Adopted by the Women's National Loyal League, May 14, 1863.
... We ask not for ourselves or our friends redress of specific
grievances or posts of honor or emolument. We speak from no
considerations of mere material gain; but, inspired by true patriotism,
in this dark hour of our nation's destiny, we come to pledge the loyal
women of the Republic to freedom and our country. We come to strengthen
you with earnest words of sympathy and encouragement. We come to thank
you for your proclamation, in which the nineteenth century seems to echo
back the Declaration of Seventy-six. Our fathers had a vision of the
sublime idea of liberty, equality and fraternity; but they failed to
climb the heights which with anointed eyes they saw. To us, their
children, belongs the work to build up the living reality of what they
conceived and uttered. It is not our mission to criticise the past.
Nations, like individuals, must blunder and repent. It is not wise to
waste our energy in vain regret, but from each failure we should rise up
with renewed conscience and courage for nobler action. The follies and
faults of yesterday we cast aside as the old garments we have outgrown.
Born anew to freedom, slave creeds and codes and constitutions all now
must pass away. "For men do not put new wine into old bottles, else the
bottles break and the wine runneth out and the bottles perish; but they
put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved."
Our special thanks are due to you, that by your proclamation 2,000,000
women are freed from the foulest bondage humanity ever suffered. Slavery
for man is bad enough, but the refinements of cruelty ever must fall on
the mothers of the oppressed race, defrauded of all the rights of the
family relation and violated in the most holy instincts of their nature.
A mother's life is bound up in that of her child. There center all her
hopes and ambitions. But the slave-mother in her degradation rejoices
not in the future promise of her daughter, for she knows by experience
what her sad fate must be. No pen can describe the unutterable agony of
that mother whose past, present and future all are wrapped in darkness;
who knows the crown of thorns she wears must press her daughter's brow;
who knows the wine-press she treads those tender feet must tread alone.
For, by the law of slavery, "the child follows the condition of the
mother."
By your act, the family, that great conservator of national virtue and
strength, has been restored to millions of humble homes around whose
altars coming generations shall magnify and bless the name of Abraham
Lincoln. By a mere stroke of the pen you have emancipated millions from
a condition of wholesale concubinage. We now ask you to finish the work
by declaring that nowhere under our national flag shall the motherhood
of any race plead in vain for justice and protection. So long as one
slave breathes in this republic, we drag the chain with him. God has so
linked the race, man to man, that all must rise or fall together. Our
history exemplifies this law. It was not enough that we at the North
abolished slavery for ourselves, declared freedom of speech and press,
built churches, colleges and free schools, studied the science of
morals, government and economy, dignified labor, amassed wealth,
whitened the sea with our commerce and commanded the respect and
admiration of the nations of the earth—so long as the South, by the
natural proclivities of slavery, was sapping the very foundations of our
national life....
You are the first President ever borne on the shoulders of freedom into
the position you now fill. Your predecessors owed their elevation to the
slave oligarchy, and in serving slavery they did but obey their masters.
In your election, northern freemen threw off the yoke, and with you
rests the responsibility that our necks never shall bow again. At no
time in the annals of the nation has there been a more auspicious moment
to retrieve the one false step of the fathers in their concessions to
slavery. The Constitution has been repudiated and the compact broken by
the southern traitors now in arms. The firing of the first gun on Sumter
released the North from all constitutional obligations to slavery. It
left the government, for the first time in our history, free to carry
out the declaration of our Revolutionary fathers, and made us in fact
what we ever have claimed to be, a nation of freemen.
"The Union as it was"—a compromise between barbarism and
civilization—can never be restored, for the opposing principles of
freedom and slavery can not exist together. Liberty is life, and every
form of government yet tried proves that slavery is death. In obedience
to this law, our republic, divided and distracted by the collisions of
class and caste, is tottering to its base and can be reconstructed only
on the sure foundation of impartial freedom to all. The war in which we
are involved is not the result of party or accident, but a forward step
in the progress of the race never to be retraced. Revolution is no time
for temporizing or diplomacy. In a radical upheaving the people demand
eternal principles on which to stand.
Northern power and loyalty never can be measured until the purpose of
the war be liberty to man; for a lasting enthusiasm ever is based on a
grand idea, and unity of action demands a definite end. At this time our
greatest need is not men or money, valiant generals or brilliant
victories, but a consistent policy, based on the principle that "all
governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."
The nation waits for you to say that there is no power under our
declaration of rights nor under any laws, human or divine, by which free
men can be made slaves; and therefore that your pledge to the slaves is
irrevocable, and shall be redeemed.
If it be true, as it is said, that northern women lack enthusiasm in
this war, the fault rests with those who have confused and confounded
its policy. The pages of history glow with instances of self-sacrifice
by women in the hour of their country's danger. Fear not that the
daughters of this republic will count any sacrifice too great to insure
the triumph of freedom. Let the men who wield the nation's power be
wise, brave and magnanimous, and its women will be prompt to meet the
duties of the hour with devotion and heroism.
When Fremont on the western breeze proclaimed a day of jubilee to the
bondmen within our gates, the women of the nation echoed back a loud
amen. When Hunter freed a million men and gave them arms to fight our
battles, justice and mercy crowned that act and tyrants stood appalled.
When Butler, in the chief city of the southern despotism, hung a traitor
we felt a glow of pride; for that one act proved that we had a
government and one man brave enough to administer its laws. And when
Burnside would banish Vallandigham to the Dry Tortugas, let the sentence
be approved and the nation will ring with plaudits. Your proclamation
gives you immortality. Be just, and share your glory with men like these
who wait to execute your will.
On behalf of the Women's National Loyal League,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, President.
Susan B. Anthony, Secretary.
Address Delivered at Ottumwa, Kansas, July 4, 1865.
Mr. President, and Men and Women of Kansas:
It is a pleasure to me, beyond the reach of words, to be with you today.
I accepted the invitation of your committee that I might feast my eyes
on your grand prairies, ever fringed with the darker green of their
timber-skirted creeks and rivers. I came here on this 89th anniversary
of our National Independence, that I might look into the honest, earnest
faces of the men and the women who, ten years ago, taught the nation
anew, that "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Through all this
glorious decade of heroic struggle, my interests, my sympathies, my
affections have been bound up with yours; for, during and since the
cruel outrages of the summer of 1856, my two and only brothers have
stood shoulder to shoulder with the freedom-loving, freedom-voting,
freedom-fighting men of Kansas. And, as I have waited the telegraphic
word that trembled along the western wires, telling of your successes
and your defeats, it has ever been with bated breath lest those of my
own home circle, too, should be numbered among the slain. Therefore,
though not here in person through all these trial years, in spirit I
have been with you, in your privations and hardships, in your sufferings
and sacrifices to make freedom and free institutions the sure
inheritance of Kansas and the nation.
You have already listened to the grand old Declaration of the Fathers of
1776. You have heard the true words of your representative to the next
Congress.[134] His manly utterances here today give you assurance that
he will faithfully reflect the highest and truest sentiments of his
constituency. Men and women of Kansas, I congratulate you, that you have
in this chosen agent a man who will speak and vote on the vital
questions to come before the next Congress from the standpoint of human
equality.
It is my purpose to call your attention to the recent declarations of
our President to our "erring sister States" of the South. I ask you
specially to note his proclamation to Mississippi. After pointing out
that the Constitution of the United States guarantees to every State in
the Union a republican form of government, and that the late rebellion
has deprived the people of Mississippi of all civil government, he
continues:
Now, therefore, in obedience to the high and solemn duties imposed
upon me by the Constitution of the United States, and for the
purpose of enabling the loyal people of said State to organize a
State government, whereby justice may be established, domestic
tranquillity insured, and loyal citizens protected in all their
rights of life, liberty, and property, I, Andrew Johnson, President
of the United States, and Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy
of the United States, do hereby appoint William L. Sharkey
Provisional Governor of the State of Mississippi, whose duty it
shall be, at the earliest practicable period, to prescribe such
rules and regulations as may be necessary and proper for convening
a convention, composed of delegates to be chosen by that portion of
the people of said State who are loyal to the United States, and no
others, for the purpose of altering or amending the constitution
thereof; and with authority to exercise, within the limits of said
State, all the powers necessary and proper to enable such loyal
people of the State of Mississippi to restore said State to its
constitutional relations to the Federal government, and to present
such republican form of State government as will entitle the State
to the guarantee of the United States therefor, and its people to
protection by the United States against invasion, insurrection, and
domestic violence: Provided, That in any election that may be
hereafter held for choosing delegates to any State Convention as
aforesaid, no person shall be qualified as an elector, or shall be
eligible as a member of such convention, unless he shall have
previously taken and subscribed the oath of amnesty, as set forth
in the President's proclamation of May 29, A. D. 1865, and is a
voter qualified as prescribed by the Constitution and laws of the
State, of Mississippi, in force immediately before the ninth (9th)
of January, A. D. 1861, the date of the so-called ordinance of
secession; and the said convention, when convened, or the
Legislature that may be thereafter assembled, will prescribe the
qualifications of electors, and the eligibility of persons to hold
office under the Constitution and laws of the State, a power the
people of the several States composing the Federal Union have
rightfully exercised from the origin of the government to the
present time.
The President says he finds the people of Mississippi "deprived of all
civil government" by the revolutionary progress of the rebellion;
therefore he appoints a provisional governor, to call an election of the
loyal people for delegates to a convention to alter or amend the
constitution that was in force prior to the rebellion. He does this "for
the purpose of enabling the loyal people of said State to organize a
State government whereby justice may be established, domestic
tranquillity insured, and loyal citizens protected in all their rights
of life, liberty and property." To this laudable end he instructs the
governor, who is his military agent, to allow no man to vote or to be
voted for, unless he shall have previously taken and subscribed to the
oath of amnesty of May 29, 1865, and is a voter by the old constitution
and laws of the slaveholding State of Mississippi. By this ordering,
the President makes it impossible for the great mass of the loyal people
to have a voice in organizing the new government. He re-establishes
precisely the same basis of class representation that worked out the
ruin of the old State government. Not to mention the loyal women, who
make fully one-half of the loyal people, he shuts out all the loyal
black men, with all the loyal poor white men, who were not allowed to
vote under the old regime of slavery.
Thus, by this initiative step, the President makes it inevitable that
the rebuilding of the government shall be controlled by the ex-rebels;
the men who have fought desperately for four years to overthrow the
federal government; the men who hate republicanism; the men who love and
are determined to enjoy aristocracy. The loyal white men there, who have
stood firmly and truly by the government through all the cruel
persecutions of this bloody rebellion, are today a most powerless and
pitiable minority; and yet the President tells this little handful that
their only hope of organizing a genuine republican form of government
lies in their ability to outvote the vast horde of disloyal civilians
and pardoned, but not penitent, returned rebel soldiers. Such an
offence against white loyalty is enough to make the very stones cry out.
But what shall we say of the other and deeper crime against the
thousands of loyal black soldiers, who have fought bravely for us from
the hour we permitted them to shoulder the musket; against the entire
slave population, who have welcomed our Yankee soldiers, been faithful
spies and guides to our armies, nursed our sick and wounded, relieved
and rescued our starving prisoners, and in every conceivable way and
manner given "aid and comfort" to our Union cause? I tell you, men and
women of Kansas, no tongue can speak the ingratitude, the injustice, the
shame and outrage of a proposition thus to leave those true and faithful
freedmen to the cruel legislation of their old tyrants and oppressors,
made tenfold more their enemies, because of their attachment and service
to the government which they themselves have failed to destroy. Think of
it, to thrust four million loyal people under the political heel of
eight millions, almost to a man, disloyal!
I am sure you, who have given the best blood of Kansas to put down the
slaveholders' rebellion against the rightful rule of the majority, will
never by your silence give seeming consent to a reorganization of those
rebel States on any basis save that of the ballot to all loyal citizens,
black and white. You will never consent that loyal Union soldiers and
friends, for no crime but the color of their skin, shall be made
subjects, if not slaves, to disloyal rebel soldiers and enemies, with no
virtue but that of belonging to the "governing race," as the President's
North Carolina appointee calls the white faces. No, no, you will make
these grand old prairies ring with your thunder-toned protests until
they shall be felt and feared in the legislative halls at Washington.
Then will your honorable and honored representative say for you on the
floor of the next Congress, as he has said here today in the shadow of
these mighty oaks of your Neosho, "no reconstruction except on the basis
of the ballot in every loyal hand, black and white." Then will your
senator[135] echo your voice from his seat in the Capitol, as he did the
other day in old, Faneuil Hall, when he said, "the price of our
victories is lost unless we give the negro the homestead, the musket,
and the ballot."
And then will your other senator,[136] who has not spoken since he, with
his colleagues in the Senate, said, "colonize" the faithful, loyal
blacks; since he said, admit Louisiana and Arkansas back into the Union
on the vote of the merest minority of their freshly-oathed white
men—then will he say "no reconstruction without negro suffrage." But,
good people, I charge you, suffer not this man to return to his seat in
the Senate, until he has not only repented and confessed, but given sure
promise forever to forsake his old sins of "white suffrage" and "black
colonization." You owe it to yourselves and your country to see that
your entire representation in the next Congress is right on this one
vital question of reunion. Tell your senator if he must advocate a class
and caste government in the rebel States, it must be loyal blacks, not
disloyal whites. If he must colonize somebody, it must be the cowed,
unconverted rebels, the anti-negro-equality white faces. Tell him
henceforth to speak and vote to disfranchise, and drive out if need be,
the persons who make war and oppress and outrage, and are resolved not
to give "fair play" to peaceable, industrious citizens. You have but to
speak and you will be obeyed, for it is the people's will, not that of
their servants, which is law.
Now, a word on your State legislature: One of the first reports that met
my ear on my arrival in your State last winter, was that the Republicans
of Kansas, almost in a body, had voted against a bill for "negro
suffrage," and that they voted thus for the reason that the question was
introduced and urged by the opposition party of the State. My humble but
earnest advice to you is that you permit those delegates who voted
against right, against justice, against equality to all men, for so
paltry a reason, henceforth to remain quietly at home. Teach them and
all other aspirants for your suffrages that your representatives must
speak and vote for the right, though the arch-demon from the pit below
shall present the measure. That miserable political quibbling at Topeka
last winter lost Kansas the place which of right belonged to her—that
of being the first of the loyal States to give her freedmen their
inalienable right to self-protection.
Our hope of salvation from the fatal errors that are now fastening
themselves upon the plan and the policy of reorganization, lies in the
prompt and right action of the coming Congress. The delegates from any
and all of the rebel States, sent up to Washington by "free white loyal
male" suffrages to knock for admission into the Union, must be sent home
with instructions that no member will be admitted to Congress except he
be elected by a majority of all the loyal men of the State, black as
well as white. To the end that Congress may thus reject the amnestied
white suffrage delegates, the people, all over the country, should unite
in one mighty voice and demand that their representatives shall thus
speak and thus vote. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." If we
sleep now, all is lost; for on this one question of the negro hangs the
future of our republic.
Since the firing of the first gun of the rebellion there has been no
hour fraught with so much danger as is the present. To have been
vanquished on the field of battle would have involved much of misery;
but to be foiled now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought
victories, and to re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of negro
disfranchisement, negro serfdom, would be a defeat and disaster, a
cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath to coming generations a
legacy of wars and rumors of wars, equalled only by that which the
Revolutionary fathers entailed upon their descendants by their fatal
compromises with slavery. It would leave the final triumph of the great
principles of republicanism, universal freedom and equality, "taxation
and representation inseparable," the "consent of the governed," to be
worked out and established in each of those old slave States, through a
fearful re-enactment of the early struggles which you of Kansas so well
remember.
If Congress shall admit the rebel representatives on the basis of white
suffrage, those States will have added to their old representation the
other two-fifths of what used to be "all other persons," which will give
them an increase of fourteen votes in the House as a reward for their
four years of fire and sword against the government. With this added
power on the floor of Congress united to their political aiders and
abettors from the Northern States, there is scarcely any project they
may not be able to carry through in their own time and way. Nor is there
room for a doubt, that it is the spirit and purpose of the slave
oligarchy, whipped and cowed as they say by force of might, not right,
to make a most desperate political fight to regain their old supremacy
in the legislation of the country.
I base my estimate of the nature and intentions of the to-be-restored
representation of the South, on the results of the elections already
held in several of the rebel States, and from the efforts everywhere
among the old planters again to reduce the black freedmen, as nearly as
possible, to the status of slavery. In Virginia, the elections gave a
legislature largely secession and almost wholly anti-negro. The planters
have solemnly leagued themselves together to pay only five dollars per
month to able field hands, each laborer to furnish his own clothes and
pay his own doctor bills. This, too, when these same planters used to
pay or receive for the hire of these same laborers, the sum of fifteen
dollars and upwards. In South Carolina, Gen. Rufus Saxton reports that
the old planters are actually driving the freedmen to work in the fields
in chain gangs, and that the woods are strewn with the bodies of negroes
shot dead in their efforts to escape the cruel torture. In Murfreesboro,
Tennessee, the city election resulted in a secession mayor and common
council. The only Union success I have noticed is that of Fernandina,
Florida, and there the negroes were allowed to vote. Even the loyal
State of Missouri saved her free constitution by less than two thousand
votes.
The result of white suffrage can not be other than the election of large
majorities of anti-negro, if not absolutely secession State and National
representatives. Tennessee, the President's own State, of the loyalty of
whose people we have heard much, has adopted a free constitution, and
under it framed a new code of anti-negro laws; and we can hardly expect
any rebel State to do better, for these new free State law-makers are
the persecuted loyal men of Tennessee who have been outraged in their
homes, hunted to the caves and mountains, or for a time driven out of
the State altogether by the secessionists. One of these new free State
laws says, the testimony of no "free colored person shall be received in
court against any white person." By this enactment, the meanest white
man may enter the home of the bravest black soldier, or wealthiest
colored citizen, may murder his sons, ravish his wife and daughters,
pillage and burn his house, commit any and every possible crime against
him and his, and yet, if no human eye but his own, or that of his
family, or his colored friends, witness the barbarisms, that black man,
the father, the husband, the land-holder, outraged beyond measure, has
no possible legal redress in the courts of Tennessee.
Then again, in case a free colored person is imprisoned and unable to
pay his jail fees, he may be apprenticed out to labor until the sum be
paid. And yet again, the courts may apprentice colored children as they
see proper. The law does not even say friendless or orphan children. Is
not that slavery under a new form? Thus, to leave those devoted black
men's lives, liberties and property to be protected by white men, whose
loyalty to the government is because it is a means to secure power to
themselves, not from any love of its republican principles, is to doom
them to all the ignominies and cruelties of slavery itself.
Let us not be deceived by the wicked wiles of politicians who tell us
that President Johnson can not give the right to the ballot to the black
loyalists of the South; for it is but the new "refuge of lies" to which
slavery resorts. The same men told us that Lincoln had not the power to
emancipate the slaves; that the government had no right to arm the
negro, etc. If President Johnson has constitutional authority, either
civil or military, to take away a man's right to vote, as a punishment
for disloyalty, he must have power to give a man the same right, as a
reward for loyalty; if the President may disfranchise a rebel soldier in
order to enable the loyal people of a State to organize a republican
form of government, he may also enfranchise a Union soldier to
accomplish the same purpose. If the President has not the right nor the
power to give the ballot to any person not entitled to it under the old
order of slavery, how will he organize South Carolina, by whose old
constitution no person was allowed to vote unless he owned ten slaves or
was worth ten thousand dollars? Of course nobody owns ten slaves, and
how many men, think you, who remained loyal at home, or how many
returned soldiers or amnestied civilians have the requisite ten thousand
dollars? In South Carolina, therefore, the President will be compelled
to create voters; and, if he shall enfranchise any of the white
non-voters, can he not also enfranchise the loyal black non-voters?
Let us watch and pray without ceasing. Let us hope that the day will
dawn, and that soon, when law shall be found on the side of justice to
the black race. These objectors never questioned McClellan's military
right to put down slave insurrections with an "iron hand," or Halleck's
infamous Order No. 3 to drive all negroes outside the military lines. It
was only when Generals Fremont, Hunter and others declared the slaves
free, that they might cripple the rebel armies and add them to our Union
forces, that the cry of no law, no power was raised. Thus it is clear
that the blindness and inability to find rightful authority, civil or
military, first to emancipate, then to arm, and now to enfranchise the
negroes, have the one source. Slavery perpetrated the "sum of all
villainies" on the negroes, and then, to justify its wickedness, filled
the whole land with atrocious lies of their depraved and degraded
nature. The American people consented to the outrage; and their
continued prejudice against that oppressed race but proves the adage,
"we hate those whom we have injured."
Last of all comes the objection that the old masters will influence the
vote of the negroes, and that, therefore, to enfranchise them will but
give increased power to the old lords of the lash. Do not believe such
nonsense. Think you, men who for four years have withstood every
possible temptation and torture to induce them to fight for the slave
oligarchy, can now be wheedled into voting for it? No, no. Those loyal,
brave, black men who have known enough to fight on the right side will
know enough to vote on the right side; and it is because the aiders and
abettors of the old slave power believe and know that the negroes will
be an invincible host on the side of equality, that they thus fear them.
We never from the beginning have had a genuine republican form of
government in any State in the Union; for in no State have "the people"
ever been permitted to elect their representatives. Even in
Massachusetts and Vermont, the States nearest republican, only one-half
of the people, the "male inhabitants," are allowed to vote. In other
States it is only all "free white male persons," and in others still,
all "free white male inhabitants owning so many slaves or so much
property." It is not true therefore that the people have ever
exercised the right to prescribe the qualifications of voters or
officers. From the beginning, Congress always has settled the question
in its organic act. That of your own Territory read, "Every free, white,
male inhabitant shall vote at the first election, and be eligible to any
office within the Territory." Thus you see Congress, not you, the
people, decided who should and who should not vote in Kansas. And when
the delegates of the prescribed "free, white, male" order met in
convention, they proved themselves nothing above human, very like the
so-elected conventions of other States, and retained all legislative
power within the limits of the original congressional permit. The same
is true of the rebel States, in which the President now finds the people
destitute of all civil government; when he specifies who may vote, when
he excludes any class from the ballot-box, he makes it impossible for
"the people" to form a republican government.
When the loyal black men are not allowed their right to vote in the
first election of the rebel States, their governments are thrown into
the hands of a very small minority, and that too of very doubtful
loyalty. The President by adhering to the old slave definition of "the
people," rules that all our brave black Union soldiers and our best
friends and allies, without whose aid we should still be struggling with
rebels in arms, shall be subjects, not citizens, of the government they
have rescued from the Confederate usurpers. It is not in human nature
that a people fanatically believing themselves a superior race, and
thereby rightful legislators over another and inferior race, shall
execute justice and equality toward those whom they decree shall be
"hewers of wood and drawers of water." No, the black man's guarantee to
the protection of his inalienable rights to "life, liberty and
property," is bound up in his right to the ballot.
When I speak of the inalienable rights of the negro, I do not forget
that these belong equally to woman. Though the government shall be
reconstructed on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, it yet will
not be a true republic. Still one-half of the people will be in
subjection to the other half, and the time will surely come when the
whole question will have to be reopened and an accounting made with this
other subject class. There will have to be virtually another
reconstruction, based on the duty of the national government to
guarantee to every citizen the right of self-protection, and this right,
for woman as for man, is vested in the ballot.
That this superior "white male" class may not be trusted even to
legislate for their own mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, the cruel
statutes in nearly all the States, both slave and free, give ample
proof. In scarcely a State has a married woman the legal right to the
control of her person, to the earnings of her hands or brain, to the
guardianship of her children, to sue or be sued, or to testify in the
courts, and by these laws women have suffered wrongs and outrages second
only to those of chattel slavery itself. If this be true, that this
so-called superior class can not legislate justice even to those nearest
and dearest in their own hearts and homes, is it not a crime to place a
separate race, one hated and despised, wholly at the will of that
governing class?
It must not be; and the one great work for the people at this hour, and
every hour, between this and next December, is to agitate this question
until the entire nation shall speak in tones not to be mistaken, which
shall compel the coming Congress to refuse admission to every
representative from the rebel States, who is sent there by the so-called
"loyal white male" people.
"No reorganization without Negro Suffrage" is the word to send back to
every rebel State. Until Congress shall define and settle this question,
it can not in the future, as it has not in the past, perform its
duty—guarantee a republican form of government in each of the States.
When Congress shall thus decide, there will be work to do in most of the
loyal States. Let us all labor to that end.
Men and women of Kansas, what say you, shall new loyal States or old
rebel States be admitted into the Union until they present constitutions
and laws truly republican, until they send representatives to Washington
elected by a majority of all the people—white and black, men and women?
You say No; your blood-enriched prairies, your battle-fought ravines,
your sacked and burned cities, say No; your martyred dead, your own
immortal John Brown, their freed souls all gloriously marching on, say
No!
My friends, there is one word more I must leave with you. There is yet
another danger. The reverence, the almost idolatry of the American
people for their martyred President, is being used and abused by the
political managers at Washington, and over all the country. The people
are lulled to sleep over the most startling propositions, by insidious
whisperings that President Lincoln originated or approved them. Almost
every reconstruction plan is sent over the wires "sugar-coated" with,
"President Johnson, in this, is but carrying out the spirit and purpose
of Mr. Lincoln!" And there is no disguising or denying the fact, that
the people are today accepting, and that too without questioning, the
anti-negro reorganization plans already inaugurated, because of these
wily, insinuating appeals to their reverence for the memory of their
sacred dead.
If the four years' administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American
people any one lesson above another, it was that they must think and
speak and proclaim, and that he, as President, was bound to execute
their will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say
as he did four years ago, "I wait the voice of the people." The stern
logic of the events of today would guide him, not those of yesterday.
Therefore let us not be thrown off our watch by any of these appeals to
our reverence for the opinions and plans of our departed President. If
his freed spirit is permitted today to hover over each and all of the
vast gatherings of the loyal people throughout the nation, it is
beckoning every soul upward and onward in the path of equal justice to
all; it is urging the great heart of the nation to plant our new Union
on the everlasting rock of republicanism—universal freedom and
universal suffrage.
Adopted by the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention, held in New
York City, Thursday, May 10, 1866.
Prepared by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
To the Senate and House of Representatives:
We already have presented to your honorable body during this session
many petitions asking the enfranchisement of women; and now, from our
national convention, we again make our appeal and urge you to lay no
hand on that "pyramid of rights," the Constitution of the Fathers,
unless to add glory to its height and strength to its foundation.
We will not rehearse the oft-repeated arguments on the natural rights of
every citizen, pressed as they have been on the nation's conscience for
the last thirty years in securing freedom for the black race, and so
grandly echoed on the floor of Congress during the past winter. We can
not add one line or precept to the comprehensive speech recently made by
Charles Sumner in the Senate, to prove that "no just government can be
formed without the consent of the governed;" to prove the dignity, the
education, the power, the necessity, the salvation of the ballot in the
hand of every man and woman; to prove that a just government and a true
church rest alike on the sacred rights of the individual.
As you are familiar with Sumner's speech on "Equal Rights to All," so
convincing in facts, so clear in philosophy, and so elaborate in
quotations from the great minds of the past, without reproducing the
chain of argument, permit us to call your attention to a few of its
unanswerable assertions regarding the ballot:
I plead now for the ballot, as the great guarantee, and the only
sufficient guarantee—being in itself peacemaker, reconciler,
schoolmaster and protector—to which we are bound by every
necessity and every reason; and I speak also for the good of the
States lately in rebellion, as well as for the glory and safety of
the republic, that it may be an example to mankind.
Ay, sir, the ballot is the Columbiad of our political life, and
every citizen who has it is a full-armed Monitor.
The ballot is schoolmaster. Reading and writing are of inestimable
value, but the ballot teaches what these can not teach.
Plutarch records that the wise man of Athens charmed the people by
saying that equality causes no war, and "both the rich and the poor
repeated it."
The ballot is like charity, which never faileth, and without which
man is only as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The ballot is
the one thing needful, without which rights of testimony and all
other rights will be no better than cobwebs which the master will
break through with impunity. To him who has the ballot all other
things shall be given—protection, opportunity, education, a
homestead. The ballot is like the horn of abundance, out of which
overflow rights of every kind, with corn, cotton, rice and all the
fruits of the earth. Or, better still, it is like the hand of the
body, without which man, who is now only a little lower than the
angels, must have continued only a little above the brutes. They
are fearfully and wonderfully made; but as is the hand in the work
of civilization, so is the ballot in the work of government. "Give
me the ballot, and I can move the world."
Do you wish to see harmony truly prevail, so that industry,
society, government, civilization, may all prosper, and the
republic may wear a crown of true greatness? Then do not neglect
the ballot.
Lamartine said, "Universal suffrage is the first truth and only
basis of every national republic."
In regard to "taxation without representation," Mr. Sumner quotes from
Lord Coke:
The supreme power can not take from any man any part of his
property without consent in person or by representation.
Taxes are not to be laid on the people, but by their consent in
person or by representation.
I can see no reason to doubt but that the imposition of taxes,
whether on trade, or on land or houses or ships, or real or
personal, fixed or floating property in the colonies, is absolutely
irreconcilable with the rights of the colonies, as British subjects
and as men. I say men, for in a state of nature no man can take any
property from me without my consent. If he does, he deprives me of
my liberty and makes me a slave. The very act of taxing, exercised
over those who are not represented, appears to me to deprive them
of one of their most essential rights as freemen, and if continued
seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil
right. For what one civil right is worth a rush, after a man's
property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure without his
consent?
In demanding suffrage for the black man you recognize the fact that, as
a freedman, he is no longer a "part of the family," and that therefore
his master is no longer his representative; hence, as he will now be
liable to taxation, he must also have representation. Woman, on the
contrary, has never been such a "part of the family" as to escape
taxation. Although there has been no formal proclamation giving her an
individual existence, the single woman always has had the right to
property and wages, the right to make contracts and do business in her
own name. And even married women, by recent legislation, have been
secured in these civil rights. Woman now holds a vast amount of the
property in the country and pays her full proportion of taxes, revenue
included. On what principle, then, do you deny her representation? By
what process of reasoning was Charles Sumner able to stand up in the
Senate, a few days after these sublime utterances, and rebuke 15,000,000
disfranchised tax-payers for the exercise of their mere right of
petition? If he felt that this was not the time for woman even to
mention her right to representation, why did he not, in some of his
splendid sentences, propose to release the wage-earning and
property-owning women from the tyranny of taxation?
We propose no new theories. We simply ask that you secure the practical
application of the immutable principles of our government to all,
without distinction of race, color or sex. And we urge our demand now,
because you have now the opportunity and the power to take this onward
step in legislation. The nations of the earth stand watching and waiting
to see if our Revolutionary idea, "all men are created equal," can be
realized in government. Crush not, we pray you, the myriad hopes which
hang on our success. Peril not this nation with another bloody war. Men
and parties must pass away, but justice is eternal; and only they who
work in harmony with its laws are immortal. All who have carefully
contrasted the speeches of this Congress with those made under the old
regime of slavery, must have seen the added power and eloquence which
greater freedom gives. But still you propose no action on your grand
ideas. Your joint resolutions, your reconstruction reports, do not
reflect your highest thought.
The Constitution, as it stands, in basing representation on "respective
numbers" covers a broader ground than any you have yet proposed. Is not
the only amendment needed to Article 1, Section 3, to strike out the
exceptions which follow "respective numbers?" And is it not your duty,
by securing a republican form of government to every State, to see that
these "respective numbers" are made up of enfranchised citizens, thus
bringing your legislation up to the Constitution—not the Constitution
down to your party possibilities? The only tenable ground of
representation is universal suffrage, as it is only through universal
suffrage that the principle of "equal rights to all" can be realized.
All prohibitions based on race, color, sex, property or education are
violations of the republican idea; and the various qualifications now
proposed are but so many plausible pretexts to debar new classes from
the ballot-box. The limitations of property and intelligence, though
unfair, can be met; as with freedom must come the repeal of statute laws
that deny schools and wages to the negro, and time will make him a
voter. But color and sex! Neither time nor statutes can make black,
white, or woman, man! You assume to be the representatives of 15,000,000
women—American citizens—who already possess every attainable
qualification for the ballot. Women read and write, hold many offices
under government, pay taxes and suffer the penalties of crime, and yet
are denied individual representation.
For twenty years we have labored to bring the statute-laws of the
several States into harmony with the broad principles of the
Constitution, and have been so far successful that in many of them
little remains to be done except to secure the right of suffrage. Hence,
our prompt protest against the propositions before Congress to introduce
the word "male" into the Federal Constitution, which, if successful,
would sanction all State action in withholding the ballot from woman. As
the only way in which disfranchised citizens can appear before you, we
availed ourselves of the sacred right of petition; and, as our
representatives, it was your duty to give those petitions a respectful
reading and a serious consideration. How a Republican Senate failed in
that duty, is already inscribed on the page of history. Some tell us it
is not judicious to press the claims of women now; that this is not the
time. Time? When you propose legislation so fatal to the best interests
of woman and the nation, shall we be silent until after the deed is
done? No! As we love justice, we must resist tyranny. As we honor the
position of American senator, we must appeal from the politician to the
man.
With man, woman shared the dangers of the Mayflower on a stormy sea, the
dreary landing on Plymouth Rock, the rigors of New England winters and
the privations of a seven years' war. With him she bravely threw off the
British yoke, felt every pulsation of his heart for freedom, and
inspired the glowing eloquence which maintained it through the century.
With you, we have just passed through the agony and death, the
resurrection and triumph of another revolution, doing all in our power
to mitigate its horrors and gild its glories. And now, think you, we
have no souls to fire, no brains to weigh your arguments; that, after
education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our
birthright of liberty to save from a timely death an effete political
organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this
desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an
importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever be, "No compromise
of human rights"—"No admission to the Constitution of inequality of
rights or disfranchisement on account of color or sex."
In the oft-repeated experiments of class and caste, who can number the
nations that have risen but to fall? Do not imagine you come one line
nearer the demand of justice by enfranchising but another shade of
manhood; for, in denying representation to woman, you still cling to the
same false principle on which all the governments of the past have been
wrecked. The right way, the safe way, is so clear, the path of duty is
so straight and simple, that we who are equally interested with
yourselves in the result, conjure you to act not for the passing hour,
not with reference to transient benefits, but to do now the one grand
deed which shall mark the zenith of the century—proclaim Equal Eights
to All. We press our demand for the ballot at this time in no narrow,
captions or selfish spirit; from no contempt of the black man's claims,
nor antagonism to you who, in the progress of civilization, are now the
privileged order; but from the purest patriotism, for the highest good
of every citizen, for the safety of the republic, and as a glorious
example to the nations of the earth.
February 15, 1870.
Careful readers of the Tribune have probably succeeded in discovering
that we have not always been able to applaud the course of Miss Susan B.
Anthony. Indeed, we have often felt, and sometimes said, that her
methods were as unwise as we thought her aims undesirable. But through
these years of disputation and struggling, she has thoroughly impressed
friends and enemies alike with the sincerity and earnestness of her
purposes....
Fifty years ago the full moon of suffrage rose in the small, red and
wrinkled countenance of the infant Susan B. Anthony. "Agitation is the
word," says Miss Anthony, in these her later years. Agitation was
probably the word then, as a happy family surrounded the cradle of the
boisterous phenomenon. Miss Anthony has compressed into her half-century
a deal of work, talk, hurry and resolution. Beginning with the women's
temperance conventions in 1848, she has strewn the gliding years with
organizations, societies, conventions innumerable, to the wonderment, if
not always to the admiration, of an observant world. "Through all these
years," remarks Mrs. Henry B. Stanton, "Miss Anthony was the connecting
link between me and the outer world—the reform scout who went to see
what was going on in the enemy's camp, and returned with maps and
observations to plan the mode of attack." It has been intimated that
Miss Anthony has not remained sweet Dian's votary, in maiden meditation
fancy free, because nobody asked her to change her name and station.
Many victims, we are told, are carrying crushed hearts and blighted
hopes through life, and all because of the unrelenting cruelty exercised
by this usually good-humored woman towards the whole male sex.—The
Tribune.
Miss Anthony bears her fifty summers lightly. Whatever our sentiments
may be as to the cause she advocates, we do full justice to her
resistless energy and activity and unswerving fidelity to her
principles. Charming and cordial in her manners, with kind words for
all, she welcomed every guest last evening and made them at ease.—The
Times.
It was regarded last night, and was a topic of conversation, that the
public announcement that Miss Anthony was fifty years old was one more
of the courageous things for which her life has been distinguished.
Battling with the wrong and striving for the right has not left so rigid
a mark of the progress of time upon her features as to prevent her
keeping up a little fiction about being fair and forty. Miss Anthony
prefers the truth, and she says that the register in the family Bible
supports the assertion that a half-century of rolling years have passed
before her.—The Herald.
Miss Anthony looked her very best last night, and let the truth be said,
even should it be followed by persecuting proposals from the bachelors,
she didn't look much more than five-and-twenty. The genial salutations
and happy surroundings of the hour effaced for the time those lines
which care and labor and fifty years will make, however pure the soul
within. Miss Anthony was happy and she looked it.... She wears her years
and honors well. May we live till the celebration of her centenary, and
she read the report thereof next day in the columns of the Evening
Mail.—The Mail.
In these latter days the aspirations and activities of woman are greatly
quickened, and her day of pure and perfect freedom seems near at hand.
When the year of jubilee shall at last ring in, no name will be more
highly honored than that of Miss Susan B. Anthony; and her honors have
been well deserved. Early and late, in season and out, in places high
and low, all over this broad land, by voice and pen, has she labored
with unflagging zeal for the exalted liberty of woman.... Men who have
honored mothers, pure sisters, devoted wives and loving daughters, owe
to Miss Anthony a heavy debt of gratitude for her life-work in behalf of
women.—The Globe.
Miss Anthony's reception has been one of the events of the week.... Men
who have expended about half of the time and half of the energy in the
business of money-making which Miss Anthony has expended in benefiting
the race, have become millionaires, and have been held up to the rising
generation as examples of energy and industry worthy of imitation.
Bronzes have been erected and numerous biographies written to do them
honor. Had Miss Anthony labored for herself as devotedly as she has for
others, she would no doubt have received the usual reward in greenbacks;
and but for the fact of her being a woman, might have had a bronze
erected in her honor.—The Courier.
It is not always true that "the good die young," for Miss Susan B.
Anthony has lived to celebrate her fiftieth birthday.... Right glad are
we that the anniversary was observed with due pomp and circumstance. No
kindly tribute to great moral worth is too good for this good woman. As
one of the chief heroines of our generation, she abundantly deserves all
the honors which were paid her on that festal night. There are many
public-spirited workers in our busy land; many noble souls who have
devoted their life-long energies to the elevation of their
fellow-beings; many moral pioneers, who, when they die, will leave the
world better than they found it; and conspicuous among these is the
staunch, unwearied and indomitable woman who, at the end of half a
century of life, can remember but few idle or wasted days. If Miss
Anthony's persevering efforts in behalf of her sex are not worthy of
generous praise, then there is no just fame due to a brave career. If
her methods have sometimes lacked soundness of judgment, they have never
lacked nobility of purpose. There exists a peculiar, invaluable and
time-honored class of plain and substantial women who are said to be "as
honest as the day is long;" and Susan B. Anthony is the queen of this
royal race. Dauntless and tireless as the sterner sex, sympathetic and
tender as the gentler, we sometimes think that she is both man and woman
in one. She is one of the sterling characters of our day. The whole
people ought to rejoice that such a woman was born, has lived and still
toils.—The Independent.
Out of scores of letters received space allows the reproduction of but a
few:
I shall always be present in sympathy with any number of people who will
express their admiration of the sterling traits which adorn the life and
character of the lady who now passes the fiftieth anniversary of her
most devoted and unselfish life. I am glad to tender the legal
representative of a dollar for each of these years, with the confident
assurance of the early triumph of that cause to which her life has been
singularly devoted. This greenback is no surer of being redeemed in gold
than is my confidence in the golden era of legal enfranchisement for
woman!... Long before Miss Anthony sees her "threescore and ten," the
political equality of all American citizens will be fully established.
With sentiments of the highest esteem, I am, very cordially and truly,
S. C. Pomeroy.
... God bless her, and may she live many happy, joyous years! That she
and her noble co-workers are soon to see the complete triumph of the
woman's cause I firmly believe. And when in after years the great
benefactors of this century are sought for, Susan B. Anthony's name will
be found occupying one of the highest niches in the temple of honest
fame. Truly yours,
J. P. Root. [Lieutenant-Governor of Kansas.]
... Enclosed is a check for $50, one for each year of your life. Will
agree to give you the same pro rata sum on your one hundredth, birthday.
With love, your brother,
D. R. Anthony.
There will be among those who sympathize with and rejoice in your
labors, no lack of testimony tonight to their persistency and value; but
from one who deplores both, you will perhaps be willing to hear a
hearty, cordial, admiring expression of the regard he is nevertheless
forced to cherish for the sincerity and the unmistakably disinterested
devotion which has marked your long and hopeful work in the cause you
hold so dear and serve so faithfully. I can not wish you the success you
seek—let me give you this better wish, that the anniversary your
friends celebrate tonight may never bring fewer tokens of regard than
now, and never find you seeming less the faithful worker "of cheerful
yesterdays and confident tomorrows." With renewed congratulations I am,
very cordially yours,
Whitelaw Reid.
I could not be where I longed to be last evening, where I could look
upon the toilworn face of the true, tried and never found wanting—the
one of all others who has borne the heat of the day, and that without
wilting or complaining ever hopeful and ever pursuing "the even tenor of
her way." Absence shall not keep from thee my mite, and how I wish it
were ten, yes, twenty times as much, but here it is with my love,
respect and genuine friendship. Be of brave heart and believe that I am
thy fast friend,
Abby Hopper Gibbons.
Yours is a "golden wedding" indeed—for the fiftieth anniversary of a
life that has been wedded to a great cause is a far more glorious golden
wedding than those which generally go by that name. Accept my heartiest
wishes for your welfare and for the success of your novel celebration.
Heretofore the privilege of growing old and possessing common sense has
belonged exclusively to the other sex. Sincerely yours,
Frances Ellen Burr.
Please accept the enclosed check of $50, as a slight token of regard
from our absent trio. As I hardly need tell you, the lion's share of
this birthday gift is sent by my father, but neither mother nor I will
admit that in the unsubstantial, and yet I hope not valueless part of
the offering, the personal regard and appreciation of your noble work
for woman which accompany it, our contribution is any less than his. I
remain yours very truly,
Laura Curtis Bullard.
You have worked for the slave and for woman. Your fifty years shine
about you and rest like a halo of glory around your head.... Fifty years
today! When that half-century again rolls around, you and I will be in
our graves and our names and work will stand back of us to all time. But
into that future I look with prophetic eye to see woman no longer
enslaved, and to find, not only on this continent, but over the world,
as benefactor of the race, the name of Susan B. Anthony. Your
affectionate friend,
Matilda Joslyn Gage.
My good husband in writing from Toledo says: "Tell Susan that all the
newspaper accounts taken together could not increase the pride which I
have long felt in her pertinacious, obstinate, fault-finding, raspish,
strong-minded, dogmatic and grand career. God bless her!" To all of
which I subscribe most affectionately,
Elizabeth R. Tilton.
... If your Bible says you are fifty, I will try to be as reverential as
possible when next we meet. I wish you similar health and strength when
you are seventy-five—you'll find no change in me. I send you by express
today Whittier's poems. Ever affectionately,
Ellen Wright Garrison.
All the people who know you and who don't know you were given
opportunity to utter their good wishes, and poor me, wandering across
these western spaces, quite left out in the cold! Please ma'am, why did
I know nothing of your reception till it was all over? I should have
sent you what I now send—a gray silk gown, wherein you are to make
yourself fine and grand, and a draft for $200 as a little nest-egg.
If I only had a happy ease with my pen, how glad I would have been to
put on paper in glowing words just what I think of the faithful,
unselfish, earnest, single-minded, courageous years, which my dear old
Susan has given to the service of humanity. How, through poverty and
persecution, evil tongues and slanderous words, ridicule and reproach,
she has said, "Nothing shall daunt me; 'tis God's service;" and so
speaking, has held fast the profession of her faith without wavering....
God bless her! God bless her! The tears come to my eyes as I write that
benediction, and think how gently and earnestly men and women alike in
time to come will repeat it when her name is mentioned; when those same
men and women shall see her life and her work, not as now "through a
glass darkly," but as those who gaze through the sunshine of truth.
Good-by, dear friend—many happy years for you, prays your loving
Anna E. Dickinson.
Accept the enclosed check for $50, not as a present, merely, but as a
debt, honestly due, for "services rendered." Had there been no
"agitation" for the last twenty years, resulting in so complete a
"Revolution," we teachers might still be working for $1 per week and
"boarding 'round." But thanks to your unfailing "persistency," and the
faithfulness of your co-workers in speaking for a class, the majority of
whom dare not speak for themselves through fear of losing the little
already gained, the salaries of all workingwomen have been largely
increased.... So, if need be, fight as valiantly, dear sister, for the
next twenty years as for the last, or at least till woman's right to a
voice in the laws by which she is governed shall be acknowledged in
every State and Territory of our country. Affectionately your sister,
Mary S. Anthony.
On this, your fiftieth birthday, permit me to present you my check for
$50, as a slight and very inadequate expression of admiring gratitude on
my part for your twenty years of arduous and self-sacrificing labor in
the cause of woman. What woman has gained already, and it is much, what
I and others have been able to achieve in professional life, must be
mainly ascribed to you, and such as you.... Your faithful friend and
co-worker,
Clemence S. Lozier.
Although away here in Rome, I have kept track of your goings-on through
The Revolution, which comes regularly.... I wish I could have been there
to assist at the merrymaking. Miss Manning has kindly offered to take a
little remembrance [an Etruscan gold and garnet pin] to you when she
goes home, which you are to wear with that new silk dress. You see how
selfish I am. I wish to compel you not only to think of me, but to
associate me in your mind with our peerless Anna, God bless the dear
child! Ever affectionately,
Kate N. Doggett.
The presents received were too numerous to mention. From Mr. and Mrs.
Cheney, South Manchester, Conn., $50; Erie Co. (N. Y.) Suffrage
Association, $50; Henry Ward Beecher, the Tiltons, Frank D. Moulton,
Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. S. C. Pomeroy, $25 each; Mr. and Mrs. Samuel E.
Sewall, $20; and from other friends, sums of ten, fifteen and twenty
dollars, amounting in all to $1,000. In addition were a broché shawl
from Mrs. Stanton, gold watch, chain and pin from Miss Sarah Johnston,
pen-and-ink sketch from Eliza Greatorex, point and duchesse lace collars
and handkerchiefs, sets of books, engravings, gold pens, pocket-books,
travelling case, and floral offerings.
Delivered in twenty-nine of the post-office districts of Monroe, and
twenty-one of Ontario, in Miss Anthony's canvass of those counties prior
to her trial in June, 1873.
Friends and Fellow-Citizens:—I stand before you under indictment for
the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election,
without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening
to prove to you that in thus doing, I not only committed no crime, but
instead simply exercised my citizen's right, guaranteed to me and all
United States citizens by the National Constitution beyond the power of
any State to deny.
Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural
right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making
and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to
secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights. We throw
to the winds the old dogma that government can give rights. No one
denies that before governments were organized each individual possessed
the right to protect his own life, liberty and property. When 100 or
1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away
their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each
other in the enjoyment of them through prescribed judicial and
legislative tribunals. They agree to abandon the methods of brute force
in the adjustment of their differences and adopt those of civilization.
Nor can you find a word in any of the grand documents left us by the
fathers which assumes for government the power to create or to confer
rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution,
the constitutions of the several States and the organic laws of the
Territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise
of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.
All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. To secure these, governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.
Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, or exclusion of
any class from their full and equal enjoyment. Here is pronounced the
right of all men, and "consequently," as the Quaker preacher said, "of
all women," to a voice in the government. And here, in this first
paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of
all to the ballot; for how can "the consent of the governed" be given,
if the right to vote be denied? Again:
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to
institute a new government, laying its foundations on such
principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Surely the right of the whole people to vote is here clearly implied;
for however destructive to their happiness this government might become,
a disfranchised class could neither alter nor abolish it, nor institute
a new one, except by the old brute force method of insurrection and
rebellion. One-half of the people of this nation today are utterly
powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write
there a new and a just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with
this form of government, that enforces taxation without
representation—that compels them to obey laws to which they never have
given their consent—that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a
jury of their peers—that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of
their own persons, wages and children—are this half of the people who
are left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of
the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this
government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of
equal rights to all. By these declarations, kings, popes, priests,
aristocrats, all were alike dethroned and placed on a common level,
politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, men,
as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule and placed on a
political level with women. By the practice of these declarations all
class and caste distinctions would be abolished, and slave, serf,
plebeian, wife, woman, all alike rise from their subject position to the
broader platform of equality.
The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity,
provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do
ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of
America.
It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor we, the male
citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. We formed it
not to give the blessings of liberty but to secure them; not to the half
of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole
people—women as well as men. It is downright mockery to talk to women
of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the
only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican
government—the ballot.
The early journals of Congress show that, when the committee reported to
that body the original articles of confederation, the very first one
which became the subject of discussion was that respecting equality of
suffrage. Article IV said:
The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and
intercourse between the people of the different States of this
Union, the free inhabitants of each of the States (paupers,
vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted) shall be entitled to
all the privileges and immunities of the free citizens of the
several States.
Thus, at the very beginning, did the fathers see the necessity of the
universal application of the great principle of equal rights to all, in
order to produce the desired result—a harmonious union and a
homogeneous people.
Luther Martin, attorney-general of Maryland, in his report to the
legislature of that State of the convention which framed the United
States Constitution, said:
Those who advocated the equality of suffrage took the matter up on
the original principles of government: that the reason why each
individual man in forming a State government should have an equal
vote, is because each individual, before he enters into government,
is equally free and equally independent.
James Madison said:
Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the
mass of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the
laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who
are to administer them.... Let it be remembered, finally, that it
has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights
for which she contended were the rights of human nature.
These assertions by the framers of the United States Constitution of the
equal and natural right of all the people to a voice in the government,
have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statesmen of the nation
throughout the entire history of our government. Thaddeus Stevens, of
Pennsylvania, said in 1866: "I have made up my mind that the elective
franchise is one of the inalienable rights meant to be secured by the
Declaration of Independence." B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three
days' discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan's
motion to strike "male" from the District of Columbia suffrage bill,
said:
Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I
stand for universal suffrage and as a matter of fundamental
principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any
ground of race or sex. I will go farther and say that I recognize
the right of franchise as being intrinsically a natural right. I do
not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitations
upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social
state itself. Sir, I have been shocked, in the course of this
debate, to hear senators declare this right only a conventional and
political arrangement, a privilege yielded to you and me and
others; not a right in any sense, only a concession! Mr. President,
I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I
believe that whenever you establish that doctrine, whenever you
crystallize that idea in the public mind of this country, you ring
the death-knell of American liberties.
Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, insisted that so soon as by the Thirteenth
Amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United
States Constitution guaranteed to them equal rights—the right to vote
and to be voted for. In closing one of his great speeches he said:
I do not hesitate to say that when the slaves of our country became
"citizens" they took their place in the body politic as a component
part of the "people," entitled to equal rights and under the
protection of these two guardian principles: First, that all just
governments stand on the consent of the governed; and second, that
taxation without representation is tyranny; and these rights it is
the duty of Congress to guarantee as essential to the idea of a
republic.
The preamble of the constitution of the State of New York declares the
same purpose. It says: "We, the people of the State of New York,
grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, in order to secure its
blessings, do establish this constitution." Here is not the slightest
intimation either of receiving freedom from the United States
Constitution, or of the State's conferring the blessings of liberty upon
the people; and the same is true of every other State constitution. Each
and all declare rights God-given, and that to secure the people in the
enjoyment of their inalienable rights is their one and only object in
ordaining and establishing government. All of the State constitutions
are equally emphatic in their recognition of the ballot as the means of
securing the people in the enjoyment of these rights. Article I of the
New York State constitution says:
No member of this State shall be disfranchised or deprived of the
rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the
law of the land, or the judgment of his peers.
So carefully guarded is the citizen's right to vote, that the
constitution makes special mention of all who may be excluded. It says:
"Laws may be passed excluding from the right of suffrage all persons who
have been or may be convicted of bribery, larceny or any infamous
crime."
In naming the various employments which shall not affect the residence
of voters, Section 3, Article II, says "that neither being kept in any
almshouse, or other asylum, at public expense, nor being confined in any
public prison, shall deprive a person of his residence," and hence of
his vote. Thus is the right of voting most sacredly hedged about. The
only seeming permission in the New York State constitution for the
disfranchisement of women is in Section 1, Article II, which says:
"Every male citizen of the age of twenty-one years, etc., shall be
entitled to vote."
But I submit that in view of the explicit assertions of the equal right
of the whole people, both in the preamble and previous article of the
constitution, this omission of the adjective "female" should not be
construed into a denial; but instead should be considered as of no
effect. Mark the direct prohibition, "No member of this State shall be
disfranchised, unless by the law of the land, or the judgment of his
peers." "The law of the land" is the United States Constitution; and
there is no provision in that document which can be fairly construed
into a permission to the States to deprive any class of citizens of
their right to vote. Hence New York can get no power from that source to
disfranchise one entire half of her members. Nor has "the judgment of
their peers" been pronounced against women exercising their right to
vote; no disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror—and none
but disfranchised persons can be women's peers. Nor has the legislature
passed laws excluding women as a class on account of idiocy or lunacy;
nor have the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny or any infamous
crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the
exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No
barriers whatever stand today between women and the exercise of their
right to vote save those of precedent and prejudice, which refuse to
expunge the word "male" from the constitution.
The clauses of the United States Constitution cited by our opponents as
giving power to the States to disfranchise any classes of citizens they
please, are contained in Sections 2 and 4, Article I. The second says:
The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen
every second year by the people of the several States; and the
electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for
electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature.
This can not be construed into a concession to the States of the power
to destroy the right to become an elector, but simply to prescribe what
shall be the qualifications, such as competency of intellect, maturity
of age, length of residence, that shall be deemed necessary to enable
them to make an intelligent choice of candidates. If, as our opponents
assert, it is the duty of the United States to protect citizens in the
several States against higher or different qualifications for electors
for representatives in Congress than for members of the Assembly, then
it must be equally imperative for the national government to interfere
with the States, and forbid them from arbitrarily cutting off the right
of one-half the people to become electors altogether. Section 4 says:
The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and
representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the
legislature thereof; but Congress may at any time, by law, make or
alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing
senators.
Here is conceded to the States only the power to prescribe times, places
and manner of holding the elections; and even with these Congress may
interfere in all excepting the mere place of choosing senators. Thus,
you see, there is not the slightest permission for the States to
discriminate against the right of any class of citizens to vote. Surely,
to regulate can not be to annihilate; to qualify can not be wholly to
deprive. To this principle every true Democrat and Republican said amen,
when applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches from
1865 to 1869 for equal rights to all; and when, in 1871, I asked that
senator to declare the power of the United States Constitution to
protect women in their right to vote—as he had done for black men—he
handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period,
and said:
Put "sex" where I have "race" or "color," and you have here the
best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a
doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will
never vote for a Sixteenth Amendment to guarantee it to them. I
voted for both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth under protest; would
never have done it but for the pressing emergency of that hour;
would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to
protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should
have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly-made
freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth nor time to await
that slow process. Women do possess all these in an eminent degree,
and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them
establish the powers of our American magna charta to protect every
citizen of the republic.
But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner's counsel I went to
the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen's right to vote,
the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them—they appealed to me,
and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally. Putting sex
where he did color, Senator Sumner would have said:
Qualifications can not be in their nature permanent or
insurmountable. Sex can not be a qualification any more than size,
race, color or previous condition of servitude. A permanent or
insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a deprivation of the
suffrage. In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without
representation, against which our Revolutionary mothers, as well as
fathers, rebelled.
For any State to make sex a qualification, which must ever result in the
disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of
attainder, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the
supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever
withheld from women and their female posterity. For them, this
government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed.
For them this government is not a democracy; it is not a republic. It is
the most odious aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe.
An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of
learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy
of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this
oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the
oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every
household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects—carries
discord and rebellion into every home of the nation. This most odious
aristocracy exists, too, in the face of Section 4, Article IV, which
says: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a
republican form of government."
What, I ask you, is the distinctive difference between the inhabitants
of a monarchical and those of a republican form of government, save that
in the monarchical the people are subjects, helpless, powerless, bound
to obey laws made by political superiors; while in the republican the
people are citizens, individual sovereigns, all clothed with equal power
to make and unmake both their laws and law-makers? The moment you
deprive a person of his right to a voice in the government, you degrade
him from the status of a citizen of the republic to that of a subject.
It matters very little to him whether his monarch be an individual
tyrant, as is the Czar of Russia, or a 15,000,000 headed monster, as
here in the United States; he is a powerless subject, serf or slave; not
in any sense a free and independent citizen.
It is urged that the use of the masculine pronouns he, his and him
in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to
be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the
letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent and accept the
other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from
taxation for the support of the government and from penalties for the
violation of laws. There is no she or her or hers in the tax laws,
and this is equally true of all the criminal laws.
Take for example the civil rights law which I am charged with having
violated; not only are all the pronouns in it masculine, but everybody
knows that it was intended expressly to hinder the rebel men from
voting. It reads, "If any person shall knowingly vote without his
having a lawful right." It was precisely so with all the papers served
on me the United States marshal's warrant, the bail-bond, the petition
for habeas corpus, the bill of indictment—not one of them had a
feminine pronoun; but to make them applicable to me, the clerk of the
court prefixed an "s" to the "he" and made "her" out of "his" and "him;"
and I insist if government officials may thus manipulate the pronouns to
tax, fine, imprison and hang women, it is their duty to thus change them
in order to protect us in our right to vote.
So long as any classes of men were denied this right, the government
made a show of consistency by exempting them from taxation. When a
property qualification of $250 was required of black men in New York,
they were not compelled to pay taxes so long as they were content to
report themselves worth less than that sum; but the moment the black
man died and his property fell to his widow or daughter, the black
woman's name was put on the assessor's list and she was compelled to pay
taxes on this same property. This also is true of ministers in New York.
So long as the minister lives, he is exempted from taxation on $1,500 of
property, but the moment the breath leaves his body, his widow's name
goes on the assessor's list and she has to pay taxes on the $1,500. So
much for special legislation in favor of women!
In all the penalties and burdens of government (except the military)
women are reckoned as citizens, equally with men. Also, in all the
privileges and immunities, save those of the jury and the ballot-box,
the foundation on which rest all the others. The United States
government not only taxes, fines, imprisons and hangs women, but it
allows them to pre-empt lands, register ships and take out passports and
naturalization papers. Not only does the law permit single women and
widows the right of naturalization, but Section 2 says, "A married woman
may be naturalized without the concurrence of her husband;" (I wonder
the fathers were not afraid of creating discord in the families of
foreigners;) and again:
When an alien, having complied with the law and declared his
intention to become a citizen, dies before he is actually
naturalized, his widow and children shall be considered citizens,
entitled to all rights and privileges as such, on taking the
required oath.
If a foreign born woman by becoming a naturalized citizen is entitled to
all the rights and privileges of citizenship, do not these include the
ballot which would have belonged to her husband? If this is true of a
naturalized woman, is it not equally true of one who is native born?
The question of the masculine pronouns—yes, and nouns too—was settled
by the United States Supreme Court, in the case of Silver versus Ladd,
December, 1868. The court said:
In construing a benevolent statute of the government, made for the
benefit of its own citizens, inviting and encouraging them to
settle on its distant public lands, the words "single man" and
"unmarried man" may, especially if aided by the context and other
parts of the statute, be taken in a generic sense. Held,
accordingly, that the Fourth Section of the Act of Congress, of
September 21, 1850, granting by way of donation lands in Oregon
Territory to every white settler or occupant, American half-breed
Indians included, embraced within the term single man an unmarried
woman.
Though the words persons, people, inhabitants, electors, citizens, are
all used indiscriminately in the national and State constitutions, there
was always a conflict of opinion, prior to the war, as to whether they
were synonymous terms, but whatever room there was for doubt, under the
old regime, the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment settled that
question forever in its first sentence:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and
of the State wherein they reside.
The second settles the equal status of all citizens:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor
shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property
without due process of law, or deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? I
scarcely believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say
they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens, and no State has
a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, which shall
abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination
against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is
today null and void, precisely as is every one against negroes.
Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? I
think the disfranchised ex-rebels and ex-State prisoners all will agree
that it is not only one of them, but the one without which all the
others are nothing. Seek first the kingdom of the ballot and all things
else shall be added, is the political injunction.
Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define citizen to be a person, in the
United States, entitled to vote and hold office. Prior to the adoption
of the Thirteenth Amendment, by which slavery was forever abolished and
black men transformed from property to persons, the judicial opinions of
the country had always been in harmony with this definition: In order to
be a citizen one must be a voter. Associate-Justice Washington, in
defining the privileges and immunities of the citizen, more than fifty
years ago, said: "They include all such privileges as are fundamental in
their nature; and among them is the right to exercise the elective
franchise, and to hold office." Even the Dred Scott decision, pronounced
by the Abolitionists and Republicans infamous because it virtually
declared "black men had no rights white men were bound to respect," gave
this true and logical conclusion, that to be one of the people was to be
a citizen and a voter.
Chief-Justice Daniels said:
There is not, it is believed, to be found in the theories of
writers on government, or in any actual experiment heretofore made,
an exposition of the term citizen which has not been considered as
conferring the actual possession and enjoyment of an entire
equality of privileges, civil and political.
Associate-Justice Taney said:
The words "people of the United States" and "citizens" are
synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the
political body, who, according to our republican institutions, form
the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the government
through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call
"the sovereign people," and every citizen is one of this people,
and a constituent member of this sovereignty.
Thus does Judge Taney's decision, which was so terrible a ban to the
black man while he was a slave, now that he is a person and no longer
property, pronounce him a citizen, possessed of entire equality of
privileges, civil and political; and not only the black man, but the
black woman, and all women. It was not until after the abolition of
slavery, by which the negroes became free men and hence citizens, that
any contrary opinion was rendered. U. S. Attorney-General Bates then
said:
The Constitution uses the word "citizen" only to express the
political quality, [not equality, mark,] of the individual in his
relation to the nation; to declare that he is a member of the body
politic, and bound to it by the reciprocal obligations of
allegiance on the one side and protection on the other. The
phrase, "a citizen of the United States," without addition or
qualification, means neither more nor less than a member of the
nation.
Then, to be a citizen of this republic is no more than to be a subject
of an empire. You and I, and all true and patriotic citizens, must
repudiate this base conclusion. We all know that American citizenship,
without addition or qualification, means the possession of equal rights,
civil and political. We all know that the crowning glory of every
citizen of the United States is that he can either give or withhold his
vote from every law and every legislator under the government.
Did "I am a Roman citizen" mean nothing more than that I am a "member"
of the body politic of the republic of Rome, bound to it by the
reciprocal obligations of allegiance on the one side and protection on
the other? When you, young man, shall travel abroad, among the
monarchies of the old world, and there proudly boast yourself an
"American citizen," will you thereby declare yourself neither more nor
less than a "member" of the American nation?
This opinion of Attorney-General Bates, that a black citizen was not a
voter, given merely to suit the political exigency of the Republican
party in that transition hour between emancipation and enfranchisement,
was no less infamous, in spirit or purpose, than was the decision of
Judge Taney, that a black man was not one of the people, rendered in the
interest and at the behest of the old Democratic party in its darkest
hour of subjection to the slave power. Nevertheless, all of the adverse
arguments, congressional reports and judicial opinions, thus far, have
been based on this purely partisan, time-serving decision of General
Bates, that the normal condition of the citizen of the United States is
that of disfranchisement; that only such classes of citizens as have had
special legislative guarantee have a legal right to vote.
If this decision of Attorney-General Bates was infamous, as against
black men, but yesterday plantation slaves, what shall we pronounce upon
Judge Bingham, in the House of Representatives, and Carpenter, in the
Senate of the United States, for citing it against the women of the
entire nation, vast numbers of whom are the peers of those honorable
gentlemen themselves in morals, intellect, culture, wealth, family,
paying taxes on large estates, and contributing equally with them and
their sex, in every direction, to the growth, prosperity and well-being
of the republic? And what shall be said of the judicial opinions of
Judges Cartter, Jameson, McKay and Sharswood, all based upon this
aristocratic, monarchial idea of the right of one class to govern
another?
I am proud to mention the names of the two United States judges who have
given opinions honorable to our republican idea, and honorable to
themselves—Judge Howe, of Wyoming Territory, and Judge Underwood, of
Virginia. The former gave it as his opinion a year ago, when the
legislature seemed likely to revoke the law enfranchising the women of
that Territory that, in case they succeeded, the women would still
possess the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment. The latter, in
noticing the recent decision of Judge Cartter, of the Supreme Court of
the District of Columbia, denying to women the right to vote under the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, says:
If the people of the United States, by amendment of their
Constitution, could expunge, without any explanatory or assisting
legislation, an adjective of five letters from all State and local
constitutions, and thereby raise millions of our most ignorant
fellow-citizens to all of the rights and privileges of electors,
why should not the same people, by the same amendment, expunge an
adjective of four letters from the same State and local
constitutions, and thereby raise other millions of more educated
and better informed citizens to equal rights and privileges,
without explanatory or assisting legislation?
If the Fourteenth Amendment does not secure to all citizens the right to
vote, for what purpose was that grand old charter of the fathers
lumbered with its unwieldy proportions? The Republican party, and Judges
Howard and Bingham, who drafted the document, pretended it was to do
something for black men; and if that something were not to secure them
in their right to vote and hold office, what could it have been? For by
the Thirteenth Amendment black men had become people, and hence were
entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the government,
precisely as were the women of the country and foreign men not
naturalized. According to Associate-Justice Washington, they already
had:
Protection of the government, the enjoyment of life and liberty,
with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and
to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject to such
restraints as the government may justly prescribe for the general
welfare of the whole; the right of a citizen of one State to pass
through or to reside in any other State for the purpose of trade,
agriculture, professional pursuit, or otherwise; to claim the
benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, to institute and maintain
actions of any kind in the courts of the State; to take, hold, and
dispose of property, either real or personal, and an exemption from
higher taxes or impositions than are paid by the other citizens of
the State.
Thus, you see, those newly-freed men were in possession of every
possible right, privilege and immunity of the government, except that of
suffrage, and hence needed no constitutional amendment for any other
purpose. What right in this country has the Irishman the day after he
receives his naturalization papers that he did not possess the day
before, save the right to vote and hold office? The Chinamen now
crowding our Pacific coast are in precisely the same position. What
privilege or immunity has California or Oregon the right to deny them,
save that of the ballot? Clearly, then, if the Fourteenth Amendment was
not to secure to black men their right to vote it did nothing for them,
since they possessed everything else before. But if it was intended to
prohibit the States from denying or abridging their right to vote, then
it did the same for all persons, white women included, born or
naturalized in the United States; for the amendment does not say that
all male persons of African descent, but that all persons are citizens.
The second section is simply a threat to punish the States by reducing
their representation on the floor of Congress, should they disfranchise
any of their male citizens, and can not be construed into a sanction to
disfranchise female citizens, nor does it in any wise weaken or
invalidate the universal guarantee of the first section.
However much the doctors of the law may disagree as to whether people
and citizens, in the original Constitution, were one and the same, or
whether the privileges and immunities in the Fourteenth Amendment
include the right of suffrage, the question of the citizen's right to
vote is forever settled by the Fifteenth Amendment. "The right of
citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged
by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color or
previous condition of servitude." How can the State deny or abridge the
right of the citizen, if the citizen does not possess it? There is no
escape from the conclusion that to vote is the citizen's right, and the
specifications of race, color or previous condition of servitude can in
no way impair the force of that emphatic assertion that the citizen's
right to vote shall not be denied or abridged.
The political strategy of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment
failing to coerce the rebel States into enfranchising their negroes, and
the necessities of the Republican party demanding their votes throughout
the South to ensure the re-election of Grant in 1872, that party was
compelled to place this positive prohibition of the Fifteenth Amendment
upon the United States and all the States thereof.
If once we establish the false principle that United States citizenship
does not carry with it the right to vote in every State in this Union,
there is no end to the petty tricks and cunning devices which will be
attempted to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right of
suffrage. It will not always be the men combining to disfranchise all
women; native born men combining to abridge the rights of all
naturalized citizens, as in Rhode Island. It will not always be the rich
and educated who may combine to cut off the poor and ignorant; but we
may live to see the hard-working, uncultivated day laborers, foreign and
native born, learning the power of the ballot and their vast majority of
numbers, combine and amend State constitutions so as to disfranchise the
Vanderbilts, the Stewarts, the Conklings and the Fentons. It is a poor
rule that won't work more ways than one. Establish this precedent, admit
the State's right to deny suffrage, and there is no limit to the
confusion, discord and disruption that may await us. There is and can be
but one safe principle of government—equal rights to all.
Discrimination against any class on account of color, race, nativity,
sex, property, culture, can but embitter and disaffect that class, and
thereby endanger the safety of the whole people. Clearly, then, the
national government not only must define the rights of citizens, but
must stretch out its powerful hand and protect them in every State in
this Union.
If, however, you will insist that the Fifteenth Amendment's emphatic
interdiction against robbing United States citizens of their suffrage
"on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude," is a
recognition of the right of either the United States or any State to
deprive them of the ballot for any or all other reasons, I will prove to
you that the class of citizens for whom I now plead are, by all the
principles of our government and many of the laws of the States,
included under the term "previous condition of servitude."
Consider first married women and their legal status. What is servitude?
"The condition of a slave." What is a slave? "A person who is robbed of
the proceeds of his labor; a person who is subject to the will of
another." By the laws of Georgia, South Carolina and all the States of
the South, the negro had no right to the custody and control of his
person. He belonged to his master. If he were disobedient, the master
had the right to use correction. If the negro did not like the
correction and ran away, the master had the right to use coercion to
bring him back. By the laws of almost every State in this Union today,
North as well as South, the married woman has no right to the custody
and control of her person. The wife belongs to the husband; and if she
refuse obedience he may use moderate correction, and if she do not like
his moderate correction and leave his "bed and board," the husband may
use moderate coercion to bring her back. The little word "moderate," you
see, is the saving clause for the wife, and would doubtless be
overstepped should her offended husband administer his correction with
the "cat-o'-nine-tails," or accomplish his coercion with blood-hounds.
Again the slave had no right to the earnings of his hands, they belonged
to his master; no right to the custody of his children, they belonged to
his master; no right to sue or be sued, or to testify in the courts. If
he committed a crime, it was the master who must sue or be sued. In many
of the States there has been special legislation, giving married women
the right to property inherited or received by bequest, or earned by the
pursuit of any avocation outside the home; also giving them the right to
sue and be sued in matters pertaining to such separate property; but not
a single State of this Union has ever secured the wife in the enjoyment
of her right to equal ownership of the joint earnings of the marriage
copartnership. And since, in the nature of things, the vast majority of
married women never earn a dollar by work outside their families, or
inherit a dollar from their fathers, it follows that from the day of
their marriage to the day of the death of their husbands not one of them
ever has a dollar, except it shall please her husband to let her have
it.
In some of the States, also, laws have been passed giving to the mother
a joint right with the father in the guardianship of the children.
Twenty-five years ago, when our woman's rights movement commenced, by
the laws of all the States the father had the sole custody and control
of the children. No matter if he were a brutal, drunken libertine, he
had the legal right, without the mother's consent, to apprentice her
sons to rumsellers or her daughters to brothel-keepers. He even could
will away an unborn child from the mother. In most of the States this
law still prevails, and the mothers are utterly powerless.
I doubt if there is, today, a State in this Union where a married woman
can sue or be sued for slander of character, and until recently there
was not one where she could sue or be sued for injury of person. However
damaging to the wife's reputation any slander may be, she is wholly
powerless to institute legal proceedings against her accuser unless her
husband shall join with her; and how often have we heard of the husband
conspiring with some outside barbarian to blast the good name of his
wife? A married woman can not testify in courts in cases of joint
interest with her husband.
A good farmer's wife in Illinois, who had all the rights she wanted, had
had made for herself a full set of false teeth. The dentist pronounced
them an admirable fit, and the wife declared it gave her fits to wear
them. The dentist sued the husband for his bill; his counsel brought the
wife as witness; the judge ruled her off the stand, saying, "A married
woman can not be a witness in matters of joint interest between herself
and her husband." Think of it, ye good wives, the false teeth in your
mouths are a joint interest with your husbands, about which you are
legally incompetent to speak! If a married woman is injured by
accident, in nearly all of the States it is her husband who must sue,
and it is to him that the damages will be awarded. In Massachusetts a
married woman was severely injured by a defective sidewalk. Her husband
sued the corporation and recovered $13,000 damages, which belong to him
absolutely, and whenever that unfortunate wife wishes a dollar of that
money she must ask her husband for it; and if he be of a niggardly
nature, she will hear him say, every time, "What have you done with the
twenty-five cents I gave you yesterday?" Isn't such a position
humiliating enough to be called "servitude?" That husband sued and
obtained damages for the loss of the services of his wife, precisely as
he would have done had it been his ox, cow or horse; and exactly as the
master, under the old regime, would have recovered for the services of
his slave.
I submit the question, if the deprivation by law of the ownership of
one's own person, wages, property, children, the denial of the right as
an individual to sue and be sued and testify in the courts, is not a
condition of servitude most bitter and absolute, even though under the
sacred name of marriage? Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal
status of married women? I will remind him of the fact that the common
law of England prevails in every State but two in this Union, except
where the legislature has enacted special laws annulling it. I am
ashamed that not one of the States yet has blotted from its statute
books the old law of marriage, which, summed up in the fewest words
possible, is in effect "husband and wife are one, and that one the
husband."
Thus may all married women and widows, by the laws of the several
States, be technically included in the Fifteenth Amendment's
specification of "condition of servitude," present or previous. The
facts also prove that, by all the great fundamental principles of our
free government, not only married women but the entire womanhood of the
nation are in a "condition of servitude" as surely as were our
Revolutionary fathers when they rebelled against King George. Women are
taxed without representation, governed without their consent, tried,
convicted and punished without a jury of their peers. Is all this
tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women under our
democratic-republican government today than it was to men under their
aristocratic, monarchial government one hundred years ago? There is not
an utterance of John Adams, John Hancock or Patrick Henry, but finds a
living response in the soul of every intelligent, patriotic woman of the
nation. Show me a justice-loving woman property-holder, and I will show
you one whose soul is fired with all the indignation of 1776 every time
the tax-collector presents himself at her door. You will not find one
such but feels her condition of servitude as galling as did James Otis
when he said:
The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not represented
appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential
rights, and if continued seems to be in effect an entire
disfranchisement of every civil right. For what one civil right is
worth a rush after a man's property is subject to be taken from him
at pleasure without his consent? If a man is not his own assessor
in person, or by deputy, his liberty is gone, for he is wholly at
the mercy of others.
What was the three-penny tax on tea or the paltry tax on paper and sugar
to which our Revolutionary fathers were subjected, when compared with
the taxation of the women of this republic? And again, to show that
disfranchisement was precisely the slavery of which the fathers
complained, allow me to cite Benjamin Franklin, who in those olden times
was admitted to be good authority, not merely in domestic but also in
political economy:
Every man of the commonalty, except infants, insane persons and
criminals, is, of common right and the law of God, a freeman and
entitled to the free enjoyment of liberty. That liberty or freedom
consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who
are to frame the laws, and who are to be the guardians of every
man's life, property and peace. For the all of one man is as dear
to him as the all of another; and the poor man has an equal right,
but more need, to have representatives in the legislature than the
rich one. They who have no voice or vote in the electing of
representatives do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved
to those who have votes and to their representatives; for to be
enslaved is to have governors whom other men have set over us, and
to be subject to laws made by the representatives of others,
without having had representatives of our own to give consent in
our behalf.
Suppose I read it with the feminine gender:
Women who have no voice or vote in the electing of representatives
do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to men who have
votes and to their representatives; for to be enslaved is to have
governors whom men have set over us, and to be subject to the laws
made by the representatives of men, without having representatives
of our own to give consent in our behalf.
And yet one more authority, that of Thomas Paine, than whom not one of
the Revolutionary patriots more ably vindicated the principles upon
which our government is founded:
The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by
which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to
reduce man to a state of slavery; for slavery consists in being
subject to the will of another; and he that has not a vote in the
election of representatives is in this case. The proposal,
therefore, to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the
proposal to take away property.
Is anything further needed to prove woman's condition of servitude
sufficient to entitle her to the guarantees of the Fifteenth Amendment?
Is there a man who will not agree with me that to talk of freedom
without the ballot is mockery to the women of this republic, precisely
as New England's orator, Wendell Phillips, at the close of the late war
declared it to be to the newly emancipated black man? I admit that,
prior to the rebellion, by common consent, the right to enslave, as well
as to disfranchise both native and foreign born persons, was conceded to
the States. But the one grand principle settled by the war and the
reconstruction legislation, is the supremacy of the national government
to protect the citizens of the United States in their right to freedom
and the elective franchise, against any and every interference on the
part of the several States; and again and again have the American people
asserted the triumph of this principle by their overwhelming majorities
for Lincoln and Grant.
The one issue of the last two presidential elections was whether the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments should be considered the irrevocable
will of the people; and the decision was that they should be, and that
it is not only the right, but the duty of the national government to
protect all United States citizens in the full enjoyment and free
exercise of their privileges and immunities against the attempt of any
State to deny or abridge. In this conclusion Republicans and Democrats
alike agree. Senator Frelinghuysen said: "The heresy of State rights has
been completely buried in these amendments, and as amended, the
Constitution confers not only National but State citizenship upon all
persons born or naturalized within our limits."
The call for the National Republican Convention of 1872 said: "Equal
suffrage has been engrafted on the National Constitution; the privileges
and immunities of American citizenship have become a part of the organic
law." The National Republican platform said: "Complete liberty and exact
equality in the enjoyment of all civil, political and public rights,
should be established and maintained throughout the Union by efficient
and appropriate State and Federal legislation."
If that means anything it is that Congress should pass a law to protect
women in their equal political rights, and that the States should enact
laws making it the duty of inspectors of elections to receive the votes
of women on precisely the same conditions as they do those of men.
Judge Stanley Matthews, a substantial Ohio Democrat, in his preliminary
speech at the Cincinnati Liberal Convention, said most emphatically:
"The constitutional amendments have established the political equality
of all citizens before the law."
President Grant, in his message to Congress, March 30, 1870, on the
adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, said, "A measure which makes at
once four millions of people voters, is indeed a measure of greater
importance than any act of the kind from the foundation of the
government to the present time."
How could four million negroes be made voters if two million out of
the four were women?
The California Republican platform of 1872 said:
Among the many practical and substantial triumphs of the principles
achieved by the Republican party during the past twelve years, it
enumerates with pride and pleasure the prohibiting of any State
from abridging the privileges of any citizen of the republic, the
declaring the civil and political equality of every citizen, and
the establishing all these principles in the Federal Constitution,
by amendments thereto, as the permanent law.
Benjamin F. Butler, in a recent letter to me, said: "I do not believe
anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of
women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other
like rights guaranteed to citizens."
It is upon this just interpretation of the United States Constitution
that our National Woman Suffrage Association, which celebrates the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the woman's rights movement next May in New
York City, has based all its arguments and action since the passage of
these amendments. We no longer petition legislature or Congress to give
us the right to vote, but appeal to women everywhere to exercise their
too long neglected "citizen's right." We appeal to the inspectors of
election to receive the votes of all United States citizens, as it is
their duty to do. We appeal to United States commissioners and marshals
to arrest, as is their duty, the inspectors who reject the votes of
United States citizens, and leave alone those who perform their duties
and accept these votes. We ask the juries to return verdicts of "not
guilty" in the cases of law-abiding United States citizens who cast
their votes, and inspectors of election who receive and count them.
We ask the judges to render unprejudiced opinions of the law, and
whereever there is room for doubt to give the benefit to the side of
liberty and equal rights for women, remembering that, as Sumner says,
"The true rule of interpretation under our National Constitution,
especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is
constitutional, everything against human rights unconstitutional." It
is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the
ballot—peaceably but nevertheless persistently—until we achieve
complete triumph and all United States citizens, men and women alike,
are recognized as equals in the government.
It is perhaps needless to say that whoever listens candidly to Susan B.
Anthony, no matter how he previously regarded her and her sentiments, is
certain to respect her and them afterwards.—Geneva Courier.
Miss Susan B. Anthony is sharp enough for a successful politician. She
is under arrest in Rochester for voting illegally, and is conducting her
case in a way which beats even lawyers. She stumped the county of Monroe
and spoke in every post-office district so powerfully that she has
actually converted nearly the entire male population to the woman
suffrage doctrine. The sentiment is so universal that the United States
district-attorney dare not trust his case to a jury drawn from that
county, and has changed the venue to Ontario. Now Miss Anthony proposes
to stump Ontario immediately, and has procured the services of Matilda
Joslyn Gage, of Fayetteville, to assist her. By the time the case comes
on, Miss Anthony will have Ontario county converted to her
doctrine.—Syracuse Standard.
If Miss Anthony has converted every man in Monroe county to her views of
the suffrage question, as the district-attorney intimates in his recent
efforts to have her case adjourned, it is pretty good evidence—unless
every man in Monroe county is a fool—that the lady has done no wrong.
"Her case," remarks the Auburn Bulletin, "will probably be carried over
to another term, and all she has to do is to canvass and convert another
county. A shrewd woman that! Again we say she ought to vote."—Rochester
Democrat and Chronicle.
There is perplexity in the northern district of New York. It was in that
jurisdiction that Miss Susan B. Anthony and sundry "erring sisters"
voted at the November election. For this they were arrested and
indicted. The venue was laid in Monroe county and there the trial was to
take place. Miss Anthony then proceeded to stump Monroe county and every
town and village thereof, asking her bucolic hearers the solemn
conundrum, "Is it a crime for a United States citizen to vote?" The
answer is supposed generally to be in the negative, and so convincing is
Sister Anthony's rhetoric regarded that it is supposed no jury can be
found to convict her. Her case has gone to the jurymen of Monroe, in her
own persuasive pleadings, before they are summoned. The
district-attorney has, therefore, postponed the trial to another term of
the court, and changed the place thereof to Ontario county; whereupon
the brave Susan takes the stump in Ontario, and personally makes known
her woes and wants. It is a regular St. Anthony's dance she leads the
district-attorney; and, in spite of winter cold or summer heat, she
will carry her case from county to county precisely as fast as the venue
is changed. One must rise very early in the morning to get the start of
this active apostle of the sisterhood.—New York Commercial Advertiser.
It seems likely that the decision of the court will be in Miss Anthony's
favor. If such be the result the advocates of woman suffrage will change
places with the public. They will no longer be forced to obtain hearings
from congressional and legislative committees for their claims, but will
exercise their right to vote by the authority of a legal precedent
against which positive laws forbidding them from voting will be the only
remedy. It is a question whether such laws can be passed in this
country. A careful examination of the subject must precede any such
legislation, and the inference from the result of Judge Selden's
investigation is that the more the subject is studied the less likely
will any legislative body be to forbid those women who want to vote from
so doing.—New York Evening Post.
Miss Susan B. Anthony, whatever else she may be, is evidently of the
right stuff for a reformer. Of all the woman suffragists she has the
most courage and resource, and fights her own and her sisters' battle
with the most wonderful energy, resolution and hopefulness. It is well
known that she is now under indictment for voting illegally in Rochester
last November. Voting illegally in her case means simply voting, for it
is held that women can not lawfully vote at all. She is to be tried
soon, but in the meantime, while at large on bail, she has devoted her
time to missionary work on behalf of woman suffrage, and has spoken, it
is said, in every post-office district in Monroe county, where her trial
would have been held in the natural course of things. She has argued her
cause so well that almost all the male population of the county have
been converted to her views on this subject. The district-attorney is
afraid to trust the case to a jury from that county, and has obtained a
change of venue to Ontario on the ground that a fair trial can not be
had in Monroe.
Miss Anthony, rather cheered than discouraged by this unwilling
testimony to the strength of her cause and her powers of persuasion, has
made arrangements to canvass Ontario county as thoroughly as Monroe.
Some foolish and bigoted people who edit newspapers are complaining that
Miss Anthony's proceedings are highly improper, inasmuch as they are
intended to influence the decision of a cause pending in the courts.
They even talk about contempt of court, and declare that Miss Anthony
should be compelled to desist from making these invidious harangues. We
suspect that the courts will not venture to interfere with this lady's
speech-making tour, but will be of the opinion that she has the same
right which other people, male or female, have to explain her political
views and make converts to them if she can. We have never known it
claimed before that a person accused of an offense was thereby deprived
of the common right of free speech on political and other
questions.—Worcester Spy.
The vapid efforts of a part of the newspaper press to entertain the
public, of late, by descriptions, criticisms and comments, founded upon
pretended interviews with Miss Anthony, reveal a standard of courtesy
and truth discreditable to the American press, and a meagerness of
interesting matter suggesting the propriety of the suspension of such
sheets altogether. The Pittsburg Leader, among others, disgraces itself
by a scurrilous report of what "the gay old girl said to a reporter;"
and the New York World, of course, waxed very funny in its account of
the late convention. These gibes at Miss Anthony's personal appearance,
unwillingness to tell her age, "fishy eyes," etc., are read by her
friends in Rochester with indignation and with contempt for the press
which will publish such misrepresentations as truth.
All Rochester will assert—at least all of it worth heeding—that Miss
Anthony holds here the position of a refined and estimable woman,
thoroughly respected and beloved by the large circle of staunch friends
who swear by her common sense and loyalty, if not by her peculiar views.
As for her age, she tells it often enough unsolicited, whenever the
famous silk dress is alluded to; the dear old dress that a New York
reporter held up as such perfection of taste and fashion! Anna Dickinson
gave that dress to Miss Anthony upon her fiftieth birthday a number of
years ago, and the news was in all the papers. That dress is going into
history with Commissioner Storrs, Judge Selden and the illustrious rest.
It has always been worn by a lady—a genuine lady—no pretense nor
sham—but good Quaker metal. She is no "sour old maid," our Miss
Anthony, nor are the young men shy of her when she can find time to
accept an invitation out; genial, cheery, warm-hearted, overflowing with
stories and reminiscences, utterly fearless and regardless of mere
public opinion, yet having a woman's delicate sensitiveness as to
anything outre in dress or appearance.
Our Susan B. Anthony will work up into a charming bit of biography some
day without a dull page within the covers, providing, of course,
stupidity does not have the writing of it. Never mind what she has been
fighting for, and will fight for till the victory is sure, we must all
own hers a brave record, and she has already accomplished for her sex
much that their scorn and contumely did not prevent her striving for. We
heard a lady remark after attending the suffrage convention: "No, I am
not converted to what these women advocate, I am too cowardly for that;
but I am converted to Susan B. Anthony."—Rochester Evening Express.
Delivered in most of the large cities of the United States, between
1870 and 1880. The speech never was written, and this abstract was
prepared from scattered notes and newspaper reports.
My purpose tonight is to demonstrate the great historical fact that
disfranchisement is not only political degradation, but also moral,
social, educational and industrial degradation; and that it does not
matter whether the disfranchised class live under a monarchial or a
republican form of government, or whether it be white workingmen of
England, negroes on our southern plantations, serfs of Russia, Chinamen
on our Pacific coast, or native born, tax-paying women of this republic.
Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show
me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.
Disfranchisement means inability to make, shape or control one's own
circumstances. The disfranchised must always do the work, accept the
wages, occupy the position the enfranchised assign to them. The
disfranchised are in the position of the pauper. You remember the old
adage, "Beggars must not be choosers;" they must take what they can get
or nothing! That is exactly the position of women in the world of work
today; they can not choose. If they could, do you for a moment believe
they would take the subordinate places and the inferior pay? Nor is it a
"new thing under the sun" for the disfranchised, the inferior classes
weighed down with wrongs, to declare they "do not want to vote." The
rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for
themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.
Years ago in England when the workingmen, starving in the mines and
factories, gathered in mobs and took bread wherever they could get it,
their friends tried to educate them into a knowledge of the causes of
their poverty and degradation. At one of these "monster bread meetings,"
held in Manchester, John Bright said to them, "Workingmen, what you need
to bring to you cheap bread and plenty of it, is the franchise;" but
those ignorant men shouted back to Mr. Bright, precisely as the women of
America do to us today, "It is not the vote we want, it is bread;" and
they broke up the meeting, refusing to allow him, their best friend, to
explain to them the powers of the franchise. The condition of those
workingmen was very little above that of slavery. Some of you may
remember when George Thompson came over to this country and rebuked us
for our crime and our curse of slavery, how the slaveholders and their
abettors shouted back to Mr. Thompson, "Look at home, look into your
mines and your factories, you have slavery in England."
You recollect a book published at that time entitled, "The Glory and
Shame of England." Her glory was the emancipation of slaves in the
British West Indies, and her shame the degraded and outraged condition
of those very miners and factory men. In their desperation, they
organized trades unions, went on strike, fought terrible battles, often
destroying property and sometimes even killing their employers. Those
who have read Charles Reade's novel, "Put Yourself in his Place," have
not forgotten the terrible scenes depicted. While those starving men
sometimes bettered their condition financially, they never made a ripple
on the surface of political thought. No member ever championed their
cause on the floor of Parliament. If spoken of at all, it was as our
politicians used to speak of the negroes before the war, or as they
speak of the Chinese today—as nuisances that ought to be suppressed.
But at length, through the persistent demands of a little handful of
reformers, there was introduced into the British Parliament the
"household suffrage" bill of 1867. John Stuart Mill not only championed
that bill as it was presented, but moved an amendment to strike out the
word "man" and substitute therefor the word "person," so that the bill
should read, "every person who shall pay a seven-pound rental per annum
shall be entitled to the franchise." You will see that Mr. Mill's motive
was to extend the suffrage to women as well as men. But when the vote
was taken, only seventy-four, out of the nearly seven hundred members of
the British Parliament, voted in its favor.
During the discussion of the original bill, the opposition was
championed by Robert Lowe, who presented all the stock objections to the
extension of the franchise to "those ignorant, degraded workingmen," as
he called them, that ever were presented in this country against giving
the ballot to the negroes, and that are today being urged against the
enfranchisement of women. Is it not a little remarkable that no matter
who the class may be that it is proposed to enfranchise, the objections
are always the same? "The ballot in the hands of this new class will
make their condition worse than before, and the introduction of this new
class into the political arena will degrade politics to a lower level."
But notwithstanding Mr. Lowe's persistent opposition, the bill became a
law; and before the session closed, that same individual moved that
Parliament, having enfranchised these men, should now make an
appropriation for the establishment and support of schools for the
education of them and their sons. Now, mark you his reason why! "Unless
they are educated," said he, "they will be the means of overturning the
throne of England." So long as these poor men in the mines and factories
had not the right to vote, the power to make and unmake the laws and
law-makers, to help or hurt the government, no measure ever had been
proposed for their benefit although they were ground under the heel of
the capitalist to a condition of abject slavery. But the moment this
power is placed in their hands, before they have used it even once, this
bitterest enemy to their possessing it is the first man to spring to his
feet and make this motion for the most beneficent measure possible in
their behalf—public schools for the education of themselves and their
children.
From that day to this, there never has been a session of the British
Parliament that has not had before it some measure for the benefit of
the working classes. Parliament has enacted laws compelling employers
to cut down the number of hours for a day's work, to pay better wages,
to build decent houses for their employes, and has prohibited the
employment of very young children in the mines and factories. The
history of those olden times records that not infrequently children were
born in the mines and passed their lives there, scarcely seeing the
sunlight from the day of their birth to the day of their death.
Sad as is the condition of the workingmen of England today, it is
infinitely better than it was twenty years ago. At first the votes of
the workingmen were given to the Liberal party, because it was the
leaders of that party who secured their enfranchisement; but soon the
leaders of the Conservative party, seeing the power the workingmen had,
began to vie with the Liberals by going into their meetings and pledging
that if they would vote the Tory ticket and bring that party into
control, it would give them more and better laws even than the Liberals.
In 1874 enough workingmen did go over to bring that party to the front,
with Disraeli at its head, where it stood till 1880 when the rank and
file of the workingmen of England, dissatisfied with Disraeli's policy,
both domestic and foreign, turned and again voted the Liberal ticket,
putting that party in power with Gladstone as its leader. This is the
way in which the ballot in the hands of the masses of wage-earners, even
under a monarchial form of government, makes of them a tremendous
balance of power whose wants and wishes the instinct of self-interest
compels the political leaders to study and obey.
The great distinctive advantage possessed by the workingmen of this
republic is that the son of the humblest citizen, black or white, has
equal chances with the son of the richest in the land if he take
advantage of the public schools, the colleges and the many opportunities
freely offered. It is this equality of rights which makes our nation a
home for the oppressed of all the monarchies of the old world.
And yet, notwithstanding the declaration of our Revolutionary fathers,
"all men created equal," "governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed," "taxation and representation
inseparable"—notwithstanding all these grand enunciations, our
government was founded upon the blood and bones of half a million human
beings, bought and sold as chattels in the market. Nearly all the
original thirteen States had property qualifications which disfranchised
poor white men as well as women and negroes. Thomas Jefferson, at the
head of the old Democratic party, took the lead in advocating the
removal of all property qualifications, as so many violations of the
fundamental principle of our government—"the right of consent." In New
York the qualification was $250. Martin Van Buren, the chief of the
Democracy, was a member of the Constitutional Convention held in Buffalo
in 1821, which wiped out that qualification so far as white men were
concerned. He declared, "The poor man has as good a right to a voice in
the government as the rich man, and a vastly greater need to possess it
as a means of protection to himself and his family." It was because the
Democrats enfranchised poor white men, both native and foreign, that
that strong old party held absolute sway in this country for almost
forty years, with only now and then a one-term Whig administration.
In those olden days Horace Greeley, at the head of the Whig party and
his glorious New York Tribune, used to write long editorials showing the
workingmen that they had a mistaken idea about the Democratic party;
that it was not so much the friend of the poor man as was the Whig, and
if they would but vote the Whig ticket and put that party in power, they
would find that it would give them better laws than the Democrats had
done. At length, after many, many years of such education and
persuasion, the workingmen's vote, native and foreign, was divided, and
in 1860 there came to the front a new party which, though not called
Whig, was largely made up of the old Whig elements. In its turn this new
party enfranchised another degraded class of labor. Because the
Republicans gave the ballot to negroes, they have been allied to that
party and have held it solid in power from the ratification of the
Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, to the present day. Until the Democrats
convince them that they will do more and better for them than the
Republicans are doing, there will be no appreciable division of the
negro vote.
The vast numbers of wage-earning men coming from Europe to this country,
where manhood suffrage prevails with no limitations, find themselves
invested at once with immense political power. They organize their
trades unions, but not being able to use the franchise intelligently,
they continue to strike and to fight their battles with the capitalists
just as they did in the old countries. Neither press nor politicians
dare to condemn these strikes or to demand their suppression because the
workingmen hold the balance of power and can use it for the success or
defeat of either party.
[Miss Anthony here related various timely instances of strikes
where force was used to prevent non-union men from taking the
places of the strikers, and neither the newspapers nor political
leaders ventured to sustain the officials in the necessary steps to
preserve law and order, or if they did they were defeated at the
next election.]
It is said women do not need the ballot for their protection because
they are supported by men. Statistics show that there are 3,000,000
women in this nation supporting themselves. In the crowded cities of the
East they are compelled to work in shops, stores and factories for the
merest pittance. In New York alone, there are over 50,000 of these women
receiving less than fifty cents a day. Women wage-earners in different
occupations have organized themselves into trades unions, from time to
time, and made their strikes to get justice at the hands of their
employers just as men have done, but I have yet to learn of a successful
strike of any body of women. The best organized one I ever knew was that
of the collar laundry women of the city of Troy, N. Y., the great
emporium for the manufacture of shirts, collars and cuffs. They formed a
trades union of several hundred members and demanded an increase of
wages. It was refused. So one May morning in 1867, each woman threw down
her scissors and her needle, her starch-pan and flat-iron, and for three
long months not one returned to the factories. At the end of that time
they were literally starved out, and the majority of them were compelled
to go back, but not at their old wages, for their employers cut them
down to even a lower figure.
In the winter following I met the president of this union, a bright
young Irish girl, and asked her, "Do you not think if you had been 500
carpenters or 500 masons, you would have succeeded?" "Certainly," she
said, and then she told me of 200 bricklayers who had the year before
been on strike and gained every point with their employers. "What could
have made the difference? Their 200 were but a fraction of that trade,
while your 500 absolutely controlled yours." Finally she said, "It was
because the editors ridiculed and denounced us." "Did they ridicule and
denounce the bricklayers?" "No." "What did they say about you?" "Why,
that our wages were good enough now, better than those of any other
workingwomen except teachers; and if we weren't satisfied, we had better
go and get married." "What then do you think made this difference?"
After studying over the question awhile she concluded, "It must have
been because our employers bribed the editors." "Couldn't the employers
of the bricklayers have bribed the editors?" She had never thought of
that. Most people never do think; they see one thing totally unlike
another, but the person who stops to inquire into the cause that
produces the one or the other is the exception. So this young Irish girl
was simply not an exception, but followed the general rule of people,
whether men or women; she hadn't thought. In the case of the
bricklayers, no editor, either Democrat or Republican, would have
accepted the proffer of a bribe, because he would have known that if he
denounced or ridiculed those men, not only they but all the trades union
men of the city at the next election would vote solidly against the
nominees advocated by that editor. If those collar laundry women had
been voters, they would have held, in that little city of Troy, the
"balance of political power" and the editor or the politician who
ignored or insulted them would have turned that balance over to the
opposing party.
My friends, the condition of those collar laundry women but represents
the utter helplessness of disfranchisement. The question with you, as
men, is not whether you want your wives and daughters to vote, nor with
you, as women, whether you yourselves want to vote; but whether you will
help to put this power of the ballot into the hands of the 3,000,000
wage-earning women, so that they may be able to compel politicians to
legislate in their favor and employers to grant them justice.
The law of capital is to extort the greatest amount of work for the
least amount of money; the rule of labor is to do the smallest amount of
work for the largest amount of money. Hence there is, and in the nature
of things must continue to be, antagonism between the two classes;
therefore, neither should be left wholly at the mercy of the other.
It was cruel, under the old regime, to give rich men the right to rule
poor men. It was wicked to allow white men absolute power over black
men. It is vastly more cruel, more wicked to give to all men—rich and
poor, white and black, native and foreign, educated and ignorant,
virtuous and vicious—this absolute control over women. Men talk of the
injustice of monopolies. There never was, there never can be, a monopoly
so fraught with injustice, tyranny and degradation as this monopoly of
sex, of all men over all women. Therefore I not only agree with Abraham
Lincoln that, "No man is good enough to govern another man without his
consent;" but I say also that no man is good enough to govern a woman
without her consent, and still further, that all men combined in
government are not good enough to govern all women without their
consent. There might have been some plausible excuse for the rich
governing the poor, the educated governing the ignorant, the Saxon
governing the African; but there can be none for making the husband the
ruler of the wife, the brother of the sister, the man of the woman, his
peer in birth, in education, in social position, in all that stands for
the best and highest in humanity.
I believe that by nature men are no more unjust than women. If from the
beginning women had maintained the right to rule not only themselves but
men also, the latter today doubtless would be occupying the subordinate
places with inferior pay in the world of work; women would be holding
the higher positions with the big salaries; widowers would be doomed to
a "life interest of one-third of the family estate;" husbands would "owe
service" to their wives, so that every one of you men would be begging
your good wives, "Please be so kind as to 'give me' ten cents for a
cigar." The principle of self-government can not be violated with
impunity. The individual's right to it is sacred—regardless of class,
caste, race, color, sex or any other accident or incident of birth. What
we ask is that you shall cease to imagine that women are outside this
law, and that you shall come into the knowledge that disfranchisement
means the same degradation to your daughters as to your sons.
Governments can not afford to ignore the rights of those holding the
ballot, who make and unmake every law and law-maker. It is not because
the members of Congress are tyrants that women receive only half pay and
are admitted only to inferior positions in the departments. It is simply
in obedience to a law of political economy which makes it impossible for
a government to do as much for the disfranchised as for the
enfranchised. Women are no exception to the general rule. As
disfranchisement always has degraded men, socially, morally and
industrially, so today it is disfranchisement that degrades women in the
same spheres.
Again men say it is not votes, but the law of supply and demand which
regulates wages. The law of gravity is that water shall run down hill,
but when men build a dam across the stream, the force of gravity is
stopped and the water held back. The law of supply and demand regulates
free and enfranchised labor, but disfranchisement estops its operation.
What we ask is the removal of the dam, that women, like men, may reap
the benefit of the law. Did the law of supply and demand regulate work
and wages in the olden days of slavery? This law can no more reach the
disfranchised than it did the enslaved. There is scarcely a place where
a woman can earn a single dollar without a man's consent.
There are many women equally well qualified with men for principals and
superintendents of schools, and yet, while three-fourths of the teachers
are women, nearly all of them are relegated to subordinate positions on
half or at most two-thirds the salaries paid to men. The law of supply
and demand is ignored, and that of sex alone settles the question. If a
business man should advertise for a book-keeper and ten young men,
equally well qualified, should present themselves and, after looking
them over, he should say, "To you who have red hair, we will pay full
wages, while to you with black hair we will pay half the regular price;"
that would not be a more flagrant violation of the law of supply and
demand than is that now perpetrated upon women because of their sex.
And then again you say, "Capital, not the vote, regulates labor."
Granted, for the sake of the argument, that capital does control the
labor of women, Chinamen and slaves; but no one with eyes to see and
ears to hear, will concede for a moment that capital absolutely
dominates the work and wages of the free and enfranchised men of this
republic. It is in order to lift the millions of our wage-earning women
into a position of as much power over their own labor as men possess
that they should be invested with the franchise. This ought to be done
not only for the sake of justice to the women, but to the men with whom
they compete; for, just so long as there is a degraded class of labor in
the market, it always will be used by the capitalists to checkmate and
undermine the superior classes.
Now that as a result of the agitation for equality of chances, and
through the invention of machinery, there has come a great revolution in
the world of economics, so that wherever a man may go to earn an honest
dollar a woman may go also, there is no escape from the conclusion that
she must be clothed with equal power to protect herself. That power is
the ballot, the symbol of freedom and equality, without which no citizen
is sure of keeping even that which he hath, much less of getting that
which he hath not. Women are today the peers of men in education, in the
arts and sciences, in the industries and professions, and there is no
escape from the conclusion that the next step must be to make them the
peers of men in the government—city, State and national—to give them
an equal voice in the framing, interpreting and administering of the
codes and constitutions.
We recognize that the ballot is a two-edged, nay, a many-edged sword,
which may be made to cut in every direction. If wily politicians and
sordid capitalists may wield it for mere party and personal greed; if
oppressed wage-earners may invoke it to wring justice from legislators
and extort material advantages from employers; if the lowest and most
degraded classes of men may use it to open wide the sluice-ways of vice
and crime; if it may be the instrumentality by which the narrow,
selfish, corrupt and corrupting men and measures rule—it is quite as
true that noble-minded statesmen, philanthropists and reformers may make
it the weapon with which to reverse the above order of things, as soon
as they can have added to their now small numbers the immensely larger
ratio of what men so love to call "the better half of the people." When
women vote, they will make a new balance of power that must be weighed
and measured and calculated in its effect upon every social and moral
question which goes to the arbitrament of the ballot-box. Who can doubt
that when the representative women of thought and culture, who are today
the moral backbone of our nation, sit in counsel with the best men of
the country, higher conditions will be the result?
Insurrectionary and revolutionary methods of righting wrongs, imaginary
or real, are pardonable only in the enslaved and disfranchised. The
moment any class of men possess the ballot, it is their weapon and their
shield. Men with a vote have no valid excuse for resorting to the use of
illegal means to fight their battles. When the masses of wage-earning
men are educated into a knowledge of their own rights and of their
duties to others, so that they are able to vote intelligently, they can
carry their measures through the ballot-box and will have no need to
resort to force. But so long as they remain in ignorance and are
manipulated by the political bosses they will continue to vote against
their own interests and turn again to violence to right their wrongs.
If men possessing the power of the ballot are driven to desperate means
to gain their ends, what shall be done by disfranchised women? There are
grave questions of moral, as well as of material interest in which women
are most deeply concerned. Denied the ballot, the legitimate means with
which to exert their influence, and, as a rule, being lovers of peace,
they have recourse to prayers and tears, those potent weapons of women
and children, and, when they fail, must tamely submit to wrong or rise
in rebellion against the powers that be. Women's crusades against
saloons, brothels and gambling-dens, emptying kegs and bottles into the
streets, breaking doors and windows and burning houses, all go to prove
that disfranchisement, the denial of lawful means to gain desired ends,
may drive even women to violations of law and order. Hence to secure
both national and "domestic tranquillity," to "establish justice," to
carry out the spirit of our Constitution, put into the hands of all
women, as you have into those of all men, the ballot, that symbol of
perfect equality, that right protective of all other rights.
First delivered at Chicago in the Spring of 1875, in the Sunday
afternoon Dime lecture course.
Though women, as a class, are much less addicted to drunkenness and
licentiousness than men, it is universally conceded that they are by far
the greater sufferers from these evils. Compelled by their position in
society to depend on men for subsistence, for food, clothes, shelter,
for every chance even to earn a dollar, they have no way of escape from
the besotted victims of appetite and passion with whom their lot is
cast. They must endure, if not endorse, these twin vices, embodied, as
they so often are, in the person of father, brother, husband, son,
employer. No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous
woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral
husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical
abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man
himself can not possibly comprehend.
It is not my purpose to harrow your feelings by any attempt at depicting
the horrible agonies of mind and body that grow out of these monster
social evils. They are already but too well known. Scarce a family
throughout our broad land but has had its peace and happiness marred by
one or the other, or both. That these evils exist, we all know; that
something must be done, we as well know; that the old methods have
failed, that man, alone, has proved himself incompetent to eradicate, or
even regulate them, is equally evident. It shall be my endeavor,
therefore, to prove to you that we must now adopt new measures and bring
to our aid new forces to accomplish the desired end.
Forty years' efforts by men alone to suppress the evil of intemperance
give us the following appalling figures: 600,000 common drunkards!
Which, reckoning our population to be 40,000,000, gives us one drunkard
to every seventeen moderate drinking and total-abstinence men. Granting
to each of these 600,000 drunkards a wife and four children, we have
3,000,000 of the women and children of this nation helplessly,
hopelessly bound to this vast army of irresponsible victims of appetite.
[Reference was here made to woman's helplessness under the laws.]
The roots of the giant evil, intemperance, are not merely moral and
social; they extend deep and wide into the financial and political
structure of the government; and whenever women, or men, shall
intelligently and seriously set themselves about the work of uprooting
the liquor traffic, they will find something more than tears and prayers
needful to the task. Financial and political power must be combined
with moral and social influence, all bound together in one earnest,
energetic, persistent force.
[Statistics given of pauperism, lunacy, idiocy and crime growing
out of intemperance.]
The prosecutions in our courts for breach of promise, divorce, adultery,
bigamy, seduction, rape; the newspaper reports every day of every year
of scandals and outrages, of wife murders and paramour shootings, of
abortions and infanticides, are perpetual reminders of men's incapacity
to cope successfully with this monster evil of society.
The statistics of New York show the number of professional prostitutes
in that city to be over twenty thousand. Add to these the thousands and
tens of thousands of Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, New Orleans, St.
Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and all our cities, great and small, from
ocean to ocean, and what a holocaust of the womanhood of this nation is
sacrificed to the insatiate Moloch of lust. And yet more: those myriads
of wretched women, publicly known as prostitutes, constitute but a small
portion of the numbers who actually tread the paths of vice and crime.
For, as the oft-broken ranks of the vast army of common drunkards are
steadily filled by the boasted moderate drinkers, so are the ranks of
professional prostitution continually replenished by discouraged,
seduced, deserted unfortunates, who can no longer hide the terrible
secret of their lives.
The Albany Law Journal, of December, 1876, says: "The laws of
infanticide must be a dead letter in the District of Columbia. According
to the reports of the local officials, the dead bodies of infants,
still-born and murdered, which have been found during the past year,
scattered over parks and vacant lots in the city of Washington, are to
be numbered by hundreds."
In 1869 the Catholics established a Foundling Hospital in New York City.
At the close of the first six months Sister Irene reported thirteen
hundred little waifs laid in the basket at her door. That meant thirteen
hundred of the daughters of New York, with trembling hands and breaking
hearts, trying to bury their sorrow and their shame from the world's
cruel gaze. That meant thirteen hundred mothers' hopes blighted and
blasted. Thirteen hundred Rachels weeping for their children because
they were not!
Nor is it womanhood alone that is thus fearfully sacrificed. For every
betrayed woman, there is always the betrayer, man. For every abandoned
woman, there is always one abandoned man and oftener many more. It is
estimated that there are 50,000 professional prostitutes in London, and
Dr. Ryan calculates that there are 400,000 men in that city directly or
indirectly connected with them, and that this vice causes the city an
annual expenditure of $40,000,000.
All attempts to describe the loathsome and contagious disease which it
engenders defy human language. The Rev. Wm. G. Eliot, of St. Louis, says
of it: "Few know of the terrible nature of the disease in question and
its fearful ravages, not only among the guilty, but the innocent. Since
its first recognized appearance in Europe in the fifteenth century, it
has been a desolation and a scourge. In its worst forms it is so subtle,
that its course can with difficulty be traced. It poisons the
constitution, and may be imparted to others by those who have no outward
or distinguishable marks of it themselves. It may be propagated months
and years after it seems to have been cured. The purity of womanhood and
the helplessness of infancy afford no certainty of escape."
[Medical testimony given from cities in Europe.]
Man's legislative attempts to set back this fearful tide of social
corruption have proved even more futile and disastrous than have those
for the suppression of intemperance—as witness the Contagious Diseases
Acts of England and the St. Louis experiment. And yet efforts to
establish similar laws are constantly made in our large cities, New York
and Washington barely escaping last winter.
To license certain persons to keep brothels and saloons is but to throw
around them and their traffic the shield of law, and thereby to blunt
the edge of all moral and social efforts against them. Nevertheless, in
every large city, brothels are virtually licensed. When "Maggie Smith"
is made to appear before the police court at the close of each quarter,
to pay her fine of $10, $25 or $100, as an inmate or a keeper of a
brothel, and allowed to continue her vocation, so long as she pays her
fine, that is license. When a grand jury fails to find cause for
indictment against a well-known keeper of a house of ill-fame, that,
too, is permission for her and all of her class to follow their trade,
against the statute laws of the State, and that with impunity.
The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the
penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this
violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it. These causes
are said to be wholly different with the sexes. The acknowledged
incentive to this vice on the part of man is his own abnormal passion;
while on the part of woman, in the great majority of cases, it is
conceded to be destitution—absolute want of the necessaries of life.
Lecky, the famous historian of European morals, says: "The statistics of
prostitution show that a great proportion of those women who have fallen
into it have been impelled by the most extreme poverty, in many
instances verging on starvation." All other conscientious students of
this terrible problem, on both continents, agree with Mr. Lecky. Hence,
there is no escape from the conclusion that, while woman's want of bread
induces her to pursue this vice, man's love of the vice itself leads him
into it and holds him there. While statistics show no lessening of the
passional demand on the part of man, they reveal a most frightful
increase of the temptations, the necessities, on the part of woman.
In the olden times, when the daughters of the family, as well as the
wife, were occupied with useful and profitable work in the household,
getting the meals and washing the dishes three times in every day of
every year, doing the baking, the brewing, the washing and the ironing,
the whitewashing, the butter and cheese and soap making, the mending and
the making of clothes for the entire family, the carding, spinning and
weaving of the cloth—when everything to eat, to drink and to wear was
manufactured in the home, almost no young women "went out to work." But
now, when nearly all these handicrafts are turned over to men and to
machinery, tens of thousands, nay, millions, of the women of both
hemispheres are thrust into the world's outer market of work to earn
their own subsistence. Society, ever slow to change its conditions,
presents to these millions but few and meager chances. Only the barest
necessaries, and oftentimes not even those, can be purchased with the
proceeds of the most excessive and exhausting labor.
Hence, the reward of virtue for the homeless, friendless, penniless
woman is ever a scanty larder, a pinched, patched, faded wardrobe, a
dank basement or rickety garret, with the colder, shabbier scorn and
neglect of the more fortunate of her sex. Nightly, as weary and worn
from her day's toil she wends her way through the dark alleys toward her
still darker abode, where only cold and hunger await her, she sees on
every side and at every turn the gilded hand of vice and crime
outstretched, beckoning her to food and clothes and shelter; hears the
whisper in softest accents, "Come with me and I will give you all the
comforts, pleasures and luxuries that love and wealth can bestow." Since
the vast multitudes of human beings, women like men, are not born to the
courage or conscience of the martyr, can we wonder that so many poor
girls fall, that so many accept material ease and comfort at the expense
of spiritual purity and peace? Should we not wonder, rather, that so
many escape the sad fate?
Clearly, then, the first step toward solving this problem is to lift
this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above
the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves, in marriage or out,
for bread and shelter. To do that, girls, like boys, must be educated to
some lucrative employment; women, like men, must have equal chances to
earn a living. If the plea that poverty is the cause of woman's
prostitution be not true, perfect equality of chances to earn honest
bread will demonstrate the falsehood by removing that pretext and
placing her on the same plane with man. Then, if she is found in the
ranks of vice and crime, she will be there for the same reason that man
is and, from an object of pity, she, like him, will become a fit subject
of contempt. From being the party sinned against, she will become an
equal sinner, if not the greater of the two. Women, like men, must not
only have "fair play" in the world of work and self-support, but, like
men, must be eligible to all the honors and emoluments of society and
government. Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a
necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way
to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the
making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life. That
equality of rights and privileges is vested in the ballot, the symbol of
power in a republic. Hence, our first and most urgent demand—that women
shall be protected in the exercise of their inherent, personal,
citizen's right to a voice in the government, municipal, state,
national.
Alexander Hamilton said one hundred years ago, "Give to a man the right
over my subsistence, and he has power over my whole moral being." No one
doubts the truth of this assertion as between man and man; while, as
between man and woman, not only does almost no one believe it, but the
masses of people deny it. And yet it is the fact of man's possession of
this right over woman's subsistence which gives to him the power to
dictate to her a moral code vastly higher and purer than the one he
chooses for himself. Not less true is it, that the fact of woman's
dependence on man for her subsistence renders her utterly powerless to
exact from him the same high moral code she chooses for herself.
Of the 8,000,000 women over twenty-one years of age in the United
States, 800,000, one out of every ten, are unmarried, and fully one-half
of the entire number, or 4,000,000, support themselves wholly or in part
by the industry of their own hands and brains. All of these, married or
single, have to ask man, as an individual, a corporation, or a
government, to grant to them even the privilege of hard work and small
pay. The tens of thousands of poor but respectable young girls
soliciting copying, clerkships, shop work, teaching, must ask of men,
and not seldom receive in response, "Why work for a living? There are
other ways!"
Whoever controls work and wages, controls morals. Therefore, we must
have women employers, superintendents, committees, legislators; wherever
girls go to seek the means of subsistence, there must be some woman.
Nay, more; we must have women preachers, lawyers, doctors—that wherever
women go to seek counsel—spiritual, legal, physical—there, too, they
will be sure to find the best and noblest of their own sex to minister
to them.
Independence is happiness. "No man should depend upon another; not even
upon his own father. By depend I mean, obey without examination—to the
will of any one whomsoever." This is the conclusion to which Pierre, the
hero of Madame Sand's "Monsieur Sylvestre," arrives, after running away
from the uncle who had determined to marry him to a woman he did not
choose to wed. In freedom he discovers that, though deprived of all the
luxuries to which he had been accustomed, he is happy, and writes his
friend that "without having realized it, he had been unhappy all his
life; had suffered from his dependent condition; that nothing in his
life, his pleasures, his occupations, had been of his own choice." And
is not this the precise condition of what men call the "better half" of
the human family?
In one of our western cities I once met a beautiful young woman, a
successful teacher in its public schools, an only daughter who had left
her New England home and all its comforts and luxuries and culture. Her
father was a member of Congress and could bring to her all the
attractions of Washington society. That young girl said to me, "The
happiest moment of my life was when I received into my hand my first
month's salary for teaching." Not long after, I met her father in
Washington, spoke to him of his noble daughter, and he said: "Yes, you
woman's rights people have robbed me of my only child and left the home
of my old age sad and desolate. Would to God that the notion of
supporting herself had never entered her head!" Had that same lovely,
cultured, energetic young girl left the love, the luxury, the protection
of that New England home for marriage, instead of self-support; had she
gone out to be the light and joy of a husband's life, instead of her
own; had she but chosen another man, instead of her father, to decide
for her all her pleasures and occupations; had she but taken another
position of dependence, instead of one of independence, neither her
father nor the world would have felt the change one to be condemned....
Fathers should be most particular about the men who visit their
daughters, and, to further this reform, pure women not only must refuse
to meet intimately and to marry impure men, but, finding themselves
deceived in their husbands, they must refuse to continue in the
marriage relation with them. We have had quite enough of the sickly
sentimentalism which counts the woman a heroine and a saint for
remaining the wife of a drunken, immoral husband, incurring the risk of
her own health and poisoning the life-blood of the young beings that
result from this unholy alliance. Such company as ye keep, such ye are!
must be the maxim of married, as well as unmarried, women....
[Numerous instances cited of the unjust discrimination against
women where men were equally guilty.]
So long as the wife is held innocent in continuing to live with a
libertine, and every girl whom he inveigles and betrays becomes an
outcast whom no other wife will tolerate in her house, there is, there
can be, no hope of solving the problem of prostitution. As long
experience has shown, these poor, homeless girls of the world can not be
relied on, as a police force, to hold all husbands true to their
marriage vows. Here and there, they will fail and, where they do, wives
must make not the girls alone, but their husbands also suffer for their
infidelity, as husbands never fail to do when their wives weakly or
wickedly yield to the blandishments of other men.
[Examples given to prove this point.]
In a western city the wives conspired to burn down a house of ill-fame
in which their husbands had placed a half-dozen of the demi-monde. Would
it not have shown much more womanly wisdom and virtue for those legal
wives to have refused to recognize their husbands, instead of wreaking
their vengeance on the heads of those wretched women? But how could they
without finding themselves, as a result, penniless and homeless? The
person, the services, the children, the subsistence, of each and every
one of those women belonged by law, not to herself, but to her
unfaithful husband.
Now, why is it that man can hold woman to this high code of morals, like
Cæsar's wife—not only pure but above suspicion—and so surely and
severely punish her for every departure, while she is so helpless, so
powerless to check him in his license, or to extricate herself from his
presence and control? His power grows out of his right over her
subsistence. Her lack of power grows out of her dependence on him for
her food, her clothes, her shelter.
Marriage never will cease to be a wholly unequal partnership until the
law recognizes the equal ownership in the joint earnings and
possessions. The true relation of the sexes never can be attained until
woman is free and equal with man. Neither in the making nor executing of
the laws regulating these relations has woman ever had the slightest
voice. The statutes for marriage and divorce, for adultery, breach of
promise, seduction, rape, bigamy, abortion, infanticide—all were made
by men. They, alone, decide who are guilty of violating these laws and
what shall be their punishment, with judge, jury and advocate all men,
with no woman's voice heard in our courts, save as accused or witness,
and in many cases the married woman is denied the poor privilege of
testifying as to her own guilt or innocence of the crime charged against
her.
Since the days of Moses and the prophets, men and ministers have
preached the law of "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children and the children's children, to the third and fourth
generations." But with absolute power over woman and all the conditions
of life for the whole 6,000 years, man has proved his utter inability
either to put away his own iniquities, or to cease to hand them down
from generation to generation; hence, the only hope of reform is in
sharing this absolute power with some other than himself, and that other
must be woman. When no longer a subject, but an equal—a free and
independent sovereign, believing herself created primarily for her own
individual happiness and development and secondarily for man's,
precisely as man believes himself created first for his own enjoyment
and second for that of woman—she will constitute herself sole umpire in
the sacred domain of motherhood. Then, instead of feeling it her
Christian duty to live with a drunken, profligate husband, handing down
to her children his depraved appetites and passions, she will know
that God's curse will be upon her and her children if she flee not from
him as from a pestilence.
It is worse than folly, it is madness, for women to delude themselves
with the idea that their children will escape the terrible penalty of
the law. The taint of their birth will surely follow them. For pure
women to continue to devote themselves to their man-appointed mission of
visiting the dark purlieus of society and struggling to reclaim the
myriads of badly-born human beings swarming there, is as hopeless as
would be an attempt to ladle the ocean with a teaspoon; as
unphilosophical as was the undertaking of the old American Colonization
Society, which, with great labor and pains and money, redeemed from
slavery and transported to Liberia annually 400 negroes; or the Fugitive
Slave Societies, which succeeded in running off to Canada, on their
"under-ground railroads," some 40,000 in a whole quarter of a century.
While those good men were thus toiling to rescue the 400 or the 40,000
individual victims of slavery, each day saw hundreds and each year
thousands of human beings born into the terrible condition of
chattelism. All see and admit now what none but the Abolitionists saw
then, that the only effectual work was the entire overthrow of the
system of slavery; the abrogation of the law which sanctioned the right
of property in man.
In answer to my proposal to speak in one of the cities of Iowa, an
earnest woman replied, "It is impossible to get you an audience; all of
our best women are at present engaged in an effort to establish a 'Home
for the Friendless.' All the churches are calling for the entire time of
their members to get up fairs, dinners, concerts, etc., to raise money.
In fact, even our woman suffragists are losing themselves in devotion to
some institution."
Thus, wherever you go, you find the best women, in and out of the
churches, all absorbed in establishing or maintaining benevolent or
reform institutions; charitable societies, soup-houses, ragged schools,
industrial schools, mite societies, mission schools—at home and
abroad—homes and hospitals for the sick, the aged, the friendless, the
foundling, the fallen; asylums for the orphans, the blind, the deaf and
dumb, the insane, the inebriate, the idiot. The women of this century
are neither idle nor indifferent. They are working with might and main
to mitigate the evils which stare them in the face on every side, but
much of their work is without knowledge. It is aimed at the effects, not
the cause; it is plucking the spoiled fruit; it is lopping off the
poisonous branches of the deadly upas tree, which but makes the root
more vigorous in sending out new shoots in every direction. A right
understanding of physiological law teaches us that the cause must be
removed; the tree must be girdled; the tap-root must be severed.
The tap-root of our social upas lies deep down at the very foundations
of society. It is woman's dependence. It is woman's subjection. Hence,
the first and only efficient work must be to emancipate woman from her
enslavement. The wife must no longer echo the poet Milton's ideal Eve,
when she adoringly said to Adam, "God, thy law; thou, mine!" She must
feel herself accountable to God alone for every act, fearing and obeying
no man, save where his will is in line with her own highest idea of
divine law.
The president of the Howard Mission School, New York, said, "Miss
Anthony, it is a marvel to me that, with so much brain and common sense,
you should always devote yourself to mere abstractions. Why is it that
you never set yourself about some practical work?"
"Like the Howard Mission?" said I. "How many less children have you now
than ten years ago?"
"Oh, no less, but many, many more."
"Would it not be a practical work, then, to make it possible for every
mother to support her own children? That is my aim and my work; while
yours is simply to pick up the poor children, leaving every girl-child
to the mother's heritage of helpless poverty and vice. My aim is to
change the condition of women to self-help; yours, simply to ameliorate
the ills that must inevitably grow out of dependence. My work is to
lessen the numbers of the poor; yours, merely to lessen the sufferings
of their tenfold increase."
If the divine law visits the sins of the fathers upon the children,
equally so does it transmit to them their virtues. Therefore, if it is
through woman's ignorant subjection to the tyranny of man's appetites
and passions that the life-current of the race is corrupted, then must
it be through her intelligent emancipation that the race shall be
redeemed from the curse, and her children and children's children rise
up to call her blessed. When the mother of Christ shall be made the true
model of womanhood and motherhood, when the office of maternity shall be
held sacred and the mother shall consecrate herself, as did Mary, to the
one idea of bringing forth the Christ-child, then, and not till then,
will this earth see a new order of men and women, prone to good rather
than evil.
I am a full and firm believer in the revelation that it is through woman
that the race is to be redeemed. And it is because of this faith that I
ask for her immediate and unconditional emancipation from all political,
industrial, social and religious subjection.
"What is most needed to ensure the future greatness of the empire?"
inquired Madame Campan of the great Napoleon. "Mothers!" was the terse
and suggestive reply. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Men are what their
mothers made them." But I say, to hold mothers responsible for the
character of their sons while you deny them any control over the
surroundings of their lives, is worse than mockery, it is cruelty!
Responsibilities grow out of rights and powers. Therefore, before
mothers can be held responsible for the vices and crimes, the wholesale
demoralization of men, they must possess all possible rights and powers
to control the conditions and circumstances of their own and their
children's lives.
A minister of Chicago sums up the infamies of that great metropolis of
the West as follows: 3,000 licensed dram-shops and myriad patrons; 300
gambling houses and countless frequenters, many of them young men from
the best families of the city; 79 obscene theatres, with their thousands
of degraded men and boys nightly in attendance; 500 brothels, with their
thousands of poor girls, bodies and souls sacrificed to the 20,000 or
30,000 depraved men—young and old, married and single—who visit them.
While all the participants in all these forms of iniquity, victims and
victimizers alike—the women excepted—may go to the polls on every
election day and vote for the mayor and members of the common council,
who will either continue to license these places, or fail to enforce the
laws which would practically close them—not a single woman in that city
may record her vote against those wretched blots on civilization. The
profane, tobacco-chewing, whiskey-drinking, gambling libertines may
vote, but not their virtuous, intelligent, sober, law-abiding wives and
mothers!
You remember the petition of 18,000 of the best women of Chicago, a year
ago, asking the common council not to repeal the Sunday Liquor Law? Why
were they treated with ridicule and contempt? Why was their prayer
unheeded? Was it because the honorable gentlemen had no respect for
those women or their demand? No; on the contrary, many of them,
doubtless, were men possessed of high regard for women, who would have
been glad to aid them in their noble efforts; but the power that placed
those men in office, the representatives of the saloons, brothels and
obscene shows, crowded the council chamber and its corridors,
threatening political death to the man who should dare give his voice or
his vote for the maintenance of that law. Could those 18,000 women, with
the tens of thousands whom they represented, have gone to the ballot-box
at the next election and voted to re-elect the men who championed their
petition, and defeat those who opposed it, does any one doubt that it
would have been heeded by the common council?
As the fountain can rise no higher than the spring that feeds it, so a
legislative body will enact or enforce no law above the average
sentiment of the people who created it. Any and every reform work is
sure to lead women to the ballot-box. It is idle for them to hope to
battle successfully against the monster evils of society until they
shall be armed with weapons equal to those of the enemy—votes and
money. Archimedes said, "Give to me a fulcrum on which to plant my
lever, and I will move the world." And I say, give to woman the ballot,
the political fulcrum, on which to plant her moral lever, and she will
lift the world into a nobler and purer atmosphere.
Two great necessities forced this nation to extend justice and equality
to the negro:
First, Military necessity, which compelled the abolition of the crime
and curse of slavery, before the rebellion could be overcome.
Second, Political necessity, which required the enfranchisement of the
newly-freed men, before the work of reconstruction could begin.
The third is now pressing, Moral necessity—to emancipate woman, before
Social Purity, the nation's safeguard, ever can be established.
Republican Nominee for President.
Indianapolis, Ind., June 30, 1888.
Dear Sir: We, representatives of the National Woman Suffrage
Association, respectfully ask you to consider the following facts:
The first plank in the platform adopted by the Republican convention
recently held in Chicago, entitled "The Purity of the Ballot," reaffirms
the unswerving devotion of the Republican party to the personal rights
and liberties of citizens in all the States and Territories of the
Union, and especially to "the supreme and sovereign right of every
lawful citizen, rich or poor, native or foreign, white or black, to cast
one free ballot in public elections and to have that ballot duly
counted." And again the platform says: "We hold the free and honest
popular ballot, and the just and equal representation of all the people,
to be the foundation of our republican government."
These declarations place the Republican party in its original attitude
as the defender of the personal freedom and political liberties of all
citizens of the United States. These sentiments, even the phraseology in
which they are here expressed, may be found in every series of
resolutions adopted by the National Woman Suffrage Association since its
organization.
The advocates of woman suffrage would have been glad to see the phrase
"male or female" inserted after the phrase "white or black" in the
resolution above quoted, because this would be a fitting conclusion to
the enumeration by antithesis of the classes into which citizens are
divided. However, no enumeration of classes was necessary to explain or
to enforce the declaration of the party's devotion to "the supreme and
sovereign right of every lawful citizen to cast one free ballot in
public elections and to have that ballot duly counted." It is the
unimpeded exercise of this "supreme and sovereign right of every lawful
citizen" which the women we represent demand.
That women are "lawful citizens" is undeniable, since the law recognizes
them as such through the visits of the assessor and tax-gatherer; since
it recognizes them as such in the police stations, the jails, the courts
and the prisons. Only at the ballot-box is the lawful citizenship of
women challenged! Only at the ballot-box, which is declared to be the
sole safe-guard of the citizen's liberty—only there is the liberty of
the female citizen denied.
But reverting to the first resolution in the Republican platform, so
satisfactory in its sentiments, we beg to suggest that its value will
depend solely upon its interpretation, and that its authoritative
interpretation must be given by the leaders of the Republican party.
Therefore to you, the chosen head of that party, we address ourselves,
asking that your letter of acceptance of the nomination to the
presidency of the United States be so framed as to indicate clearly your
recognition of the fact that the Republican party has pledged itself to
protect every citizen in the free exercise of "the supreme and
sovereign right" to vote at public elections.
It appears to us that the application of Republican principles which we
seek must be in harmony with your own inherited tendencies. One familiar
with the history of the English-speaking people, during the last two and
a half centuries, with their struggles for conscience, and freedom's
sake, must deem it a matter of course that by this time the sense of
individual responsibility has become strong even in the hearts of women;
and the descendant of one who in the name of individual liberty stood
with Cromwell against the "divine right of kings" and the tyranny
consequent upon that obnoxious doctrine, can not be surprised to find
himself appealed to by his country-women, in that same sacred name, to
stand with the most enlightened portion of his party—with such men as
Morton, Sumner and Lincoln—against the divine right of sex and the
political tyranny involved in this doctrine, which in a republic
presents such an anomaly.
Hoping that the question suggested by this appeal will command from you
the attention which its importance merits, we subscribe ourselves,
Yours with high esteem,
Susan B. Anthony,
Vice-President-at-Large N. W. S. A.
May Wright Sewall,
Chairman Executive Committee N. W. S. A.
Delivered in Kansas City at the opening of the campaign, May 4, 1894.
I come to you tonight not as a stranger, not as an outsider but, in
spirit and in every sense, as one of you. I have been connected with you
by the ties of relationship for nearly forty years. Twenty-seven years
ago I canvassed this entire State of Kansas in your first woman suffrage
campaign. During the last decade I have made a speaking tour of your
congressional districts over and over again. Now I come once more to
appeal to you for justice to the women of your State.
To preface, I want to say that when the rebellion broke out in this
country, we of the woman suffrage movement postponed our meetings, and
organized ourselves into a great National Women's Loyal League with
headquarters in the city of New York. We sent out thousands of petitions
praying Congress to abolish slavery, as a war measure, and to these
petitions we obtained 365,000 signatures. They were presented by Charles
Sumner, that noblest Republican of them all, and it took two stalwart
negroes to carry them into the Senate chamber. We did our work
faithfully all those years. Other women scraped lint, made jellies,
ministered to sick and suffering soldiers and in every way worked for
the help of the government in putting down that rebellion. No man, no
Republican leader, worked more faithfully or loyally than did the women
of this nation in every city and county of the North to aid the
government.
In 1865 I made my first visit to Kansas and, on the 2d of July, went by
stage from Leavenworth to Topeka. O, how I remember those first acres
and miles of cornfields I ever had seen; how I remember that ride to
Topeka and from there in an open mail wagon to Ottumwa, where I was one
of the speakers at the Fourth of July celebration. Those were the days,
as you recollect, just after the murder of Lincoln and the accession to
the presidential chair of Andrew Johnson, who had issued his
proclamation for the reconstruction of Mississippi. So the question of
the negro's enfranchisement was uppermost in the minds of leading
Republicans, though no one save Charles Sumner had dared to speak it
aloud. In that speech, I clearly stated that the government never would
be reconstructed, that peace never would reign and justice never be
uppermost until not only the black men were enfranchised but also the
women of the entire nation. The men congratulated me upon my speech, the
first part of it, every word I said about negro suffrage, but declared
that I should not have mentioned woman suffrage at so critical an hour.
A little later the Associated Press dispatch came that motions had been
made on the floor of the House of Representatives at Washington to
insert the word "male" in the second clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment. You remember the first clause, "All persons born or
naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they
reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges and immunities of citizens." That was magnificent. Every
woman of us saw that it included the women of the nation as well as
black men. The second section, as Thaddeus Stevens drew it, said, "If
any State shall disfranchise any of its citizens on account of color,
all that class shall be counted out of the basis of representation;" but
at once the enemy asked, "Do you mean that if any State shall
disfranchise its negro women, you are going to count all of the black
race out of the basis of representation?" And weak-kneed Republicans,
after having fought such a glorious battle, surrendered; they could not
stand the taunt. Charles Sumner said he wrote over nineteen pages of
foolscap in order to keep the word "male" out of the Constitution; but
he could not do it so he with the rest subscribed to the amendment: "If
any State shall disfranchise any of its MALE citizens all of that class
shall be counted out of the basis of representation."
There was the first great surrender and, in all those years of
reconstruction, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great leader of our woman
suffrage movement, declared that because the Republicans were willing to
sacrifice the enfranchisement of the women of the nation they would lose
eventually the power to protect the black man in his right to vote. But
the leaders of the Republican party shouted back to us, "Keep silence,
this is the negro's hour." Even our glorious Wendell Phillips, who said,
"To talk to a black man of freedom without the ballot is mockery,"
joined in the cry, "This is the negro's hour;" but we never yielded the
point that, "To talk to women of freedom without the ballot is mockery
also." But timidity, cowardice and want of principle carried forward the
reconstruction of the government with the women left out.
Then came in 1867 the submission by your Kansas legislature of three
amendments to your constitution: That all men who had served in the
rebel army should be disfranchised; that all black men should be
enfranchised; and that all women should be enfranchised. The Democrats
held their State convention and resolved they would have nothing to do
with that "modern fanaticism of woman's rights." The Germans held a
meeting in Lawrence, and denounced this "new-fangled idea." The
Republicans held their State convention and resolved to be "neutral."
And they were neutral precisely as England was neutral in the rebellion.
While England declared neutrality, she allowed the Shenandoah, the
Alabama and other pirate ships to be fitted up in her ports to maraud
the seas and capture American vessels. The fact was not a single stump
speaker appointed by the Republican committee advocated the woman
suffrage amendment and, more than this, all spoke against it.
Then, of course, we had to make a woman suffrage campaign through the
months of September and October. We did our best. Everywhere we had
splendid audiences and I think we had a larger ratio of men in those
olden times than we have nowadays. Election day came, that 5th day of
November, 1867, when 9,070 men voted yes, and over 18,000 voted no. On
the negro suffrage amendment, 10,500 voted yes and the remainder voted
no. Both amendments were lost. All the political power of the national
and State Republican party was brought to bear to induce every man to
vote for negro suffrage; on the other hand, all the enginery and power
of the Republican, as well as of the Democratic party, were against us;
and many were so ignorant they absolutely believed that to vote for
woman suffrage was to vote against the negro. It was exactly like
declaring here tonight that if every woman in this house should fill her
lungs with oxygen, she would rob all you men of enough to fill yours.
Nobody is robbed by letting everybody have equal rights.
Since 1867 seven other States have submitted the question. Let me run
them over.
[Miss Anthony then gave a graphic description of the campaigns in
Michigan, 1874; Colorado, 1877; Nebraska, 1882; Oregon, 1884; Rhode
Island, 1886; Washington, 1889; South Dakota, 1890; all of which
failed for lack of support from the political platforms, editors
and speakers.]
But at last in Colorado, in the second campaign, we won by the popular
vote, gained through party endorsement, the enfranchisement of women.
During the summer of 1893 nearly every Republican and Populist and not a
few Democratic county conventions put approving planks in their
platforms. When the fall campaign opened every stump orator was
authorized to speak favorably upon the subject; no man could oppose it
unless he ran counter to the principles laid down in his party platform.
That made it a truly educational campaign to all the voters of the
State. A word to the wise is sufficient. Let every man who wants the
suffrage amendment carried, demand a full and hearty endorsement of the
measure by his political party, be it Democrat, Republican, Populist or
Prohibition, so that Kansas shall win as did her neighbor State,
Colorado.
The Republicans of Kansas made the Prohibition amendment a party measure
in 1880. After they secured the law they had planks in their platform
for its enforcement from year to year, until they were tired of fighting
the liquor dealers, backed by the Democrats in the State and on the
borders. They wearied of being taunted with the fact that they had not
the power to enforce the law. Then in 1887 they gave municipal suffrage
to women as a sheer party necessity. Just as much as it was a necessity
of the Republicans in reconstruction days to enfranchise the negroes, so
was it a political necessity in the State of Kansas to enfranchise the
women, because they needed a new balance of power to help them elect and
re-elect officers who would enforce the law. Where else could they go to
get that balance? Every man in the State, native and foreign, drunk and
sober, outside of the penitentiary, the idiot and lunatic asylums,
already had the right to vote. They had nobody left but the women. As a
last resort the Republicans, by a straight party vote, extended
municipal suffrage to women.
This political power was put into the hands of the women of this State
by the old Republican party with its magnificent majorities—82,000, you
remember, the last time you bragged. It was before you had the quarrel
and division in the family; it was by that grand old party, solid as it
was in those bygone days!
Last year, and two years ago, after the People's party was organized,
when their State convention was held, and also when the Republican
convention was held, each put a plank in its platform declaring that the
time had come for the submission of a proposition for full suffrage to
women. What then could the women infer but that such action meant
political help in carrying this amendment? If I had not believed this I
never would have come to the State and given my voice in twenty-five or
thirty political meetings, reminding the Republicans what a grand and
glorious record they had made, not only in the enfranchisement of the
black men but in furnishing all the votes on the floor of Congress ever
given for women's enfranchisement there, and in extending municipal
suffrage to the women of Kansas. I have vowed, from the time I began to
see that woman suffrage could be carried only through party help, that I
never would lend my influence to either of the two dominant parties that
did not have a woman suffrage plank in its platform.
I consider, by every pledge of the past, by the passage of the
resolution through the legislature when the representatives of the two
parties, the People's and Republican, vied with each other to see who
would give the largest majority, that both promised to make this a party
measure and I speak tonight to the two parties as the old Republican
party. You are not the same men altogether, but you are the descendants,
the children, of that party; and I am here tonight, and have come all
the way from my home, to beg you to stand by the principles which have
made you great and strong, and to finish the work you have so nobly
begun.
The Republicans are to have their State convention the 6th of June. I
shall be ashamed if the telegraph wires flash the word over the country,
"No pledge for the amendment," as was flashed from the Republican League
the other day. Should this happen, as I have heard intimated, and there
is a woman in the State of Kansas who has any affiliation with the
Republican party, any sympathy with it, who will float its banner after
it shall have thus failed to redeem its pledge, I will disown her; she
is not one of my sort.
The Populist convention is to be held the 12th of June. If it should
shirk its responsibility, and not put a strong suffrage plank in its
platform, pledging itself to use all its educational powers and all its
party machinery to carry the amendment, then I shall have no respect for
any woman who will speak or work for its success.
The Democrats have declared their purpose. They are going to fight us.
What does the good Book say? "He that is not for me is against me." We
know where the Democratic party is, it is against us. If the Republican
and People's parties say nothing for us, they say and do everything
against us. No plank will be equivalent to saying to every woman
suffrage Republican and Populist speaker, "You must not advocate this
amendment, for to do so will lose us the whisky vote, it will lose us
the foreign vote." Hence, no plank means no word for us, and no word for
us means no vote for us. But while no word can be spoken in favor, every
campaign orator, as in 1867, is free to speak in opposition.
Men of the Republican party, it comes your time first to choose whom
you will have for your future constituents, to make up the bone and
sinew of your party; whether you will have the most ignorant foreigners,
just landed on our shores, who have not learned a single principle of
free government—or the women of your own households; whether you will
lose to-day a few votes of the high license or the low license
Republicans, foreign or native, black or white, as the case may be, and
gain to yourselves hereafter the votes of the women of the State. These
are the alternatives. It has been stated that you can not have a
suffrage plank in the Republican platform in Saline county because it
would lose the votes of the Scandinavians. Will those 1,000 Scandinavian
men be of more value to the Republicans than will be the votes of their
own wives, mothers, daughters and sisters in all the years to come?
The crucial moment is upon you now, and I say unto you, men of both
parties, you will have driven the last nail in the coffin of this
amendment and banished all hope of carrying it at the ballot-box if you
do not incorporate woman suffrage in your platforms. I know what the
party managers will say, I have talked with and heard from many of them.
I read Mr. Morrill's statement that "this question should go to the
ballot-box on its merits and should not be spoken of in the political
meetings or made a party measure."
The masses are rooted and grounded in the old beliefs in the inferiority
and subjection of women, and consider them born merely to help man carry
out his plans and not to have any of their own. Now, friends, because
this is true, because no man believes in political equality for woman,
except he is educated out of every bigotry, every prejudice and every
usage that he was born into, in the family, in the church and in the
state, so there can be no hope of the rank and file of men voting for
this amendment, until they are taught the principles of justice and
right; and there is no possibility that these men can be reached, can be
educated, through any other instrumentality than that of the campaign
meetings and campaign papers of the political parties. Therefore, when
you say this is not to be a political question, not to be in your
platform, not to be discussed in your meetings, not to be advocated in
your papers, you make it impossible for its merits to be brought before
the voters.
Who are the men that come to our women's meetings? We have just finished
the tour of the sixty counties in the State of New York. We had
magnificent gatherings, composed of people from the farthest townships
in the county, and in many of them from every township, with the largest
opera houses packed, hundreds going away who could not get in. Our
audiences have been five-sixths women, and the one man out of the six,
who was he? A man who already believed there was but one means of
salvation for the race or the country, and that was through the
political equality of women, making them the peers of men in every
department of life. How are we going to reach the other five-sixths of
the men who never come to women's meetings? There is no way except
through the political rallies which are attended by all men. Now if you
shut out of these the discussion of this question, then I say the fate
of this amendment is sealed.
Even if it were possible to reach the men through separate meetings,
the women of Kansas can not carry on a fall campaign. They can not get
the money to do it unless you men furnish it. Our eastern friends have
already contributed to the extent of their ability to hold these spring
meetings, and you very well know that after the husbands shall have paid
their party assessments there will be nothing left for them to "give to
their wives" to defray the expenses of a woman suffrage campaign.
Therefore, no discussion in the regular political meetings means no
discussion anywhere. But suppose there were plenty of money, and there
could be a most thorough fall campaign, what then? Why, the same old
story of "women talking to women," not one of whom can vote on the
question.
Again, with what decency can either of the parties ask women to come to
their political meetings to expound Populist or Republican doctrines
after they have set their heels on the amendment? Do you not see that if
it will lose votes to the parties to have the plank, it will lose votes
to allow women to advocate the amendment on their platforms? And what a
spectacle it would be to see women pleading with men to vote for the one
or the other party, while their tongues were tied on the question of
their own right to vote! Heaven and the Republican and Populist State
Conventions spare us such a dire humiliation!
But should the Republicans refuse to insert the plank on June 6 and the
Populists put a good solid one in their platform on June 12, what then?
Do you suppose all the women in the State would shout for the
Republicans and against the Populists? Would they pack the Republican
meetings, where no word could be spoken for their liberty, and leave the
benches empty in the Populist meetings where at every one hearty appeals
were made to vote for woman's enfranchisement? My dear friends, woman
surely will be able to see that her highest interest, her liberty, her
right to a voice in government, is the great issue of this campaign, and
overtops, outweighs, all material questions which are now pending
between the parties.
I know you think your Kansas men are going to vote on this amendment
independently of party endorsement. You are no more sanguine today than
were the men and women, myself included, in 1867, that those Free State
men, who had given up every comfort which human beings prize for the
sake of liberty, who had fought not only through the border ruffian
warfare but through the four years of the rebellion, would vote freedom
to the heroic women of Kansas. Where would you ever expect to find a
majority more ready to grant to women equal rights than among those old
Free State men? You have not as glorious a generation of men in Kansas
today as you had in 1867. I do not wish to speak disparagingly, but in
the nature of things there can not be another race of men as brave as
those. If you had told me then that a majority of those men would have
gone to the ballot-box and voted against equal rights for women, I
should have defended them with all my power; but they did it, two to
one.
Do you mean to repeat the experiment of 1867? If so, do not put a plank
in your platform; just have a "still hunt." Think of a "still hunt" when
it must be necessarily a work of education! My friends, I know enough of
this State, to feel that it is worth saving. I have given more time and
money and effort to Kansas than to any other State in the Union, because
I wanted it to be the first to make its women free. Women of Kansas,
all is lost if you sit down and supinely listen to politicians and
candidates. Both reckon what they will lose or what they will gain. They
study expediency rather than principle. I appeal to you, men and women,
make the demand imperative: "The amendment must be endorsed by the
parties and advocated on the platform and in the press." Let me propose
a resolution:
Whereas, From the standpoint of justice, political expediency and
grateful appreciation of their wise and practical use of school
suffrage from the organization of the State, and of municipal
suffrage for the past eight years, we, Republicans and Populists,
descendants of that grand old party of splendid majorities which
extended these rights to the women of Kansas, in mass meeting
assembled do hereby
Resolve, That we urgently request our delegates in their
approaching State conventions to endorse the woman suffrage
amendment in their respective platforms.
[The resolution was adopted by a unanimous vote.]
That vote fills my soul with joy and hope. Now I want to say to you, my
good friends, I never would have made a 1,500 mile journey hither to
appeal to the thinking, justice-loving men of Kansas. They already are
converted, but they are a minority. We have to consider those whose
votes can be obtained only by that party influence and machinery which
politicians alone know how to use. This hearty response is a pledge that
you will demand of your State conventions that the full power of this
political machinery shall be used to carry the woman suffrage amendment
to victory.