Produced by Richard J. Shiffer and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this
text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant
spellings and other inconsistencies. Text that has been changed to
correct an obvious error is noted at the end of this ebook.
Also, many occurrences of mismatched single and double quotes
remain as they were in the original.]
[Illustration: Phoebe W. Couzins.]
HISTORY
of
WOMAN SUFFRAGE.
EDITED BY
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON,
SUSAN B. ANTHONY, AND
MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE.
ILLUSTRATED WITH STEEL ENGRAVINGS.
_IN THREE VOLUMES._
VOL. III.
1876-1885.
"WOMEN ARE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES, ENTITLED TO ALL
THE RIGHTS, PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES GUARANTEED
TO CITIZENS BY THE NATIONAL CONSTITUTION."
SUSAN B. ANTHONY,
17 MADISON ST., ROCHESTER, N. Y.
Copyright, 1886, by SUSAN B. ANTHONY.
PREFACE.
The labors of those who have edited these volumes are not only
finished as far as this work extends, but if three-score years and
ten be the usual limit of human life, all our earthly endeavors
must end in the near future. After faithfully collecting material
for several years, and making the best selections our judgment has
dictated, we are painfully conscious of many imperfections the
critical reader will perceive. But since stereotype plates will not
reflect our growing sense of perfection, the lavish praise of
friends as to the merits of these pages will have its antidote in
the defects we ourselves discover. We may however without egotism
express the belief that this volume will prove specially
interesting in having a large number of contributors from England,
France, Canada and the United States, giving personal experiences
and the progress of legislation in their respective localities.
Into younger hands we must soon resign our work; but as long as
health and vigor remain, we hope to publish a pamphlet report at
the close of each congressional term, containing whatever may be
accomplished by State and National legislation, which can be
readily bound in volumes similar to these, thus keeping a full
record of the prolonged battle until the final victory shall be
achieved. To what extent these publications may be multiplied
depends on when the day of woman's emancipation shall dawn.
For the completion of this work we are indebted to Eliza Jackson
Eddy, the worthy daughter of that noble philanthropist, Francis
Jackson. He and Charles F. Hovey are the only men who have ever
left a generous bequest to the woman suffrage movement. To Mrs.
Eddy, who bequeathed to our cause two-thirds of her large fortune,
belong all honor and praise as the first woman who has given alike
her sympathy and her wealth to this momentous and far-reaching
reform. This heralds a turn in the tide of benevolence, when,
instead of building churches and monuments to great men, and
endowing colleges for boys, women will make the education and
enfranchisement of their own sex the chief object of their lives.
The three volumes now completed we leave as a precious heritage
to coming generations; precious, because they so clearly
illustrate--in her ability to reason, her deeds of heroism and her
sublime self-sacrifice--that woman preeminently possesses the three
essential elements of sovereignty as defined by Blackstone:
"wisdom, goodness and power." This has been to us a work of love,
written without recompense and given without price to a large
circle of friends. A thousand copies have thus far been distributed
among our coadjutors in the old world and the new. Another thousand
have found an honored place in the leading libraries, colleges and
universities of Europe and America, from which we have received
numerous testimonies of their value as a standard work of reference
for those who are investigating this question. Extracts from these
pages are being translated into every living language, and, like so
many missionaries, are bearing the glad gospel of woman's
emancipation to all civilized nations.
Since the inauguration of this reform, propositions to extend the
right of suffrage to women have been submitted to the popular vote
in Kansas, Michigan, Colorado, Nebraska and Oregon, and lost by
large majorities in all; while, by a simple act of legislature,
Wyoming, Utah and Washington territories have enfranchised their
women without going through the slow process of a constitutional
amendment. In New York, the State that has led this movement, and
in which there has been a more continued agitation than in any
other, we are now pressing on the legislature the consideration
that it has the same power to extend the right of suffrage to women
that it has so often exercised in enfranchising different classes
of men.
Eminent publicists have long conceded this power to State
legislatures as well as to congress, declaring that women as
citizens of the United States have the right to vote, and that a
simple enabling act is all that is needed. The constitutionality of
such an act was never questioned until the legislative power was
invoked for the enfranchisement of women. We who have studied our
republican institutions and understand the limits of the executive,
judicial and legislative branches of the government, are aware that
the legislature, directly representing the people, is the primary
source of power, above all courts and constitutions. Research into
the early history of this country shows that in line with English
precedent, women did vote in the old colonial days and in the
original thirteen States of the Union. Hence we are fully awake to
the fact that our struggle is not for the attainment of a new
right, but for the restitution of one our fore-mothers possessed
and exercised.
All thoughtful readers must close these volumes with a deeper sense
of the superior dignity, self-reliance and independence that belong
by nature to woman, enabling her to rise above such multifarious
persecutions as she has encountered, and with persistent
self-assertion to maintain her rights. In the history of the race
there has been no struggle for liberty like this. Whenever the
interest of the ruling classes has induced them to confer new
rights on a subject class, it has been done with no effort on the
part of the latter. Neither the American slave nor the English
laborer demanded the right of suffrage. It was given in both cases
to strengthen the liberal party. The philanthropy of the few may
have entered into those reforms, but political expediency carried
both measures. Women, on the contrary, have fought their own
battles; and in their rebellion against existing conditions have
inaugurated the most fundamental revolution the world has ever
witnessed. The magnitude and multiplicity of the changes
involved make the obstacles in the way of success seem almost
insurmountable.
The narrow self-interest of all classes is opposed to the
sovereignty of woman. The rulers in the State are not willing to
share their power with a class equal if not superior to themselves,
over which they could never hope for absolute control, and whose
methods of government might in many respects differ from their own.
The annointed leaders in the Church are equally hostile to freedom
for a sex supposed for wise purposes to have been subordinated by
divine decree. The capitalist in the world of work holds the key to
the trades and professions, and undermines the power of labor
unions in their struggles for shorter hours and fairer wages, by
substituting the cheap labor of a disfranchised class, that cannot
organize its forces, thus making wife and sister rivals of husband
and brother in the industries, to the detriment of both classes. Of
the autocrat in the home, John Stuart Mill has well said: "No
ordinary man is willing to find at his own fireside an equal in the
person he calls wife." Thus society is based on this fourfold
bondage of woman, making liberty and equality for her antagonistic
to every organized institution. Where, then, can we rest the lever
with which to lift one-half of humanity from these depths of
degradation but on "that columbiad of our political life--the
ballot--which makes every citizen who holds it a full-armed
monitor"?
LIST OF ENGRAVINGS.
VOL. III.
PHOEBE W. COUZINS _Frontispiece._
MARILLA M. RICKER page 112
FRANCES E. WILLARD 129
JANE H. SPOFFORD 192
HARRIET H. ROBINSON 273
PHEBE A. HANAFORD 337
ARMENIA S. WHITE 369
LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE 417
RACHEL G. FOSTER 465
CORNELIA C. HUSSEY 481
MAY WRIGHT SEWALL 545
ELIZABETH BOYNTON HARBERT 592
SARAH BURGER STEARNS 656
CLARA BEWICK COLBY 689
HELEN M. GOUGAR 704
LAURA DEFORCE GORDON 753
ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY 769
CAROLINE E. MERRICK 801
MARY B. CLAY 817
MENTIA TAYLOR 833
PRISCILLA BRIGHT MCLAREN 864
GEORGE SAND 896
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE CENTENNIAL YEAR--1876.
The Dawn of the New Century--Washington Convention--Congressional
Hearing--Woman's Protest--May Anniversary--Centennial Parlors in
Philadelphia--Letters and Delegates to Presidential
Conventions--50,000 Documents sent out--The Centennial Autograph
Book--The Fourth of July--Independence Square--Susan B. Anthony
reads the Declaration of Rights--Convention in Dr. Furness' Church,
Lucretia Mott, Presiding--The Hutchinson Family, John and Asa--The
Twenty-eighth Anniversary, July 19, Edward M. Davis,
Presiding--Letters, Ernestine L. Rose, Clarina I. H. Nichols--The
_Ballot-Box_--Retrospect--The Woman's Pavilion 1