bore witness; it went to Grand Rapids upon her invitation, and
upon her work for many months before its opening depended its
success, which was unquestioned. At one of the evening sessions
she was surprised by the presentation of a handsome souvenir of
the occasion containing the signatures of the officers of the
association, the speakers and many of the local workers. At the
close of the first evening the National officers, assisted by
Mrs. Ketcham, Mrs. William Alden Smith, Mrs. Julius Burrows and
several of the speakers, received in the beautiful parlor of the
St. Cecilia, thus giving delegates and visitors an opportunity to
meet the people of the city and to exchange social greetings with
each other.
The Ladies' Literary Club, which also owns its home, kept open
house several afternoons from four to six, the officers receiving
the guests and serving light refreshments. This club also
tendered the freedom of its house for any and all hours of the
day to the delegates. Saturday afternoon the Federation of the
Woman's Christian Temperance Unions of Grand Rapids received the
convention at the Young Woman's Building, where a substantial
supper was served. The Bissell carpet-sweeper factory, president,
Mrs. M. R. Bissell, presented to the delegates one hundred and
fifty specially made small carpet-sweepers, each marked in gilt,
National American Woman Suffrage Association.
But to the Board of Trade belongs the honor of having outrivaled
all the other kind hosts in the extent of their hospitality. They
presented to the convention its programs, beautifully printed on
extra fine paper and bearing a picture of the St. Cecilia Club
House. The Board also sent carriages to take the entire working
convention for a drive through the city, a visit to one of the
largest furniture warehouses and to the carpet-sweeper factory,
where Mrs. Bissell received the delegates and all were shown
through the works. A handsome souvenir containing many views of
the city was given by the Board to every delegate.
The ladies of the St. Cecilia were kindness itself, and it was
delightful to hold the meetings in so friendly an atmosphere, as
well as in so well appointed a building. The president, Mrs.
Kelsey, presented to the badge committee St. Cecilia pins having
a reproduction of Carlo Dolci's head of the musical saint after
whom this club is named, the only musical society of women in the
United States which owns a club-house.
Cordial addresses of welcome were made by Emily B. Ketcham,
president of Susan B. Anthony Club; Mary Atwater Kelsey,
president of St. Cecilia; Josephine Ahnafeldt Goss, president of
Ladies' Literary Club; May Stocking Knaggs, president of State
Equal Suffrage Association; Martha A. Keating, president of State
Federation of Women's Clubs; Mrs. A. S. Benjamin, president of
State Women's Christian Temperance Union; Mary A. McConnelly,
department president of State Woman's Relief Corps; Lucy A.
Leggett, president of State Woman's Press Association, and
Frances E. Burns, Great Commander Ladies of the Maccabees.
Mrs. Ketcham expressed their pleasure in having Grand Rapids selected
in preference to several larger cities which had extended invitations;
referred to the long distances many of the delegates had come and
assured the convention of a royal welcome, not only from the city but
from the State. Brief extracts must give an idea of the scope and
cordiality of these addresses:
MRS. GOSS: This has been called the woman's century. The past
centuries might have been called man's, because of the great
progress he has made in them; and it is now conceded that God
made women to match the men. The next will be the children's
century, when they will make real their parents' ideals. After
humanity has been sufficiently educated, people will understand
that no class has a right to special privileges, or can
appropriate them without injury to the body politic. Then a woman
will not demand any special privilege because she is a woman, nor
be denied it because she is not a man. As a result of this
movement, old lessons have been better learned and old burdens
more easily carried. We advocate equal suffrage not alone because
it is just to the mothers, but because it will be good for the
children, good for man, good for all humanity. We are glad to be
a part of this movement for a higher civilization. Grand Rapids
is noted for its furniture factories, and after equal suffrage is
granted it will supply plenty of material for the President's
cabinet.
MRS. KNAGGS: I welcome you in behalf of the Michigan E. S. A.,
representing the women of this State who are especially
interested in woman's enfranchisement. We have looked forward to
the day when you would bring us the inspiration of one of these
great meetings; we needed it. We are told that women are
indifferent. Many are so; and nothing can better arouse us than
to meet those engaged in this work from so many different places.
An alderman this spring boasted that he had been elected by the
votes of eight nationalities. He enumerated seven of them but for
some time was unable to think of the eighth. At last he
remembered; it was the American. The ballot in the hands of our
present voters might be improved by the intelligence that the
great body of Michigan women would bring to it. We are beginning
to appreciate the solidarity of women. When one State wins
suffrage, all the others are gainers by it. The good of this
meeting will go abroad over the country.
MRS. KEATING: ....In the happy tone of welcome that you may hear
rising from all parts of our State the club women join, with
voices 9,000 strong. We have never been happier than now, even
during the annual club elections, amid the joy and intelligence
of the club ballot. Your fame has preceded you.
MRS. BENJAMIN: The W. C. T. U. of Michigan numbers about 9,000
active members, and I bring you the greeting of your white-ribbon
sisters. We welcome not only you but your principles, and your
avowed determination to conquer before you die. A good mother
works in the home, but she would not wish to be forbidden to
cross the threshold. For the good of her child, she needs
sometimes to cross it. A mother should guard her child outside
the home as well as in it. Every mother worthy of the name wishes
to protect her own child from vice, and her duty extends to her
neighbor's child also. Equal suffrage is coming, friends, and
coming soon.
MRS. BURNS: I bring you the welcome of the 45,000 Ladies of the
Maccabees. Times have greatly changed in Michigan since seventy
years ago, when the Indian squaws did all the manual labor, and
the braves limited themselves to the noble task of hunting. There
has been a corresponding change in the condition of women all
along the line.
In the response of Miss Susan B. Anthony, the national president, she
said:
Since our last convention the area of disfranchisement in the
possessions of the United States has been greatly enlarged. Our
nation has undertaken to furnish provisional governments for
Hawaii and the Philippine Islands, Cuba and Porto Rico. Hitherto
the settlers of new Territories have been permitted to frame
their own provisional governments, which were ratified by
Congress, but to-day Congress itself assumes the prerogative of
making the laws for the newly-acquired Territories. When the
governments for those in the West were organized there had been
no practical example of universal suffrage in any one of the
older States, hence it might be pardonable for their settlers to
ignore the right of the women associated with them to a voice in
their governments.
But to-day, after fifty years' continuous agitation of the right
of women to vote, and after the demand has been conceded in
one-half the States in the management of the public schools;
after one State has added to that of the schools the management
of its cities; and after four States have granted women the full
vote--the universal reports show that the exercise of the
suffrage by women has added to their influence, increased the
respect of men, and elevated the moral, social and political
conditions of their respective commonwealths. With those
object-lessons before Congress, it would seem that no member
could be so blind as not to see it the duty of that body to have
the provisional governments of our new possessions founded on the
principle of equal rights, privileges and immunities for all the
people, women included. I hope this convention will devise some
plan for securing a strong expression of public sentiment on this
question, to be presented to the Fifty-sixth Congress, which is
to convene on the first Monday of December next....
During the reconstruction period and the discussion of the
negro's right to vote Senator Blaine and others opposed the
counting of all the negroes in the basis of representation,
instead of the old-time three-fifths, because they saw that to do
so would greatly increase the power of the white men of the South
on the floor of Congress. Therefore the Republican leaders
insisted upon the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to secure
the ballot to the negro men. Only one generation has passed and
yet nearly all of the Southern States have by one device or
another succeeded in excluding from the ballot-box very nearly
the entire negro vote, openly and defiantly declaring their
intention to secure the absolute supremacy of the white race, but
there is not a suggestion on their part of allowing the citizens
to whom they deny the right of suffrage to be counted out from
the basis of representation. Some of the Northern newspapers
have been growing indignant upon the subject, declaring that a
vote in South Carolina counts more than two votes in New York, in
the election of the President and the House of Representatives.
It seems to me that a still greater violation of the principle of
"the consent of the governed" is practiced in all the States of
the Union where women, though disfranchised, are yet counted in
the basis of representation, and I think the time has come when
this association should make a most strenuous demand for an
amendment to the Constitution of the United States forbidding any
State thus to count disfranchised citizens....
The increased discussion of the enfranchisement of women in the
newspapers throughout the country evidences the larger demand of
the public for information on this line, and a vast amount of
educational work is being done in this way.... The presentation
of the woman question in the New York _Sunday Sun_ each week by
Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, with the articles it has elicited from
the opposition, is of incalculable value; and when we add to the
number of people who read the _Sun_ the vast numbers who read the
copies of these articles made by the many newspapers between the
two oceans, we see what an immense reading audience is gained by
getting our question into that one of the best New York dailies.
We must remember that these papers never would have copied Mrs.
Harper's or any other literary woman's productions had they been
first published in one of our special organs; therefore one very
important branch of press work is to gain access to the
metropolitan dailies. Then there is the immense work done by Mrs.
Elnora M. Babcock for the State of New York, and by the chairmen
of the different State press committees, as well as that done by
our national organizer from the headquarters. Never has the press
of the entire nation been kept so alive with discussions upon the
woman suffrage question as during the past year, and my hope is
that we may yet have upon every one of the great city papers a
strong, educated suffrage woman, as editor of a woman's page or,
better still, as writer of suffrage articles to be inserted
without a special heading which would advertise to the general
reader that they were about women.
Though we have not obtained the suffrage in any of the States
where we had hoped to do so during the past year, the failures
have been by very small majorities. In South Dakota, where eight
years ago a woman suffrage amendment was lost by a majority of
over 23,000, at the election of 1898 the opposing majority was
reduced to 3,000; while in Washington, where the question was
submitted for the second time, it was lost by a majority less
than one-half as large as that of nine years ago. In California
both Houses of the Legislature passed the School Suffrage Bill,
which the Governor refused to sign, repeating the action of 1894.
The suffrage bills in the Territorial Legislatures of Oklahoma
and Arizona were carried by very fine majorities through both
lower Houses, but were lost in both upper Houses (as will be
stated by our national organizer, who led our suffrage hosts in
each case) through a shameful surrender to the temptation of
bribery from the open and avowed enemies of woman's
enfranchisement, the liquor organizations.
None of these so-called defeats ought to discourage us in the
slightest degree. Our enemies, the women remonstrants, may
comfort themselves with the thought that the liquor interest has
joined in their efforts, but we surely can solace ourselves with
the fact that the very best men voted in favor of allowing women
to exercise their right to a voice in the conditions of home and
State. So we have nothing to fear but everything to gain by going
forward with renewed faith to agitate and educate the public,
until the vast majority of men and women are thoroughly grounded
in the great principle of political equality....
I thank you, friends, for your cordial words of welcome. We are
glad to come here. I always feel a certain kinship to Michigan
since the constitutional amendment campaign of 1874, in which I
assisted. I remember that I went across one city on a dray, the
only vehicle I could secure, in order to catch a train. A
newspaper said next day: "That ancient daughter of Methuselah,
Susan B. Anthony, passed through our city last night, with a
bonnet looking as if she had just descended from Noah's Ark." Now
if Susan B. Anthony had represented votes, that young political
editor would not have cared if she were the oldest or youngest
daughter of Methuselah, or whether her bonnet came from the Ark
or from the most fashionable man milliner's.
There are women's clubs all over the country; did you ever hear
of one organized for other than an uplifting purpose? (Several
voices: "Yes, the Anti-Suffrage Associations!") Well, even the
"antis" wish to keep the world just as it is; they do not aim to
make it worse. Some persons have tried to belittle the resolution
passed by the Colorado Legislature recently, testifying to the
good results of equal suffrage, by declaring that the members
were afraid of the women. I never heard before of a Legislature
that voted solidly in a certain way for fear of women. We have
with us to-day Mrs. Welch, the president of the Colorado Equal
Suffrage Association, of whom it is said that the Legislature was
so afraid. [Miss Anthony led forward Mrs. Welch, a pretty little
woman in a very feminine bonnet, who shrank away slightly from
the compelling hand, and showed shyness in every line of her
figure, as she felt the eyes of the audience' concentrated upon
her.] At the time of the first recognition of women in the early
Granger days, when the farmers used to harness up their horses to
their big wagons and take all their women folks to the meetings,
I used to say that I could tell a Grange woman as far off as I
could see her, because of her air of feeling herself as good as a
man. Now look at this woman from Colorado!
MRS. WELCH: When I came before the Executive Committee this
morning, and they said they were proud of me as a free woman, I
felt almost ashamed to be a free woman. I thought of all the
tears and sorrows and struggles of Miss Anthony and wondered if
she ever would possess the ballot for which she had done so much,
and I so little.
MISS ANTHONY: I am glad you have it. We are not working for
ourselves alone; that is one reason why our society does not grow
as fast as some others.
The paper of the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer (R. I.) was a strong,
philosophical presentation of our Duty to the Women of Our New
Possessions:
....Prof. Otis T. Mason, author of that important book, "Woman's
Share in Primitive Culture," tells us that "the longer one
studies the subject the more he will be convinced that savage
tribes can now be elevated chiefly through their women." Why is
this true? For the reason that the savage is in the stage of
social order through which all civilized nations have passed at
some period--the stage of the mother-rule more or less modified
by partial masculine domination. It is a well-known fact of human
history and prehistoric record that the Matriarchate, or the
mother-rule, preceded the Patriarchate, or the father-rule. "All
the social fabrics of the world are built around women. The first
stable society was a mother and her child." The reason why the
primitive descent of name and property, and the first fixed stake
of home life, was the expression of this maternal relationship is
obvious. Motherhood was demonstrated by nature before fatherhood
was definitely known. Inheritance of name by the female line was
alone possible; and that, as well as the female holding and
transmitting of property, was a family or tribal or clan
relationship, women always retaining rule and wealth not so much
as individuals as custodians of communal life and possessions.
Not only was the mother with the child the first founder of human
society, but the woman in savage life was the first inventor and
originator of all life-sustaining industries....
When man also began to "settle down"--whether from personal
choice or from social pressure--when he, too, began to learn and
practice the industrial arts heretofore solely in the hands of
women, he began to press his more personal and individualistic
claims of recognition and of property-owning against the family
wealth of which the woman was the custodian.
As man more and more assumed the burden of the world's industries
outside the home (which before had been woman's care alone), and
as woman became more and more absorbed in purely domestic
concerns, man's individualism assumed greater and greater power
within the family life, and he gradually acquired the despotic
family headship which marked the ancient patriarchal order of
Rome. This was not a social descent, but an immense social
uplift, in the age in which it was natural. Professor Mason says,
and with profound truth, "Matrimony in all ages is an effort to
secure to the child the authenticity of the father." It was
necessary for social growth that offspring should have two
parents instead of one; that the division of labor should be more
equal, and man be fastened to domestic needs by bonds he could
not break, and through labors which were peaceful as well as
arduous. For that process his individualism, developed through
ages of free wandering and purely militant life, must be not only
tamed somewhat, but harnessed to the home life.
To accomplish that mighty social uplift by which offspring
secured two parents instead of one, woman's subjection to man was
paid as the price of the higher form of family unity. Nor was her
subjection to man in the ruder ages of the world wholly an evil
to herself. It has been said that "woman was first the wife of
any, second the wife of many, and third one of many wives." Each
of these steps was an advance in her sexual relationship. All
were stepping-stones to the monogamic union which is the standard
of our civilization, and the realized ideal of all our best and
wisest men and women....
Bebel says, "Woman was the first human being to taste of
bondage." True, and her bondage has been long and bitter; but the
subjection of woman to man in the family bond was a vast step
upward from the preceding condition. It gave woman release from
the terrible labor-burdens of savage life; it gave her time and
strength to develop beauty of person and refinement of taste and
manners. It gave her the teaching capacity, for it put all the
younger child-life into her exclusive care, with some leisure at
command to devote to its mental and moral, as well as physical,
well-being. It led to a closer relationship between man and woman
than the world had known before, and thus gave each the advantage
of the other's qualities. And always and everywhere the
subjection of woman to man has had a mitigation and softening of
hardships unknown to other forms of slavery, by reason of the
power of human affection as it has worked through sex-attraction.
As soon, however, as the slavery of woman to man was outgrown and
obsolete it became (as was African slavery in a professedly
democratic country like our own) "the sum of all villainies." And
to-day there is no inconsistency so great, and therefore no
condition so hurtful and outrageous, as the subjection of women
to men in a civilization which like ours assumes to rest upon
foundations of justice and equality of human rights....
To-day these considerations (especially the failure fully to
apply the doctrine of equality of human rights to women, even in
the most advanced centers of modern civilization) have an
especial and most fateful significance in relation to the women
of the more backward races as they are brought into contact with
our modern civilization. I said the peoples with whom we are now
being brought as a nation into vital relationship may be still in
the matriarchate. If they are not, most of them are certainly in
some transition stage from that to the father-rule. Not all
peoples have had to pass through the entire subjection of women
to men which marked our ancestral advance. The more persistent
tribal relationship and collective family life have sometimes
softened the process of social growth which was so harsh for
women under the old Roman law and the later English common law.
It may be that the dusky races of Africa and of the islands of
the sea, as well as our Aryan cousins of India, may pass more
easily through the stages of attachment of man's responsibility
to the family life than we, with our tough fiber of character,
were able to do. If so, in the name of justice they should have
the chance!
But if we, who have not yet "writ large" in law and political
rights that respect for woman which all our education, industry,
religion, art, home life and social culture express; if we, who
are still inconsistent and not yet out of the transition stage
from the father-rule to the equal reign of both sexes; if we lay
violent hands upon these backward peoples and give them only our
law and our political rights as they relate to women, we shall do
horrible injustice to the savage women, and through them to the
whole process of social growth for their people. When we tried to
divide "in severalty" the lands of the American Indian, we did
violence to all his own sense of justice and co-operative feeling
when we failed to recognize the women of the tribes in the
distribution. We then and there gave the Indian the worst of the
white man's relationship to his wife, and failed utterly, as in
the nature of the case we must have done, to give him the best of
the white man's relation to his wife.
When in India, as Mrs. Garrett Fawcett has so finely shown, we
introduce the technicalities of the English law of marriage to
bind an unwilling wife to her husband, we give the Hindoo the
slavery of the Anglo-Saxon wife, but we do not give him that
spirit of Anglo-Saxon marriage and home-life which has made that
slavery often scarcely felt, and never an unmixed evil. If,
to-day, in the Hawaiian Islands or in Cuba we fail to recognize
the native women, who still hold something of the primitive
prestige of womanhood, fail to recognize them as entitled to a
translation, under new laws and conditions, of the old dignity of
position, we shall not only do them an injustice, but we shall
forcibly give the Hawaiian and Cuban men lessons in the wrong
side and not the right side of our domestic relations. Above all,
if in the Philippines we abruptly and with force of arms
establish the authority of the husband over the wife, by
recognizing men only as property-owners, as signers of treaties,
as industrial rulers and as domestic law-givers, we shall
introduce every outrage and injustice of women's subjection to
men, without giving these people one iota of the sense of family
responsibility, of protection of and respect for woman, and of
deep and self-sacrificing devotion to childhood's needs, which
mark the Anglo-Saxon man.
In a word, if we introduce one particle of our belated and
illogical political and legal subjection of women to men into any
savage or half-civilized community, we shall spoil the domestic
virtues that community already possesses, and we shall not
(because we can not so abruptly and violently) inoculate them
with the virtues of civilized domestic life. Nature will not be
cheated. We can not escape, nor can we roughly and swiftly help
others to escape, the discipline of ages of natural growth.
This all means that we need another Commission to go to all the
lands in which our flag now claims a new power of oversight and
control--a Commission other than that so recently sent to the
Philippines--to see what may be done to bring order to that
distracted group of islands. We need a Commission which shall
study domestic rather than political conditions, and which shall
look for the undercurrents of social growth rather than the more
showy political movements. We should have on that Commission two
archaeologists, a man and a woman, and I can name them--Otis T.
Mason and Alice C. Fletcher....
An earnest discussion followed this paper, in which Mrs. Clara Bewick
Colby (D. C.), Mrs. Helen Philleo Jenkins (Mich.), Henry B. Blackwell
(Mass.), Miss Octavia W. Bates (Mich.), Miss Martha Scott Anderson
(Minn.), and Miss Anthony took part:
MRS. JENKINS: ....Whatever power in government may be given to
the men of our new possessions in selecting their rulers, let the
same privilege be accorded the women. It may be said that the
women are ignorant, and need yet to be held in subjection--that
they are unfit to have a voice in the new order of things. Let us
not be deceived. Probably the women are no more ignorant and
stupid than the masses of men in these newly acquired
regions--excepting always the few men whom circumstances have
developed. The ignorant mother can guide her child quite as
safely as its ignorant father. Men and women in all nations and
tribes are pretty nearly on a level as to common sense and
forethought for the future good of the family. Indeed, the
interests of the home, protection of the children, and the morals
and behavior of the community make the standard of even
unlettered women one notch higher than that of their ignorant
husbands. Let us of this nation hesitate before we establish a
sex supremacy that it may take long centuries to overcome....
Thousands of dollars are expended on a military commission; it is
sent to investigate the commercial possibilities, the financial
opportunities, in remote lands; but the army, the commerce, the
finance are not all there is of a nation. There are more vital
interests--there is something which lies at the very base of the
nation, without which it could not exist--the homes, the women
and the children. It is the social conditions that need special
consideration in our country's dealings with these new lands.
MISS BATES: ....In the presence of the events which have
transpired during the past year, and in all the discussions
pertaining to the new peoples who have suddenly become our
proteges, seldom if ever does one hear a word about the women,
who, all will admit, are a most important factor in the
civilization--or the lack of it--which we have taken under our
control.
We women are here at this time to do our best to awaken the
public conscience to a realizing sense of the state of affairs.
We are the result of what the religion, the education of the
nineteenth century and the liberty which it has granted to women
have made us. We are ready and willing and competent to befriend
our less favored sisters beyond the seas, and to extend to them
the benefits we enjoy, so far as they are able to receive them;
but--the tragedy of it--in a certain sense we are utterly
helpless to reach them and to give them what they, unconsciously
to themselves, so grievously need. There is no place for the
thought of the women of this land in the plans of the nation for
the study of these questions.
No matter how much our speaker may think and write and publish on
this subject--aye, and women like her--no matter how wise the
conclusions they reach, is it at all likely that their voices
will be listened to in the din and blare and clash of warring
political parties, or respected in legislative halls? Or is it
probable that the advocates of territorial expansion will pause a
moment to ponder on the woman side of that question? We, to-day,
are discussing this subject without even the shadow of a hope of
putting our convictions into practice. Is it any wonder that
women at large are dead to the importance of this matter?...
I am in favor of pushing the question to the utmost--not that I
have any hope that such a Commission will be appointed, but
because it furnishes a most valuable argument for extending the
suffrage to women: first, in order that, by its possession, they
may have an uncontested, legally-defined right of serving on such
commissions; and, second, because of the opportunity it offers
for proving to the world the necessity of commissions like this
for settling questions and conditions of which women form a
central and integral part. Of course if we possessed the
suffrage, we should have no necessity for a discussion like the
present. Everything we are saying would seem like truisms then,
instead of being contested point by point, as it is to-day....
MR. BLACKWELL: ....In those islands are peoples ranging from
absolute savagery to mediaeval civilization, from fighters with
blow-guns and bows and arrows to fighters with Mauser rifles and
modern artillery. Laws and institutions suited to the needs of
one tribe are unsuited to those of another. Side by side are
Catholicism, Mohammedanism and heathenism. Their amusements vary
from cannibalism to cock-fighting. Their social status ranges
from barbarous promiscuity to Moslem polygamy and thence to
Hindoo monogamy. But everywhere exist masculine domination and
feminine subjection, under varied forms of political despotism,
tempered with Protestant liberalism in the case of Hawaii. To
establish over all these diverse social conditions the rigid
principles of the English common law, which prevail largely in
our jurisprudence, will perpetuate and intensify the tyranny of
husband over wife, of father over offspring.
We see the consequences already in the British West Indies, where
negro women generally prefer to live outside of legal marriage
because as wives they find themselves subjected to practical
serfdom. In Jamaica 75 per cent. of the births are illegitimate
for this reason. When I visited Haiti, I was told to my great
surprise that the homes and small farms were usually owned by the
women. Expressing my admiration of this chivalrous recognition of
women's right to the homestead, I was informed that there was no
such sentiment. It was solely because the men were so lazy and
unreliable that the perpetuity of the race was endangered. The
fathers of the children were here to-day and away to-morrow. They
spent their time in loafing, drinking, gambling and plotting
"revolutions." The women, anchored by the love for their
children, lived in the little huts on their small plantations,
raising yams and bananas, and if the men became too drunken and
abusive the women ordered them to leave. Among those people, in a
tropical climate, with land to squat upon, most of the work is
done by the women. Let no one imagine that the so-called
"matriarchate" of early ages was an ideal condition of society.
It was based primarily upon the industrial and moral
irresponsibility of men.
In our new possessions, side by side with these primitive
conditions, we have great bodies of Chinese and Hindoo coolies,
who represent ancient and fossilized types of civilized society,
patient, economical, industrious, monogamous and exclusive in
their family relations. The trouble is that where Western
civilization interferes with Oriental abuses it does not go far
enough. When in India the British government prohibited the
custom of burning widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased
husbands, widows became the slaves of their husband's relatives,
and were actually believed to be responsible for his death and
were ill treated accordingly. When infanticide was forbidden and
peace maintained, population multiplied until famine became
chronic. The only salvation for the women of our new possessions
lies in a legal recognition of their personal, industrial, social
and political equality. If, as seems too probable, their rights
shall be simply ignored in the reconstruction, women will suffer
all the disabilities of the law, without the practical
alleviations afforded by an enlightened public opinion. Such
women, even more than those of our own States, will need the
ballot as a means of self-protection....
MISS ANTHONY: I have been overflowing with wrath ever since the
proposal was made to engraft our half-barbaric form of government
on Hawaii and our other new possessions. I have been studying how
to save, not them, but ourselves from the disgrace. This is the
first time the United States has ever tried to foist upon a new
people the exclusively masculine form of government. Our business
should be to give this people the highest form which has been
attained by us. When our State governments were originally
formed, there was no example of woman suffrage anywhere, but now
we have a great deal of it, and everywhere it has done good. The
principle is constantly spreading....
We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of
justice--that the ballot be given to the women of our new
possessions upon the same terms as to the men--because we shall
not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get
it; our business is to make the demand. Suppose during these
fifty years we had asked only for what we thought we could
secure, where should we be now? Ask for the whole loaf and take
what you can get.
Mrs. Mary L. Doe (Mich.), brought greetings from the American
Federation of Labor. "Woman suffrage would find its most hopeful and
fertile field among the labor organizations," she said; "the
workingmen stood for weak and defenseless women even before they did
for their own rights." From Samuel Gompers, president of the
Federation, she read the following letter:
The American Federation of Labor, at every convention where the
subject has been brought up and discussed, has unfalteringly
declared for equal legal, political and economic rights for
women. At the convention held in Detroit, some thirteen years
ago, a resolution to that effect was unanimously adopted. A
petition to Congress for the submission of a constitutional
amendment enfranchising women was circulated among our various
unions, and within two months it received nearly 300,000
signatures and indorsements.
At the Kansas City convention last December, the question of
woman's work was discussed, and the following declaration was
unanimously adopted: "In view of the awful conditions under which
woman is compelled to toil, this, the eighteenth annual
convention of the American Federation of Labor, strongly urges
the more general formation of trade unions of wage-working women,
to the end that they may scientifically and permanently abolish
the terrible evils accompanying their weakened, because
unorganized state; and we emphatically reiterate the trade-union
demand that women receive equal compensation for equal service
performed."
You will see that there ought to be no question as to the
attitude of the organized labor movement on this subject,
notwithstanding the designing misrepresentations of enemies of
our cause, who seek to place our movement in a false light. Let
me say, too, that the declaration just quoted is not for
compliment merely, for members of many of our organizations have
been involved in long and sacrificing contests in order to secure
to women equal pay for equal work. Please convey fraternal
greetings to our friends who will meet at Grand Rapids.
When Mrs. Loraine Immen came forward with a greeting from the Michigan
Elocutionists' Association, Miss Anthony spoke of the great change
which had taken place in women's voices in the last twenty-five years.
At an early Woman's Rights Convention, when she insisted that they
should speak louder, one of them answered, "We are not here to
screech; we are here to be ladies."
Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.) spoke entertainingly on The Hope of
the Future:
The lessons of the past year have brought home to many of us more
forcibly than any other recent events the injustice and cruelty
of denying to women their proper share in deciding questions for
the public good. We have seen the republic plunged into war in
which women have borne a heavy share of the burdens. It should be
the rule of all nations that no contest of arms should be entered
into without the consent of the women....
Another significant object lesson grew out of the war. When the
time of election approached, the governmental authorities became
much exercised over the means of providing for the voting of the
soldiers. It is astonishing how much men think of their own right
to vote. Extra sessions of the Legislatures were called to
provide means of meeting this emergency. In this dilemma I
ventured to write to the Governor of my State and suggest that he
recommend the passing of a law empowering each soldier and sailor
to send to some woman at home a proxy permitting her to vote for
him. You can see how simple a plan this would be. Every man would
have a beloved mother, a dear sister or some adored damsel whom
he would be proud to have represent him at the polls, and the
amount of money which this scheme would have saved to the State
is enormous. The counting of the soldiers' votes when at last
they were sent to New York cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In one instance, in a certain county where the board of
supervisors had to be called together in two special sessions and
the county officials summoned as if at a regular election, to
count six votes, the amount reached $100 per vote!
Miss Frances A. Griffin (Ala.), a new speaker on the national
platform, captured the audience with her rich voice and southern
intonation as she discussed The Effects of Our Teaching:
The thanksgiving of the old Jew, "Lord, I thank Thee that Thou
didst not make me a woman," doubtless came from a careful review
of the situation. Like all of us, he had fortitude enough to bear
his neighbors' afflictions....
Miss Anthony deals recklessly with years, apportioning them to
her friends as liberally as Napoleon dealt out kingdoms and
duchies to his brothers and other relations. Her example has
strengthened me; you never would have had this next remark but
for Miss Anthony: Thirty-five years ago I read a graduating
essay. I knew I was doing an unwomanly thing, and in order to
preserve what little womanliness I might have left, when I got up
to read it I whispered the whole essay. I've quit that. Since I
made up my mind to be heard, I have been heard.... A great
progress of women has gone on and is going on. Men for the most
part are manageable; women are the converts needed. When women
have their minds made up to vote, it will be with them as it was
with me about being heard....
This is a new era for woman. If the larger sphere now open to her
is not a new discovery, it is at least a new testament. The day
will come that people will look back with shame on the time when
brains and virtue were shut away from the ballot-box, if they
belonged to a woman....
Miss Anna Caulfield (Mich.) pointed out The Achievements of Woman in
Art. Mrs. May Wright Sewall (Ind.) spoke eloquently on The True
Civilization of the World, saying in part:
In the new civilization the sense of personal responsibility is
strong; it respects the child's individuality and also recognizes
the unity of all educational agencies--kindergarten, school,
college and university.
There is also a new theology, in which individual conscience is
substituted for the dictates of authority, and which
distinguishes between metaphysical doctrine and practical
principle. It seeks the higher unity, all embracing.
The new political economy recognizes the right of the individual,
and the body politic as composed of units, each one of which must
be respected. Its whole effort is to preserve the rights of
employers and to give equal recognition to the employed; to unify
all those classes that have heretofore been kept divided.
The new civilization results from all these. The difficulties in
realizing this perfect unit arise from selfishness. We have long
recognized that individual selfishness is a defect, but national
selfishness has been for a long time extolled under the name of
patriotism, and has gone on cleaving great chasms between
different peoples. In the new civilization the individual will
recognize himself at his best in his relation to the whole. The
different professions will recognize that what each contributes
bears but a small ratio to what each receives from the rest. The
different nationalities will recognize their respective dignities
in just the proportion in which the whole must transcend any
part. Then humanity will exceed national feeling and the unity of
the race will exalt the dignity of the individual.
The resolution presented by Mrs. Sewall, member for the United States
of the International Peace Union, rejoicing over the approaching Peace
Conference at The Hague and assuring the commissioners from the United
States of the sympathy of the women of this country, was unanimously
adopted.
The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, national vice-president, whose childhood
and early girlhood had been spent in Michigan, closed the Saturday
evening meeting with a tender address on Working Partners, a graphic
description of the pioneer days of this State and the hardships of
its women, during which she said: "Women have been faithful partners
and have done their full share of the work. A gentleman opposed to
their enfranchisement once said to me, 'Women have never produced
anything of any value to the world.' I told him the chief product of
the women had been the men, and left it to him to decide whether the
product was of any value. Is it said that women must not vote because
they can not bear arms? Why, women's arms have borne all the
arm-bearers of the world. We have no antique art in America, but we
have antique laws. We do not look back to the antiquity of the world,
but to the babyhood of the world. Who would think of calling a
new-born infant antique? Yet laws made in the babyhood of the world
are in this day of its manhood quoted for our guidance. Much has been
said lately about 'the white man's burden', but the white man will
never have a heavier burden to take up than himself."
Twelve churches offered their pulpits, which were filled by the women
speakers Sunday morning.[117] The regular convention services were
held Sunday afternoon in the St. Cecilia building, a large audience
being present. The Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell led the devotional
exercises, and the Rev. Florence Kollock Crooker gave the sermon from
the text: "Whether one member suffers, all the members suffer with it;
or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it." Afterwards
Mrs. Sewall spoke on the coming Peace Congress at The Hague and, on
motion of Melvin A. Root, a resolution was adopted that on May 15, the
opening day of the congress, the women of our country assemble in
public and send to it the voice of women in favor of peace.
A touching letter from Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was read by Miss
Anthony during the convention, in which she said: "We seem to be
pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold
anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we
should have an equal place on this planet. We do not hold the ignorant
class of men responsible for these outrages against women, but rather
the published opinions of men in high positions, judges, bishops,
presidents of colleges, editors, novelists and poets--all taught by
the common and civil law. It is a sad reflection that the chains of
woman's bondage have been forged by her own sires and sons. Every man
who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is
responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It
is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but
while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing
in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in
the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help
and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed
against her."
Monday evening Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, national treasurer, told of
An Ohio Woman's Experience as Member of a School Board. She gave a
lively account of her own nomination and election in Warren, and said
in concluding: "It was not a war of women against men, but of
liberalism against conservatism, of principle against prejudice, of
the new against the old. It does not take any more time to clean up a
schoolhouse and keep out scarlet fever than it does to nurse the
children through the scarlet fever."
Mrs. Flora Beadle Renkes, School Commissioner of Barry County, Mich.,
described Some Phases of Public School Work. She advocated industrial
and moral as well as intellectual training and all of this equally for
both sexes.
Mrs. Minerva Welch, in considering Woman's Possibilities, said: "To my
mind it is given to woman to develop the greatest possibilities in all
the world. She can direct the character of generations. If woman ever
gains the place God intended her to have it must be through the mother
element. In Denver we have organized women's clubs for the study of
art, literature and political science. We have learned to fraternize.
Men have found that women bring their moral influence into politics,
and the men also know that they must look to their own morals if they
want office. Many questions have been sent to our State asking about
the new conditions. Woman suffrage has proved a success, and the women
can stand with heads erect, shoulder to shoulder with any one, knowing
that they are full, free citizens of the State of Colorado and of the
United States."
Miss Anthony then, by special request, gave a recital of all the facts
connected with her arrest, trial and conviction for voting in 1872.
Miss Shaw introduced her as a criminal, and Miss Anthony retorted,
"Yes, a criminal out of jail, just like a good many of the brethren."
With marvelous power she recalled all the details of that dramatic
episode.
Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway (Ore.) gave an address on How to Win the
Ballot, containing much sound sense. It was published in full by the
Grand Rapids _Democrat_. Mrs. Evelyn H. Belden, president of the Iowa
Equal Suffrage Association, spoke on Women and War, saying:
Did you ever have to live with heroes--with men who have survived
the hardships and dangers of war? One of the reasons for my
mildness in public is that I have to be mild at home. I live with
the heroes of two wars. The elder put down the rebellion--so he
tells me. The younger, for whom I am responsible, has
accomplished an even more perilous feat; he met in mortal combat
every day for six months the product of the commissary department
of our late war. He is still alive, but "kicking"--and so is his
mother!
Note that there were no women on the War Investigating
Commission. Brutal officers, incompetent quartermasters and
ignorant doctors were tried before a jury of their peers. Every
department which was conducted without the help of women has been
for months writhing under the probe of an official investigation,
and is still writhing under the lash of public opinion.
When the war broke out, the women of Iowa, with the suffragists
at their head, cheerfully consecrated themselves to the service
of a State which does not recognize them as the equals of their
own boys. I have one old trunk that made six trips to Chickamauga
Park, filled with delicacies for the soldiers. About August I
made up my mind to go and see things for myself. My husband was
told it was no place for a woman there among 60,000 men and 1,500
animals; but he had business at home which he did not think I
could attend to, and he thought I could go to Chickamauga just as
well as he....
If there had been women on the commission, would they have
pitched the camp five miles from water? Or provided only one
horse and one mule to bring the water for two companies? Or
ordered the soldiers to filter and boil their drinking water,
without furnishing any filters or any vessels to boil it in? It
is said that suffragists do not know how to keep house. If so,
the men who managed the war must all be suffragists.
But Clara Barton and the women nurses have won golden opinions
from every one. If any man had given a tithe of what Helen Gould
did, he could have had any office in the gift of the
administration. So could she, if she had been a voter. She might
even have been Secretary of War.
We raise our sons to die not for their country--no woman grudges
her sons to her country--but to die unnecessarily of disease and
neglect, because of red tape....
History furnishes no parallel to the women of America during the
last year's war. They were fully alive to its issues,
intelligently conversant with its causes, its purposes and
possibilities; they studied camp locations, conditions and
military rules; and through the hand the heart found constant
expression, as many a company of grateful boys can testify. The
experience of this war ought to have effectually destroyed the
last trace of mediaeval sentiment concerning the propriety of
women mixing in the affairs of government, and also the last
shadow of doubt as to the expediency of recognizing them as
voters.
Mrs. Josephine K. Henry (Ky.) made an address sparkling with the
epigrams for which she was noted, entitled A Plea for the Ballot:
....The light and the eager interest in the faces of American
women show that they are going somewhere; and when women have
started for somewhere, they are harder to head off than a
comet.... All roads for women lead to suffrage, even if they do
not know it. We are Daughters of Evolution, and who can stop old
Dame Evolution?... We must live up to our principles, or, as a
nation, we are not going to live at all. Then it will be time for
Liberty to throw down her torch, and go out of the enlightening
business.... "Woman's sphere"--these are the two hardest-worked
words in the dictionary.... They call in the mental and moral
wreckage of foreign nations to help rule us. A man was asked,
"How are you going to vote on the constitution?" He answered: "My
constitution's mighty poorly; my mother was feeble before me."
There is deep tragedy in giving such men control of the lives and
property of American women.... There is not so much the matter
with the U. S. Constitution as with the constitutions of some of
our statesmen.... It is not an expansion of territory that we
need so much as an expansion of justice to our own women....
American men have had a hard struggle for their own liberty, and
some of them are afraid there will not be liberty enough to go
around.... What relation is woman to the State? She is a very
poor relation, yet her tax-money is demanded promptly.
Dr. Mary H. Barker Bates, of the Denver School Board, discussed Our
Gains and Our Losses, and said in closing: "We have learned that in
politics we must have a machine, only it should be used for good
government, not for corruption. Make your machine as perfect as you
can, without a flaw in it anywhere, and then use it for good ends."
Mrs. Mary B. Clay (Ky.) gave a careful survey of conditions resulting
from The Removal of Industries from the Home, which had forced woman
to follow them and made her an industrial factor in the outside world.
Miss Griffin being again called on told these anecdotes:
In my home in Alabama there are four educated women. My father
has passed away. My sisters are widows and I am an old maid. We
have as our gardener a negro boy twenty-three years old. When he
came to us he said that he had been in the Second Reader for ten
years, but on election day he goes over and votes to represent
our family. If we complain of having no vote on the expenditure
of our tax-money, we are told we must "influence" men; in other
words, we must influence that gardener. But when we start to do
so, and ask him how he means to vote, he says he doesn't know
yet, because he hasn't seen "Uncle Peter," the colored minister.
In my section men are chivalric and say, "Don't you know that you
shall have everything you ask as ladies? Don't you know that we
are your natural protectors?" But what is a woman afraid of on a
lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there
is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.
On the islands off our coast there was a large population that
could not read or write. A missionary-spirited woman went there
to help educate them. After awhile she was made a member of the
school board, which consisted of a few white men and more
negroes. The president of the board, a colored man, was disgusted
at the elevation of a woman to that dignity, and when she was
sworn in he resigned, saying, "Now you've swore her in, you've
got to swear me out; I'm not going to sit on no board with no
woman."
During the convention Miss Anthony made an earnest appeal for
co-operation in the equal suffrage work, saying: "Why is it the duty
of the little handful on this platform to be talking and working for
the enfranchisement of women any more than that of all of you who sit
here to-night? Every woman can do something for the cause. She who is
true to it at her own fireside, who speaks the right word to her
guests, to her children and her neighbors' children, does an
educational work as valuable as that of the woman who speaks from the
platform." She also urged a wider reading of the equal rights papers,
the _Woman's Journal_, _Tribune_, _Standard_, _Wisconsin Citizen_,
etc., and suffrage pamphlets and leaflets. She defended herself
against the accusation of abusing the men, saying, "We have not been
fighting the 'male' citizen anywhere but in the statute books."
Eighty-seven delegates representing twenty-two States were present at
this convention. The treasurer reported the receipts of the past year
to be $14,020. Mrs. Chapman Catt, chairman of the Organization
Committee, related the work done by the suffrage organizations in
behalf of the Spanish-American War. She described also the efforts
made to obtain suffrage for women in the new constitution of Louisiana
the preceding year, which resulted in securing the franchise for
taxpaying women on all matters submitted to taxpayers. The work in
different States and Territories, especially in Arizona and Oklahoma,
was sketched in detail, and will be found in their respective
chapters.
In concluding her report as chairman of the Legislative Committee,
Mrs. Blake called attention to the more hopeful character of this
record as compared to that of last year, and urged upon all State
presidents the importance of having some one to represent the
interests of women constantly at their capitals during the legislative
sessions, not only to secure favorable legislation but to prevent that
inimical to their interests, citing the case of New Mexico, where a
law which infringes on the right of dower was recently passed without
the knowledge of women.
Mrs. Elnora M. Babcock (N. Y.) was made chairman of National Press
Work, with power to appoint a chairman in each State. The customary
telegram of congratulation and appreciation was sent to the honorary
president, Mrs. Stanton. Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborne (N. Y.) was
appointed fraternal delegate to the International Council of Women to
meet in London in June. Greetings were received through fraternal
delegates, Mrs. Jessie R. Denney, from the Ancient Order of United
Workingmen, and Mrs. Emma A. Wheeler from the Canadian W. C. T. U. The
letter to Miss Anthony from its president, Mrs. Annie O. Rutherford,
said: "A vigorous campaign is being carried on in every Province in
favor of equal suffrage, with fair hope of success in most of them. We
wish for your convention a most successful issue, and that your life,
whose grand pioneer work has made it easy for those who follow after,
may be spared many years yet to help broaden the path and uplift the
cause of humanity." Many letters and telegrams were received from
State suffrage associations and from individuals. Mrs. Belva A.
Lockwood (D. C.) wrote: "As a delegate to the ninth annual convention
of the International League of Press Clubs just held in Baltimore, I
succeeded in gaining recognition on equal terms for women journalists
in the space to be allotted to men journalists in the Exposition at
Paris in 1900."
A lively discussion was caused by a resolution offered by Mrs. Lottie
Wilson Jackson, a delegate from Michigan, so light-complexioned as
hardly to suggest a tincture of African blood, that "colored women
ought not be compelled to ride in smoking cars, and that suitable
accommodations should be provided for them." It was finally tabled as
being outside the province of the convention.[118]
The memorial resolutions were presented by the Rev. Antoinette Brown
Blackwell, who said: "These tributes are largely to older men and
women with whom I was associated long ago and it is a pleasure to
recall their noble services to humanity in times when they and their
work were far more unpopular than to-day. There are twenty-five on my
list, yet I think there was only one of the entire number who was not
more than fifty years old, and most of them reached on toward the
eighties and nineties. All were earnest advocates of equal suffrage,
but there were kindred causes to which most of them were also
devoted.... Laura P. Haviland spent seventy years of her life in
Michigan, the last five here in Grand Rapids. At one time she assumed
the care of nine orphan children; at another, during the Civil War she
was the active agent who freed from prison a large number of Union
soldiers held upon false charges. She labored for every good cause and
was a simple Quaker in religion and life....
"Parker Pillsbury of New Hampshire, who died last year, aged 88, known
as a life-long worker for the oppressed before the Civil War, gave
much of his energy to the cause of anti-slavery. When that noble
philanthropy was split in two throughout its whole length because
one-half would not let women serve on committees with men or raise
their voices publicly for those who were dumb and helpless, Parker
Pillsbury stood by the side of Abby Kelly and the Grimke sisters. His
terse, characteristic, uncompromising language, his cheerful braving
of prejudice, his sympathetic claim for justice to womanhood, made him
one of the noblest of men....
"In the long and many-sided history of the woman's cause, Mrs. Matilda
Joslyn Gage made a deep and lasting mark. I recall her as she came
first upon our platform at the Syracuse Woman's Rights Convention in
1852, a young mother of two children, yet with a heart also for a
wider cause. Wendell Phillips said of her then, 'She came to us an
unknown woman. She leaves us a co-worker whose reputation is
established.' ...
"The Hon. Nelson W. Dingley was able officially to help our movement
with efficient good-will. His vote was recorded for the admission of
States with a woman suffrage constitution."
Mrs. Blackwell paid personal tribute to most of those who had passed
away, and Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby continued the memorial, speaking at
length of the splendid work of Mrs. Gage; of Mrs. Flora M. Kimball and
Mrs. Abigail Bush, of California--but early Eastern pioneers; Mrs.
Sarah M. Kimball of Utah; Mrs. Frances Bagley and Dr. Charlotte
Levanway of Michigan; and a long list of men and women in various
States who had done their part in aiding the cause of equal suffrage.
She concluded with eloquent words of appreciation of the services of
Robert Purvis of Philadelphia, and presented the following resolutions
sent by Mrs. Stanton:
During the period of reconstruction, the popular cry was, "This
is the negro's hour," and Republicans and Abolitionists alike
insisted that woman's claim to the suffrage must be held in
abeyance until the negro was safe beyond peradventure.
Distinguished politicians, lawyers and congressmen declared that
woman as well as the negro was enfranchised by the Fourteenth
Amendment, yet reformers and politicians denounced those women
who would not keep silent, while the Republican and anti-slavery
press ignored their demands altogether. In this dark hour of
woman's struggle, forsaken by all those who once recognized her
civil and political rights, two noble men steadfastly maintained
that it was not only woman's right but her duty to push her
claims while the constitutional door was open and the rights of
citizens in a republic were under discussion; therefore,
_Resolved_, That women owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Purvis
and Parker Pillsbury for their fearless advocacy of our cause,
when to do so was considered to be treason to a great party
measure, involving life and liberty for the colored race.
_Resolved_, That in the death of men of such exalted virtue, true
to principle under the most trying circumstances, sacrificing the
ties of friendship and the respect of their compeers, they are
conspicuous as the moral heroes of the nineteenth century.
The memorial service was closed with prayer by the Rev. Anna Howard
Shaw, who voiced the gratitude for the inspiration of such lives as
these and the hope that this generation might carry the work on to its
full fruition.
* * * * *
The keynote to the speeches and action of this convention was the
status of women in our new possessions. At a preliminary meeting of
the Business Committee, held in the home of Mrs. Chapman Catt at
Bensonhurst-by-the-Sea, N. Y., Jan. 2, 1899, the following "open
letter" had been prepared and sent to every member of Congress:
TO THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: We respectfully
request that in the qualifications for voters in the proposed
Constitution for the new Territory of Hawaii the word "male" be
omitted.
The declared intention of the United States in annexing the
Hawaiian Islands is to give them the benefits of the most
advanced civilization, and it is a truism that the progress of
civilization in every country is measured by the approach of
women toward the ideal of equal rights with men.
Under barbarism the struggle for existence is entirely on the
physical plane. The woman freely enters the arena and her failure
or success depends wholly upon her own strength. When life rises
to the intellectual plane public opinion is expressed in law.
Justice demands that we shall not offer to women emerging from
barbarism the ball and chain of a sex disqualification while we
hold out to men the crown of self-government.
The trend of civilization is closely in the direction of equal
rights for women. [Then followed a list of the gains for woman
suffrage.]
The Hon. John D. Long, Secretary of the Navy, calls the
opposition to woman suffrage a "slowly melting glacier of
bourbonism and prejudice". The melting is going on steadily all
over our country, and it would be most inopportune to impose upon
our new possessions abroad the antiquated restrictions which we
are fast discarding at home.
We, therefore, petition your Honorable Body that, upon whatever
conditions and qualifications the right of suffrage is granted to
Hawaiian men, it shall be granted to Hawaiian women.[119]
Notwithstanding this appeal, and special petitions also from the
Suffrage Associations of the forty-five States, our Congress provided
a constitution in which the word "male" was introduced more frequently
than in the Constitution of the United States or of any State, in the
determination to bar out Hawaiian women from voting and holding
office. It was declared that only "male" citizens should fill any
office or vote for any officer, a sweeping restriction which is not
made in a single State of our Union. Not satisfied with this infamous
abuse of power, our Congress refused to this new Territory a privilege
enjoyed by every other Territory in the United States--that of having
the power vested in its Legislature to grant woman suffrage--and
provided that this Territorial Legislature must submit the question to
the voters. It took care, however, to enfranchise every male being in
the Islands--Kanaka, Japanese and Portuguese--and it will be only by
their permission that even the American and English women residing
there ever can possess the suffrage.
The members of the commission who drafted this constitution were
President Sanford B. Dole and Associate Justice W. F. Frear of Hawaii;
Senators John T. Morgan, Ala.; Shelby M. Cullom, Ills.; Representative
Robert R. Hitt, Ills. Justice Frear said over his own signature, Feb.
11, 1899: "I proposed at a meeting of the Hawaiian Commission that the
Legislature be permitted to authorize woman suffrage, and President
Dole supported me, but the other members of the commission took a
different view." In other words, the Hawaiian members favored the
enfranchisement of their women but were overruled by the American
members. If but one of the latter had stood by those from Hawaii its
women would not have been placed, as they now are, under greater
subjection even than those of the United States, and far greater than
they were before the annexation of the Islands. Yet after the
consummation of this shameful act the world was asked to rejoice over
the creation of a new republic!
There is not the slightest reason to hope that the appeals for justice
to the women of the Philippines will meet with any greater success, as
it is the policy of our Government to give to men every incentive to
study its institutions and fit themselves for an intelligent voice in
their control, but to discourage all interest on the part of women and
to prevent them absolutely from any participation. Having held
American women in subjection for a century and a quarter, it now shows
a determination to place the same handicap upon the women of our
newly-acquired possessions.
* * * * *
During the spring of 1902, just before this volume goes to the
publishers, the U. S. Senate Philippine Commission has been summoning
before it a number of persons competent to give expert testimony as to
existing conditions in those Islands. Among these were Judge W. H.
Taft, who for the past year has been Governor of the Philippines and
speaks with high authority; and Archbishop Nozaleda, who has been
connected with the Catholic church in the Islands for twenty-six
years, and Archbishop since 1889, and who has the fullest
understanding of the natives. Governor Taft said in answer to the
committee:
The fact is that, not only among the Tagalogs but also among the
Christian Filipinos, the woman is the active manager of the
family, so if you expect to confer political power on the
Filipinos it ought to be given to the women.
Archbishop Nozaleda testified as follows: (Senate Document 190, p.
109.)
The woman is better than the man in every way--in intelligence,
in virtue and in labor--and a great deal more economical. She is
very much given to trade and trafficking. If any rights and
privileges are to be granted to the natives, do not give them to
the men but to the women.
Q. Then you think it would be much better to give the women the
right to vote than the men?
A. O, much better. Why, even in the fields it is the women who do
the work; the men who go to the cock fights and gamble. The woman
is the one who supports the man there; so every law of justice
demands that even in political life they should have the
privilege over the men.
The action which our Government will eventually take in conferring the
suffrage on the Filipinos can not be recorded in this volume, but the
prophecy is here made that, in spite of the above testimony, and much
more of the same nature which has been given by correspondents in the
Philippines and by many who have returned from there, the Government
of the United States will enfranchise the inferior male inhabitants
and hold as political subjects the superior women of these Islands.
And again the world will be called upon to greet another republic!
FOOTNOTES:
[117] Miss Anthony spoke to a crowded house in the Fountain Street
Baptist Church on The Moral Influence of Women, and the Rev. Anna
Howard Shaw to another great audience in the Park Congregational
Church from the text, "Only be thou strong and very courageous."
Calvary Baptist Church was filled to overflowing to hear Miss Laura
Clay on The Bible for Equal Rights. Interested congregations listened
to the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who preached at the Division
Street Methodist Church from the text, "Knowledge shall increase";
Miss Laura Gregg, who spoke at the Second Baptist Church on My
Country, 'Tis of Thee; Mrs. Colby, at the Plainfield Avenue Methodist
Church, on The Legend of Lilith; Miss Lena Morrow at Memorial Church,
Miss Lucy E. Textor at All Souls, and Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton and
various members of the convention in other pulpits.
[118] The following resolutions were adopted:
That we reaffirm our devotion to the immortal principle that
governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,
and we call for its application in the case of women citizens.
We protest against the introduction of the word "male" in the suffrage
clause of the proposed Constitution of Hawaii, and declare that upon
whatever terms the franchise may be granted to men, it should be
granted also to women.
In all the great questions of war and peace, currency, tariff and
taxation, annexation of foreign territory and alien races, women are
vitally interested and should have an equal expression at the ballot
box, and we recommend to the President of the United States the
appointment of a committee of women to investigate the condition of
women in our new island territories.
We congratulate the women of Ireland who have just voted for the first
time for municipal and county officers, and we call attention to the
fact that 75 per cent. of the qualified women voted, and that the
dispatches say they discharged their duty in a serious and
businesslike spirit, with a keen eye to the personal merits of
candidates.
We congratulate the women of Colorado, whose Legislature lately passed
a resolution testifying to the good effects of equal suffrage by a
vote of 45 to 3 in the House, and 30 to 1 in the Senate.
We congratulate the women of New Orleans, who are about to vote for
the first time, on a tax levy for sewerage and drainage, and we
commend their patriotic activity in collecting the signatures of 2,000
taxpaying women of that city in behalf of clean streets and a pure
water supply.
We congratulate the women of France, who have just voted for the first
time for judges of tribunals of commerce, and we call attention to the
fact that in Paris, of the qualified voters, men and women taken
together, only 14 per cent. voted, but of the women 30 per cent.
voted.
We congratulate the women of Kansas on the increased municipal vote of
April, 1899, over the entire State, Kansas City alone registering
4,800 women and casting over 3,000 women's votes at the municipal
election.
We thank the House of Representatives of Oklahoma for its vote of 14
to 9, and of Arizona for its vote of 19 to 5, for woman suffrage, and
regret that the question did not reach the Councils of these
Territories.
We thank the Legislature of California for its enactment, with only
one dissenting vote in the House and six in the Senate, of a school
suffrage law (which failed to receive the approval of the Governor),
also we thank the Legislatures of Connecticut and Ohio, which have
defeated bills to repeal the existing school suffrage laws of those
States.
We thank the legislators of Oregon who have just submitted an
amendment granting suffrage to women by a vote of 48 to 6 in the House
and 25 to 1 in the Senate, and we hope that Oregon will add a fifth
star to our equal suffrage flag.
This association is non sectarian and non partisan, and asks for the
ballot not for the sake of advancing any specific measure, but as a
matter of justice to the whole human family. In all the States where
equal suffrage campaigns are pending we advise women and men to base
their plea on the ground of clear and obvious justice, and not to
indulge in predictions as to what women will do with the ballot before
it is secured.
We protest against women being counted in the basis of representation
of State and nation so long as they are not permitted to vote for
their representatives.
We appreciate the friendly attitude of the American Federation of
Labor, the National Grange and other public bodies of voters, as shown
by their resolutions indorsing the legal, political and economic
equality of women.
We rejoice in the Peace Congress about to meet at The Hague, and hope
it may be preliminary to the establishment of international
arbitration.
[119] See also Chap. XXIII for further efforts to protect the women of
Hawaii.
CHAPTER XX.
THE NATIONAL-AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1900.
The Thirty-second annual convention of the suffrage association, held
in Washington, D. C., Feb. 8-14, 1900, possessed two features of
unusual interest--it closed the century and it marked the end of Miss
Susan B. Anthony's presidency of the organization. The latter event
attracted wide attention. Sketches of her career and of the movement
whose history was almost synonymous with her own, appeared in most of
the leading newspapers and magazines of the country; special reporters
were sent to Washington, and the celebration of her eightieth birthday
at the close of the convention was in the nature of a national event.
On the opening morning the _Post_ said in a leading editorial:
Washington entertains the National Woman Suffrage Association
from year to year with entire complacency, apart from any
political prejudice, without any sense of partisanship and in a
spirit of keen interest in the great propaganda which is being
thus conducted. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the
plea for suffrage was ridiculed far and wide; but the women have
worked ahead undaunted by the scoffings of the world, until they
have actually won the battle in such a marked degree as to give
them unbounded assurance for the future....
The world is beginning to take a new view of this suffrage
question. The advent of women into the professions and even the
trades, their appearance as wage-earners in virtually every
branch of modern activity, and their success in these various
enterprises which they have entered, have worked a reform even
more significant than the absolute and universal grant of the
suffrage would have been. It can not be denied by men to-day that
the women have become economic factors of marked importance, and
this appreciation has had a great influence in softening the
sentiments of the male population toward the suffragists.
One of the foremost arguments formerly urged against the
extension of the suffrage to women was that it would be harmful
to woman's moral nature to thrust her into contact with the rough
conditions of campaigning. The women answered that their entrance
would perhaps redeem the immoral character of the politics of
many communities. In the minds of impartial observers the
argument was a stand-off. But this economic, professional
tendency of the women has done much to destroy the force of the
men's plea to preserve the women from contaminating contact with
harsh conditions. The security of the average woman worker in the
various lines of honest activity which the sex has fearlessly
entered has worked a revelation. The close of the century is
witnessing a great change in public sentiment in this regard. The
demand of the suffragists can not but be strengthened by the
demonstrated fact that women can become workers in competition
with men without becoming demoralized.
Just where this new tendency will lead in an economic direction
is a serious question, to be answered by facts rather than by
theories. Some students of the science believe that it is working
a revolution and is affecting the whole business fabric. There
may be a reaction against it, affecting in turn the now moderate
attitude of most men toward the suffrage question; but in any
event it is clear that this great agitation, carried on by the
association now in session, has been of serious importance and
not without palpable fruits.
The advocates of woman's enfranchisement never were brighter, happier
or more hopeful and courageous. All of the States but four were
represented by the 173 delegates in attendance. Some of them were
white-haired and wrinkled and had been coming to Washington for the
whole thirty-two years. Others were in the prime and vigor of life and
had entered the movement after the heaviest blows had been struck and
the hardest battles had been won, but now they had enlisted until the
end of the war. And now there were a large number of beautiful and
highly-educated young women, graduates of the best colleges, filled
with the zeal of new converts, bringing to the work well-trained and
thoroughly-equipped minds and giving to the old members the comforting
assurance that the vital cause would still be carried forward when
their own labors were ended.
The _Woman's Journal_ in recounting the gains for suffrage concluded:
"In this year, 1900, the woman suffragists, after a half-century of
unbroken national organization, can go before Congress and claim the
support of members from four States who were elected in part by the
votes of women. They can enforce their pleas before presidential
nominating conventions with the concrete fact that thirteen members of
the electoral college have a constituency of women voters."
Miss Anthony presided at three public sessions daily and at all the
executive and business meetings, went to Baltimore and held a
one-day's conference and made a big speech, addressed a parlor
meeting, attended several dinners and receptions, participated in her
own great birthday festivities, afternoon and evening, and remained
for nearly a week of Executive Committee meetings after the convention
had closed.
As she rose to open the convention, clad as usual in soft black satin,
with duchesse lace in the neck and sleeves and the lovely red crepe
shawl falling gracefully from her shoulders, there were many a moist
eye and tightened throat at the thought that this was the last time.
Her fine voice with its rich alto vibrations was as strong and
resonant as fifty years ago, and her practical, matter-of-fact speech,
followed by the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw's lively stories, soon dispelled
the sadness and put the audience in a cheerful mood. Miss Anthony
commenced by saying:
I have been attending conventions in Washington for over thirty
years. It is good for us to come to this Mecca, the heart of our
nation. Here the members of Congress from all parts of the
country meet together to deliberate for the best interests of the
whole government and of their respective States. So our delegates
assemble here to plan for the best interests of our cause in the
nation and in their respective States. We come here to study how
we may do more and more for the spread of the doctrine of
equality, but chiefly to study how to get the States to
concentrate their efforts on Congress. Our final aim is an
amendment to the Federal Constitution providing that no citizen
over whom the Stars and Stripes wave shall be debarred from
suffrage except for cause. I am always glad when we come to
Washington, and in our little peregrinations over the country I
have been more and more impressed with the conviction that, while
we should do all the good work we can in our own States, we ought
to hold our annual meeting in the national capital.
In beginning her vice-president's address, which as usual defied
reporting, Miss Shaw said:
Before giving my report I want to tell a story against Miss
Anthony. We suffragists have been called everything under the
sun, and when there was nothing else quite bad enough for us we
have been called infidels, which includes everything. Once we
went to hold a convention in a particularly orthodox city in New
York, and Miss Anthony, wishing to impress upon the audience that
we were not atheists, introduced me as "a regularly-ordained
orthodox minister, the Rev. Anna H. Shaw, _my right bower_!" That
orthodox audience all seemed to know what a "right bower" is, for
they laughed even louder than you do. After the meeting Miss
Anthony said to me, "Anna, what did I say to make the people
laugh so?" I answered, "You called me your right bower." She
said, "Well, you are my right-hand man. That is what right bower
means, isn't it?" And this orthodox minister had to explain to
her Quaker friend what a right bower is.
The chief event of last summer was the quinquennial meeting of
the International Council of Women in London. The Woman's
National Council of the United States is made up of about twenty
societies with an aggregate membership of over a million women.
It was only allowed two delegates besides its president, and it
is not a suffrage association, yet it honored two women who have
been known for some years as suffragists, Miss Anthony and
myself, by making us its delegates to London. They said they did
this because they wanted women who did not represent anything too
radical!
That Congress was the greatest assemblage of women from all parts
of the world that ever had taken place, and therefore the biggest
suffrage convention ever held. Suffrage seemed to take possession
of the whole meeting, as it does at every great gathering of
women. From this point of view it was a decided and emphatic
success. The largest meeting of all was the one held by the
Suffrage Association and every suffrage heart would have swollen
so large it could hardly have been kept within the bounds of the
body if it had heard the applause with which Miss Anthony was
greeted. She could not speak for ten minutes....
In England I entered upon a role I had never filled before, or
had any ambition for--I "entered society," and for ten days I was
in it from before breakfast till after midnight; and I prayed the
prayer of the Pharisee--I thanked the Lord that I was not as
other women are who have to go into society all the time. I had
thought that traveling up and down the country with gripsack in
hand was hard enough; but it is child's play to hand-shaking and
hob-nobbing with duchesses and countesses. However, the
experience was good for us, and it was especially good for those
American women who had thought that they knew more than other
women till they met them and found that they didn't.
I came home, spent three days there, and then took my grip in
hand and started out again lecturing--mostly for the Redpath
bureau, and for people who did not want to hear about suffrage;
so I spoke on "The Fate of Republics," "The American Home," "The
New Man," etc. Under these titles I gave them stronger doses of
suffrage than I ever do to you here, and they received it with
great enthusiasm, because it was not called suffrage. I spoke the
other day in Cincinnati to about 3,000 people and they were
delighted, and did not suspect that I was talking suffrage. They
don't know what woman suffrage is. They think it only means to
berate the men. In this way I have perhaps done the best suffrage
work I possibly could.
Later in the session Miss Anthony made her report as delegate from
the National Council of Women of the United States to this
International Congress in London, in which she said:
During the last seventeen years there has been a perfect
revolution in England. When Mrs. Stanton and I went there for the
first time, in 1883, just a few families were not afraid of
us--the Brights, Peter Taylor's household, and some of the old
abolitionists who knew all about us. When it was proposed to get
up a testimonial meeting for us, even the officers of the
suffrage societies did not dare to sign the invitation. They
thought we Americans were too radical....
This time when we reached London we were the recipients of
testimonials not only from the real, radical suffrage people, but
also from the conservatives. At that magnificent Queen's Hall
meeting of the Suffrage Association, with Mrs. Fawcett presiding,
three or four thousand people packed the hall. It was a
representative gathering. Australia and New Zealand were there to
speak for themselves, and they had me to speak for the United
States. I tried to have them call on Miss Shaw instead, but they
would not do it....
Every young woman who is to-day enjoying the advantages of free
schools and opportunities to earn a living and the other enlarged
rights for women, is a child of the woman suffrage movement. This
larger freedom has broadened and strengthened women wonderfully.
At the end of the Council, Lady Aberdeen, who had been its
president for six years, in a published interview summing up the
work of the women who had been present, said there was no denying
that the English-speaking women stood head and shoulders above
all the others in their knowledge of Parliamentary law, and that
at the very top were those of the United States and Canada--the
two freest parts of the world. I said: "If the women of the
United States, with their free schools and all their enlarged
liberties, are not superior to women brought up under monarchical
forms of government, then there is no good in liberty." It is
because of this freedom that Europeans are always struck with the
greater self-poise, self-control and independence of American
women. These characteristics will be still more marked when we
have mingled more with men in their various meetings. It is only
by the friction of intellect with intellect that these desirable
qualities can be gained.
The public sessions of the Council were all that heart could
wish. I was present at only a few of them because the business
meetings came at the same hour, and were held miles away. But
every day people would say to me, "Miss Anthony, you yourself
could not have made a stronger suffrage speech than So-and-So
made to-day in such-and-such a section"--industrial,
professional, etc. In the educational section, one of the best
speeches was made by Miss Brownell, dean of Sage College, Cornell
University, on co-education.
It was a great occasion. Here were the advocates of this movement
for absolutely equal rights received and entertained by the
nobility of England--American women at the head. Among many
others a reception was given by the Lord Bishop of London at his
home, Fulham Palace. In talking with Lady Battersea, daughter of
a Rothschild, I caught myself repeatedly addressing her as "Mrs.
Battersea," and I said, "I suppose I shock you very much by
forgetting your title." She answered emphatically: "Not at all. I
like an American to be an American. It is much pleasanter than
when they come cringing and crawling and trying to conform to our
customs." When all sorts of notables were giving us receptions, I
said to Lady Aberdeen: "If this great Council of Women of ten
nations were meeting in Washington, we would be invited to the
White House. Can't you contrive an interview with the Queen?"
Miss Anthony then described the reception of the Congress by the Queen
at Windsor Castle, the serving of tea in the great Hall of St. George,
and all the incidents of that interesting occasion, and concluded:
"What I want most to impress upon you is this: If we had represented
nothing but ourselves we should have been nowhere. Wendell Phillips
said: 'When I speak as an individual, I represent only myself, but
when I speak for the American Anti-Slavery Society, I represent every
one in the country who believes in liberty.' It was because Miss Shaw
and I represented you and all which makes for liberty that we were so
well received; and I want you to feel that all the honors paid to us
were paid to you."
A paper to be remembered was that of Mrs. Isabel C. Barrows (Mass.) on
Woman's Work in Philanthropy. After tracing the various lines of
philanthropic effort in which women had been distinguished, she said
in conclusion that no woman who ever had lived had done more in the
line of philanthropy than Susan B. Anthony.
Miss Harriet May Mills (N. Y.) gave a fine address on The Winning of
Educational Freedom, saying in part:
Abigail Adams said of the conditions in the early part of the
nineteenth century: "Female education in the best families went
no farther than reading, writing and arithmetic and, in some rare
instances, music and dancing." A lady living in the first quarter
of the century relates that she returned from a school in
Charleston, where she had been sent to be "finished off," with
little besides a knowledge of sixty different lace stitches....
The majority of women were content, they asked no change; they
took no part in the movement for higher education except to
ridicule it. This, like every other battle for freedom which the
world has seen, was led by the few brave, strong souls who saw
the truth and dared proclaim it. In 1820 the world looked aghast
upon "bluestockings." Because a young woman was publicly examined
in geometry at one of Mrs. Emma Willard's school exhibitions, a
storm of ridicule broke forth at so scandalous a proceeding. It
was ten years after Holyoke was founded before Mary Lyon dared to
have Latin appear in the regular course, because the views of the
community would not allow it. Boston had a high school for girls
in 1825, which was maintained but eighteen months, Mayor Quincy
declaring that "no funds of any city could stand the expense."
The difficulty was that "too many girls attended." ...
In 1877 President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard protested against
the opening of the Boston Latin School to girls, saying: "I
resist the proposition for the sake of the boys, the girls, the
schools and the general interest of education." Nearly twenty
years later, he said to the Radcliffe graduates: "It is a quarter
of a century since the college doors were open to women. From
that time, where boys and girls have been educated together, it
has become a historical fact that women have taken a greater
number of honors, in proportion to their numbers, than men." It
is to be hoped that the next twenty years may work further
conversion in the mind of this learned president, and lead him to
see that equality in citizenship is as desirable as equality in
education.
One learned man prophesied that all educated women would become
somnambulists. Another declared that the perilous track to higher
education would be strewn with wrecks. There are now over thirty
thousand of these college-educated wrecks, the majority of them
engaged in the active work of the world. It was found in 1874,
when Dr. E. H. Clarke's evil prophecies as to higher education
were attracting attention, that at Antioch, opened to women in
1853, thirteen and one-half per cent. of the men graduates had
died, nine and three-fourths per cent. of the women. This did not
include war mortality or accidental death. Three of the men then
living were confirmed invalids; not one of the women was in such
a condition. The Association of Collegiate Alumnae has compiled
later and fuller statistics. The results show an increase during
the college course of from three to six per cent. in good health,
and the health after graduation to be twenty-two per cent. higher
among graduates than among women who have not been in college....
Elizabeth Blackwell applied to twelve colleges before she gained
admittance to the Geneva (N. Y.) Medical School in 1846, and
secured the first M. D. ever given to a woman in this country.
To-day 1,583 women are studying medicine. Not so full a measure
of freedom has been won in law or theology. In 1897, 131 women
were in the law schools, 193 in the theological schools, but
women are still handicapped in these professions....
Unfortunately, educational freedom has not been followed by
industrial freedom. Of the leading colleges for women but four
have women presidents; but one offers a free field to women on
its professional staff. In the majority of co-educational
colleges which give women any place as teachers, they appear in
small numbers as assistant professors and, more often, as
instructors....
With educational freedom partially won has come general interest
among collegiate and non-collegiate women in furthering the
movement. Large gifts have been bestowed for scholarships and for
colleges, both co-educational and separate. Within the last year
thirty-four women have given $4,446,400 to the cause of
education. Mrs. Stanford's munificent benefactions, and other
lesser ones, swell the amount to more than fifty millions from
women alone. As a result of the struggle for educational freedom,
we have 35,782 women in the colleges of the country.[120]
Educational freedom without political freedom is but partial.
Minerva sprang fully armed from the head of Jove; not only had
she wisdom, but she had the spear and the helmet in her
hands--every weapon of offense and defense to equip her for the
world's conquest. Standing on the threshold of the new century,
we behold the woman of the future thus armed; we see the fully
educated woman possessed of a truer knowledge of the fundamental
principles of government; we see her conscious of her
responsibilities as a citizen, and doing her part in the making
of laws and in the fulfilment of the ideal of democracy.
Educational freedom must lead to political freedom.
Mrs. Mary C. C. Bradford, a leader among Colorado women, spoke
eloquently on The Social Transformation, following the stages in
evolution expressed in the words, "I dare, I will, I am." Describing
the effects of woman suffrage, she said:
I wish I could make you all understand that the home is not
touched. Equal suffrage does not mean destruction or
disintegration but the radiation of the home--carrying it out
into the wider life of the community. The ideal of the family
must pervade society; and that is what equal suffrage is
gradually bringing about. I know you hear all sorts of things
about woman suffrage in Colorado. Not very long ago certain
Eastern papers gave great prominence to an interview with a
"distinguished citizen of Colorado," who gave a highly
unfavorable account of the workings of woman suffrage there. The
"distinguished citizen" in question was a prize-fighter who had
killed three men--a gambler driven out by woman suffrage; and he
naturally said that woman suffrage was a failure.... The great
Woman's Club of Denver is a power for good in the city; it is
carrying on schools in "the bottoms," night schools, kitchen
gardens, traveling libraries; it secured the establishment of the
State Home for Dependent Children, the removal of the emblems
from the Australian ballot, and other good things....
I would that you could all go out to Colorado and see how
subtly, yes, and how swiftly, the social transformation is going
on. It is the home transforming the State, not the State
destroying the home. A Denver paper lately said the men had found
out that in determining all questions of morality, sanitation,
etc., if the women were consulted, better results were obtained.
We have more intelligent homes because of equal suffrage. Where
children see their father and mother go to the polls together,
and hear them talk over public questions, and occasionally
express different views, they learn tolerance. A party slave will
not come out from such a home. The children will grow up seeing
that it is un-American to say that everybody in the opposite
party is either a fool or a knave. The two best features of equal
suffrage are the improvement of the individual woman and the
prospective abolition of the political "boss."
Introducing Henry B. Blackwell (Mass.) to report on Presidential
Suffrage, Miss Anthony said: "Here is a man who has the virtue of
having stood by the woman's cause for nearly fifty years. I can
remember him when his hair was not white, and when he was following up
our conventions assiduously because a bright, little, red-cheeked
woman attracted him. She attracted him so strongly that he still works
for woman suffrage, and will do so as long as he lives, not only
because of her who was always so true and faithful to the cause--Lucy
Stone--but also because he has a daughter, a worthy representative of
the twain who were made one."
On Friday evening Mrs. Ida Husted Harper gave a portion of her paper,
The Training of the Woman Journalist, which she had presented at the
International Congress in London. Miss Anna Barrows (Mass.), literary
editor of _The American Kitchen Magazine_, spoke on New Professions
for Women Centering in the Home:
The main objection made by conservative people to definite
occupations or professions for women has been that such callings
would inevitably tend to destroy the home. Once let women prove
that they can follow a trade or profession and yet make a home
for themselves and others, and such objectors have no ground
left.... The fear is sometimes expressed that the club movement
is drawing women away from home interests; but the general
attention now given to household economics by all the women's
clubs proves that women are realizing that knowledge of history,
art and science is needed to give the broad culture necessary for
the proper conduct of the home life. Although as yet few women's
colleges offer adequate courses in home economics, nevertheless
after marriage the college women begin to study household
problems with all the energy brought out by the college
training.
A very general comment on woman's desire for a share in municipal
and national government is that the servant question is yet
unsolved; that, since she has not succeeded in governing her own
domain, she has no rights outside of it. By going outside of her
home as an employee herself she is learning to deal with this
problem. It has been necessary for women to have thorough
business training in other directions before they could discover
how unbusinesslike were the methods pursued in the average
household. The more women have gone out of their homes into new
occupations, the more they have realized that the home is
dependent upon the same principles as the business world. The
business woman understands human nature, and therefore can deal
successfully with the butcher, the baker and other tradespeople.
She has a power of adapting herself to new conditions which is
impossible to her sister accustomed only to the narrow treadmill
of housework.
Specialization is the tendency of the age, and by wise attention
to this in the household, as elsewhere, enough time should be
saved to each community for the world's work to be done in fewer
hours, and for men and women to have time besides to be
homemakers and good citizens. Little by little one art and craft
after another has been evolved into the dignity of a profession,
while housework as a whole has been left to untrained workers.
Needle work, cookery and cleaning are dependent on the
fundamental principles of all the natural sciences.... There is
need also of trained women to lead public sentiment to recognize
the dignity of manual labor.
The statesmanlike paper of Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) on the
Duty of Woman Citizens of the United States in the Present Political
Crisis, was read by Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.), who enforced its
sentiments by earnest and stirring remarks of her own. Mrs. Mary
Church Terrell, A. M. of Oberlin College, president of the National
Association of Colored Women and a member of the Washington School
Board, considered the Justice of Woman Suffrage:
....To assign reasons in this day and time why it is unjust to
deprive one-half of the human race of rights and privileges
freely accorded to the other, which is neither more deserving nor
more capable of exercising them, seems like a reflection upon the
intelligence of the audience. As a nation we professed long ago
to have abandoned the principle that might makes right. Before
the world we pose to-day as a government whose citizens have the
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, in
spite of these lofty professions and noble sentiments, the
present policy of this government is to hold one-half of its
citizens in legal subjection to the other, without being able to
assign good and sufficient reasons for such a flagrant violation
of the very principles upon which it was founded.
When one observes how all the most honorable and lucrative
positions in Church and State have been reserved for men,
according to laws which they themselves have made so as to debar
women; how, until recently, a married woman's property was under
the exclusive control of her husband; how, in all transactions
where husband and wife are considered one, the law makes the
husband that one--man's boasted chivalry to the disfranchised sex
is punctured beyond repair.
These unjust discriminations will ever remain, until the source
from which they spring--the political disfranchisement of
woman--shall be removed. The injustice involved in denying woman
the suffrage is not confined to the disfranchised sex alone, but
extends to the nation as well, in that it is deprived of the
excellent service which woman might render....
The argument that it is unnatural for woman to vote is as old as
the rock-ribbed and ancient hills. Whatever is unusual is called
unnatural, the world over. Whenever humanity takes a step forward
in progress, some old custom falls dead at our feet. Nothing
could be more unnatural than that a good woman should shirk her
duty to the State.
If you marvel that so few women work vigorously for political
enfranchisement, let me remind you that woman's success in almost
everything depends upon what men think of her. Why the majority
of men oppose woman suffrage is clear even to the dullest
understanding. In all great reforms it is only the few brave
souls who have the courage of their convictions and who are
willing to fight until victory is wrested from the very jaws of
fate.
In treating of Women in the Ministry, the Rev. Ida C. Hultin (Mass.)
considered what is known as "the woman movement" from a broad and
philosophical standpoint, which carried conviction and disarmed
opposition.
At the opening of the Saturday evening meeting a telegram was read
from the Executive Committee of the National Anti-Trust Conference, in
session at Chicago: "Hearty congratulations to the distinguished
president of the Woman Suffrage Association, and hopes that Miss
Anthony may enjoy many years of added happiness and honor. This
cordial salutation includes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and all of the
noble souls who have wrought so great a work in the liberation and
advancement of the women of this country." A letter was read also from
Frank Morrison, secretary of the American Federation of Labor, with
the following resolution, which was passed by the convention held in
Detroit, Mich., the previous December:
WHEREAS, Disfranchised labor, like that of the enslaved, degrades
all free and enfranchised labor; therefore,
_Resolved_, That the American Federation of Labor earnestly
appeals to Congress to pass a resolution submitting to the
Legislatures of the several States a proposition for a Sixteenth
Amendment to the Federal Constitution that shall prohibit the
States from disfranchising United States citizens on account of
sex.
Miss Anthony expressed her satisfaction that equal suffrage was
endorsed by "the hard-working, wage-earning men of the country, each
of them with a good solid ballot in his hand."
Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.) gave a historical sketch of Our Great
Leaders, replete with beauty and pathos. Miss Kate M. Gordon spoke
entertainingly on the possibilities of A Scrap of Suffrage.[121] In
presenting her Miss Anthony said: "The right of taxpaying women in
Louisiana to vote upon questions of taxation is practically the first
shred of suffrage which those of any Southern State have secured, and
they have used it well. They deserve another scrap, and I think they
will get it before some of us do who have been asking for half a
century."
Miss Gail Laughlin, a graduate of Wellesley and of the Law Department
of Cornell University, discussed Conditions of the Wage-Earning Women
of Our Country, saying in part:
"Wage-earner" among women is used in a broad sense. All women
receiving money payment for work are proud to be called
wage-earners, because wage-earning means economic independence.
The census of 1890 reports nearly 400 occupations open to women,
and nearly 4,000,000 women engaged in them. But government
reports show the average wages of women in large cities to be
from $3.83 to $6.91 per week, and the general average to be from
$5.00 to $6.68. In all lines women are paid less than men for the
same grade of work, and they are often compelled to toil under
needlessly dangerous and unsanitary conditions. If the people of
this country want to advance civilization, they have no need to
go to the islands of the Pacific to do it.
How are these evils to be remedied? By organization, suffrage,
co-operation among women, and above all, the inculcation of the
principle that a woman is an individual, with a right to choose
her work, and with other rights equal with man. Our law-makers
control the sanitary conditions and pay of teachers. Here is work
for the women who have "all the rights they want." When one of
these comfortably situated women was told of the need of the
ballot for working women, she held up her finger, showing the
wedding ring on it, and said, "I have all the rights I want." The
next time that I read the parable of the man who fell among
thieves and was succored by the good Samaritan, methought I could
see that woman with the wedding ring on her finger, passing by on
the other side.
It is said that every woman who earns her living crowds a man
out. That argument is as old as the trade guilds of the
thirteenth century, which tried to exclude women. The Rev. Samuel
G. Smith of St. Paul, who has recently declared against women in
wage-earning occupations, stands to-day just where they did seven
hundred years ago....[122]
Mrs. Helen Adelaide Shaw (Mass.), in A Review of the Remonstrants, was
enthusiastically received. Young, handsome and a fine elocutionist,
her imitation of the "remonstrants" and their objections to woman
suffrage convulsed the audience and was quite as effective as the most
impassioned argument.
The speakers of the convention were invited to fill a number of
pulpits in Washington Sunday morning and evening. In the Unitarian
Church, where the Rev. Ida C. Hultin preached, there was not standing
room. The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw gave the sermon at the Universalist
Church, of which the _Post_ said:
Never in the history of the church had such a crowd been in
attendance. The lecture rooms on either side of the auditorium
had been thrown open, and these, as well as the galleries, were
crowded almost to suffocation. Women stood about the edges of the
room, and seats on window sills were at a premium. Outside in the
vestibules of the church women elbowed one another for points of
vantage on the gallery stairs, where an occasional glimpse might
be caught of the handsome, dark-eyed, gray-haired woman who
looked singularly appropriate at the pulpit desk. The
congregation hung upon every word, and her remarks, sometimes
bitter and caustic, were met with a hum of approval from the
crowded auditorium.
Perhaps eight-tenths of the congregation were women. Miss Shaw's
pulpit manner is easy, but her words are emphasized by gestures
which impress her hearers with a sense of the speaker's
earnestness. Her voice, while sweet and musical, is strong, and
carries a tone of conviction. Her subject last night was
"Strength of Character." The text was chosen from Joshua, 1:9:
"Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of good courage; be not
afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the Lord thy God is with
thee whithersoever thou goest."
In the opening remarks the speaker said it was now time that
women asserted their rights. "Men have no right to define for us
our limitations. Who shall interpret to a woman the divine
element in her being? It is for me to say that I shall be free.
No human soul shall determine my life for me unless that soul
will stand before the bar of God and take my sentence. Men who
denounce us do so because they are ignorant of what they do.
Woman has broken the silence of the century. Her question to God
is, 'Who shall interpret Thee to me?' The churches of this day
have not begun to conceive of what Christianity means.
"It is not true that all women should be married and the managers
of homes. There is not more than one woman in five capable of
motherhood in its highest possible state, and I may say that not
one man in ten is fitted for fatherhood. We strongly advocate
that no woman and man should marry until they are instructed in
the science of home duties. Instead of woman suffrage breaking up
families, it has just the opposite effect. In the State of
Wyoming where it has existed thirty years, there is a larger per
cent. of marriages and a less of divorces than in any other State
in the Union. Because a woman is a suffragist is no reason that
she may not be a good housekeeper. The two most perfect
housekeepers I ever knew in my life were members of my
congregation in New England--one was a suffragist and the other
had no thought of the rights of women." ...
After the services almost every woman in the congregation crowded
forward to shake the hand of the speaker.
On Monday evening the national character of the convention was
conspicuously demonstrated, as the speakers represented the East, the
South, the Middle West and the Pacific Slope. Mrs. Florence Howe Hall
(N. J.), the highly educated daughter of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, read a
charming farce entitled The Judgment of Minerva, the suffragists and
the antis, as goddesses, bringing their cause before Jupiter, with a
decision, of course, in favor of the former. Miss Diana Hirschler, a
young lawyer of Boston, presented Woman's Position in the Law in a
paper which was in itself an illustration of the benefit of a legal
training. Mrs. Virginia D. Young (S. C.) told the Story of Woman
Suffrage in the South, and sketched the history of the progressive
Southern woman, beginning as follows:
The woman suffragists of the South have suffered in the pillory
of public derision. It has been as deadly a setting up in the
stocks as ever New England practiced on her martyrs to freedom.
The women who have led in this revolt against old ideals have had
to be as heroic as the men who stormed San Juan heights in the
contest for Santiago de Cuba....
It is out of date to be carried in a sedan chair when one can fly
around on a bicycle, and though in our conservative South, we
have still some preachers with Florida moss on their chins, who
storm at the woman on her wheel as riding straight to hell, we
believe, with Julian Ralph, that the women bicyclists "out-pace
their staider sisters in their progress to woman's emancipation."
Clark Howell, the brilliant Georgian, in his recent address
before the Independent Club, set people to talking about him,
from Niagara Falls in the East to the Garden of the Gods in the
West, by his elucidations of "The Man with his Hat in his Hand;"
but I propose to show you to-night a greater--the Woman With Her
Bonnet Off, who speaks from the platform in a Southern city. You
know how the women of the stagnant Orient stick to their veils,
coverings for head and face, outward signs of real slavery. The
bonnet is the civilized substitute for the Oriental veil, and to
take it off is the first manifestation of a woman's resolve to
have equal rights, even if all the world laugh and oppose.
In South Carolina the first newspaper article in favor of woman
suffrage written by a woman over her own name, was met by the
taunt that she had imbibed her views from the women of the North.
But this was merely ignorance of history, for the story of woman
suffrage in the South really antedates that in New England. The
new woman of the new South, who asks for equal rights with her
brother man, is in the direct line of succession to that
magnificent "colonial dame," Mistress Margaret Brent of Maryland,
who asked for a vote in the Colonial Assembly after the death of
her kinsman, Lord Baltimore, who had endowed her with powers of
attorney. Margaret Brent antedated Abigail Adams by over a
century.
Mrs. Annie L. Diggs, State librarian, depicted Municipal Suffrage in
Kansas, with the knowledge of one who had been a keen observer and an
active participant.[123] Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway described the work
which had been and would be done in the interest of the approaching
suffrage amendment campaign in Oregon.
On Tuesday evening Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd (Mass.), under the head of
The Village Beautiful, told what might be accomplished toward the
beautifying of towns and cities if the authority and the means were
allowed to women. This was followed by a strong, clear business talk
from Mrs. A. Emmagene Paul, superintendent of the Street-Cleaning
Department of the First Ward, Chicago, who told how "crooked
contractors and wily politicians" at first began to cultivate her.
They found, however, that they could not shake her determination to
make them live up to their contracts; they had agreed to clean the
streets, they were receiving pay for that purpose, and she, as an
inspector, was there to see that the contracts were lived up to. Mrs.
Paul was appointed when the municipal government adopted a civil
service system, and holds her position by virtue of its examination.
She has checkmated the contractor and politician, and has accomplished
a long-needed reform in the street-cleaning department of
Chicago.[124]
An interesting description of The Russian Woman was given by Madame
Sofja Levovna Friedland, who said that there is little suffrage for
either men or women in Russia, but such as there is both alike
possess. Mrs. Amy K. Cornwall, president of the Colorado Equal
Suffrage Association, related the work accomplished by the women of
her State since they had been enfranchised; "only six years," she
said, "and yet we are expected to have cleaned up all Colorado,
including Denver." Grace Greenwood (Mrs. Sara J. Lippincott) was
introduced by Miss Anthony as a suffragist of thirty years' standing.
The audience was greatly amused by her recital of the answers which
she had made to the "remonstrants" more than a quarter of a century
ago, showing that they were using then exactly the same objections
which are doing service to-day. Several of the speakers having failed
to appear, a very unusual occurrence, Mrs. May Wright Sewall,
president of the International Council of Women, was pressed into
service by Miss Anthony. She introduced her address gracefully by
saying: "We women think we believe in freedom, but we are often told
that we love best the tyrant who can make us obey, and I can testify
to the truth of it," motioning toward Miss Anthony. She then made an
eloquent and convincing plea for the enfranchisement of women.
The mornings were devoted to committee reports and to ten-minute
reports from each of the States, often the most interesting features
of the convention. The afternoons were given to Work Conferences, when
all the various details of the work were discussed under the
leadership of those who had proved most competent--methods of
organization, of holding conventions, etc. The treasurer, Mrs. Upton,
stated that the receipts for the past year were $10,345; that the
association had an indebtedness of about $1,400, and Miss Anthony,
desiring to leave it entirely free from debt, had raised almost all of
this amount herself; that the books now showed every bill to be paid.
Before the close of the convention almost $10,000 were subscribed
toward the work of the coming year. It was decided to hold a National
Suffrage Bazar in New York City before the holidays in order to add to
this fund.[125]
Mrs. Chapman Catt, chairman of the Organization Committee, reported
that with the secretary of the committee, Miss Mary G. Hay, she had
visited twenty States, lecturing and attending State conventions,
giving fifty-one lectures and traveling 13,000 miles. Ten thousand
letters had been sent out from the office.
The comprehensive report of Mrs. Elnora M. Babcock (N. Y.), chairman
of the Press Committee, showing the remarkable success achieved in
securing the publication of articles on suffrage, seemed to offer the
best possible proof of an increasing favorable public sentiment.
Articles had been furnished regularly to 1,360 newspapers; 3,675 had
been prepared on the present convention and birthday celebration;
altogether 31,800 weekly articles had been sent out and, so far as
could be ascertained, all had been published. The number of papers
which would use plate matter on suffrage was limited only by the money
which could be commanded to supply it.
Miss Anthony, in reporting for the Congressional Committee, made a
good point when she said:
One reason why so little has been done by Congress is because
none of us has remained here to watch our employes up at the
Capitol. Nobody ever gets anything done by Congress or by a State
Legislature except by having some one on hand to look out for it.
We need a Watching Committee. The women can not expect to get as
much done as the railroads, the trusts, the corporations and all
the great moneyed concerns. They keep hundreds of agents at the
national Capital to further their interests. We have no one here,
and yet we expect to get something done, although we labor under
the additional disadvantage of having no ballots to use as a
reward or punishment. Whatever takes place in Washington is felt
to the circumference of the country. I have had nearly all the
States send petitions to Congress asking that upon whatever terms
suffrage is extended to the men of Hawaii and our other new
possessions, it may be extended to the women, and it is this
which has stirred up the anti-suffragists in Massachusetts, New
York and Illinois to their recent demonstrations.... Mrs. Harper
has culled extracts from all the favorable congressional reports
we have had during the past thirty years, and we have made a
pamphlet of them, which will be laid on the desk of every member
of Congress.[126]
Mary F. Gist, Anna S. Hamilton and Emma Southwick Brinton were
introduced as fraternal delegates from the Woman's National Press
Association; Mrs. William Scott, from the Universal Peace Union; Dr.
Agnes Kemp, from the Peace Society of Philadelphia; Elizabeth B.
Passmore from the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends. Letters of
greeting were received from Mrs. Priscilla Bright McLaren of Scotland,
Mrs. Mary Foote Henderson, of Washington, D. C., and many others.
Among the memorial resolutions were the following:
In reviewing the gains and losses of the past year, we recall
with profound regret the loss of those tried and true workers for
woman's enfranchisement, George W. and Mrs. Henrietta M. Banker
of New York, who died within a few days of each other. "Lovely in
life, in death they were not divided." Although we shall sorely
miss their genial and inspiring presence, they will continue by
the munificent provisions of their wills to aid the cause.
We are also saddened by the news just received of the decease of
Dr. Elizabeth C. Sargent of San Francisco, our valued co-worker
in the recent California Suffrage Campaign, and daughter of our
lifelong friends, U. S. Senator Aaron A. and Mrs. Ellen Clark
Sargent. All advocates of equal suffrage unite in offering to the
bereaved mother their heartfelt sympathy in her loss.
A vote of thanks was passed to Bishop Spaulding of Peoria, Ills.,
Bishop McQuaid of Rochester, N. Y. (Catholics), and the Rev. Frank M.
Bristol of the M. E. Metropolitan Church, Washington (the one attended
by President McKinley), for their recent sermons referring favorably
to woman suffrage. These were the more noticeable as during this
convention Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore devoted his Sunday discourse
to a terrific arraignment of society women and those asking for the
suffrage, denouncing them alike as destroyers of the home, etc.
The National Association requested the appointment by President
McKinley of Mrs. Bertha Honore Palmer as National Commissioner from
the United States to the Paris Exposition, and of Mrs. May Wright
Sewall as delegate to represent the organized work of women in the
United States. Both of these appointments were afterwards made.
The corresponding secretary read invitations for the next annual
convention from the Citizens' Business League of Milwaukee; the
Business Men's League and the Mayor of Cincinnati; the Chamber of
Commerce of Detroit; the Business Men's League of San Antonio; the
Cleveland Business Men's Convention League; the Suffrage Society of
Buffalo and the following: "The Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association
takes great pride in being able to invite you most cordially to hold
your annual meeting for 1901 in the city of Minneapolis. We guarantee
$600 towards expenses and more if necessary. Enclosed are invitations
from the Board of Trade, the Mayor and our three daily newspapers, all
assuring us of financial backing." This was signed by Mrs. Martha J.
Thompson, president, and Dr. Ethel E. Hurd, corresponding secretary.
The invitation was accepted.
The usual hearings were held Tuesday morning, February 13, in the
Marble Room of the Senate and the committee room of the House
Judiciary, both of which were crowded to the doors, the seats being
filled with women while members of Congress stood about the sides of
the room. That before the Senate Committee--John W. Daniel (Va.),
chairman; James H. Berry (Tenn.); George P. Wetmore (R. I.); Addison
G. Foster (Wash.)--was confined to a historical resume of the movement
for woman suffrage, the speakers being presented by Miss Anthony. The
Work with Congress was carefully delineated by Mrs. Colby, who
concluded: "Everything that a disfranchised class could do has been
done by women, and never in the long ages in which the love of freedom
has been evolving in the human heart has there been such an effort by
any other class of people. Surely it ought to win the respect and
support of every man in this republic who has a brain to understand
the blessings of liberty and a heart to beat in sympathy with a
struggle to obtain it."[127]
Municipal Suffrage in Kansas was described by Mrs. Laura M. Johns.
Woman Suffrage in Colorado was presented by Mrs. Bradford. Mrs.
Harriot Stanton Blatch told of Woman Suffrage in England, closing as
follows:
We have heard about the suffrage in the Western States of
America, and the reply always is: "Oh, that is all very well for
thinly populated countries." Now I am going to tell you a little
of the suffrage question in England, not a thinly populated
country, with its 20,000,000 of people crowded in that small
space.
Gentlemen of the committee, I would like to draw your attention
to one thing, which is true in America as well as in
England--that nothing has been given to women gratuitously. They
have had at each step to prove their ability before you gave them
anything else. In 1870 England passed the Education Act, which
gave women the right to sit on the school boards and to vote for
them. It was the first time they had had elective school boards
in England; before that all the education had been controlled by
church organizations, who had appointed boards of managers. Women
had been appointed to those boards and so admirable had been
their work that when the law was passed in 1870 many women stood
for election and were elected, and in three cases they came in at
the head of the polls. Five years after that a verdict was passed
upon the work of those women as school officials, for in 1875,
women were allowed to go on the poor-law boards. In 1894 the law
was further modified so that it contemplated the possibility of a
larger circle of poor-law guardians. Before that there had been a
high qualification--occupation of a house of a certain rental,
etc., but now that was all pushed aside. What was the result?
Nearly 1,000 women are now sitting on the poor-law boards of
England; 94 on the great board of London itself.
These local boards deal with the great asylums, with the great
pauper schools, with the immense poorhouses and, more than that,
they deal with one of the largest funds in England, the outdoor
and indoor relief. What has been the verdict upon the work of
those women on the poor-law board? In 1896 there was the
question, when this law was extended to Ireland, whether women
should be put on those boards. The vote in Parliament was 272 in
favor of the women and only 8 against. Eight men only, so unwise,
so foolish, left in the great English Parliament, who said it was
not for women to deal with those immense bodies of pauper
children, not for women to deal with this outdoor relief fund,
not for women to deal with the unfortunate mothers of
illegitimate children....
Women in England, qualified women, have every local vote,
everything which would correspond with your State and municipal
vote here, they have all except the Parliamentary vote.
In England we have opponents, just as you have here. I do not
know whether they are more illogical or less so, but they
certainly do one extraordinary thing--they are in favor of
everything that has been won and take advantage of it. A large
number of the 2,000 women who are sitting on the various local
bodies in England are opposed to the Parliamentary vote for their
sex, and yet they are really in political life. Now, gentlemen,
if you want to have the women stop coming here, give us the vote
and then we won't come; give the "antis" the vote, and then they
will have the political life that they are really longing for.
Almost always, if you analyze the anti-suffrage idea in either a
man or a woman you find it is anti-democratic. I have begun to
think that I am the only good democrat left in America. I believe
in the very widest possible suffrage. Why do I believe it?
Because I have lived and seen the other thing in England, and I
have seen that as democracy broadened politics was purified. That
has been the history from the beginning. No politics in the world
was more corrupt than the English at the beginning of this
century, but as democracy has come farther and farther into the
field, England has become politically one of the purest nations
in the world.
The paper on Woman Suffrage in the British Isles and Colonies was
prepared by Miss Helen Blackburn, editor of the _Englishwoman's
Review_; and Woman Suffrage in Foreign Countries was described by Mrs.
Jessie Cassidy Saunders. The last address was given by Mrs. Carrie
Chapman Catt (N. Y.), Why We Ask for the Submission of an Amendment:
A survey of the changes which have been wrought within the past
hundred years in the status of women--educational, social,
financial and political--fills the observing man or woman with a
feeling akin to awe. No great war has been fought in behalf of
their emancipation; no great political party has espoused their
cause; no heroes have bled and died for their liberty; yet words
fail utterly to measure the distance between the "sphere" of the
woman of 1800 and that of the woman of 1900. How has the
transformation come? What mysterious power has brought it?