by one sex of the control
of everything relating to marriage, and the equally unnatural and
mischievous passivity on the part of the other, have given birth
to the meek maiden waiting for her fate, to the typical
disconsolate and forlorn "superfluous woman," to the two
standards of morality for the sexes, to the mercenary marriage
with all its attendant miseries, to the selfish, exacting,
querulous wife, to the disappointed or tyrannical husband; and of
late, with the wider possibilities of individual pleasure and
satisfaction, to the growing aversion of young people to
matrimony, and the rush of women to the divorce courts for
freedom from the galling bonds; all these and a thousand
variations of each, until the nature of both sexes is so
perverted that it is impossible to decide what is nature.
A letter was read from Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage (N. Y.) urging women
individually to petition Senators and Representatives for the removal
of their political disabilities, because by this means these men were
compelled to think on the question.
Mrs. Virginia L. Minor (Mo.) addressed the convention on The Law of
Federal Suffrage, a legal argument on the right to vote conferred by
the Constitution. Miss Anthony supplemented Mrs. Minor's argument with
a history of the Fourteenth Amendment, in which she said:
When that Fourteenth Amendment was under discussion--when it was
proposed to put the word "male" into the second section--it read:
"If any State shall disfranchise any of its citizens on account
of color, all of that class shall be counted out of the basis of
representation." But there were timid souls on the floor of
Congress at the close of the war, as well as at other periods of
our history, and to prevent the enfranchisement of women by this
amendment they moved to make it read: "If any State shall
disfranchise any of its _male_ citizens, all of that class shall
be counted out of the basis of representation." Male citizens!
For the first time in the history of our Government that
discriminating adjective was placed in the Constitution, and yet
the men on the floor of Congress, from Charles Sumner down, all
declared that this amendment would not in any wise change the
status of women!
We at once asserted our right to vote under this amendment: "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 or immunities of
citizens of the United States." Our first trial was on civil
rights, when Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago, who had been for some
time publishing a law journal which every lawyer in the State
said he could not afford to do without, applied for admission to
the bar, and these same lawyers denied it. She appealed to the
Illinois Supreme Court and it confirmed the denial, because she
was not only a woman but a married woman. Then she appealed her
case to the Supreme Court of the United States, and a majority of
this court decided that the right to be a lawyer was not
especially a citizen's right and that therefore the State of
Illinois could legally abridge the privileges and immunities of
its women by denying them admission to the bar.
I shall never forget how our hearts sank when in 1871 that
decision came, declaring the powerlessness of the Federal
Constitution to protect women in their civil right of being
eligible to the legal profession. When we said if these rights
which it is meant to protect are not civil they must be political
rights, we thought we had the Supreme Court in a corner. But when
my trial for voting came on, Justice Hunt said that the right to
vote was a special right belonging to men alone. We didn't
believe that this decision could be confirmed, but it was, when
Mrs. Minor, who attempted to vote at the same election in her
State of Missouri, appealed her case to the Supreme Court of the
United States. It was argued by her husband, the ablest of
lawyers, and when the Judges brought in their decision it was to
the effect that the Constitution of the United States has no
voters. Thus it is that we have two Supreme Court decisions
relative to the powers of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect
women, and in both cases they have been excluded absolutely from
its provisions.
I remember, Mrs. Minor (turning to that lady), how we discussed
these questions in those early years. We weren't sleepy in our
talk as we were being cut off inch by inch from the protection of
the Constitution. I remember how Mrs. Stanton said in a public
address: "If you continue to deny to women the protection of this
amendment, you will finally come to the point when it will cease
to protect even black men," and we have lived to see that day.
The address on The Coming Sex by Mrs. Eliza Archard Connor, a
well-known journalist of New York, was declared by the press to be in
its delivery "the gem of the convention." She said in part:
It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the
race. They have keener sympathies and quicker intuitions than
men. They have a gift of language that not even their worst
enemies will deny, and these are just the qualities which go to
make the orator.... The time is coming when we shall need all our
eloquence, all our intellectual power and all our love. The day
is approaching when men will come with ballots in their hands,
begging women to use them....
Wherever you go, wake women up, tell them to learn everything.
Tell them to study with all their might history, civil
government, political economy, social and industrial science--for
the time is coming when they will need them all....
This is the work before us. This is the meaning of the desperate
unrest and unhappiness of women. It is this that has drawn us
here to enter our protest against the wicked, old, one-legged
order of things. Our honored Miss Anthony has gone through fire
and hail while she worked for her convictions. All of us have
wrought as best we might for the higher education of women, for
their pecuniary independence, for their civil and political
rights, fighting the world, the flesh and the devil.
My own work has been in the field of journalism. For nearly
twenty years I have faced here every form of disability because I
am a woman, have met defeat after defeat, till the iron has
entered my soul. Yet every day I have thanked God that I have
been permitted to bear my share in the tremendous struggle for
the development of women in the nineteenth century. Struggle
means development; it can come in no other way, and this will be
the grandest since creation began--the crowned, perfected woman.
For this the cry of womanhood has risen out of the depths through
the centuries. Up through agony and despair it has come, through
sin and shame, through poverty and martyrdom, through torture
which has wrung drops of blood from woman's lips, still up, up,
till it has reached the great white throne itself.
The enrollment committee reported a list of about one hundred thousand
names of persons asking for woman suffrage. The treasurer announced
the receipts for 1888 to be $12,510. All of the expenses of the great
International Council had been paid and a balance of nearly $300
remained.
The resolutions might be described as an epitomized recital of wrongs
and a Bill of Rights.
WHEREAS, Women possessed and exercised the right of suffrage in
the inauguration of this Government; and,
WHEREAS, They were deprived of this right by the arbitrary Acts
of successive State Legislatures in violation of the original
compact as seen in the early constitutions; therefore,
_Resolved_, That it is the duty of the several States to make
prompt restitution of these ancient rights, recognized by
innumerable precedents in English history, and to-day by the
gradual extension of the suffrage over vast territories.
WHEREAS, Woman's title deed to an equal share in the inheritance
left her by the fathers of the Republic has been examined and
proved by able lawyers; and,
WHEREAS, This right is already exercised in some form in one
hundred localities in different parts of the world; therefore,
_Resolved_, That sex is no longer considered a bar to the
exercise of suffrage by civilized nations.
_Resolved_, That it is the duty of Congress to pass a declaratory
act, compelling the several States to establish a "republican
form of government" within their borders by securing to women
their right to vote, thus nullifying the fraudulent Acts of
Legislatures and making our Government homogeneous from Maine to
Oregon.
_Resolved_, That the question of enfranchising one-half the
people is superior to that of Indian treaties, admission of new
States, tariff, international copyright or any other subject
before the country, and that it is the foremost duty of the
Fiftieth Congress at this, its last session, to submit an
amendment to the Constitution forbidding States to disfranchise
citizens on account of sex.
_Resolved_, That as a question of ethics the difference between
putting a fraudulent ballot in the box and keeping a rightful
ballot out is nothing, and that we condemn the action which
prevents women from casting a ballot at any election as a
shameful evidence of the corruption of dominant political parties
in this country.
WHEREAS, The Legislature of Washington Territory has twice voted
for woman suffrage--women for the most part having gladly
accepted and exercised the right, Governor Squire in his report
to the Secretary of the Interior in 1884 having declared that it
met the approval of a large majority of the people; and,
WHEREAS, In 1887, after the women had voted for three and a half
years, the Territorial Supreme Court pronounced the law invalid
on the ground that the nature of the bill must be described in
the title of the act; and,
WHEREAS, In January, 1888, another bill passed by the Legislature
gave to this law an explicit title; and the bill, again granting
suffrage to women, was signed by Governor Semple, thus
triumphantly showing the approval of the people, the Legislature
and the Governor; and,
WHEREAS, The Territorial Supreme Court, in August, 1888, again
rendered a decision against the right of the women of the
Territory to vote, basing their decision upon the false
assumption that Congress had never delegated to the Territories
the right to define the status of their own voters; and,
WHEREAS, This decision strikes a blow at the fundamental powers
of the United States Congress, confounding laws delegated to the
Territories by the Organic Act of 1852, which vests in their
Legislatures the power to prescribe their qualifications for
voting and holding office--with State governments which limit
legislative enactments by constitutions of their own making--thus
setting at naught the will of the people; therefore,
_Resolved_, That we earnestly and respectfully petition Congress
that in passing an enabling act or acts for the admission of the
other Territories there be incorporated a clause allowing women
to vote for delegates to their constitutional conventions, and at
the election for the adoption of the constitution, in every one
where the Legislature has granted woman suffrage and such law has
not been repealed by a subsequent Legislature.
WHEREAS, In the year 1873 our leader, Susan B. Anthony, was
deprived of the right of trial by jury, by a Judge of the Supreme
Court of the United States, simply because she was a woman, it is
the duty of all women to resent the insult thus offered to
womanhood and demand of the men of this closing century of
constitutional government such condemnation of this infamous
decision of Judge Ward Hunt[74] as shall teach the coming
generation of voters that the welfare of the republic demands
that women be protected equally with men in the exercise of
citizenship; and,
WHEREAS, In the great Centennial Celebration of 1876 women were
denied all participation in the public proceedings commemorating
the birth of the Declaration of Independence, though they sought
earnestly and respectfully to declare their sentiments of loyalty
to the great principles of liberty and responsibility there
enunciated, they should now demand official recognition by
Congress and the State Legislature on all the Boards of
Commissioners which, at the public expense, are to initiate and
carry out the august ceremonials of the coming Constitutional
Celebration in New York in April, 1889, to the end that taxation
without representation shall no longer be acknowledged a just and
constitutional policy in this government nominally of the
_people_, therefore,
_Resolved_, That a committee be appointed by the National W. S.
A. to memorialize Congress on this subject, and to take such
other action as shall bring before the enlightened manhood of our
country their duty of chivalry no less than justice in this
important matter.[75]
WHEREAS, The question of woman's enfranchisement is fundamental
and of paramount importance; therefore,
_Resolved_, That, while the National Woman Suffrage Association
welcomes and claims the support of persons of all parties and
beliefs, it desires to strongly reassert the position which it
has held of being nonpartisan.
A hearing was granted by the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage the
morning of January 24. Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Minor, Mrs. Duniway, Mrs.
Johns, the Rev. Olympia Brown, the Rev. Miss Shaw and Miss Alice Stone
Blackwell were introduced to the committee by Miss Anthony, and each
from a different standpoint presented the arguments for the submission
of a Sixteenth Amendment enfranchising women.
On February 7, Senator Blair reported for the committee--Senators
Charles B. Farwell (Ill.), Jonathan Chace (R. I.), Edward O. Wolcott
(Col.), in favor of the amendment. After an able and exhaustive
argument the report closed as follows:
Unless this Government shall be made and preserved truly
republican in form by the enfranchisement of woman, the great
reforms which her ballot would accomplish may never be; the
demoralization and disintegration now proceeding in the body
politic are not likely soon to be arrested. Corruption of the
male suffrage is already a well-nigh fatal disease; intemperance
has no sufficient foe in the law-making power; a republican form
of government can not survive half-slave and half-free.
The ballot is withheld from women because men are not willing to
part with one-half the sovereign power. There is no other real
cause for the continued perpetration of this unnatural tyranny.
Enfranchise women or this republic will steadily advance to the
same destruction, the same ignoble and tragic catastrophe, which
has engulfed the male republics of history. Let us establish a
government in which both men and women shall be free indeed. Then
shall the republic be perpetual.
The women of the nation are deeply indebted to Senator Blair for his
able and persistent efforts in their behalf. Year after year, in the
midst of the great pressure of duties connected with his office, he
carefully prepared these constitutional and legal reports knowing that
they could have only the indirect results of educating public
sentiment and contributing to the history of this great movement for
the political rights of half the race.
The other members of the committee, Senators Zebulon B. Vance (N. C.),
Joseph E. Brown (Ga.), J. B. Beck (Ky.), announced that they should
present a minority report in opposition, but as "Letters from a
Chimney Corner," by Mrs. Caroline F. Corbin, and "The Law of Woman
Life," by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, apparently had been exhausted, and as
no other woman had provided them with the necessary ideas, the report
never materialized. Senator Vance, however, as chairman of this Select
Suffrage Committee asked for a clerk at this time, to be paid out of
the contingent fund.
The House Judiciary Committee granted a hearing January 28, which was
addressed by Miss Anthony, Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Duniway, Mrs. Minor, the
Rev. Olympia Brown, Mrs. Colby, Miss Lavina A. Hatch (Mass.) and Mrs.
Ella M. Marble (Minn.). The committee took no action.
FOOTNOTES:
[73] It is a loss to posterity that Miss Shaw never writes her
addresses. She is beyond question the leading woman orator of this
generation, and is not surpassed in power by any of the men.
[74] See History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 647.
[75] This was done, but no representation was allowed women in the
celebration.
CHAPTER X.
THE NATIONAL-AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1890.
The winter of 1890 brought the usual crowd of eminent women to
Washington to attend the Twenty-second national convention of the
suffrage association, February 18-21. As the president, Mrs. Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, was to start for Europe on the 19th, the congressional
hearings took place previous to the convention and consisted only of
her address. The Senate hearing on February 8 was held for the first
time in the new room set apart for the Select Committee on Woman
Suffrage, but much objection was made because on account of its size
only a small audience could be admitted. Senators Vance, Farwell,
Blair and John B. Allen of the new State of Washington were present.
Mrs. Stanton said in part:
For almost a quarter of a century a body of intelligent and
law-abiding women have held annual conventions in Washington and
made their appeals before committees of the House and the Senate,
asking to be recognized as citizens of this Republic. A whole
generation of distinguished members, who have each in turn given
us aid and encouragement, have passed away--Seward, Sumner,
Wilson, Giddings, Wade, Garfield, Morton and Sargent--with
Hamlin, Butler and Julian still living, have all declared our
demands just, our arguments unanswerable.
In consulting at an early day as to the form in which our claims
should be presented, some said by an amendment to the
Constitution, others said the Constitution as it is, in spirit
and letter, is broad enough to protect the rights of every
citizen under our flag. But when the war came and we saw that it
took three amendments to make the slaves of the South
full-fledged citizens, we thought it would take at least one to
make woman's calling and election sure. So we asked for a
Sixteenth Amendment. But learned lawyers, Judges and Congressmen
took the ground that women were already enfranchised by the
Fourteenth Amendment. The House minority report in 1871, signed
by Benjamin F. Butler and William Loughridge, held that view. It
is an able, unanswerable argument on the whole question, based on
the oft-repeated principles of the Republican party at that
time. It stands to-day a living monument of the grossest
inconsistencies of which the Republican party ever was
guilty.[76] ...
We can not play fast and loose with the eternal principle of
justice without being caught sooner or later in the net of our
own weaving. The legitimate results of the war have been all
frittered away by political maneuvering. While Northern statesmen
have made a football of the rights of 12,000,000 women as voters,
and by Supreme Court decisions driven them from the polls, why
arraign the men in the South for treating 1,000,000 freedmen in
the same way? Are the rights of that class of citizens more
sacred than ours? Are the violations of the fundamental
principles of our Government in their case more dangerous than in
ours?...
In addressing those who already enjoy the right of suffrage, one
naturally would suppose that it would not be necessary to enlarge
on the advantages of having a voice in deciding the laws and the
rulers under which one lives. And neither would it if each member
of this committee understood that woman's wants and needs are
similar to his own; that the cardinal virtues belong to her as
well as to him; that personal dignity, the power of
self-protection, are as important for her as for him; that woman
loves justice, equality, liberty, and wishes the right to give
her consent to the Government under which she lives, as much as
man does. Matthew Arnold says: "The first desire of every
cultured mind is to take part in the great work of government."
...
If we would rouse new respect for womanhood in the hearts of the
masses, we must place woman in a position to respect herself,
which she can never do as long as her political status is beneath
that of the most degraded, ignorant classes of men. To make women
the political equals of their sons, or even of their gardeners
and coachmen, would add new dignity to their position; and to
change our laws and constitutions in harmony with the new status
would have its influence on the large class of young men now
devoting themselves to the study of the law. Lord Brougham said
long ago that the Common Law of England for women, and all the
statutes based on such principles, were a disgrace to the
Christianity and civilization of the nineteenth century. Do you
think our sons can rise from such studies with a high ideal of
womanhood? And with what feelings do you suppose women themselves
read these laws, and the articles in the State constitutions,
rating them with the disreputable and feeble-minded classes? Can
you not understand the dignity, the pride, the new-born
self-respect which would thrill the hearts of the women of this
nation in their enfranchisement? It would elevate their sphere of
action and every department of labor in which they are occupied;
it would give new force to their words as teachers, reformers and
missionaries, new strength to their work as guardians of the
young, the wayward and the unfortunate. It would transform them
from slaves to sovereigns, crowned with the rights of
citizenship, with the ballot, that scepter of power, in their own
right hands....
If there are any who do not wish to vote, that is the strongest
reason for their enfranchisement. If all love of liberty has been
quenched in their souls by their degraded condition, the duties
of citizenship and the responsibility of self-government should
be laid upon them at once, for their pitiful indifference is
merely the result of their disfranchisement. Would that I could
awake in the minds of my countrywomen the full significance of
this demand for the right of suffrage; what it is to be queens in
their own right, intrusted with the power of self-government,
possessed of all the privileges and immunities of American
citizens....
Whoever heard of an heir apparent to a throne in the Old World
abdicating her rights because some conservative politician or
austere bishop doubted woman's capacity to govern? History
affords no such example. Those who have had the right to a throne
have invariably taken possession of it and, against intriguing
cardinals, ambitious nobles and jealous kinsmen, fought even to
the death to maintain the royal prerogatives which by inheritance
were theirs. When I hear American women, descendants of
Jefferson, Hancock and Adams, say they do not want to vote, I
feel that the blood of the revolutionary heroes must long since
have ceased to flow in their veins.
Suppose when the day dawned for Victoria to be crowned Queen of
England she had gone before the House of Commons and begged that
such terrible responsibilities might not be laid upon her,
declaring that she had not the moral stamina nor intellectual
ability for the position; that her natural delicacy and
refinement shrank from the encounter; that she was looking
forward to the all-absorbing duties of domestic life, to a
husband, children, home, to her influence in the social circle
where the Christian graces are best employed. Suppose with a
tremulous voice and a few stray tears in her blue eyes, her head
drooping on one side, she had said she knew nothing of the
science of government; that a crown did not befit a woman's brow;
that she had not the physical strength even to wave her nation's
flag, much less to hold the scepter of power over so vast an
empire; that in case of war she could not fight and hence could
not reign, as there must be force behind the throne, and this
force must be centered in the hand which governed. What would her
Parliament have thought? What would other nations have
thought?...
None of you would admit, honorable gentlemen, that all the great
principles of government which center round our theories of
justice, liberty and equality in favor of individual sovereignty
have not as yet produced as high a type of womanhood as has a
monarchy in the Old World. We have a large number of women as
well fitted as Victoria for the most responsible positions in the
Government, who could fill the highest places with equal dignity
and wisdom.
There is no subject more intensely interesting to men than the
science of government, and when their wives are intelligent on
all the questions it comprises they will be far more valuable
companions than they are to-day. Marriage means companionship, a
similarity of tastes and opinions, and where one of the parties
has no interest in or knowledge of those subjects most absorbing
to the other, the bonds of union necessarily are weakened. So
long as woman's thought is centered in personal and family
aggrandizement, her strongest influence will be used to keep
man's interest there also. The virtue of patriotism would be far
greater among men, their devotion to the public good far more
earnest, if the influences of home life were not continually
drawing them into a narrow selfishness.
Women naturally take no interest in questions where their
opinions have no weight, in a sphere of action from which they
are excluded. They are not supposed to know what is necessary for
the public good, hence how could they influence their husbands to
make that their first duty when in public life? But when women
are enfranchised their interest in the State will deepen. They
will see that the welfare of their own children depends as much
on the conditions of the outside world as on the environments of
their own homes. This settled discontent of women is exerting an
insidious influence which is undermining the very foundations of
the home as well as the State. We must rouse them to new hopes,
new ambitions, new aspirations, through the enjoyment of the
blessings of freedom and self-government.
Moreover, an active participation in the practical duties of
government by educated women would bring a new and needed element
to the State. We can not overestimate the influence women exert,
whether for good or ill, hence the immense importance of their
having right views on all questions of public interest and some
knowledge of the requirements of practical politics. But their
power to-day is wholly irresponsible and hence dangerous. Lay on
them the responsibility of legislating, with all the criticism
and odium of a constituency and a party, in case they make some
blunder, and you render them wiser in judgment and more
deliberate in action. To secure this large disfranchised class as
allies to one of the leading parties would be a wise measure for
that party and bring a new element of morality and intelligence
into the body politic. Women are now taking a more active part in
public affairs than ever before and, with political freedom,
always will be the reserved moral power to sustain great men in
their best endeavors.
An interesting conversation followed. Chairman Zebulon B. Vance (N.
C.) asked Mrs. Stanton if women would be willing to go to war if they
had the ballot. She answered that they would decide whether there
should be war. He inquired whether women would not lose their refining
influence and moral qualities if they engaged in men's work. She
replied that there would have to be a definition of "men's work" and
that she found the latter in many avocations, such as washing,
cooking, and selling needles and tape, which might be considered the
work of women. "The moral qualities," she said, "are more apt to grow
when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps
to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to
idleness and fashionable frivolities. The consideration of questions
of legislation, finance, free trade, etc., certainly would not degrade
woman, nor is her refinement so evanescent a virtue that it could be
swept away by some work which she might do with her hands. Queen
Victoria looked as dignified and refined in opening Parliament as any
lady one ever had seen."
Miss Susan B. Anthony, who was never so happy as when her beloved
friend was scoring a victory, said there would always be a division of
labor, in time of war as in time of peace. Women would do their share
in the hospitals and elsewhere, and if they were enfranchised, the
only difference would be that they would be paid for their services
and pensioned at the close of the war. Mrs. Colby reminded the
committee that the report of the U. S. Commissioner of Labor showed
that the largest proportion of immoral women came from home life and
the more feminine occupations.
Mrs. Stanton drew from the chairman the admission that his wife wanted
the franchise, and he laughingly admitted that he had had the worst of
the discussion. Senator Allen expressed himself in favor of woman
suffrage, and Senator Charles B. Farwell said, "The suffragists have
logic, argument, everything on their side."
Another heaping was granted by the Senate Committee, February 24, when
they were addressed by the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Sallie Clay
Bennett, Mrs. Virginia L. Minor and Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby.
Later in the session Senator Henry W. Blair (N. H.) presented the
majority report of the Committee (No. 1576), the usual strong,
dignified statement. It closed as follows: "To deny the submission of
this joint resolution to the action of the Legislatures of the States
is analogous to the denial of the right of justice in the courts. It
is to say that no plaintiff shall bring his suit; no claimant of
justice shall be heard; and whatever may be the result to the friends
of woman suffrage when they reach the Legislatures of the States, it
is, in our belief, the duty of Congress to submit the joint resolution
and give them the opportunity to try their case."
Mrs. Stanton presented the same address before the House Judiciary
Committee, February 11, with the result that for the first time in
history a majority House report in favor of a Sixteenth Amendment was
submitted. It was presented by Lucien B. Caswell (Wis.) and said in
conclusion: "The disfranchisement of twelve millions of people, who
are citizens of the United States, should command from us an immediate
action. Since the women of this country are unjustly deprived of a
right so essential to complete citizenship in a republic as the
elective franchise, common justice requires that we should submit the
proposition for a change in the fundamental law to the State
Legislatures, where the correction can be made."[77]
The fiftieth birthday of Susan B. Anthony had been celebrated in New
York City in 1870 by a large number of prominent men and women, the
first instance of the kind on record. It had been decided by her
friends that her seventieth birthday should receive a similar
recognition, but that it should be more national in character. The
arrangements were made by Mrs. May Wright Sewall and Mrs. Rachel
Foster Avery, and on the evening of February 15 a distinguished
company of two hundred sat around the banquet tables in the great
dining-room of the Riggs House. Miss Anthony occupied the place of
honor, on her right Senator Blair and Mrs. Stanton, on her left Robert
Purvis, Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker and Mrs. Sewall, who presided. In
addition to the after-dinner speeches of these distinguished guests
there were clever and sparkling responses to toasts by the Rev. Anna
Howard Shaw, Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Miss Phoebe W. Couzins, the
Rev. Frederick A. Hinckley, Representative J. A. Pickler (S. D.), Mrs.
Colby, Mrs. Stanton's two daughters--Mrs. Harriot Blatch and Mrs.
Margaret Lawrence--Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant of England, and others.
Mrs. Stanton began her address by saying: "If there is one part of my
life which gives me more intense satisfaction than another, it is my
friendship of more than forty years' standing with Susan B. Anthony."
The key-note to Miss Anthony's touching response was struck in the
opening sentence: "The thing I most hope for is that, should I stay on
this planet twenty years longer, I still may be worthy of the
wonderful respect you have manifested for me to-night."
Among the more than two hundred letters, poems and telegrams received
were those of George William Curtis, William Lloyd Garrison, John G.
Whittier, George F. Hoar, Lucy Stone, Frances E. Willard, Speaker
Thomas B. Reed, Mrs. John A. Logan, Thomas W. Palmer, the Rev. Olympia
Brown, Harriet Hosmer, Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, Alice Williams
Brotherton, Charles Nordhoff, Frank G. Carpenter, U. S. Senator Henry
L. Dawes, Neal Dow, Laura M. Johns, T. V. Powderly and Leonora M.
Barry. Most of the prominent newspapers in the country contained
editorial congratulations, and the _Woman's Tribune_ issued a special
birthday edition.
The convention opened in Metzerott's Music Hall, February 18, 1890,
continuing four days. The feature of this occasion which will
distinguish it in history was the formal union of the National and the
American Associations under the joint name. For the past twenty-one
years two distinctive societies had been in existence, both national
as to scope but differing as to methods. Negotiations had been in
progress for several years toward a uniting of the forces and, the
preliminaries having been satisfactorily arranged by committees from
the two bodies,[78] the officers and members of both participated in
this national convention of 1890.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the newly-elected president of the united
societies, faced a brilliant assemblage of men and women as she arose
to make the opening address. Having declared that in going to England
as president of the National-American Association she felt more
honored than if sent as minister plenipotentiary of the United States,
she spoke to a set of resolutions which she presented to the
convention.[79] After reviewing the history of the movement for the
rights of woman and naming some of its brilliant leaders she said:
For fifty years we have been plaintiffs in the courts of justice,
but as the bench, the bar and the jury are all men, we are
nonsuited every time. Some men tell us we must be patient and
persuasive; that we must be womanly. My friends, what is man's
idea of womanliness? It is to have a manner which pleases
him--quiet, deferential, submissive, approaching him as a subject
does a master. He wants no self-assertion on our part, no
defiance, no vehement arraignment of him as a robber and a
criminal. While the grand motto, "Resistance to tyrants is
obedience to God," has echoed and re-echoed around the globe,
electrifying the lovers of liberty in every latitude and making
crowned heads tremble on their thrones; while every right
achieved by the oppressed has been wrung from tyrants by force;
while the darkest page on human history is the outrages on
women--shall men still tell us to be patient, persuasive,
womanly?
What do we know as yet of the womanly? The women we have seen
thus far have been, with rare exceptions, the mere echoes of men.
Man has spoken in the State, the Church and the Home, and made
the codes, creeds and customs which govern every relation in
life, and women have simply echoed all his thoughts and walked in
the paths he prescribed. And this they call womanly! When Joan of
Arc led the French army to victory I dare say the carpet knights
of England thought her unwomanly. When Florence Nightingale, in
search of blankets for the soldiers in the Crimean War, cut her
way through all orders and red tape, commanded with vehemence and
determination those who guarded the supplies to "unlock the doors
and not talk to her of proper authorities when brave men were
shivering in their beds," no doubt she was called unwomanly. To
me, "unlock the doors" sounds better than any words of
circumlocution, however sweet and persuasive, and I consider that
she took the most womanly way of accomplishing her object.
Patience and persuasiveness are beautiful virtues in dealing with
children and feeble-minded adults, but those who have the gift of
reason and understand the principles of justice, it is our duty
to compel to act up to the highest light that is in them, and as
promptly as possible.
Mrs. Stanton urged that women should have more power in church
management, saying:
As women are taking an active part in pressing on the
consideration of Congress many narrow sectarian measures, such as
more rigid Sunday laws, the stopping of travel, the distribution
of the mail on that day, and the introduction of the name of God
into the Constitution; and as this action on the part of some
women is used as an argument for the disfranchisement of all, I
hope this convention will declare that the Woman Suffrage
Association is opposed to all union of Church and State, and
pledges itself as far as possible to maintain the secular nature
of our Government. As Sunday is the only day that the laboring
man can escape from the cities, to stop the street-cars,
omnibuses and railroad trains would indeed be a lamentable
exercise of arbitrary authority. No, no, the duty of the State is
to protect those who do the work of the world, in the largest
liberty, and instead of shutting them up in their gloomy tenement
houses on Sunday, to open wide the parks, horticultural gardens,
museums, libraries, galleries of art and the music halls where
they can listen to the divine melodies of the great masters.
She demanded that women declare boldly and decisively on all the vital
issues of the day, and said:
In this way we make ourselves mediums through which the great
souls of the past may speak again. The moment we begin to fear
the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in
us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak,
the divine floods of light and life flow no longer into our
souls. Every truth we see is ours to give the world, not to keep
for ourselves alone, for in so doing we cheat humanity out of
their rights and check our own development.
As Mrs. Stanton finished she introduced her daughter, Mrs. Blatch, a
resident of England, who in a few impressive remarks showed that on
the great socialistic questions of the day--capital and labor, woman
suffrage, race prejudice--England was liberal and the United States
conservative; that the latter had beautiful ideas but did not apply
them, and tended too much to the worship of legislation.
The Hon. Wm. Dudley Foulke, retiring president of the American
Association, an uncompromising advocate of woman's enfranchisement,
then made a strong and scholarly address in the course of which he
said:
The fundamental rights of self-government, the right of each man
to cast his single vote and have it counted as it is cast, is of
greater and more lasting importance than any of the temporary
consequences which flow from the result of any election. Beyond
all matters of expediency and good administration lies the great
question of human liberty and equality, which can only be
maintained by the uncorrupted equal suffrage of every citizen;
and so sacred is this in the eyes of the law that years of
penitentiary service are prescribed for the interference with the
right of a single human being of the male sex to cast the vote
which the law allows him.
But there may be a moral guilt outside the law, of a character
quite similar to that which is so punished when it comes within
the terms of the statute, and it may be the crime, not of a
single lawbreaker, but of the entire community that establishes
the constitutions and enacts the statutes, which denies these
equal rights to citizens who are subject to equal burdens.
Wherever the rule of power is substituted for the just and
equitable principle that all who are subject to government should
have a voice in controlling it, we are guilty under the form of
law of the same violation of the just rights of others for which
the corruptor of elections and the forger of tally-sheets is
tried, convicted and incarcerated. Yet from the remotest times
the world has done this thing, for equal rights have never been
conceded to women, and so warped are our convictions by custom
and prejudice that a denial of their political equality seems as
natural as the breath we draw....
Paternalism in government, which seeks to do good to the people
against their will, is wrong in the Czar of Russia and in old
King George, but is quite right and just when it affects only our
wives, sisters and daughters! They have everything they need, why
ask the ballot? Ah, my friends, so long as they have not the
right to determine the thing they need, so long as the ultimate
sovereignty remains with men to say what is good and what is bad
for them, they are deprived of that which we, as men, esteem the
most precious of all rights. I suppose there never was a time
when men did not believe that women had everything they ought to
want; that they had as much as was good for them. The woman must
obey in consideration of the kind protection which her lord
vouchsafes to her. The wife's property ought to belong to the
husband, because upon him the law casts the burden of sustaining
the family. There must be a ruler, and the husband ought to be
that one. But this is the same principle which, during thousands
of years, maintained the divine right of kings. When we apply it
to our system of suffrage the number of sovereigns is increased,
that is all. It is a recognition of the divine right of man to
legislate for himself and woman too. It is only a difference in
the number of autocrats and the manner in which their decrees are
promulgated....
By what argument can a man defend his own suffrage as a right and
not concede an equal right to woman? A just man ought to accord
to every other human being, even his own wife, the rights which
he demands himself.
"But she has her sphere and she ought not go beyond it." My
friend, who gave you the right to determine what that sphere
should be? If nature prescribes it, nature will carry out her own
ordinances without your prohibitory legislation. I have the
greatest contempt for the sort of legislation which seeks to
enable nature to carry out her own immutable laws. I would have
very little respect for any decree, enacted with whatever
solemnity, which should prescribe that an object shall fall
towards the earth and not from it; and I have just as little
respect for any statute of man which enacts that women shall
continue to love and care for their children by shutting them out
from political action and preferment lest they should neglect the
duties of the household....
"But," say you, "woman is already adequately represented. She
does not form a separate class. She has no interests different
from those of her husband, brother or father." These arguments
have been used even by so eminent an authority as John Bright. Is
it indeed a fact? Wherever woman owns property which she would
relieve from unjust taxation; wherever she has a son whom she
would preserve from the temptations of intemperance, or a
daughter from the enticements of a libertine, or a husband from
the conscriptions of war, she has a separate interest which she
is entitled to protect.
"But she can control legislation by her influence." If it were
proposed to take away our right to vote, we would think it a
satisfactory answer that our influence would still remain? If she
has influence she is entitled to that and her vote too. You have
no right to burn down a man's house because you leave him his
lot.
"But woman does not want the suffrage." How do you know? have you
given her an opportunity of saying so? Wherever the right has
been accorded it has been generally exercised, and the best proof
of her wishes is the actual use which she makes of the ballot
when she has it. But it makes no difference whether all women
want to vote or whether most women want to vote, so long as there
is one woman who insists upon this simple right, the justice of
America can not afford to deny it....
At the close of Mr. Foulke's address Mrs. Stanton was obliged to leave
in order to reach New York City in time for her steamer. The entire
audience arose, the women waving handkerchiefs and the men joining in
three farewell cheers.
One splendid address followed another, morning and evening, while the
afternoons were occupied with business meetings, and even here there
were many little speeches which were worthy of preservation. Among
them was one of Miss Anthony's, in which she said: "If it is
necessary, I will fight forty years more to make our platform free for
the Christian to stand upon, whether she be a Catholic and counts her
beads, or a Protestant of the straightest orthodox sect, just as I
have fought for the rights of the 'infidels' the last forty years.
These are the principles I want to maintain--that our platform may be
kept as broad as the universe, that upon it may stand the
representatives of all creeds and of no creeds--Jew and Christian,
Protestant and Catholic, Gentile and Mormon, believer and atheist."
Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) discussed The Centennial of 1892,
demanding the recognition of women. Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.)
spoke on the Present, the Destiny of To-day. Mrs. Ormiston Chant
(Eng.) depicted the glory of The Coming Woman. Mrs. Carrie Chapman
Catt made her first appearance on the national platform with an
address on The Symbol of Liberty, describing political conditions with
a keen knowledge of the facts and showing their need of the
intelligence, morality and independence of women. The subject selected
by Miss Phoebe W. Couzins, herself an office-holder, was Woman's
Influence in Official Government.
Henry B. Blackwell made a strong speech on Woman Suffrage a Growth of
Civilization. He read a letter from Lucy Stone, his wife, who was to
have spoken on The Progress of Women but was prevented by illness, in
which she said: "The time is full of encouragement for us. We look
back to our small beginnings and over the many years of constant
endeavor to secure for women the application of the principles which
are the foundation of a representative government. Now we are a host.
Both Houses of Congress and the legislative bodies in nearly all the
States, have our questions before them. So has the civilized world.
Surely at no distant day the sense of justice which exists in
everybody will secure our claim, and we shall have at last a truly
representative government, of the people, by the people and for the
people. We may, therefore, rejoicing in what is already gained, look
forward with hope to the future."
A large audience listened to the address of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe on
The Chivalry of Reform, during which she said:
The political enfranchisement of woman has long been sought upon
the ground of abstract right and justice. This ground is surely
the soundest and safest basis for any claim to rest upon. But
mankind, after yielding a general obedience to the moral law,
will reserve for themselves a certain freedom in its application
to particular things. Even in so imperative a matter as the
salvation of their own souls they will not be content with
weights and measures. The touch of sentiment must come in,
uplifting what law knocks down, freeing what it trammels,
satisfying man's love for freedom by ministering to his sense of
beauty. When this subtle power joins itself to the demonstrations
of reason, the victory is sure and lasting.
It is in the grand order of these ideas that I stand here to
advocate the enfranchisement of my sex. Morally, socially,
intellectually equal with men, it is right that we should be
politically equal with them in a society which claims to
recognize and uphold one equal humanity. I do not say it is _our_
right. I say it is right--God's right and the world's.
In the name of high sentiment then, in the name of all that good
men profess, I ask that the gracious act may be consummated which
will admit us to the place that henceforth befits us, that of
equal participants with you in the sovereignty of the people. Do
this in the spirit of that mercy whose quality is not strained.
Remember that the neglect of justice brings with it the direst
retribution. Make your debt to us a debt of honor, and pay it in
that spirit; if you do not pay it, dread the proportions which
its arrears will assume. Remember that he who has the power to do
justice and refrains from doing it, will presently find it doing
itself, to his no small discomfiture....
Women, trained for the moral warfare of the time, armed with the
fine instincts which are their birthright, are not doomed to sit
forever as mere spectators in these great encounters of society.
They are to deserve the crown as well as to bestow it; to meet
the powers of darkness with the powers of light; to bring their
potent aid to the eternal conquest of right. And let me say here
to those women who not only hang back from this encounter but who
throw obstacles in the way of true reform and progress, that the
shallow ground upon which they stand is within the belt of the
moral earthquake, and that what they build upon it will be
overthrown....
The Rev. Miss Shaw, in an address filled with humor as well as logic,
treated of Our Unconscious Allies, among whom she included clergymen
who oppose equal suffrage, the women remonstrants with their weak
documents, the colleges which try to keep out girls, and the many
cases of outrage and wrong committed by "our motherless Government."
The Rev. Olympia Brown replied to the question, Where is the Mistake?
With great power and earnestness she pointed out the mistakes made by
our Government during the century of its existence and demanded the
correction of the greatest one of all--the exclusion of women.
The address of Mrs. Zerelda G. Wallace (Ind.), A Whole Humanity,
aroused the universal sympathy and appreciation of the audience,
permeated as it was with the spirit of love, charity and justice:
....The animus of this movement for woman's freedom has been
mistaken in the idea that it meant competition between women and
men; to my thought it simply means co-operation in the work of
the world. The man is to bring the physical forces, and he has
done that work magnificently. I never go over this continent and
see what men have done, that I do not feel like bowing my head in
reverence to their wisdom, their strength, their power, and I
think the nearest thing we see to divinity is the incarnation of
the God-head in a grand good man.
But there are other forces which must be brought into subjection
to humanity before we reach the highest development, and those
are the moral and spiritual forces. That is woman's share
largely, not that I exempt man, but pre-eminently woman is the
teacher of the race; in virtue of her motherhood she is the
character builder; she forms the soul life; she rears the
generations. It is not part of woman's work to contend with man
for supremacy over the material forces. It was never told to
woman that she should earn her bread by the sweat of her brow.
That was man's curse. He was to earn his bread and woman's too,
if he faithfully performed his duty, and we are not "dependents"
even if he does that. I never allow a man to say in my presence
that he "supports" his wife, and I want every woman to take the
same position. I would correct any man and tell him he was
mistaken in his phraseology if he should say anything of that
kind. You have something different to do, my sisters. You shall
hate evil, was said to woman, and evil shall hate you. There
shall go forth from you an influence which shall ultimately
exterminate evil.... The men of this nation would never have made
the success they have in the material world, if some stronger
force had limited them on all sides.
I said a moment ago that I do not like the idea of dependence of
women on men, or the dependence of men on women. I do not like
the word independence, but I do like the word interdependence. It
is said of this beautiful country, "United we stand, divided we
fall." It is the same with men and women. Men without women would
go back to barbarism, and women without men would be most
frivolous and vain. If we work not in competition but in
co-operation and harmony we shall bring the race to its ultimate
inheritance, which is rulership over the universe.
Now to deprive woman of the right to express her thought with
authority at the ballot-box in regard to the laws under which she
is governed, puts a mark of imbecility upon her at once. So far
as the Government is concerned we are held in perpetual tutelage,
we are minors always, and while good men will act justly towards
women, it is an excuse for every bad and foolish man to oppress
them, and every unfledged boy to make them the subject of
ridicule....
I believe the great majority of American men love our free
institutions; I believe they have hope and pride in the future of
this nation; but as sure as you live, every argument you use
against the enfranchisement of women deals a death-blow against
the fundamental principle which lies at the base of our
government, and it is treason to bring an argument against it.
Another thing which you permit is reacting now to the detriment
of our free institutions; if from prejudice or expediency you
think you have a right to withhold the ballot from the women of
this nation, you have but to go one step further and deprive any
other class of a right they already have, should you think it
expedient to do so. It is beginning to bear its fruit now in your
elections. You are becoming demoralized; ballots are bought and
sold; you have your blocks of five; and in some entire
communities the men are deprived of the right of suffrage. It is
simply a question of time how long you will be able to maintain
the freedom you cherish for yourselves.
If we women are citizens, if we are governed, if we are a part of
the people, according to the plain declarations of the
fundamental principles which underlie this nation, we are as much
entitled to vote as you, and you can not make an argument against
us that would not disfranchise yourselves.
I feel this phase of the question more acutely than any other
because I think from a fundamental standpoint the progress of the
race is bound up in republican institutions. It is not a question
of woman's rights, it is a question of human rights, of the
success or failure of these institutions, and the more highly
cultured a woman is the more deeply she feels this
humiliation....
I do not think it weakness to say that women love, and that love
predominates in their nature, because, my friends, love is the
only immortal principle in the universe. Love is to endure
forever. Faith will be swallowed up in knowledge after a while,
and hope in fruition, but love abides forever. It is peculiarly
an attribute of our feminine nature to love our offspring over
everything else; for them we would peril our lives; and for the
men of this nation, under our form of government, to say to us
that we shall not have the power which will enable us through
laws and legislation to decide the conditions which shall
surround them, and throw the mother love around these children
from the cradle to the grave, is an inhuman use of their
authority....
The Washington _Star_ said: "If the first day of the convention was
Mrs. Stanton's, the rest have belonged to Miss Anthony, 'Saint Susan,'
as her followers love to call her. As vice-president-at-large she
presided over every session, and never was in better voice or more
enthusiastic spirits. As she sat by the table clad in a handsome dress
of black satin, she was the life and soul of the meetings.... She does
not make much noise with her gavel,[80] nor does she have to use it
often, but she manages to keep the organization over which she
presides in a state of order that puts to shame many a convention of
the other sex. Business is transacted in proper shape, and every
important measure receives its due share of attention. There is no
filibustering. The speakers who have been invited to address the
convention are listened to with attention and interest. When speeches
are on the program they are made. When resolutions are desired they
are presented, discussed, rejected or adopted as the case may be....
There are no attempts to push through unsuitable measures in haste and
without the necessary attention. If any of those who have not attended
the meetings of the association are of the opinion that serious
breaches of parliamentary usage are committed through ignorance or
with intent, they are laboring under a decided delusion."
The business meeting devoted to a discussion of Our Attitude toward
Political Parties proved to be the most exciting of the series. Among
the speakers were Mr. Foulke, Mrs. Sewall, Mrs. Howe, Miss Blackwell,
Mrs. Blake, the Rev. Mr. Hinckley, Mrs. Alice M. A. Pickler, Mrs.
Ellen Sully Fray, Mr. Blackwell, Miss Shaw, Mrs. Martha McClellan
Brown, the Rev. Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Martha E. Root and Miss Mary Desha.
Without exception the sentiment was in favor of keeping strictly aloof
from all political alliances. It was pointed out that repeatedly the
promises made by politicians were violated and the planks in the
platforms ignored; it was shown that the suffrage can be gained only
through the assistance of men in all parties; and it was proved
beyond doubt that in the past, where members had allied themselves
with a political party it had injured the cause of woman suffrage.
In addition to the speakers already mentioned Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Col.
D. R. Anthony, Ellen Battelle Dietrick, Laura Clay, the Hon. J. A.
Pickler, Sallie Clay Bennett, Margaret W. Campbell, Laura M. Johns,
Frances Ellen Burr, Frances Stuart Parker, Dr. Frances Dickinson and
others participated in the various discussions of the convention.
A deep interest was felt in the pending woman suffrage amendment in
South Dakota. The subject was presented by Representative and Mrs.
Pickler, national speakers were appointed to canvass the State and a
fund of over $5,000 was eventually raised.
Tributes of respect were paid to Caroline Ashurst Biggs and Margaret
Bright Lucas of England, U. S. Senator Elbridge G. Lapham, Maria
Mitchell, the great astronomer, Prudence Crandall Philleo, Harriet
Winslow Sewall, Amy Post, Wm. D. Kelley, M. C., Dinah Mendenhall,
Emerine J. Hamilton, Amanda McConnell and other friends and supporters
of woman suffrage who had passed away during the year.
The vote for officers of the united association, which was limited
strictly to delegates, stood as follows: For president, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, 131; Susan B. Anthony, 90; scattering, 2: for
vice-president-at-large, Susan B. Anthony, 213; scattering, 9.[81]
Rachel Foster Avery was elected recording secretary; Alice Stone
Blackwell, corresponding secretary; Jane H. Spofford, treasurer; Lucy
Stone, chairman of the executive committee by unanimous vote; Eliza T.
Ward and the Rev. Frederick A. Hinckley, auditors. The Rev. Anna
Howard Shaw was appointed national lecturer.
FOOTNOTES:
[76] See History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 464.
[77] The other members in favor of this report were Ezra B. Taylor,
O., _Chairman_; George E. Adams, Ill.; James Buchanan, N. J.; Albert
C. Thompson, O.; H. C. McCormick, Penn., and Joseph R. Reed, Ia. The
six members from the Southern States were opposed.
[78] National:--May Wright Sewall, _Chairman_; Isabella Beecher
Hooker, Harriette R. Shattuck, Olympia Brown, Helen M. Gougar, Laura
M. Johns, Clara Bewick Colby, Virginia L. Minor, Abigail Scott
Duniway, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Mary B. Clay, Mary F. Eastman, Clara
Neymann, Sarah M. Perkins, Jane H. Spofford, Lillie Devereux Blake,
Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, Rachel Foster Avery, _Secretary_.
American:--Julia Ward Howe, _Chairman_; Wm. Dudley Foulke, Margaret W.
Campbell, Anna Howard Shaw, Mary F. Thomas, Hannah M. Tracy Cutler,
Henry B. Blackwell, _Secretary_.
[79] The resolutions declared the constitutional right of women to
vote, and continued:
_Resolved_, That as the fathers violated the principles of justice in
consenting to a three-fifths representation, and in recognizing
slavery in the Constitution, thereby making a civil war inevitable, so
our statesmen and Supreme Court Judges by their misinterpretation of
the Fourteenth Amendment, declaring that the United States has no
voters and that citizenship does not carry with it the right of
suffrage, not only have prolonged woman's disfranchisement but have
undermined the status of the freedman and opened the way for another
war of races.
WHEREAS, It is proposed to have a national law, restricting the right
of divorce to a narrower basis, and
WHEREAS, Congress has already made an appropriation for a report on
the question, which shows that there are 10,000 divorces annually in
the United States and the majority demanded by women, and
WHEREAS, Liberal divorce laws for wives are what Canada was for the
slaves--a door of escape from bondage, therefore,
_Resolved_, That there should be no farther legislation on this
question until woman has a voice in the State and National
Governments.
_Resolved_, That the time has come for woman to demand of the Church
the same equal recognition she demands of the State, to assume her
right and duty to take part in the revision of Bibles, prayer books
and creeds, to vote on all questions of business, to fill the offices
of elder, deacon, Sunday school superintendent, pastor and bishop, to
sit in ecclesiastical synods, assemblies and conventions as delegates,
that thus our religion may no longer reflect only the masculine
element of humanity, and that woman, the mother of the race, may be
honored as she must be before we can have a happy home, a rational
religion and an enduring government.
They concluded with a demand that the platform of the suffrage
association should recognize the equal rights of all parties, sects
and races.
[80] There is no woman in the world who has wielded the gavel at as
many conventions as has Miss Anthony.
[81] For account of Miss Anthony's determination not to accept the
presidency see her Life and Work, p. 631.
CHAPTER XI.
THE NATIONAL-AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1891.
Immediately preceding the Twenty-third annual suffrage convention in
1891, the first triennial meeting took place of the National Council
of Women, which had been formed in 1888. It was held in Albaugh's
Opera House, Washington, beginning Sunday, February 22, and continuing
four days, an assemblage of the most distinguished women of the nation
in many lines of work. Miss Frances E. Willard presided and the other
officers contributed to the success of the Council--Miss Susan B.
Anthony, vice-president; Mrs. May Wright Sewall, corresponding
secretary; Miss Mary F. Eastman, recording secretary; Mrs. M. Louise
Thomas, treasurer. Ten national organizations were represented by
official delegates and forty sent fraternal delegates.
The Sunday services were conducted entirely by women, the Rev. Ida C.
Hultin giving the sermon from the text, "For the earth bringeth forth
fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full
corn in the ear." "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth". The
program of the week included Charities, Education, Temperance,
Religion, Organized Work, Political Status of Women, etc.[82] On
Saturday evening Mrs. Jane H. Spofford gave a large reception at the
Riggs House to the Council and the Suffrage Association. The latter
held its sessions February 26-March 1, occupying the same beautifully
decorated opera house which had been filled for four days by audiences
in attendance at the Council, who kept on coming, scarcely knowing the
difference.
The Call for this convention expressed the great joy over the action
of Congress during the past year in admitting Wyoming as a State with
woman suffrage in its constitution:
The admission of Wyoming into the Union as a State with equal
rights for women guaranteed in its organic law, not only sets a
seal of approval upon woman suffrage after a practical experience
of twenty-one years, but it makes woman a recognized factor in
national politics. Hereafter the Chief Executive and both Houses
of Congress will owe their election partly to the votes of women.
The injustice and absurdity of allowing women in one State to be
sovereign rulers, and across the line in every direction obliging
them to occupy the position of a subject class, taxed without
representation and governed without consent--and this in a nation
which by its Constitution guarantees equal rights to all the
States and equal protection to all their citizens--must soon be
manifest even to the most conservative and prejudiced. We
therefore congratulate the friends of woman suffrage everywhere
that at last there is one spot under the American flag where
equal justice is done to women. Wyoming, all hail; the first true
republic the world has ever seen!
The program attracted considerable attention from a design on the
cover showing a woman yoked with an ox to the plow, and, looking down
upon them a girl in a college cap and gown with the inscription,
"Above the Senior Wrangler," referring to the recent victory at
Cambridge University, England, by Philippa Fawcett, in outranking the
male student who stood highest in mathematics. The first session was
opened by the singing of Mrs. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert's inspiring
hymn, The New America. After a welcome by Mrs. Ella M. S. Marble,
president of the District W. S. A., Miss Anthony read the address of
Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was in England, entitled, The
Degradation of Disfranchisement, which said in part:
Disfranchisement is the last lingering shadow of the old spirit
of caste which always has divided humanity into classes of
greater or less inferiority, some even below certain animals that
were considered special favorites with Heaven. One can not
contemplate these revolting distinctions among mankind without
amazement and disgust. This spirit of caste which has darkened
the lives of millions through the centuries still lives. The
discriminations against color and sex in the United States are
but other forms of this same hateful spirit, still sustained by
our religion as in the past. It is the outgrowth of the false
ideas of favoritism ascribed to Deity in regard to races and
individuals, but which have their origin in the mind of man.
Banish the idea of divine authority for these machinations of the
human mind, and the power of the throne and the church, of a
royal family and an apostolic order of succession, of kings and
queens, of popes and bishops, and man's headship in the State,
the Church, and the Home will be heard of no more forever....
All men of intelligence appreciate the power of holding the
ballot in their own hands; of having a voice in the laws under
which they live; of enjoying the liberty of self-government.
Those who have known the satisfaction of wielding political
influence would not willingly accept the degradation of
disfranchisement. Yet men can not understand why women should
feel aggrieved at being deprived of this same protection, dignity
and power. This is the Gibraltar of our difficulties to-day. We
can not make men see that women feel the humiliation of their
petty distinctions of sex precisely as the black man feels those
of color. It is no palliation of our wrongs to say that we are
not socially ostracized as he is, so long as we are politically
ostracized as he is not. That all orders of foreigners also rank
politically above the most intelligent, highly-educated
women--native-born Americans--is indeed the most bitter drop in
the cup of our grief which we are compelled to swallow....
Again, the degradation of woman in the world of work is another
result of her disfranchisement. Some deny that, and say the
laboring classes of men have the ballot yet they are still
helpless victims of capitalists. They have the power and hold the
weapon of defense but have not yet learned how to use it. The
bayonet, the sword, the gun, are of no value to the soldier until
he knows how to wield them. Yet without the weapons of defense
what could individuals and nations do in time of war for their
own protection? The first step in learning to use a gun or a
ballot is to possess one....
Man has the prestige of centuries in his favor, with the force to
maintain it, and he has possession of the throne, which is
nine-tenths of the law. He has statutes and Scriptures and the
universal usages of society all on his side. What have women? The
settled dissatisfaction of half the race, the unorganized
protests of the few, and the open resistance of still fewer. But
we have truth and justice on our side and the natural love of
freedom and, step by step, we shall undermine the present form of
civilization and inaugurate the mightiest revolution the world
has ever witnessed. But its far-reaching consequences themselves
increase the obstacles in the way of success, for the selfish
interests of all classes are against us. The rulers in the State
are not willing to share their power with a class over whom as
equals they could never obtain absolute control, whose votes they
could not manipulate to maintain the present conditions of
injustice and oppression....
Again, the rulers in the church are hostile to liberty for a sex
supposed for wise purposes to have been subordinated to man by
divine decree. The equality of woman as a factor in religious
organizations would compel an entire change in church canons,
discipline, authority, and many doctrines of the Christian faith.
As a matter of self-preservation, the church has no interest in
the emancipation of woman, as its very existence depends on her
blind faith....
Society at large, based on the principle that might makes right,
has in a measure excluded women from the profitable industries of
the world, and where she has gained a foothold her labor is at a
discount. Man occupies the ground and holds the key to the
situation. As employer, he plays the cheap labor of a
disfranchised class against the employe, thus in a measure
undermining his independence, making wife and daughter in the
world of work the rivals of husband and father.
The family, too, is based on the idea of woman's subordination,
and man has no interest, as far as he sees, in emancipating her
from that despotism by which his narrow, selfish interests are
maintained under the law and religion of the country.
Here, then, is a fourfold bondage, so many cords tightly twisted
together, strong for one purpose. To attempt to undo one is to
loosen all.... To my mind, if we had at first bravely untwisted
all the strands of this fourfold cord which bound us, and
demanded equality in the whole round of the circle, while
perhaps, we should have had a harder battle to fight, it would
have been more effective and far shorter. Let us henceforth meet
conservatives on their own ground and admit that suffrage for
woman does mean political, religious, industrial and social
freedom--a new and a higher civilization....
Woman's happiness and development are of more importance than all
man's institutions. If constitutions and statute laws stand in
the way of woman's emancipation, they must be amended to meet her
wants and needs, of which she is a better judge than man possibly
can be. If church canons and scriptures do not admit of woman's
equal recognition in all the sacred offices, then they must be
revised in harmony with that idea. If the present family life is
necessarily based on man's headship, then we must build a new
domestic altar, at which the mother shall have equal dignity,
honor and power; and we do not propose to wait another century to
secure all this; the time has come....
Miss Anthony, with an allusion to pioneer days, then introduced Lucy
Stone, who, amid much applause, said that, while this was the first
time she had stood beside Susan B. Anthony in a Washington suffrage
convention, she had stood beside her on more than one hard-fought
battle-field before many of those present were born. After sketching
briefly the progress of the last forty years and giving some trying
personal experiences, she said in conclusion: "The vote will not make
a man of a woman, but it will enable her to demand and receive many
things which are hers by right; to do the things which ought to be
done, to prevent what ought not to be done. Women and men can help
each other in making the world better. This is not an anti-man
movement, but an effort toward the highest good of the race. We can
congratulate ourselves upon what we have gained, but the root of the
evil still remains--the root of disfranchisement. All organizations of
women should join with us in pulling steadily at this deeply-planted
and obstinate root."
Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) read an able paper on Woman in
Politics and Jurisprudence, in which she showed the necessity in
politics and in law of a combination of the man's and the woman's
nature, point of view and distinguishing characteristics.
The second evening Mrs. Julia Ward Howe gave an address on The
Possibilities of the American Salon, and the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer
considered The Democratic Principle. Mrs. Spencer pointed out that the
reason why the advance in the specific line of woman suffrage had not
been so great as in some other directions was because its advocates
had to contend with a reaction of disbelief in the democratic
principle. In expressing her own faith in this principle she said:
"There are wisdom enough and virtue enough in this country to take
care of all its ignorance and wickedness. The difficulty is that the
average American citizen does not know that he wears a crown. And oh,
the pity of it, and the shame of it, when some of us women, who do
feel the importance of the duty of suffrage and who need no man to
teach us patriotism, wish to help in this work that any man should say
us nay!"
Miss Florence Balgarnie, who brought the greetings of a number of
great English associations,[83] gave a comprehensive sketch of The
Status of Women in England. The Rev. Ida C. Hultin (Ills.) followed in
an eloquent appeal that there should be no headship of either man or
woman alone, but that both should represent humanity; government is a
development of humanity and if woman is human she has an equal right
in that development. Mrs. Ellen Battelle Dietrick (Mass.) showed that
the present supremacy of men was a reaction from the former undue
supremacy of women, and brought out many historical points of deep
interest. Mrs. Josephine K. Henry spoke on The Kentucky Constitutional
Convention, illustrating the terrible injustice of the laws of that
State in regard to women and the vain efforts of the latter to have
them changed. The Rev. Frederick A. Hinckley (R. I.) lifted the
audience to the delectable heights, taking as a text, "Husband and
Wife are One." After illustrating the tendency of all nature and all
science toward unity and harmony, he said:
Humanity is the whole. Men alone are half a sphere; women alone
half a sphere; men and women together the whole of truth, the
whole of love, the whole of aspiration. We have come to recognize
this thought in nearly all the walks of life. We want to
acknowledge it in the unity of mankind. The central thought we
need in our creeds and in our lives is that of the solidarity and
brotherhood of the race. This movement derives its greatest
significance not because it opens a place here and there for
women; not because it enables women to help men; but because in
all the concerns of life it places man and woman side by side,
hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, putting their best thought,
their finest feeling, their highest aspiration, into the work of
the world. This reflection gives us a lasting and sublime
satisfaction amid defeat and derision. Whatever of fortune or
misfortune befalls the Suffrage Association in the carrying on of
its work, this belief is the root which is calculated to sustain
and inspire us--that this movement is the next step in the
progress of the race towards the unification of humanity....
I look forward to the time when men and women, labor and capital,
all classes and all sections, shall work side by side with one
great co-operative spirit, the denizens of the world and the
keepers of human progress. When that time comes we may not have
reached the millennium but we shall be nearer to it. We shall
then together establish justice, temperance, purity of life, as
never has been done before. Earth's aspirations then shall grow
to events. The indescribable--that shall then be done.
U. S. Senator Joseph M. Carey was introduced by Miss Anthony as "the
man who on the floor of Congress fought Wyoming's battle for
Statehood." His address on Wyoming, the True Republic, was a leading
feature of the convention. He said in part:
On the tenth day of July last, the State of Wyoming was born and
the forty-fourth star took its place on the old flag. Never was
first-born more warmly welcomed, for not only had a commonwealth
been created, but the principle of equality of citizenship
without regard to sex had been fully recognized and incorporated
as a part of the constitution of the new State.
The adoption of a woman suffrage bill by the first Territorial
Legislature was graphically described, and after relating the
subsequent efforts for its repeal, and its incorporation finally into
the State constitution, he told of the struggle in Congress and said:
While I would not make invidious distinctions by giving the names
of those in both branches of Congress who favored Wyoming's
admission, I wish to say that I was agreeably surprised to have
many of the ablest members, both in public and private, disclose
the fact that they firmly believed the time would come when women
would be permitted to exercise full political rights throughout
the United States. They rejoiced that an opportunity had
presented itself by which they could show they had no prejudice
or opposition in their hearts to women's exercising the rights of
citizenship.
He closed with the following strong argument for the enfranchisement
of women:
Suffrage should be granted to women for two reasons: first,
because it will help women; and second, because it will promote
the interests of the State. Whatever doubt I may have entertained
in the past concerning either the first or second proposition,
has entirely disappeared. From the experiment made under my own
eyes I can state in all candor that suffrage has been a real
benefit to women. It gives them a character and standing which
they would not otherwise possess. It does not lower a woman to be
consulted about public affairs, but is calculated to make her
more intelligent and thoughtful in matters that concern her own
household, especially in bringing up her sons and daughters. It
increases her interest in those things which concern the great
body of the people. Men in office and out of office, particularly
those who expect to serve the public, are compelled to be more
considerate of her wishes, and more desirous of doing those
things which will secure her approval. The greater the number of
persons living under a government who are interested in the
administration of its affairs, its well-being and the perpetuity
of its institutions, the stronger the government and the more
difficult it will be to compass its overthrow....