III. CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS AND REPORTS OF 1884…

III. CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS AND REPORTS OF 1884

Both Senate and House of the preceding Congress had appointed Select Committees on Woman Suffrage to whom all petitions, etc., were referred.[20] The Senate of the Forty-eighth Congress renewed this committee, but the House declined to do so. Early in the session, Dec. 19, 1883, the Committee on Rules refused to report such a committee but authorized Speaker Warren Keifer of Ohio to present the question to the House. A spirited debate followed which displayed the sentiment of members against the question of woman suffrage itself. John H. Reagan of Texas was the principal opponent, saying in the course of his remarks:

I hope that it will not be considered ungracious in me that I oppose the wish of any lady. But when she so far misunderstands her duty as to want to go to working on the roads and making rails and serving in the militia and going into the army, I want to protect her against it. I do not think that sort of employment suits her sex or her physical strength. I think also, when we attempt to overturn the social status of the world as it has existed for six thousand years, we ought to begin somewhere where we have a constitutional basis to stand upon....

But I suppose whoever clamors for action here finds a warrant for it in the clamor outside, and it is not necessary to look to the Constitution for it; it is not necessary to regard the interests of civilization and the experience of ages in determining our social as well as our political policy; but we will arrange it so that there shall be no one to nurse the babies, no one to superintend the household, but all shall go into the political scramble, and we shall go back as rapidly as we can march into barbarism. That is the effect of such doings as this, disregarding the social interests of society for a clamor that never ought to have been made.

Mr. Reagan then rambled into a long discussion of the rights allowed under the Constitution, although no action had been proposed except the mere appointment of a Select Committee, to whom all questions relating to woman suffrage might be referred, such as already existed in the Senate.

James B. Belford of Colorado in an able reply said:

I have no doubt that this House will be gratified with the profound respect which the gentleman from Texas has expressed for the Constitution of the country. The last distinguished act with which he was connected was its attempted overthrow; and a man who was engaged in an enterprise of that kind can fight a class to whom his mother belonged. I desire to know whether a woman is a citizen of the United States or an outcast without any political rights whatever....

What is the proposition presented by the gentleman from Ohio? That we will constitute a committee to whom shall be referred all petitions presented by women. Is not the right of petition a constitutional right? Has not woman, in this country at least, risen above the horizon of servitude, discredit and disgrace, and has she not a right, representing as she does in many instances great questions of property, to present her appeals to this National Council and have them judiciously considered? I think it is due to our wives, daughters, mothers and sisters to afford them an avenue through which they can legitimately and judicially reach the ear of this great nation.

Moved by Mr. Reagan's attacks, Mr. Keifer made a strong plea for the rights of women, which deserves a place in history, saying in part:

We must remember that we stand here committed in a large sense to the matter of woman suffrage. In the Territories of Wyoming and Utah for fifteen years past women have had the right to vote on all questions which men can vote upon; and the Congress of the United States has stood by without disapproving the legislative acts of those Territories. And we now have before us a law passed at the last session of the Legislature of Washington, giving to its women the right to vote. We have not passed upon the question one way or the other, but we have the right to pass upon it. This, I think, seems to dispose sufficiently of the question of constitutional legislative power without trampling upon the toes of any State-rights man.

The right of petition belongs to all persons within the limits of our republic, and with the right of petition goes the right on the part of the Congress through constitutional means to grant relief. Do gentlemen claim it is unconstitutional to amend the Constitution? I know that claim was made at one time on the floor of this House and on the floor of the Senate. When it was proposed to abolish slavery in the United States, distinguished gentlemen argued that it was unconstitutional to amend the Constitution so as to abolish slavery. But all that has passed away and we now find ourselves, in the light of the present, seeing clearly that we may amend the Constitution in any way we please, pursuing always the proper constitutional methods of doing so.

There are considerations due to the women of this country which ought not to be lightly thrust aside. For thirty-five years they have been petitioning and holding conventions and demanding that certain relief should be granted them, to the extent of allowing them to exercise the right of suffrage. In that thirty-five years we have seen great things accomplished. We have seen some of the subtleties of the Common Law, which were spread over this country, swept away. There is hardly anybody anywhere who now adheres to the doctrine that a married woman can not make a contract, and that she has no rights or liabilities except those which are centered in her husband. Even the old Common-Law maxim that "husband and wife are one, and that one the husband," has been largely modified under the influence of these patriotic, earnest ladies who have taken hold of this question and enlightened the world upon it. There are now in the vaults of this Capitol hundreds of thousands of petitions for relief, sent in here by women and by those who believed that women ought to have certain rights and privileges of citizenship granted to them. For sixteen years there has been held in this city, annually, a convention composed of representative women from all parts of the country. These conventions, as well as various State and local conventions, have been appealing for relief; and they ought not to be met by the statement that we will not even give them the poor privilege of a committee to whom their petitions and memorials may be referred.

We have made some progress. In 1871 there was a very strong minority report made in this House in favor of woman suffrage. Notwithstanding the notion that we must stand by all our old ideas, the Supreme Court of the United States, after deliberately considering the question, admitted a woman to practice at the bar of that Court.[21] A hundred years ago, in the darkness of which some gentlemen desire still to live, I suppose they would not have done this. Favorable reports on this subject were made by the Committee on Privileges and Elections in the Senate of the Forty-fifth Congress, and in the last Congress by a Select Committee of the Senate and of the House. The Legislatures of many of the States have expressed their judgment on the matter. There has been a great deal of progress in that direction. The Senate and the House of Representatives of the last Congress provided Select Committees to whom all matters relating to woman suffrage could be referred. Will this House take a step backward on this question?

I want especially to notify the gentleman from Texas that we are not standing still on this matter. Eleven States--New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado and Oregon--have authorized women to vote for school trustees and members of school boards. Kentucky extends this right to widows who have children and pay taxes. Women are nominated and voted for not only in the eleven States and three Territories, but in nearly all the Northern and Western States. Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa and other States have large numbers of women county superintendents of public schools. And let me say, for the benefit of the Democratic party, that in the great, progressive western State of Kansas the Democracy rose so high as to nominate and vote for a woman for State Superintendent of Public Instruction at the last election. So there has been a little growing away from those old ideas and notions, even among the Democracy. We are permitting women to fill public offices. Why should they not participate in the election of officers who are to govern them? We require them to pay taxes and there are a great many burdens imposed upon them. Kansas, Michigan, Colorado and Nebraska have in recent years submitted the question of woman suffrage to a vote of the people and more than one-third of the electors of each voted in favor. Oregon has now a similar proposition pending.

By the laws of all the States women are required to pay taxes; but we are practically working on the theory that these women shall be taxed without the right of representation. Taxation without representation led to the separation of the colonies from the mother country. They were not so much opposed to being taxed as they were to being taxed without representation. The patriots of that day conceived the idea that there was a principle somewhere involved in the right of representation. So they evolved and formulated that Revolutionary maxim, "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute." The basis of that maxim was that they would not give to the payment of taxes without the right of representation. Revolution and war made representation and taxation correlative. But the States tax all women on their property. For illustration, 8,000 women of Boston and 34,000 in Massachusetts pay $2,000,000 of taxes, one-eleventh of the entire tax of that great and wealthy State. The same ratio will be found to prevail in all the other States.

Progress has gone on elsewhere than in the United States. England has been moving forward in this matter, and we should not stand behind her in anything....

I am one of those who do not believe that to give to women common rights and privileges will degrade them, but on the contrary I believe it will ennoble them; and I believe further that to put them on an equality in the matter of rights and privileges with men will enhance their charms and not lessen their beauty.

The vote resulted--yeas, 85; nays, 124; not voting, 112. Of the affirmative votes 72 were Republican, 13 Democratic; of the negative, 4 were Republican, 120 Democratic.

In January, 1884, after the return of the members from their holiday recess, Miss Anthony addressed letters to the 112 absentees, asking each how he would have voted had he been present. Fifty-two replies were received, 26 from Republicans, all of whom would have voted yes; 26 from Democrats, 10 of whom would have voted yes, 10, no, and 6 could not tell which way they would have voted.

In the hope that this respectable minority could be increased to a majority, the Hon. John D. White (Ky.) made a further attempt, Feb. 7, 1884, to secure the desired committee, saying in his speech upon this question:

It seems to me to be an anomalous state of affairs that in a great Nation like this one-half of the people should have no committee to which they could address their appeals.

Women consider they have the same political rights as men. I might read from such distinguished authority as Miss Susan B. Anthony, whose name has been jeered in her native State, and who has been prosecuted there for voting, but who stands before the American people to-day the peer of any woman in the nation, and the superior of half the men occupying a representative capacity. It does seem to me hard that when a woman like this comes to Congress, instructed by thousands and tens of thousands of her sex, in order to be heard she should be compelled to hang around the doors of the Judiciary Committee, or of some other committee, pre-eminently occupied with other matters. But we are told there is no room. Yet we have a room where lobbyists of every sort are provided for. And are we to be told that no room in this wing of the Capitol can be had where respectable women of the nation can present arguments for the calm consideration of their friends in this body? I ask simply for the opportunity to be afforded the representatives of the political rights of women to be heard in making respectful argument to the law-making power of the nation.

Byron M. Cutcheon (Mich.) also spoke in favor of the committee, saying:

Ever since the organization of this House I have received petitions from my constituents in regard to this matter of the political rights of women, but there seems to be no committee to which they could properly be referred. A few years since, when this question of woman suffrage was submitted to the people in my State, more than 40,000 electors were in favor of it. It seems to me, without committing ourselves on the question of the political rights of women, it is but respectful to a very large number of people in all our States that there should be a committee to receive and consider and report upon these petitions which come to us from time to time.

The House refused to allow a vote.

The Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage granted a hearing March 7, 1884, at 10:30 a. m., in the Senate reception room, to the speakers and delegates in attendance at the convention, the entire committee being present.[22] In introducing the speakers Miss Anthony said: "This is the sixteenth year that we have come before Congress in person, and the nineteenth by petitions, asking national protection for the citizen's right to vote, when the citizen happens to be a woman."

MRS. HARRIET R. SHATTUCK (Mass.): We canvassed four localities in the city of Boston, two in smaller cities, two in country districts and made one record also of school teachers in nine schools of one town. The teachers were unanimously in favor of woman suffrage, and in the nine localities we found that the proportion of women in favor was very much larger than of those opposed. The total of women canvassed was 814. Those in favor were 405, those opposed, 44; indifferent, 166; refused to sign, 160; not seen, 39. These canvasses were made by respectable, responsible women, and they swore before a Justice of the Peace as to the truth of their statements. Thus we have in Massachusetts this reliable canvass of women showing those in favor are to those opposed as nine to one....

MRS. MAY WRIGHT SEWALL (Ind.): ... My friend has said that men have always kept us just a little below them where they could shower upon us favors and they have done that generously. So they have, but, gentlemen, has your sex been more generous to women than they have been generous toward you in their favors? Neither can dispense with the service of the other, neither can dispense with the reverence of the other or with the aid of the other in social life. The men of this nation are rapidly finding that they can not dispense with the service of woman in business life. I know that they are also feeling the need of the moral support of woman in their political life.

You, gentlemen, by lifting the women of the nation into political equality would simply place us where we could lift you where you never yet have stood--upon a moral equality with us. I do not speak to you as individuals but as the representatives of your sex, as I stand here the representative of mine, and never until we are your equals politically will the moral standard for men be what it now is for women, and it is none too high. Let woman's standard be still more elevated, and let yours come up to match it.

We do not appeal to you as Republicans or as Democrats. We were reared with our brothers under the political belief and faith of our fathers, and probably as much influenced by that rearing as they were. We shall go to strengthen both the parties, neither the one nor the other the more, probably. So this is not a partisan measure; it is a just measure, which is our due, because of what we are, men and women both, by virtue of our heritage and our one Father, our one Mother eternal.

MRS. HELEN M. GOUGAR (Ind.): I maintain there is no political question paramount to that of woman suffrage before the people of America to-day. Political parties would have us believe that tariff is the great question of the hour. It is an insult to the intelligence of the present to say that when one-half of the citizens of this republic are denied a direct voice in making the laws under which they shall live, that the tariff, the civil rights of the negro, or any other question which can be brought up, is equal to the one of giving political freedom to women.

I ask you to let me have a voice in the laws under which I shall live because the older empires of the earth are sending to the United States a population drawn very largely from their asylums, penitentiaries, jails and poor-houses. They are emptying those men upon our shores, and within a few months they are intrusted with the ballot, the law-making power in this republic, and they and their representatives are seated in official and legislative positions. I, as an American-born woman, enter my protest at being compelled to live under laws made by this class of men while I am denied the protection that can only come from the ballot. While I would not have you take this right from those men whom we invite to our shores, I do ask you, in the face of this immense foreign immigration, to enfranchise the tax-paying, intelligent, moral, native-born women of America.

....We have in our State the signatures of over 5,000 of the school teachers asking for woman's ballot. I ask you if the Government does not need the voice of those 5,000 educated teachers as much as it needs the voice of the 240 criminals who are, on an average, sent out of the penitentiary of Indiana each year, to go to the ballot-box upon every question, and make laws under which those teachers must live, and under which the mothers of our State must keep their homes and rear their children?

On behalf of the mothers of this country I demand that their hands shall be loosened before the ballot-box, and that they shall have the privilege of throwing the mother heart into the laws which shall follow their sons not only to the age of majority, but even after their hair has turned gray and they have seats in the United States Congress; yes, to the very confines of eternity. This can be done in no indirect way; it can not be done by silent influence; it can not be done by prayer. While I do not underestimate the power of prayer, I say give me my ballot with which to send statesmen instead of modern politicians into our legislative halls. I would rather have that ballot on election day than the prayers of all the disfranchised women in the universe!

....Our forefathers did not object to taxation, but they did object to taxation without representation, and we object to it. We are willing to contribute our share to the support of this Government, as we always have done; but we demand our little yes and no in the form of the ballot so that we shall have a direct influence in distributing the taxes.

I am amenable to the gallows and the penitentiary, and it is no more than right that I shall have a voice in framing the laws under which I shall be rewarded or punished. It is written in the law of every State in this Union that a person tried in the courts shall have a jury of his peers; yet so long as the word "male" stands as it does in the Constitution of the United States and the States, no woman can have a jury of her peers. I protest in the name of justice against going into the court-room and being compelled to run the gauntlet of the gutter and saloon--yes, even of the police court and of the jail--as is done in selecting a male jury to try the interests of woman, whether relating to life, property or reputation....

The political party that presumes to fight the moral battles of the future must have the women in its ranks. We are non-partisan. We come as Democrats, Republicans, Prohibitionists and Green-backers, and if there were half a dozen other political parties some of us would affiliate with them. We ask this beneficent action upon your part, because we believe the intelligence and justice of the hour demand it. We ask you in the name of equity and humanity alone, and not in that of any party....

You ask us if we are impatient. Yes; we are impatient. Some of us may die, and I want our grand old standard-bearer, Susan B. Anthony, whose name will go down to history beside those of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Phillips--I want that woman to go to Heaven a free angel from this republic. The power lies in your hands to make all women free.

MRS. CAROLINE GILKEY ROGERS (N. Y.): It is often said to us that when all the women ask for the ballot it will be granted. Did all the married women petition the Legislatures of their States to secure to them the right to hold in their own name the property which belonged to them? To secure to the poor forsaken wife the right to her earnings? All the women did not ask for these rights, but all accepted them with joy and gladness when they were obtained, and so it will be with the franchise. Woman's right to self-government does not depend upon the numbers that demand it, but upon precisely the same principles on which man claims it for himself. Where did man get the authority which he now exercises to govern one-half of humanity; from what power the right to place woman, his helpmeet in life, in an inferior position? Came it from nature? Nature made woman his superior when it made her his mother--his equal when it fitted her to hold the sacred position of wife. Did women meet in council and voluntarily give up all their right to be their own law-makers? The power of the strong over the weak makes man the master. Thus, and thus only, does he gain the authority.

It is all very well to say, "Convert the women." While we most heartily wish they could all feel as we do, yet when it comes to the decision of this great question they are mere ciphers, for if it is settled by the States it will be left to the men, not to the women, to decide. Or if suffrage comes to women through a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, it will be decided by Legislatures elected by men only. In neither case will women have an opportunity of passing upon the question. So reason tells us we must devote our best efforts to converting those to whom we must look for the removal of the barriers which now prevent our exercising the right of suffrage....

MRS. MARY SEYMOUR HOWELL (N. Y.): We ask for the ballot for the good of the race. Huxley says: "Admitting, for the sake of argument, that woman is the weaker, mentally and physically, for that very reason she should have the ballot and every help which the world can give her." When you debar from your councils and legislative halls the purity, the spirituality and the love of woman, then those councils are apt to become coarse and brutal. God gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a better land, and by our love and our intellect to help make our country pure and noble, and if you would have statesmen you must have stateswomen to bear them....

MRS. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE (N. Y.): It is often said that we have too many voters; that the aggregate of vice and ignorance among us should not be increased by giving women the right of suffrage. In the enormous immigration which pours upon our shores every year, numbering nearly half a million, there come twice as many men as women. What does this mean? It means a constant preponderance of the masculine over the feminine; and it means also, of course, a preponderance of the voting power of the foreign men as compared to the native born men. To those who fear that our American institutions are threatened by this gigantic inroad of foreigners, I commend the reflection that the best safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign influence is to put the ballot in the hands of the American born woman, and of all other women also, so that if the foreign born man overbalances us in numbers we shall be always in a majority on the side of the liberty which is secured by our institutions....

MRS. ELIZABETH BOYNTON HARBERT: From the great State of Illinois I come, representing 200,000 men and women of that State who have recorded their written petitions for woman's ballot, 90,000 of these being citizens under the law, male voters; those 90,000 have signed petitions for the right of woman to vote on the temperance question; 90,000 women also signed those petitions; 50,000 men and women signed the petitions for the school vote, and 60,000 more have signed petitions that the full right of suffrage might be accorded to woman.

This growth of public sentiment has been occasioned by the needs of the children and the working women of that great State. I come here to ask you to make a niche in the statesmanship and legislation of the nation for the domestic interests of the people. You recognize that the masculine thought is more often turned to material and political interests. I claim that the mother-thought, the woman-element needed, is to supplement the statesmanship of American men on political and industrial affairs with domestic legislation.

In her closing address Miss Anthony took up the question of obtaining suffrage for women through the States instead of Congress and said:

My answer is that I do not wish to see the women of the thirty-eight States of this Union compelled to leave their homes to canvass each one of these, school district by school district. It is asking too much of a moneyless class. The joint earnings of the marriage co-partnership in all the States belong legally to the husband. It is only that wife who goes outside the home to work whom the law permits to own and control the money she earns. Therefore, to ask of women, the vast majority of whom are without an independent dollar of their own, to make a thorough canvass of their several States, is asking an impossibility.

We have already made the experiment of canvassing four States--Kansas in 1867, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, Nebraska in 1882--and in each, with the best campaign possible for us to make, we obtained a vote of only one-third. One man out of every three voted for the enfranchisement of the women of his household, while two out of every three voted against it....

We beg, therefore, that instead of insisting that a majority of the individual voters must be converted before women shall have the franchise, you will give us the more hopeful task of appealing to the representative men in the Legislatures of the several States. You need not fear that we shall get suffrage too quickly if Congress submits the proposition, for even then we shall have a long siege in going from Legislature to Legislature to secure the vote of three-fourths of the States necessary to ratify the amendment. It may require twenty years after Congress has taken the initiative step, to obtain action by the requisite number, but once submitted by Congress it always will stand until ratified by the States.

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's paper on Self-Government the Best Means of Self-Development was read to the committee. A few extracts will serve to show its broad scope:

The basic idea of a republic is the right of self-government, the right of every citizen to choose his own representatives and to have a voice in the laws under which he lives. As this right can be secured only by the exercise of the suffrage, the ballot in the hand of every qualified citizen constitutes the true political status of the people in a republic.

The right of suffrage is simply the right to govern one's self. Every human being is born into the world with this right, and the desire to exercise it comes naturally with the feeling of life's responsibilities. Those only who are capable of appreciating this dignity, can measure the extent to which women are defrauded, and they only can measure the loss to the councils of the nation of the wisdom of representative women. They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience.

It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts. If woman naturally has no will, no self-assertion, no opinions of her own, what means the terrible persecution of the sex under all forms of religious fanaticism, culminating in witchcraft in which scarce one wizard to a thousand witches was sacrificed? So powerful and merciless has been the struggle to dominate the feminine element in humanity, that we may well wonder at the steady, determined resistance maintained by woman through the centuries. To every step of progress which she has made from slavery to the partial freedom she now enjoys, the Church and the State alike have made the most cruel opposition, and yet, under all circumstances she has shown her love of individual freedom, her desire for self-government, while her achievements in practical affairs and her courage in the great emergencies of life have vindicated her capacity to exercise this right....

The right of suffrage in a republic means self-government, and self-government means education, development, self-reliance, independence, courage in the hour of danger. That women may attain these virtues we demand the exercise of this right. Not that we suppose we should at once be transformed into a higher order of beings with all the elements of sovereignty, wisdom, goodness and power full-fledged, but because the exercise of the suffrage is the primary school in which the citizen learns how to use the ballot as a weapon of defense; it is the open sesame to the land of freedom and equality. The ballot is the scepter of power in the hand of every citizen. Woman can never have an equal chance with man in the struggle of life until she too wields this power. So long as women have no voice in the Government under which they live they will be an ostracised class, and invidious distinctions will be made against them in the world of work. Thrown on their own resources they have all the hardships that men have to encounter in earning their daily bread, with the added disabilities which grow out of disfranchisement. Men of the republic, why make life harder for your daughters by these artificial distinctions? Surely, if governments were made to protect the weak against the strong, they are in greater need than your stalwart sons of every political right which can give them protection, dignity and power....

The disfranchisement of one-half the people places a dangerous power in the hands of the other half. All history shows that one class never did legislate with justice for another, and all philosophy shows they never can, as the relations of class grow out of either natural or artificial advantages which one has over the other and which it will maintain if possible. It is folly to say that women are not a class, so long as there is any difference in the code of laws for men and women, any discrimination in the customs of society, giving advantages to men over women; so long as in all our State constitutions women are ranked with lunatics, idiots, paupers and criminals. When you say that one-half the people shall be governed by the other half, surely the class distinction is about as broad as it can be....

The disfranchisement of one-half the people deprives the State of the united wisdom of man and woman--that "consensus of the competent" so necessary in national affairs--making our Government an oligarchy of males, instead of a republic of the people, thus perpetuating with all its evils a dominant masculine civilization. But in answer to this it is said that although women do not vote, yet they have an indirect influence in Government through their husbands and brothers. Yes, an "irresponsible power," of all kinds of influence the most dangerous....

The dogged, unreasonable persecutions of sex in all ages, the evident determination to eliminate, as far as possible, the feminine element in humanity, has been the most fruitful cause of the moral chaos the race has suffered, under every form of government and religion.... The loss to women themselves of the highest development of which they are capable is sad, but when this involves a lower type of manhood and danger to our free institutions, it is still more sad. The primal work in every country, for its own safety, should be the education and freedom of woman.

The arguments before the Judiciary Committee of the House were given the next morning, March 8, twelve of the fifteen members being present.[23] Miss Anthony opened the hearing with an earnest address in which she referred to the hundreds of thousands of petitions which had been sent to Congress for woman suffrage--far more than for any other measure--and continued:

Negro suffrage was again and again overwhelmingly voted down in various States--New York, Connecticut, Ohio, etc.--and you know, gentlemen, that if the negro had never had the right to vote until the majority of the rank and file of white men, particularly foreign-born men, had voted "Yes," he would have gone without it till the crack of doom. It was because of the prejudice of the unthinking majority that Congress submitted the question of the negro's enfranchisement to the Legislatures of the several States, to be adjudicated by the educated, broadened representatives of the people. We now appeal to you to lift the decision of woman suffrage from the vote of the populace to that of the Legislatures, that you may thereby be as considerate, as just, to the women of this nation as you were to the male ex-slaves.

Every new privilege granted to women has been by the Legislatures. The liberal laws for married women, the right of the wife to own and control her inherited property and separate earnings, the right of women to vote at school elections in a dozen States, the right to vote on all questions in three Territories, have all been gained through the Legislatures. Had any one of these beneficent propositions been submitted to the masses, do you believe a majority would have placed their sanction upon them? I do not.

It takes all too many of us women, and too much of our hard earnings, from our homes and from the works of charity and education of our respective localities, even to come to Washington, session after session, until Congress shall have submitted the proposition, and then to go from Legislature to Legislature, urging its adoption; but when you insist that we shall beg at the feet of each and every individual voter of each and every one of the thirty-eight States, native and foreign, white and black, educated and ignorant, you doom us to incalculable hardships and sacrifices and to most exasperating insults and humiliations. I pray you, therefore, save us from the fate of working and waiting for our freedom until we shall have educated the masses of men to consent to give their wives and sisters equality of rights with themselves. You surely will not compel us to wait the enlightenment of all the freedmen of this nation and all the newly-made voters from the monarchial governments of the Old World!

Liberty for one's self is a natural instinct possessed alike by all, but to be willing to accord liberty to another is the result of education, of self-discipline, of the practice of the golden rule--"Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you." Therefore we ask that the question of equality of rights to women shall be arbitrated upon by the picked men of the nation in Congress, and the picked men of the several States in their respective Legislatures.

THE REV. FLORENCE KILLOCK (Ills.): ... Called as I am into the homes of the people through the requirements of my office, I know whereof I speak when I say that I am as faithfully fulfilling its sacred duties when I come before you urging this claim, as when, on my bended knees, I plead at the throne of God for the salvation of souls.

I know too well the suffering that might be alleviated, the terrible wrongs that might be righted, the sins that might be punished, could the moral power of the women of our land be utilized--could it be brought to bear on those great questions which affect so vitally the welfare of society. The gigantic evil of intemperance is prostrating the finest powers of our country and threatening the life of social purity; it is in truth the fell destroyer of peace, virtue and domestic and national safety, and upon the unoffending the blow falls with the greatest weight. Why should not they who suffer the most deeply through this evil, be authorized before the law of the land to protect themselves and their loved ones from its fearful ravages? Is it other than simple justice which I ask for them? I have listened to too many sad stories from heart-broken wives and mothers not to know that the demand which the women of the land make in this matter comes not from love of power, is not prompted by false ambition, springs not from unwomanly aspirations, but does come from a direful need of self-protection and an earnest desire to protect those dearer than life itself.

Gentlemen of the Judiciary Committee, in the same spirit in which I seek the aid of Heaven in my endeavor to promote the spiritual welfare of mankind, I now and here seek your aid in promoting the highest moral welfare of every man, woman and child. This you will do in giving your vote and influence for the equality of women before the law, and as you thus confer this new power upon the women of our land, like the bread cast upon the waters, it shall come to you in a higher, nobler type of womanhood, in sweeter homes, in purer social life, in all that contributes to the welfare of the individual and the state.

MRS. MARY B. CLAY (Ky.): We do not come here to plead as individual women with individual men, but as a subject class with a ruling class; nor do we come as suffering individuals--though God knows some of us might do that with propriety--but as the suffering millions whom we represent....

We are born of the same parents as men and raised in the same family. We are possessed of the same loves and animosities as our brothers, and we inherit equally with them the substance of our fathers. So long as we are minors the Government treats us as equals, but when we come of age, when we are capable of feeling and knowing the difference, the boy becomes a free human being, while the girl remains a slave, a subject, and no moral heroism, no self-sacrificing patriotism, ever entitles her to her freedom. Is this just? Is it not, indeed, barbarous?

If American men intend always to keep women slaves, political and civil, they make a great mistake when they let the girl, with the boy, learn the alphabet, for no educated class will long remain in subjection. We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket-handkerchief?

Each one of you is responsible for these laws continuing as they are, and you can not avoid responsibility by saying that you did not help to make them. Great injustice is done us in the fact that we are not tried by a jury of our peers. Great injustice is done us everywhere by our not having a vote. Human nature is naturally selfish, and, as woman is deprived of the ballot, and powerless either to punish or reward, man, loving his bread and butter more than justice, will ever thrust her aside for the benefit of those who can help him, those with ballots in their hands.

....All that is good in the home, and largely the highest principles taught in your youth, were given by your mothers. How then it is possible for you to return this love and interest, as soon as you are capable of acting, by riveting the chains which hold them still slaves, politically and civilly?

You need woman's presence and counsel in legislation as much as she needs yours in the home; you need the association and influence of woman; her intuitive knowledge of men's character and the effect of measures upon the household; you need her for the economical details of public work; you need her sense of justice and moral courage to execute the laws; you need her for all that is just, merciful and good in government. But above all, women themselves need the ballot for self-protection, and as we are by common right and the laws of God free human beings, we demand that you no longer hold us your subjects--your political slaves.

MRS. MARY E. HAGGART (Ind.): When Abraham Lincoln penned the immortal emancipation proclamation he did not stop to inquire whether every man and every woman in Southern slavery did or did not want to be free. Whether women do or do not wish to vote does not affect the question of their right to do so. The right of man to the ballot is a logical deduction from the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. And singular to say, while this inheres in all people alike, the privilege of exercising it is withheld from women by a class who have no right to say whether they are willing or not that women should vote. Their right to the ballot was long ago settled beyond a quibble, by laws and principles of justice which are superior to the codes of men, who have usurped the power to regulate the voting privileges of citizens. If this right be inherent and existing in the great body of society before governments are formed, it follows that all citizens of a republic, be they male or female, are alike entitled to its exercise.

....Is there a man among you willing to resign his own right to the ballot and to place his own business interests and general welfare at the mercy of the votes of others? Would you not resent an attempt on the part of any man, or set of men, to fix your mental status, assign your work in life and lay out with mathematical precision your exact sphere in the world? And yet men undertake to adjust the limitations of the Elizabeth Cady Stantons, the Susan B. Anthonys, the Harriet Beecher Stowes, the Frances E. Willards, the Harriet Hosmers of the world, and continue to talk with patronizing condescension of female retirement, female duties and female spheres.

The question is not whether women want or do not want to vote, but how can republican inconsistencies be wiped out, justice universally recognized and impartially administered, and the civil and political errors of the past effectually repaired. Whoever admits that men have a right to the franchise must include in the admission women also, for there are no reasons capable of demonstrating an abstract right in behalf of one sex which are not equally applicable to the other....

The assertion that women do not want to vote is absolutely without authority, so long as each individual woman does not speak out for herself. In Ohio 225,000, and in Illinois 185,000, have signified a desire to use the ballot for home protection, and yet it is still asserted in those States that women do not want it. Over 100,000 women have already notified this Congress that they desire equality of political rights, and still it is declared all around us that women do not want to vote. Gentlemen, this is most emphatically an assertion which no individual can be justified in making for another.

Since the elective franchise is the parent stem from which branch out legal, industrial, social and educational enterprises necessary to the welfare of the citizens, it will be readily seen how women engaged in reforms, public charities, social enterprises, are hampered and trammeled in their progress without the ballot. Women have beheld their plans frustrated, their Herculean labor undone, their lives wasted, for want of legislative power through the citizen's emblem of sovereignty....

All ranks and occupations are beginning to realize that monstrous evils must ever crowd upon both classes while one side of humanity only is represented, and while one sex has the irresponsible keeping of the rights and privileges of the other. To-day, throughout the length and breadth of our land, woman finds the greatest need of the ballot through an almost overpowering desire to have her wishes and opinions crystallized into law.

I have no hesitancy in saying that if the conditions which surround the women of this nation to-day were the conditions of the male citizens of the country, they would rise up and pronounce them the exact definition of civil and political slavery, instead of the true interpretation of natural justice and civil equity.

Many persons claim that men are born with the right to vote, as they are to the right of life, liberty and happiness; that suffrage is the gift of the State, and that the State has a right to regulate it in any way that it may deem best for the common good. If men are born with the right to life, liberty and happiness, they are also born with the right to give expression as to how these are to be maintained; and in this nation, which professes to rest upon the consent of the governed, this expression is given through the ballot. Consequently the expression of a freeman's will is as God-given as his right to be free. Since the year of Magna Charta we have repudiated the idea of representation by proxy.

We all know that there are thousands of women in this nation who are owners of property, mothers of children, devoted to their homes and families and to all the duties and responsibilities which grow out of social life, and hence are most deeply interested in the public welfare. They have just as much at stake in this Government, which affords them no opportunity of giving or withholding their consent, as men who are consulted. John Quincy Adams said in that grand speech in defense of the petitions of the women of Plymouth: "The women are not only justified, but exhibit the most exalted virtue, when they do depart from the domestic sphere and enter upon the concerns of their country, of humanity and of God."

Miss Phoebe W. Couzins (Mo.) in closing her address said: "At the gateway of this nation, the harbor of New York, there soon shall stand a statue of the Goddess of Liberty, presented by the republic of France--a magnificent figure of a woman, typifying all that is grand and glorious and free in self-government. She will hold aloft an electric torch of great power which is to beam an effulgent light far out to sea, that ships sailing towards this goodly land may ride safely into harbor. So should you thus uplift the women of this nation, and teach these men, at the very threshold, when first their feet shall touch the shore of this republic, that here woman is exalted, ennobled and honored; that here she bears aloft the torch of intelligence and purity which guides our Ship of State into the safe harbor of wise laws, pure morals and secure institutions."

It had been the custom of these committees, when they reported at all, to delay doing so until the following year. In 1884, however, those of both Senate and House submitted reports soon after the hearings. The favorable recommendation was presented March 28, 1884, signed by Thomas W. Palmer, Henry W. Blair, Elbridge G. Lapham and Henry B. Anthony. Senators Francis Marion Cockrell and Joseph E. Brown dissented.[24] The name of Senator James G. Fair does not appear on either document, but he had signed an adverse report in 1882.

An adverse majority report from the House Judiciary Committee was presented by William C. Maybury (Mich.) and began thus:

The right of suffrage is not and never has, under our system of government, been one of the essential rights of citizenship....

What class or portion of the whole people of any State should be admitted to suffrage, and should, by virtue of such admission, exert the active and potential control in the direction of its affairs, was a question reserved exclusively for the determination of the State.

[The report loses sight entirely of the point that this question was not and never has been left to "the people" of a State, but that men alone usurped the right to decide who should be admitted to the suffrage, arbitrarily excluded women and have kept them excluded.]

Under the influence of a just fear that without suffrage as a protective power to the newly-acquired rights and privileges guaranteed to the former slave he might suffer detriment, and with this dominant motive in view, originated the Fifteenth Amendment. It will be noted that by this later amendment the privilege of suffrage is not sought to be conferred on any class; but an inhibition is placed upon the States from excluding from the privilege of suffrage any class on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

[The Fifteenth Amendment does not mention the "privilege" of suffrage. It says expressly, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged." But whether it be a "right" or a "privilege," where did the negro get that which the States are forbidden to deny or abridge, if it does not inhere in citizenship? The report is incorrect in saying that the State is prohibited from excluding any "class;" it is only the "males" of any class who are protected from exclusion. The same right or privilege belongs to women, but they are not protected in the exercise of it. Women never have asked Congress to grant them any new right or privilege, but only to prohibit the States from denying or abridging what is already theirs, as it did in the case of negro men.]

Woman's true sphere is not restricted, but is boundless in resources and consequences. In it she may employ every energy of the mind and every affection of the heart, while within its limitless compass, under Providence, she exercises a power and influence beyond all other agencies for good. She trains and guides the life that is, and forms it for the eternity and immortality that are to be. From the rude contact of life, man is her shield. He is her guardian from its conflicts. He is the defender of her rights in his home, and the avenger of her wrongs everywhere.

[That is, what man considers her true sphere is not restricted, but she is not allowed to decide for herself what shall be its dimensions. "Her power for good is beyond all other agencies," but it is not wanted in affairs of State, where surely it is needed quite as badly as in any place in the world. "Man is her shield, guardian, defender and avenger." Witness the Common Law of England, made by men, under which women lived for centuries and which is still in force in a number of the States; witness the records of the courts with the wife-beaters and slayers, the rapists, the seducers, the husbands who have deserted their families, the schemers who have defrauded widows and orphans--witness all these and then say if all men are the natural protectors of women. But even if they were, witness the millions of women who are not legally entitled to the protection and assistance of any man. However, the report does not forget these women.]

The exceptional cases of unmarried females are too rare to change the general policy, while expectancy and hope, constantly being realized in marriage, are happily extinguishing the exceptions and bringing all within the rule which governs wife and matron.

To permit the entrance of political contention into the home would be either useless or pernicious--useless if man and wife agree, and pernicious if they differ. In the former event the volume of ballots alone would be increased without changing results. In the latter, the peace and contentment of home would be exchanged for the bedlam of political debate and become the scene of base and demoralizing intrigue.

[What a breadth of statesmanship, what a grasp of the principles of a republican form of government, to see in the voting of husband and wife only an "increase of ballots"; what a reflection upon men to assume that if there were an honest difference of opinion "the home would become a scene of base and demoralizing intrigue"; what a recognition of justice to decree that, since possibly there might be a disagreement, the man should do the voting and the woman should be forbidden a voice!]

In respect to married women, it may well be doubted whether the influences which result from the laws of property between husband and wife, would not make it improbable that the woman should exercise her suffrage with freedom and independence. This, too, in despite of the fact that the dependence of woman under the Common Law has been almost entirely obliterated by statutory enactments.

[Almost, but not quite, and it would still prevail everywhere had its obliteration depended upon the committee making this report. Think of saying in cold blood that, as the husband holds the purse-strings, the wife would not dare vote with freedom and independence!]

Your committee are of the opinion that while a few intelligent women, such as appeared before the committee in advocacy of the pending measure, would defy all obstacles in the way of their casting the ballot, yet the great mass of the intelligent, refined and judicious, with the becoming modesty of their sex, would shrink from the rude contact of the crowd and, with the exceptions mentioned, leave the ignorant and vile the exclusive right to speak for the gentler sex in public affairs.

[This opinion has been wholly disproved by the experience of States where women do vote. The "intelligent and judicious" have learned that there is more "rude contact" in going to the market, the theater, the train and the ferry-boat, than in a quiet booth where no man is permitted to come within a hundred feet. But women are not so "modest and refined" as to shrink from "rude contact" even, if it would give them the opportunity to control the conditions which surround and influence their husbands, their children, their homes and their community.]

Your committee are of the opinion that the general policy of female suffrage should remain in abeyance, in so far as the general Government is concerned, until the States and communities directly chargeable under our system of government with the exercise and regulation of this privilege, shall put the seal of affirmation upon it; and there certainly can be no reason for an amendment of the Constitution to settle a question within the jurisdiction of the States, and which they should first settle for themselves.

[Of course, according to this logic, after the States settle the question and put the seal of affirmation on it, then the general Government will take a hand!]

This House Report (No. 1330) was not drastic enough to suit the Hon. Luke P. Poland (Vt.), so he made his own, in which he said:

No government founded upon the principle that sovereignty resides in the people has ever allowed all the people to vote, or to directly participate in making or administering the laws. Suffrage has never been regarded as the natural right of all the people or of any particular class or portion of the people. Suffrage is representation, and it has been given in free governments to such class of persons as in their judgment [whose judgment?] would fairly and safely represent the rights and interests of the whole. The right has generally, if not universally, been conferred on men above twenty-one years of age, and often this has been restricted by requiring the ownership of property or the payment of taxes. [Which?]

The great majority of women are either under the age of twenty-one, or are married and therefore under such influence and control as that relation implies and confers. Is there any necessity for the protection and preservation of the rights of women, that they must be allowed to vote and, of course, to hold office and directly to participate in the administration of the laws?

Nearly every man who votes has a wife or mother or sisters or daughters; some sustain all these relations or more than one. I think it certain that the great majority of men when voting or when engaged as legislators or in administering the laws in some official character, are fully mindful of the interests of all that class with whom they are so closely connected, and whose interests are so bound up with their own, and that, therefore, they fairly represent all the rights and interests of women as well as their own. Persons who have been accustomed to see legal proceedings in the courts, and occasionally to see a female litigant in court, know very well whether they are apt to suffer wrong because their rights are determined wholly by men.[25] There is just as little reason for suspicion that their rights are not carefully guarded in legislation, and in every way where legislation can operate.

There is another reason why I think this proposal to enlist the women of the country as a part of its active political force, and to cast upon them an equal duty in the political meetings, campaigns and elections--to make them legislators, jurors, judges and executive officers--is all wrong. I believe it to be utterly inconsistent with the very nature and constitution of woman, and wholly subversive of the sphere and function she was designed to fill in the home and in society. The office and duty which nature has devolved upon woman during all the active and vigorous portion of her life would often render it impossible, and still more often indelicate, for her to appear and act in caucuses, conventions or elections, or to act as a member of the Legislature or as a juror or judge.

I can not bring myself to believe that any large portion of the intelligent women of this country desire any such thing granted them, or would perform any such duties if the chance were offered them.

[To comment upon this would be "to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet." It would be positively "indelicate."]

William Dorsheimer (N. Y.) agreed with the committee to table the resolution, but did not endorse their arguments. He signed the following statement: "I think it probable that the interests of society will some time require that women should have the right of suffrage, and I am not willing to say more than that the present is not an opportune time for submission to the States of the proposed amendment."

In this, it will be observed, there is no recognition of woman's right to represent herself, no disposition to grant her petition for her own sake, but simply the opinion that should there ever be a crisis when her suffrage was needed it should be allowed as a matter of expediency.

In the eyes of posterity the Judiciary Committee of this Forty-eighth Congress will be redeemed from the disgrace of these reports by that of the minority, signed by Thomas B. Reed, afterwards for many years Speaker of the House; Ezra B. Taylor (O.); Moses A. McCoid (Ia.); Thomas M. Browne (Ind.). The question of woman suffrage never has been and never can be more concisely and logically stated.

No one who listens to the reasons given by the superior class for the continuance of any system of subjection can fail to be impressed with the noble disinterestedness of mankind. When the subjection of persons of African descent was to be maintained, the good of those persons was always the main object. When it was the fashion to beat children, to regard them as little animals who had no rights, it was always for their good that they were treated with severity, and never on account of the bad temper of their parents. Hence, when it is proposed to give to the women of this country an opportunity to present their case to the various State Legislatures to demand equality of political rights, it is not surprising to find that the reasons on which the continuance of the inferiority of women is urged are drawn almost entirely from a tender consideration of their own good. The anxiety felt lest they should thereby deteriorate would be an honor to human nature were it not an historical fact that the same sweet solicitude has been put up as a barrier against all the progress which women have made since civilization began.

There is no doubt that if to-day in Turkey or Algiers, countries where woman's sphere is most thoroughly confined to the home circle, it was proposed to admit them to social life, to remove the veil from their faces and permit them to converse in open day with the friends of their husbands and brothers, the conservative and judicious Turk or Algerine of the period, if he could be brought even to consider such a horrible proposition, would point out that the sphere of woman was to make home happy by those gentle insipidities which education would destroy; that by participating in conversation with men they would debase their natures, and men would thereby lose that ameliorating influence which still leaves them unfit to associate with women. He would point out that "nature" had determined that women should be secluded; that their sphere was to raise and educate the man-child, and that any change would be a violation of the divine law which, in the opinion of all conservative men, ordains the present but never the future.

So in civilized countries when it was proposed that women should own their own property, that they should have the earnings of their own labor, there were not wanting those who were sure that such a proposition could work only evil to women, and that continually. It would destroy the family, discordant interests would provoke dispute, and the only real safety for woman was in the headship of man; not that man wanted superiority for any selfish reason, but to preserve intact the family relation for woman's good. To-day a woman's property belongs to herself; her earnings are her own; she has been emancipated beyond the wildest hopes of any reformer of twenty-five years ago. Almost every vocation is open to her. She is proving her usefulness in spheres which the "nature" worshiped by the conservative of the last generation absolutely forbade her to enter. Notwithstanding all these changes the family circle remains unbroken, the man-child gets as well educated as before, and the ameliorating influence of woman has become only the more marked.

Thirty years ago hardly any political assemblage of the people was graced by the presence of women. Had it needed a law to enable them to be present, what an argument could have been made against it! How easily it could have been shown that the coarseness, the dubious expressions, the general vulgarity of the scene, could have had no other effect than to break down that purity of thought and word which women have, and which conservative and radical are alike sedulous to preserve. And yet the actual presence of women at political meetings has not debased them but has raised the other sex. Coarseness has not become diffused through both sexes but has fled from both. To put the whole matter in a short phrase: The association of the sexes in the family circle, in society, and in business, having improved both, there is neither history, reason nor sense to justify the assertion that association in politics will lower the one or demoralize the other.

Hence, we would do well to approach the question without trepidation. We can better leave the "sphere" of woman to the future than confine it in the chains of the past. Words change nothing. Prejudices are none the less prejudices because we vaguely call them "nature," and prate about what nature has forbidden, when we only mean that the thing we are opposing has not been hitherto done. "Nature" forbade a steamship to cross the Atlantic the very moment it was crossing, and yet it arrived just the same. What the majority call "nature" has stood in the way of all progress of the past and present, and will stand in the way of all future progress. It is only another name for conservatism. With conservatism the minority have no quarrel. It is essential to the stability of mankind, of government and of social life. To every new proposal it rightfully calls a halt, demanding countersign, whether it be friend or foe. The enfranchisement of women must pass this ordeal like everything else. It must give good reason for its demand to be, or take its place among the half-forgotten fantasies which have challenged the support of mankind and have not stood the test of argument and discussion.

The majority of the committee claim that suffrage is not a right but a privilege to be guarded by those who have it, and to be by them doled out to those who shall become worthy. That every extension of suffrage has been granted in some form or other by those already holding it is probably true. In some countries, however, it has been extended upon the simple basis of expediency, and in others in obedience to a claim of right. If suffrage be a right, if it be true that no man has a claim to govern any other man except to the extent that the other man has a right to govern him, then there can be no discussion of the question of Woman Suffrage. No reason on earth can be given by those who claim suffrage as a right of manhood which does not make it a right of womanhood also. If the suffrage is to be given man to protect him in his life, liberty and property, the same reasons urge that it be given to woman, for she has the same life, liberty and property to protect. If it be urged that her interests are so bound up in those of man that they are sure to be protected, the answer is that the same argument was urged as to the merging in the husband of the wife's right of property, and was pronounced by the judgment of mankind fallacious in practice and in principle. If the natures of men and women are so alike that for that reason no harm is done by suppressing women, what harm can be done by elevating them to equality? If the natures be different, what right can there be in refusing representation to those who might take juster views about many social and political questions?

Our Government is founded, not on the rule of the wisest and best, but upon the rule of all. The learned and the ignorant, the wise and the unwise, the judicious and the injudicious are all invited to assist in governing, and upon the broad principle that the best government for mankind is not the government which the wisest and best would select, but that which the average of mankind would select. Laws are daily enacted, not because they seem the wisest even to those legislators who pass them, but because they represent what the whole people wish. And, in the long run, it may be just as bad to enact laws in advance of public sentiment as to hold on to laws behind it. Upon what principle in a Government like ours can one-half the minds be denied expression at the polls? Is it because they are untrained in public affairs? Are they more so than the slaves were when the right of suffrage was conferred on them? It is objected that to admit women would be temporarily to lower the suffrage on account of their lack of training in public duties. What is now asked of us is not immediate admission to the right, but the privilege of presenting to the Legislatures of the different States the amendment, which can not become effective until adopted by three-fourths of them. It may be said that the agitation and discussion of this question will, long before its adoption, have made women as familiar with public affairs as the average of men, for the agitation is hardly likely to be successful until after a majority, at least, of women are in favor of it.

We believe in the educating and improving effect of participation in government. We believe that every citizen in the United States is made more intelligent, more learned and better educated by his participation in politics and political campaigns. It must be remembered that education, like all things else, is relative. While the average American voter may not be all that impatient people desire, and is far behind his own future, yet he is incomparably superior to the average citizen of any other land where the subject does not fully participate in the government. Discussions on the stump, and above all the discussions he himself has with his fellows, breed a desire for knowledge which will take no refusal and which leads to great general intelligence. In political discussion, acrimony and hate are not essential, and have of late years quite perceptibly diminished and will more and more diminish when discussions by women, and in the presence of women, become more common. If, then, discussion of public affairs among men has elevated them in knowledge and intelligence, why will it not lead to the same results among women? It is not merely education that makes civilization, but diffusion of education. The standing of a nation and its future depend not upon the education of the few, but of the whole. Every improvement in the status of woman in the matter of education has been an improvement to the whole race. Women have by education thus far become more womanly, not less. The same prophecies of ruin to womanliness were made against her education on general subjects that are now made against her participation in politics.

It is sometimes asserted that women now have a great influence in politics through their husbands and brothers. This is undoubtedly true. But that is just the kind of influence which is not wholesome for the community, for it is influence unaccompanied by responsibility. People are always ready to recommend to others what they would not do themselves. If it be true that women can not be prevented from exercising political influence, is not that only another reason why they should be steadied in their political action by that proper sense of responsibility which comes from acting themselves?

We conclude then, that every reason which in this country bestows the ballot upon man is equally applicable to the proposition to bestow the ballot upon woman, and that in our judgment there is no foundation for the fear that woman will thereby become unfitted for all the duties she has hitherto performed.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] For an interesting account of the struggle to secure these committees see History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. III, p. 198.

[21] But it was after five years of persistent appeal to Congress by Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood, and the enactment of a law, by overwhelming majorities in both Houses, prohibiting the Supreme Court from denying admission to lawyers on account of sex, that this act of justice was accomplished.

[22] This committee was composed of Senators Cockrell (Mo.), Fair (Nev.), Brown (Ga.), Anthony (R. I.), Blair (N. H.), Palmer (Mich.), Lapham (N. Y.).

[23] J. Randolph Tucker, Va.; Nathaniel J. Hammond, Ga.; David B. Culberson, Tex.; Samuel W. Moulton, Ills.; James O. Broadhead, Mo.; William Dorsheimer, N. Y.; Patrick A. Collins, Mass.; George E. Seney, O.; William C. Maybury, Mich.; Thomas B. Reed, Me.; Ezra B. Taylor, O.; Moses A. McCoid, Ia.; Thomas M. Browne, Ind.; Luke P. Poland, Vt.; Horatio Bisbee, Jr., Fla.

[24] Their report, dated April 23, 1884, was used entire by Senator Brown in the debate on woman suffrage which took place in the Senate of the United States January 25, 1887, and will be found in Chapter VI, which contains also a portion of the majority report included in the speech of Senator Blair.

[25] Would the men whose crimes very often have sent these "female litigants" into the courts, be willing to have their cases tried before a jury of women?

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. THE NATIONAL SUFFRAGE CONVENTION OF 1885.[26]

The Seventeenth of the national conventions was held in Lincoln Hall, Washington, D. C., Jan. 20-22, 1885, preceded by the usual brilliant reception, which was extended by Mr. and Mrs. Spofford each season for the twelve years during which the association had its headquarters at the Riggs House.

It is rather amusing to note the custom of the newspaper reporters to give a detailed description of the dress of each one of the speakers, usually to the exclusion of the subject-matter of her speech. On this occasion the public was informed that one lady "spoke in dark bangs and Bismarck brown;" one "in black and gold with angel sleeves, boutonniere and ear-drops;" another "in a basque polonaise and snake bracelets;" another "in black silk dress and bonnet, gold eye-glasses and black kid gloves." One lady wore "a small bonnet made of gaudy-colored birds' wings;" one "spoke with a pretty lisp, was attired in a box-pleated satin skirt, velvet newmarket basque polonaise, hollyhock corsage bouquet;" another "addressed the meeting in low tones and a poke bonnet;" still another "discussed the question in a velvet bonnet and plain linen collar." "A large lady wore a green cashmere dress with pink ribbons in her hair;" then there was "a slim lady with tulle ruffles, velvet sacque and silk skirt." Of one it was said: "Her face, though real feminine in shape, was painted all over with business till it looked like a man's, and her hair was shingled and brushed in little banglets." "Miss Anthony," so the report said, "wore a blue barbe trimmed in lace," while Mrs. Stanton "was attired in a black silk dress with a white handkerchief around her throat." One record declares that "there was not a pair of earrings on the platform, but most of the ladies wore gold watch-chains."

These extracts are taken verbatim from the best newspapers of the day. The conventions had passed the stage where, according to the reporters, all of the participants had short hair and wore bloomers, but, according to the same authority, they had reached the wonderful attire described above. This was fifteen years ago. The proceedings of the national convention of 1900 occupied from four to seven columns daily in each of the Washington papers, and one or more columns were telegraphed each day to the large newspapers of the United States, and yet it may be safely said that there was not one line of reference to the costumes of the ladies in attendance. The business meetings, speeches, etc., were reported with the same respect and dignity as are accorded to national conventions of men. The petty personalities of the past were wholly eliminated and women were presented from an intellectual standpoint, to be judged upon their merits and not by their clothes. This result alone is worth the fifty years of endeavor.

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton presided over all of the sessions. Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake gave a full report of the legislative work done in New York during the past year. In the address of Mrs. Harriette R. Shattuck (Mass.) she laid especial stress on the need for women to be invested with responsibility. Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage (N. Y.) discussed the woman question from a scientific standpoint. She was followed by Mrs. Laura de Force Gordon, the second woman admitted to practice before the U. S. Supreme Court, who answered the question, Is our Civilization Civilized? and described the legal status of women in California. Mrs. Caroline Gilkey Rogers (N. Y.) gave a spirited talk on the Aristocracy of Sex. The principal address of the evening was by Mrs. Stanton, a long and thoughtful paper in which she said:

Those people who declaim on the inequalities of sex, the disabilities and limitations of one as against the other, show themselves as ignorant of the first principles of life as would that philosopher who should undertake to show the comparative power of the positive as against the negative electricity, of the centrifugal as against the centripetal force, the attraction of the north as against the south end of the magnet. These great natural forces must be perfectly balanced or the whole material world would relapse into chaos. Just so the masculine and feminine elements in humanity must be exactly balanced to redeem the moral and social world from the chaos which surrounds it. One might as well talk of separate spheres for the two ends of the magnet as for man and woman; they may have separate duties in the same sphere, but their true place is together everywhere. Having different duties in the same sphere, neither can succeed without the presence and influence of the other. To restore the equilibrium of sex is the first step in social, religious and political progress. It is by the constant repression of the best elements in humanity, by our false customs, creeds and codes, that we have thus far retarded civilization....

There would be more sense in insisting on man's limitations because he can not be a mother, than on woman's because she can be. Surely maternity is an added power and development of some of the most tender sentiments of the human heart and not a "limitation." "Yes," says another pertinacious reasoner, "but it unfits woman for much of the world's work." Yes, and it fits her for much of the world's work; a large share of human legislation would be better done by her because of this deep experience....

If one-half the effort had been expended to exalt the feminine element that has been made to degrade it, we should have reached the natural equilibrium long ago. Either sex, in isolation, is robbed of one-half its power for the accomplishment of any given work. This was the most fatal dogma of the Christian religion--that in proportion as men withdrew from all companionship with women, they could get nearer to God, grow more like the Divine Ideal.

Telegrams of greetings were received from many associations and individuals. Miss Frances Ellen Burr, who made a fine stenographic report of the entire convention, spoke for Connecticut, closing with an ideal picture of civilization as it might be with the wisdom of both sexes brought to bear on the problems of society. The following resolutions were written by Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby:

WHEREAS, The dogmas incorporated in the religious creeds derived from Judaism, teaching that woman was an afterthought in creation, her sex a misfortune, marriage a condition of subordination, and maternity a curse, are contrary to the law of God as revealed in nature and the precepts of Christ; and,

WHEREAS, These dogmas are an insidious poison, sapping the vitality of our civilization, blighting woman and palsying humanity; therefore,

Resolved, That we denounce these dogmas wherever they are enunciated, and we will withdraw our personal support from any organization so holding and teaching; and,

Resolved, That we call upon the Christian ministry, as leaders of thought, to teach and enforce the fundamental idea of creation that man was made in the image of God, male and female, and given equal dominion over the earth, but none over each other. And further we invite their co-operation in securing the recognition of the cardinal point of our creed, that in true religion there is neither male nor female, neither bond nor free, but all are one.

The resolutions were introduced and advocated by Mrs. Stanton, who said: "Woman has been licensed to preach in the Methodist church; the Unitarian and Universalist and some branches of the Baptist denomination have ordained women, but the majority do not recognize them officially, although for the first three centuries after the proclamation of Christianity women had a place in the church. They were deaconesses and elders, and were ordained and administered the sacrament. Yet through the Catholic hierarchy these privileges were taken away in Christendom and they have never been restored. Now we intend to demand equal rights in the church."

This precipitated a vigorous discussion which extended into the next day. Miss Anthony was opposed to a consideration of the resolutions and in giving her reasons said:

I was on the old Garrisonian platform and found long ago that this matter of settling any question of human rights by people's interpretation of the Bible is never satisfactory. I hope we shall not go back to that war. No two can ever interpret alike, and discussion upon it is time wasted. We all know what we want, and that is the recognition of woman's perfect equality--in the Home, the Church and the State. We all know that such recognition has never been granted her in the centuries of the past. But for us to begin a discussion here as to who established these dogmas would be anything but profitable. Let those who wish go back into the history of the past, but I beg it shall not be done on our platform.

Mrs. Mary E. McPherson (Ia.) insisted that the Bible did not ignore women, although custom might do so. The Rev. Dr. McMurdy (D. C.) declared that women were teachers under the old Jewish dispensation; that the Catholic church set apart its women, ordained them and gave them the title "reverend"; that the Episcopal church ordained deaconesses. He hoped the convention would not take action on this question. John B. Wolf upheld the resolution. Mrs. Shattuck thought the church was coming around to a belief in woman suffrage and it would be a mistake to antagonize it.

Mrs. Colby insisted the resolutions did not attack the Bible, but the dogmas which grew out of man's interpretation of it, saying:

This dogma of woman's divinely appointed inferiority has sapped the vitality of our civilization, blighted woman and palsied humanity. As a Christian woman and a member of an orthodox church, I stand on this resolution; on the divine plan of creation as set forth in the first chapter of Genesis, where we are told that man was created male and female and set over the world to have equal dominion; and on the gospel of the new dispensation, in which there is neither male nor female, bond nor free, but all are one. This resolution avows our loyalty to what we believe to be the true teachings of the Bible, and the co-operation of the Christian ministry is invited in striving to secure the application of the golden rule to women.

Edward M. Davis (Penn.) declared that, while individual members might favor woman suffrage, not one religious body ever had declared for it, and the convention ought to express itself on this subject. Mrs. Gordon pointed out the difference between religion and theology. Mrs. Stanton, being called on for further remarks, spoke in the most earnest manner:

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman. There is not one which has not made her subject to man. Men may rejoice in them because they make man the head of the woman. I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself on the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion. Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, "Thus saith the Lord," of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us that as Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of the woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women can look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage. Observe to-day the work women are doing for the churches. The church rests on the shoulders of women. Have we ever yet heard a man preach a sermon from Genesis i:27-28, which declares the full equality of the feminine and masculine element in the Godhead? They invariably shy at that first chapter. They always get up in their pulpits and read the second chapter.

Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us that abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?... The canon laws are infamous--so infamous that a council of the Christian church was swamped by them. In republican America, and in the light of the nineteenth century, we must demand that our religion shall teach a higher idea in regard to woman. People seem to think we have reached the very end of theology; but let me say that the future is to be as much purer than the past as our immediate past has been better than the dark ages. We want to help roll off from the soul of woman the terrible superstitions that have so long repressed and crushed her.

Through the determined efforts of Miss Anthony and some others the resolution was permitted to lie on the table.

Miss Matilda Hindman (Penn.) gave an address on As the Rulers, So the People, well fortified with statistics. The Rev. Olympia Brown (Wis.) made a stirring appeal under the title All Are Created Equal. Among the many excellent addresses were those of Mrs. Colby, Mrs. Annie L. Diggs (Kas.) and Dr. Alice B. Stockham (Ills.). The usual resolutions were adopted, and the memorial called forth a number of eulogies:

Resolved, That in the death of the Hon. Henry Fawcett, of England, Senator Henry B. Anthony, the Rev. William Henry Channing, ex-Secretary of the Treasury Charles J. Folger, Bishop Matthew Simpson, Madame Mathilde Anneke, Kate Newell Doggett, Frances Dana Gage, Laura Giddings Julian, Sarah Pugh and Elizabeth T. Schenck, the year 1884 has been one of irreparable losses to our movement.

Among the many interesting letters written to the convention was one from Wm. Lloyd Garrison, inclosing letters received in times past expressing sympathy with the efforts of the suffrage advocates, from his father, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and from the Rev. William Henry Channing, whose body at this very time was being borne across the ocean to its resting place in this country. A touching message was read from that faithful and efficient pioneer, Clarina I. H. Nichols, of California, which ended: "My last words in the good work for humanity are, 'God is with us.' There can be no failure and no defeat outside ourselves." The writer passed away before it reached the convention. Other encouraging letters were received from the Reverends Anna Garlin Spencer (R. I.), Ada C. Bowles and Phebe A. Hanaford (Mass.); from Mrs. Julia Foster and her daughters, Rachel and Julia, in Berlin; from Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick (La.), Mrs. Emma C. Bascom, of Wisconsin University, and friends and workers in all parts of the country.

The convention adopted a comprehensive plan of work submitted by Mrs. Blake, Miss Hindman and Mrs. Colby.[27] At the last session Miss Anthony made a strong, practical speech on the Present Status of the Woman Suffrage Question, and Mrs. Stanton closed the convention.

A number of ministers on the following Sunday took as a text the resolution which had been discussed so vigorously, and used it as an argument against the enfranchisement of women, some of them going so far as to denounce the suffrage advocates as infidels and the movement itself as atheistic and immoral. They wholly ignored the facts--first, that the resolution was merely against the dogmas which had been incorporated into the creeds, and was simply a demand that Christian ministers should teach and enforce only the fundamental declarations of the Scriptures; second, that there was an emphatic division of opinion among the members on the resolution; third, that by consent it was laid on the table; and fourth, that even had it been adopted, it was neither atheistic nor immoral.

On February 6, 1885, Thomas W. Palmer (Mich.) brought up in the Senate the joint resolution for a Sixteenth Amendment which had been favorably reported by the Select Committee on Woman Suffrage the previous winter, and in its support made a masterly argument which has not been surpassed in the fifteen years that have since elapsed, saying in part:

This resolution involves the consideration of the broadest step in the progress of the struggle for human liberty that has ever been submitted to any ruler or to any legislative body. Its taking is pregnant with wide changes in the pathway of future civilization. Its obstruction will delay and cripple our advancement. The trinity of principles which Lord Chatham called the "Bible of the English Constitution," the Magna Charta, the Petition of Rights, and the Bill of Rights, are towering landmarks in the history of our race, but they immediately concerned but few at the time of their erection.

The Declaration of Independence by the colonists and its successful assertion, the establishment of the right of petition, the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the property qualification for suffrage in nearly all the States, the recognition of the right of women to earn, hold, enjoy and devise property, are proud and notable gains.

The emancipation of 4,000,000 slaves and the subsequent extension of suffrage to the male adults among them were measures enlarging the possibilities of freedom, the full benefits of which have yet to be realized; but the political emancipation of 26,000,000 of our citizens, equal to us in most essential respects and superior to us in many, it seems to me would translate our nation, almost at a bound, to the broad plateau of universal equality and co-operation to which all these blood-stained and prayer-worn steps have surely led.

Like life insurance and the man who carried the first umbrella, the inception of this movement was greeted with derision. Born of an apparently hopeless revolt against unjust discrimination, unequal statutes, and cruel constructions of courts, it has pressed on and over ridicule, malice, indifference and conservatism, until it stands in the gray dawn before the most powerful legislative body on earth and challenges final consideration.

The laws which degraded our wives have been everywhere repealed or modified, and our children may now be born of free women. Our sisters have been recognized as having brains as well as hearts, and as being capable of transacting their own business affairs. New avenues of self-support have been found and profitably entered upon, and the doors of our colleges have ceased to creak their dismay at the approach of women. Twelve States have extended limited suffrage through their Legislatures, and three Territories admit all citizens of suitable age to the ballot-box, while from no single locality in which it has been tried comes any word but that of satisfaction concerning the experiment.

The spirit of inquiry attendant upon the agitation and discussion of this question has permeated every neighborhood in the land, and none can be so blind as to miss the universal development in self-respect, self-reliance, general intelligence and increased capacity among our women. They have lost none of the womanly graces, but by fitting themselves for counselors and mental companions have benefited man, more perhaps than themselves.

In considering the objections to this extension of the suffrage we are fortunate in finding them grouped in the adverse report of the minority of your committee, and also in confidently assuming, from the acknowledged ability and evident earnestness of the distinguished Senators who prepared it, that all is contained therein in the way of argument or protest which is left to the opponents of this reform after thirty-seven years of discussion. I wish that every Senator would examine this report and note how many of its reasonings are self-refuting and how few even seem to warrant further antagonism.

They cite the physical superiority of man, but offer no amendment to increase the voting power of a Sullivan or to disfranchise the halt, the lame, the blind or the sick. They regard the manly head of the family as its only proper representative, but would not exclude the adult bachelor sons. They urge disability to perform military service as fatal to full citizenship, but would hardly consent to resign their own rights because they have passed the age of conscription; or to question those of Quakers, who will not fight, or of professional men and civic officials, who, like mothers, are regarded as of more use to the State at home.

They are dismayed by a vision of women in attendance at caucuses at late hours of the night, but doubtless enjoy their presence at balls and entertainments until the early dawn. They deprecate the appearance of women at political meetings, but in my State women have attended such meetings for years upon the earnest solicitation of those in charge, and the influence of their presence has been good. Eloquent women are employed by State committees of all parties to canvass in their interests and are highly valued and respected....

They object that many women do not desire the suffrage and that some would not exercise it. It is probably true, as often claimed, that many slaves did not desire emancipation in 1863--and there are men in most communities who do not vote, but we hear of no freedman to-day who asks re-enslavement, and no proposition is offered to disfranchise all men because some neglect their duty.

The minority profess a willingness to have this measure considered as a local issue rather than a national one, but those who recall the failures to extend the ballot to black men, in the most liberal Northern States, by a popular vote, may be excused if they question their frankness in suggesting this transfer of responsibility. The education of the people of a whole State on this particular question is a much more laborious and expensive work than an appeal to the several Legislatures. The subject would be much more likely to receive intelligent treatment at the hands of the picked men of a State, where calm discussion may be had, than at the polls where prejudice and tradition oftentimes exert a more potent influence than logic and justice. To refuse this method to those to whom we are bound by the dearest ties betrays an indifference to their requests or an inexplicable adhesion to prejudice, which is only sought to be defended by an asserted regard for women, that to me seems most illogical.

I share no fears of the degradation of women by the ballot. I believe rather that it will elevate men. I believe the tone of our politics will be higher, that our caucuses will be more jealously guarded and our conventions more orderly and decorous. I believe the polls will be freed from the vulgarity and coarseness which now too often surround them, and that the polling booths, instead of being in the least attractive parts of a ward or town, will be in the most attractive; instead of being in stables, will be in parlors. I believe the character of candidates will be more closely scrutinized and that better officers will be chosen to make and administer the laws. I believe that the casting of the ballot will be invested with a seriousness--I had almost said a sanctity--second only to a religious observance.

The objections enumerated above appear to be the only profferings against this measure excepting certain fragmentary quotations and deductions from the sacred Scriptures; and here, Mr. President, I desire to enter my most solemn protest. The opinions of Paul and Peter as to what was the best policy for the struggling churches under their supervision, in deferring to the prejudices of the communities which they desired to attract and benefit, were not inspirations for the guidance of our civilization in matters of political co-operation; and every apparent inhibition of the levelment of the caste of sex may be neutralized by selections of other paragraphs and by the general spirit and trend of the Holy Book.... Sir, my reverence for this grandest of all compilations, human or divine, compels a protest against its being cast into the street as a barricade against every moral, political and social reform; lest, when the march of progress shall have swept on and over to its consummation, it may appear to the superficial observer that it is the Bible which has been overthrown and not its erroneous interpretation.

If with our present experience of the needs and dangers of co-operative government and our present observation of woman's social and economic status, we could divest ourselves of our traditions and prejudices, and the question of suffrage should come up for incorporation into a new organic law, a distinction based upon sex would not be entertained for a moment. It seems to me that we should divest ourselves to the utmost extent possible of these entanglements of tradition, and judicially examine three questions relative to the proposed extension of suffrage: First, Is it right? Second, Is it desirable? Third, Is it expedient? If these be determined affirmatively our duty is plain.

If the right of the governed and the taxed to a voice in determining by whom they shall be governed and to what extent and for what purposes they may be taxed is not a natural right, it is nevertheless a right to the declaration and establishment of which by the fathers we owe all that we possess of liberty. They declared taxation without representation to be tyranny, and grappled with the most powerful nation of their day in a seven-years' struggle for the overthrow of such tyranny. It appears incredible to me that any one can indorse the principles proclaimed by the patriots of 1776 and deny their application to women.

Samuel Adams said: "Representation and legislation, as well as taxation, are inseparable, according to the spirit of our Constitution and of all others that are free." Again, he said: "No man can be justly taxed by, or bound in conscience to obey, any law to which he has not given his consent in person or by his representative." And again: "No man can take another's property from him without his consent. This is the law of nature; and a violation of it is the same thing whether it is done by one man, who is called a king, or by five hundred of another denomination."

James Otis, in speaking of the rights of the colonists as descendants of Englishmen; said they "were not to be cheated out of them by any phantom of virtual representation or any other fiction of law or politics." Again: "No such phrase as virtual representation is known in law or constitution. It is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd."

The Declaration of Independence asserts that, to secure the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among men, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Benjamin Franklin wrote that "liberty or freedom consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who frame the laws and who are the guardians of every man's life, property and peace;" that "they who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes and to their representatives."

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." ...

The right of women to personal representation through the ballot seems to me unassailable, wherever the right of man is conceded and exercised. I can conceive of no possible abstract justification for the exclusion of the one and the inclusion of the other.

Is the recognition of this right desirable? The earliest mention of the Saxon people is found in the Germany of Tacitus, and in his terse description of them he states that "in all grave matters they consult their women." Can we afford to dispute the benefit of this counseling in the advancement of our race?

The measure of the civilization of any nation may be no more surely ascertained by its consumption of salt than by the social, economic and political status of its women. It is not enough for contentment that we assert the superiority of our women in intelligence, virtue, and self-sustaining qualities, but we must consider the profit to them and to the State in their further advancement.

Our statistics are lamentably meager in information as to the status of our women outside their mere enumeration, but we learn that in a single State 42,000 are assessed and pay one-eleventh of the total burden of taxation, with no voice in its disbursements. From the imperfect gleaning of the Tenth Census we learn that of the total enumerated bread-winners of the United States more than one-seventh are women.... That these 2,647,157 citizens of whom we have official information labor from necessity and are everywhere underpaid is within the knowledge and observation of every Senator upon this floor. Only the Government makes any pretense of paying women in accordance with the labor performed--without submitting them to the competition of their starving sisters, whose natural dignity and self-respect have suffered from being driven by the fierce pressure of want into the few and crowded avenues for the exchange of their labor for bread. Is it not the highest exhibit of the moral superiority of our women that so very few consent to exchange pinching penury for gilded vice?

Will the possession of the ballot multiply and widen these avenues to self-support and independence? The most thoughtful women who have given the subject thorough examination believe it, and I can not but infer that many men, looking only to their own selfish interests, fear it.

History teaches that every class which has assumed political responsibility has been materially elevated and improved thereby, and I can not believe that the rule would have an exception in the women of to-day. I do not say that to the idealized women so generally described by obstructionists--the dainty darlings whose prototypes are to be found in the heroines of Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper--immediate awakening would come; but to the toilers, the wage-workers and the women of affairs, the consequent enlargement of possibilities would give new courage and stimulate to new endeavor, and the State would be the gainer thereby.

The often-urged fear that the ignorant and vicious would swarm to the polls while the intelligent and virtuous would stand aloof, is fully met by the fact that the former class has never asked for the suffrage or shown interest in its seeking, while the hundreds of thousands of petitioners are from our best and noblest women, including those whose efforts for the amelioration of the wrongs and sufferings of others have won for them imperishable tablets in the temple of humanity. Would fear be entertained that the State would suffer mortal harm if, by some strange revolution, its exclusive control should be turned over to an oligarchy composed of such women as have been and are identified with the agitation for the political emancipation of their sex? Saloons, brothels and gaming-houses might vanish before such an administration; wars avoidable with safety and honor might not be undertaken, and taxes might be diverted to purposes of general sanitation and higher education, but neither in these respects nor in the efforts to lift the bowed and strengthen the weak would the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness be placed in peril. Women have exercised the highest civil powers in all ages of the world--from Zenobia to Victoria--and have exhibited statecraft and military capacity of high degree without detracting from their graces as women or their virtues as mothers....

The preponderance of women in our churches, our charitable organizations, our educational councils, has been of such use as to suggest the benefit of their incorporation into our voting force to the least observant. A woman who owns railroad or manufacturing or mining stock may vote unquestioned by the side of the brightest business men of our continent, but if she transfers her property into real estate she loses all voice in its control.

Their abilities, intellectual, physical and political, are as various as ours, and they err who set up any single standard, however lovely, by which to determine the rights, needs and possibilities of the sex. To me the recognition of their capacity for full citizenship is right and desirable, and it only remains to consider whether it is safe, whether it is expedient. To this let experience answer to the extent that the experiment has been made.

During the first thirty years of the independence of New Jersey, universal suffrage was limited only by a property qualification; but we do not learn that divorces were common, that families were more divided on political than on religious differences, that children were neglected or that patriotism languished, although the first seven years of that experiment were years of decimating war, and the remaining twenty-three of poverty and recuperation--conditions most conducive to discontent and erratic legislation.

The reports from Wyoming, which I have examined, are uniform in satisfaction with the system, and I do not learn therefrom that women require greater physical strength, fighting qualities or masculinity to deposit a ballot than a letter or visiting card; while in their service as jurors they have exhibited greater courage than their brothers in finding verdicts against desperadoes in accordance with the facts. Governors, judges, officers and citizens unite in praises of the influence of women upon the making and execution of wholesome laws.

In Washington Territory, last fall, out of a total vote of 40,000 there were 12,000 ballots cast by women, and everywhere friends were rejoiced and opponents silenced as apprehended dangers vanished upon approach. Some of the comments of converted newspaper editors which have reached us are worthy of preservation and future reference. The elections were quiet and peaceable for the first time; the brawls of brutal men gave place to the courtesies of social intercourse; saloons were closed, and nowhere were the ladies insulted or in any way annoyed. Women vote intelligently and safely, and it does not appear that their place is solely at home any more than that the farmer should never leave his farm, the mechanic his shop, the teacher his desk, the clergyman his study, or the professional man his office, for the purpose of expressing his wishes and opinions at the tribunal of the ballot-box.

To-day--and to a greater extent in the near future--we are confronted with political conditions dangerous to the integrity of our nation. In the unforeseen but constant absorption of immigrants and former bondmen into a vast army of untrained voters, without restrictions as to the intelligence, character or patriotism, many political economists see the material for anarchy and public demoralization. It is claimed that the necessities of parties compel subserviency to the lawless and vicious classes in our cities, and that, without the addition of a counterbalancing element, the enactment and enforcement of wholesome statutes will soon be impossible. Fortunately that needed element is not far to seek. It stands at the door of the Congress urging annexation. In its strivings for justice it has cried aloud in petitions from the best of our land, and more than one-third of the present voters of five States have indorsed its cause. Its advocates are no longer the ridiculed few, but the respected many. A list of the leaders of progressive thought of this generation who espouse and urge this reform would be too long and comprehensive for recital.

Mr. President, I do not ask the submission of this amendment, nor shall I urge its adoption, because it is desired by a portion of the American women, although in intelligence, property and numbers that portion would seem to have every requisite for the enforcement of their demands; neither are we bound to give undue regard to the timidity and hesitation of that possibly larger portion who shrink from additional responsibilities; but I ask and shall urge it because the nation has need of the co-operation of women in all directions.

The war power of every government compels, upon occasion, all citizens of suitable age and physique to leave their homes, families and avocations to be merged in armies, whether they be willing or unwilling, craven or bold, patriotic or indifferent, and no one gainsays the right, because the necessities of State require their services. We have passed the harsh stages incident to our permanent institution. We have conquered our independence, conquered the respect of European powers, conquered our neighbors on the western borders, and at vast cost of life and waste have conquered our internal differences and emerged a nation unchallenged from without or within. The great questions of the future conduct of our people are to be economic and social ones. No one doubts the superiority of womanly instincts, and consequent thought in the latter, and the repeated failures and absurdities exhibited by male legislators in the treatment of the former, should give pause to any assertion of superiority there.

The day has come when the counsel and service of women are required by the highest interests of the State, and who shall gainsay their conscription? We place the ballot in the keeping of immigrants who have grown middle-aged or old in the environment of governments dissimilar to the spirit and purpose of ours, and we do well, because the responsibility accompanying the trust tends to examination, comparison and consequent political education; but we decline to avail ourselves of the aid of our daughters, wives and mothers, who were born and are already educated under our system, reading the same newspapers, books and periodicals as ourselves, proud of our common history, tenacious of our theories of human rights and solicitous for our future progress. Whatever may have been wisest as to the extension of suffrage to this tender and humane class when wars of assertion or conquest were likely to be considered, to-day and to-morrow and thereafter no valid reason seems assignable for longer neglect to avail ourselves of their association.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] This chapter closes with the speech in favor of woman suffrage by Thomas W. Palmer in the U. S. Senate.

[27] The primal object of the National Woman Suffrage Association has been from its foundation to secure the submission by the Congress of a Sixteenth Amendment which shall prohibit the several States from disfranchising United States citizens on account of sex. To this end all State societies should see that senators and members of Congress are constantly appealed to by their constituents to labor for the passage of this amendment by the next Congress.

Woman suffrage associations in the several States are advised to push the question to a vote in their respective Legislatures. The time for agitation alone has passed, and the time for aggressive action has come. It will be found by a close examination of many State constitutions that by the liberal provisions of their Bill of Rights--often embodied in Article I--the women of the State can be enfranchised without waiting for the tedious and hopeless proviso of a constitutional amendment....

In States where there has been little or no agitation we recommend the passage of laws granting School Suffrage to women. This first step in politics is an incentive to larger usefulness and aids greatly in familiarizing women with the use of the ballot.

We do not specially recommend Municipal Suffrage, as we think that the agitation expended for the fractional measure had better be directed towards obtaining the passage of a Full Suffrage Bill, but we leave this to the discretion of the States.

The acting Vice-President in every State must hold a yearly convention in the capital or some large town. No efficient organization can exist without some such annual reunion of the friends.

In each county there should be a county woman suffrage society auxiliary to the State; in each town or village a local society auxiliary to the county. Friends desirous of forming a society should meet, even though few in number, and organize.

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V. THE NATIONAL SUFFRAGE CONVENTION OF 1886

The Eighteenth national convention met in the Church of Our Father, Washington, D. C., Feb. 17-19, 1886, presided over by Miss Susan B. Anthony, vice-president-at-large, with twenty-three States represented. In her opening address Miss Anthony paid an eloquent tribute to her old friend and co-laborer, their absent president, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton; sketched the history of the movement for the past thirty-six years, and described the first suffrage meeting ever held in Washington. This had been conducted by Ernestine L. Rose and herself in 1854, and the audience consisted of twenty or thirty persons gathered in an upper room of a private house. To-night she faced a thousand interested listeners.

The first address was given by Mrs. Sarah M. Perkins (O.), Are Women Citizens? "While suffrage will not revolutionize the world," she said, "the door of the millennium will have a little child's hand on the latch when the mothers of the nation have equal power with its fathers."

In the evening Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby addressed the audience on The Relation of the Woman Suffrage Movement to the Labor Question. She began by saying, "All revolutions of thought must be allied to practical ends." After sketching those already attained by women, she continued:

The danger threatens that, having accomplished all these so thoroughly and successfully that they no longer need our help and already scarcely own their origin, we will be left without the connecting line between the abstract right on which we stand and the common heart and sympathy which must be enlisted for our cause ere it can succeed. Why is it that, having accomplished so much, the woman suffrage movement does not force itself as a vital issue into the thoughts of the masses? Is it not because the ends which it most prominently seeks do not enlist the self-interest of mankind, and those palpable wrongs which it had in early days to combat have now almost entirely disappeared?...

We need to vitalize our movement by allying it with great non-partisan questions, and many of these are involved in the interests of the wage-earning classes.... We need to labor to secure a change of the conditions under which workingwomen live. We need to help them to educative and protective measures, to better pay, to better knowledge how to make the most of their resources, to better training, to protection against frauds, to shelter when health and heart fail. We must help them to see the connection between the ballot and better hours, exclusion of children from factories, compulsory education, free kindergartens; between the ballot and laws relating to liability of employers, savings banks, adulteration of food and a thousand things which it may secure when in the hands of enlightened and virtuous people.

Miss Ada C. Sweet, who for a number of years occupied the unique position of pension agent in Chicago, supplemented Mrs. Colby's remarks by urging all women to work for the ballot in order to come to the rescue of their fellow-women in the hospitals, asylums and other institutions. She emphasized her remarks by recounting instances of personal knowledge.

The Rev. Rush R. Shippen, pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church of Washington, a consistent advocate of equal suffrage, spoke on woman's advance in every department of the world's work, on the evolution of that work itself and the necessity for a continued progress in conditions.

Mrs. May Wright Sewall presented a comprehensive report of the year's work of the executive committee. The Edmunds Bill had been a special point of attack because of its arbitrary disfranchisement of Utah women, and Mrs. Zerelda G. Wallace (Ind.) had written a personal plea against it to every member of the House. At the close of this report a vote on woman suffrage was called for. The audience voted unanimously in favor, except one man whose "no" called forth much laughter. Miss Anthony said she sympathized with him, as she had been laughed at all her life.

Mrs. Sallie Clay Bennett (Ky.), whose specialty was the Bible argument for woman's equality, said in the course of her remarks: "I am filled with shame and sorrow that from listening to men, instead of studying the Bible for myself, I did once think that the God who said He came into the world to preach glad tidings to the poor, to break every yoke and to set the prisoners free, had really come to rivet the chains with which sin had bound the women, and to forge a gag for them more cruel and silencing than that put into their mouths by heathen men; for in many heathen nations women were once selected to preside at their most sacred altars."

Miss Mary F. Eastman (Mass), in an impressive address, said:

I asked a friend what phase of the subject I should talk about to-night. She answered, "The despair of it.".. Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that "we, the people," should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?...

Men tell us that they speak for us. There is no companionship of women as equals permitted in the State. A man can not represent a woman's opinion. It was in inspiration that magnificent Declaration of Independence was framed. Men builded better than they knew; they were at the highest perception of principles; but after declaring this magnificent principle they went back on it....

Although I hold the attitude of a petitioner, I come not with the sense that men have any right to give. Our forefathers erected barriers which exclude women. I want to press it into the consciousness of the legislator and of the individual citizen that he is personally responsible for the continuance of this injustice. We ask that men take down the barriers. We do not come to pledge that we will be a unit on temperance or virtue or high living, but we want the right to speak for ourselves, as men speak for themselves.

Mrs. Caroline Hallowell Miller (Md.) spoke strongly on A Case in Point. Mrs. Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, of St. Louis, devoted her remarks chiefly to a caustic criticism of Senator George G. Vest, who had recently declared himself uncompromisingly opposed to woman suffrage. He was made the target of a number of spicy remarks, and some of the newspaper correspondents insisted that the presence of the suffrage convention in the city was responsible for the Senator's severe illness, which followed immediately afterwards. Mrs. Meriwether's son, Lee, paid a handsome tribute to "strong-minded mothers".

Mrs. Harriette R. Shattuck (Mass.) addressed the convention on The Basis of Our Claim, the right of every individual to make his personality felt in the Government. Madame Clara Neymann (N. Y.) gave a scholarly paper on German and American Independence Contrasted, in which she said:

The difference between the German and the American is simply this: Germans believe in monarchism, in the rule of the Emperor and Prince Bismarck, while Americans believe in the government by all the people, high or low, rich or poor. You have conferred the blessings of free citizenship upon the negro; you invite the humblest, the lowest men to cast their vote; you make them feel that they are sovereign human beings; you place those men above the most virtuous, intelligent women; you set them above your own daughters. Yes, your own child, if born a girl on this free soil, is not free, for she stands without the pale of the Constitution. She, and only she, is deprived of her rightful heritage.

Oh, shame upon the short-sightedness, the delinquency of American statesmen, who will quietly look on and suffer such an injustice to exist! Nowhere in the world is woman so highly respected as in free America, and nowhere does she feel so keenly and deeply her degradation. The vote--you know it full well--is the insignia of power, of influence, of position. And from this position the American woman is debarred.

Do you wonder at the low estimate of American politics? The exclusion of women means the exclusion of your best men. Not before the husband can take his wife, the brother his sister, the father his daughter to the primary meeting, to the political assembly and to the polls, will he himself become interested and fulfil his duty as a voter and a citizen....

"Look at the homes of the wealthy, or even of the large middle-class", it is often said; "what shallowness and pretense among the women; how they shrink from the responsibility of motherhood; how they spend their days in idle gossip, in hollow amusements; how they waste their hours in frivolities; see what extravagant, unhallowed lives they lead". Sad and true enough! For there is no aristocracy so pernicious as a moneyed aristocracy--no woman so dangerous as she who has privileges and no corresponding duties. There is nothing so wasteful as wasted energies, nothing so harmful as powers wrongfully directed; and the gifts and powers of our wealthy, well-to-do women are wrongfully directed. They are employed in the interest of vanity, of worldly ambition, of public display, of sense gratification.

From whence arises this misdirected ambition? The harm is caused by the false standard man holds up to woman. If men would no longer admire the shallowness of such women they would undoubtedly aim higher. On the one side man subordinates himself to woman's whims and caprices, and on the other side she is made conscious all the time of her dependence and subordination in all that pertains to the higher interests of life; and while he makes a slave of her, she revenges herself and makes a slave of him. See how these women hold men down to their own low level; for women who have no higher aspirations than their own immediate pleasure will induce men to do the same. There is an even-handed justice that rules this world. For every wrong society permits to exist, society must suffer. Look what fools men are made by foolish women--women who are brought up with the idea that they must be ornamental, a beautiful toy for man to play with. See how they turn around and make a toy of him, an instrument to play upon at their leisure.

What we ask in place of all this indulgence is simple justice, a recognition of woman's higher endowment. In giving her larger duties to perform, nobler aims to accomplish--in making her a responsible human being--you not only will benefit her, but will regenerate the manhood of America....

To make the advocates of suffrage responsible for the sins of American women is simply atrocious, since it is from these very advocates that every reform for and among women has started; it is they who preach simplicity, purity, devotion, and who would gird all womanhood with the armor of self-respect and true womanliness. That such women are compelled to come before the public, before the Congress and the Legislatures, and pray for such rights as are freely given to every unenlightened foreigner is a burning shame and reflects badly upon the intelligence, the righteousness of Legislatures and people.

Much indignation was expressed during the convention over the recent action of Gov. Gilbert A. Pierce, of the Territory of Dakota. The Legislature, composed of residents, the previous year passed a bill conferring Full Suffrage on women, which was vetoed by the Governor, an outsider appointed a short time before by President Chester A. Arthur. With a stroke of the pen he prevented the enfranchisement of 50,000 women.

Hundreds were turned away at the last evening session and there was scarcely standing room within the church. A witty and vivacious speech by Mrs. Helen M. Gougar (Ind.) was the first number on the program. Mrs. Julia B. Nelson (Minn.) followed in an original dialect poem, Hans Dunderkopf's Views of Equality. Mrs. Sewall showed the Absurdity of the American Woman's Disfranchisement:

The inconsistency of the present position of the American woman is forcibly shown in that she is now making such an advance in education, studying political science under the best teachers of constitutional law, and enjoying such advantages at the expense of the Government, yet is not allowed to make use of this knowledge in the Government....

Much has been said about the need of the ballot to protect the industrial interests of men, but is it not as ungallant as it is illogical that they should have the ballot for their protection while women, pressed by the same necessities, should be denied it?...

I may perhaps put it that man is composed of brain and heart and woman of heart and brain. We must have the brain of man and the heart of woman employed in the higher developments to come. There can be no great scheme that does not require to be conceived by our brains, quickened by our hearts and carried into execution by our skilled hands. The activities which are considered the especial sphere of woman need more brain; the realm of State developed by the brain of man needs more heart. Home and State have been too long divided. Man must not neglect the interests of home, woman must care for the State. Our public interests and private hopes need all the subtle forces of brain and heart.

An interesting feature of these national conventions was the State reports, which contained not only valuable specific information, but often felicitous little arguments quite equal to those of the more formal addresses. Such reports were received in 1886 from thirty different States. A large number of interesting letters also were read, among them one from George W. Childs, inclosing check; John W. Hutchinson, Belva A. Lockwood, the Hon. J. A. Pickler, Madame Demorest, Dr. Mary F. Thomas, Lucinda B. Chandler, the Rev. Olympia Brown, Mary E. Haggart, Armenia S. White, Emma C. Bascom, Almeda B. Gray and many others.

A letter from Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton urged that the question of woman suffrage should now be carried into the churches and church conventions for their approval, and that more enlightened teaching from the pulpit in regard to women should be insisted upon. The letter was accompanied by a resolution to this effect, both expressed in very strong language. They were read first in executive session. The following extracts are taken from the stenographic report of the meeting:

Mrs. Helen M. Gougar (Ind.) moved that the resolution be laid upon the table, saying: "A resolution something like this came into the last convention, and it has done more to cripple my work and that of other suffragists than anything which has happened in the whole history of the woman suffrage movement. When you look this country over you find the slums are opposed to us, while some of the best leaders and advocates of woman suffrage are among the Christian people. A bishop of the Roman Catholic Church stood through my meeting in Peoria not long since. We can not afford to antagonize the churches. Some of us are orthodox, and some of us are unorthodox, but this association is for suffrage and not for the discussion of religious dogmas. I can not stay within these borders if that resolution is adopted, from the fact that my hands would be tied. I hope it will not go into open convention for debate.

MRS. PERKINS (O.): I think we ought to pay due consideration and respect to our beloved president. I have no objection to sending missionaries to the churches asking them to pay attention to woman suffrage; but I do not think the churches are our greatest enemies. They might have been so in Mrs. Stanton's early days, but to-day they are our best helpers. If it were not for their co-operation I could not get a hearing before the public. And now that they are coming to meet us half way, do not throw stones at them. I hope that resolution, as worded, will not go into the convention.

MRS. MERIWETHER (Mo.): I think the resolution could be amended so as to offend no one. The ministers falsely construe the Scriptures. We can overwhelm them with arguments for woman suffrage--with Biblical arguments. We can hurl them like shot and shell. Herbert Spencer once wrote an article on the different biases which distort the human mind, and among the first he reckoned the theological bias. In Christ's time and in the early Christian days there was no liberty, every one was under the despotism of the Roman Caesars, but women were on an equality with men, and the religion that Christ taught included women equally with men. He made none of the invidious distinctions which the churches make to-day.

MRS. SHATTUCK (Mass.): We did not pass the resolution of last year, so it could not have harmed anybody. But I protest against this fling at masculine interpretation of the Scriptures.

MRS. MINOR (Mo.): I object to the whole thing--resolution and letter both. I believe in confining ourselves to woman suffrage.

MRS. COLBY (Neb.): I was on that committee of resolutions last year and wrote the modified one which was presented, and I am willing to stand by it. I have not found that it hurts the work, save with a few who do not know what the resolution was, or what was said about it. The discussion was reported word for word in the Woman's Tribune and I think no one who read it would say that it was irreligious or lacked respect for the teachings of Christ. I believe we must say something in the line of Mrs. Stanton's idea. She makes no fling at the church. She wants us to treat the Church as we have the State--viz., negotiate for more favorable action. We have this fact to deal with--that in no high orthodox body have women been accorded any privileges.

EDWARD M. DAVIS (Penn.): I think we have never had a resolution offered here so important as this. We have never had a measure brought forward which would produce better results. I agree entirely with Mrs. Stanton on this thing, that the church is the greatest barrier to woman's progress. We do not want to proclaim ourselves an irreligious or a religious people. This question of religion does not touch us either way. We are neutral.

MADAME NEYMANN (N. Y.): Because the clergy has been one-sided, we do not want to be one-sided. I know of no one for whom I have a greater admiration than for Mrs. Stanton. Her resolution antagonizes no one.

MRS. BROOKS (Neb.): Let us do this work in such a way that it will not arouse the opposition of the most bigoted clergyman. All this discussion only shows that the old superstitions have got to be banished.

MRS. SNOW (Me.): Mrs. Stanton wishes to convert the clergy.

MRS. DUNBAR (Md.): I don't want the resolution referred back to the committee, out of respect to Mrs. Stanton and the manner in which she has been treated by the clergy. I do not want to lose the wording of the original resolution, and therefore move that it be taken up here.

MRS. GOUGAR: I think it is quite enough to undertake to change the National Constitution without undertaking to change the Bible. I heartily agree with Mrs. Stanton in her idea of sending delegates to church councils and convocations, but I do not sanction this resolution which starts out--"The greatest barrier to woman's emancipation is found in the superstitions of the church." That is enough in itself to turn the entire church, Catholic and Protestant, against us.

MRS. NELSON (Minn.): The resolution is directed against the superstitions of the church and not against the church, but I think it would be taken as against the church.

MISS ANTHONY (N. Y.): As the resolution contains the essence of the letter, I move that the whole subject go to the Plan of Work Committee.

The meeting adjourned without action, and on Friday morning the same subject was resumed. A motion to table Mrs. Stanton's resolution was lost. Miss Anthony then moved that both letter and resolution be placed in her hands, as the representative of the president of the association, to be read in open convention without indorsement. "I do not want any one to say that we young folks strangle Mrs. Stanton's thought."

THE REV. DR. MCMURDY (D. C.): I do not intend to oppose or favor the motion, but as a clergyman and a High Church Episcopalian, I can not see any particular objections to Mrs. Stanton's letter. The Scriptures must be interpreted naturally. Whenever Paul's remarks are brought up I explain them in the light of this nineteenth century as contrasted with the first.

It was finally voted that the letter be read without the resolution.

The resolution was brought up later in open convention and the final vote resulted in 32 ayes and 24 noes. This was not at that time a delegate body, but usually only those voted who were especially connected with the work of the association. Before the present convention adjourned a basis of delegate representation was adopted, and provision made that hereafter only regularly accredited delegates should be entitled to vote.

The resolution calling upon Congress to take the necessary measures to secure the ballot for women through an amendment to the Federal Constitution, was vigorously opposed by the Southern delegates as contrary to States' Rights, but was finally adopted. There was some discussion also on the resolution which condemned the disfranchising of Gentile as well as Mormon women, but which approved the action of Congress in making disfranchisement a punishment for the crime of polygamy. A difference of opinion was shown in regard to the latter clause. This closed the convention.

As a favorable Senate report was pending, no hearing was held before that committee.

The House Judiciary Committee[28] granted a hearing on the morning of February 20. The speakers, as usual, were introduced to the chairman of the committee by Miss Anthony. The first of these, Mrs. Virginia L. Minor, had attempted to vote in St. Louis, been refused permission, carried her case to the Supreme Court and received an adverse decision.[29] Miss Anthony said in reference to this decision: "Chief Justice Waite declared the United States had no voters. The Dred Scott Decision was that the negro, not being a voter, was not a citizen. The Supreme Court decided that women, although citizens, were not protected in the rights of citizenship by the Fourteenth Amendment." Mrs. Minor said in part:

I do not stand here to represent rich women but poor women. Should you give me the right to vote and deny it to my sister I should spurn the gift. Without the ballot no class is so helpless as the working women. If the ballot is necessary for man, it is necessary for woman. We must have one law for all American citizens.

The Supreme Court has half done the work. When my case came up, and I asked them that the same law should protect me as protected the negro, the court said, "When the State gives you the right to vote, we will perpetuate it; the United States has no voters." I want to ask you one question. If there are no United States voters, what right has the U. S. Court to go into the State of New York, arrest Susan B. Anthony and condemn her under Federal Law?[30]

Another decision of the Supreme Court said in relation to the Fourteenth Amendment, that the negro, because of citizenship, was made a voter in every State of the Union. The court went on to say that it had a broader significance, that it included the Chinese or any nationality that should become citizens. That court has said we are citizens. If the Chinese would have the right to vote if they were citizens, have not we the right to vote because of citizenship?

A third decision was in the case of the United States vs. Kellar in the State of Illinois. A man arrested for illegal voting was brought before the court; he was born abroad and was the son of an American woman. Justice Harlan held that because his mother was a citizen, she had transmitted citizenship to her son, therefore he had a right to vote. This right must have been inherent in the mother, else she could not have transmitted it to her son.

Mrs. Julia B. Nelson (Minn.), who had been for many years teaching the freed negroes of the South, said:

What are the obligations of the Government to me, a widow, because my husband gave his life for it? I have been forced to think. As a law-abiding citizen and taxpayer and one who has given all she could give to the support of this Government, I have a right to be heard. I am teaching for it, teaching citizens. I began teaching freedmen when it was so unpopular that men could not have done it. The voting question met me in the office of the mission, which sends out more women than men because better work is done by them. A woman gets for this work $15 per month; if capable of being a principal she has $20. A man in this position receives $75 a month. There must be something wrong, but I do not need to explain to you that an unrepresented class must work at a disadvantage.

If it were granted to women to fill all positions for which they are qualified, they would not be so largely compelled to rush into those occupations where they are unfairly remunerated. As so many people have faith that whatever is is right, the law as it stands has great influence. If it puts woman down as an inferior, she will surely be regarded as such by the people. If I am capable of preparing citizens, I am capable of possessing the rights of a citizen myself. I ask you to remove the barriers which restrain women from equal opportunities and privileges with men.

Mrs. Meriwether pointed out the helplessness of mothers to obtain legal protection for themselves and their children, or to influence the action of municipal bodies, without the suffrage. Miss Eastman said in the course of her address:

The first business of government is foreshadowed in the Constitution, that it is to secure justice between man and man by allowing no intrusion of any on the rights of others. This principle is large in application although simple in statement. The first words, "We, the people," contain the foundation of our claim. If we limit the application of the word "people," all the rest falls to the ground. Whatever work of government is referred to, it all rests on its being managed by "We, the people." If we strike that out, we have lost the fundamental principle. Who are the people? I feel that it is not my business to ask men to vote on my right to be admitted to the franchise. I have been debarred from my right. You hold the position to do me justice. Why should I go to one-half of the people and ask whether so clear and explicit a declaration as this includes me? The suffrage is not theirs to give, and I would not get it from them easily if it were. Neither would you get even education if you had to ask them for it. This question is not for the people at large to settle. Justice demands that we should be referred to the most intelligent tribunals in the land, and not remanded to the popular vote.

Mrs. Clay Bennett based her argument largely on the authority of the Scriptures. Mrs. Gougar said:

We do not come as Democrats or Republicans, not as Northern or as Southern, but as women representing a great principle. This is in line with the Magna Charta, with the Petition of Rights, with the Articles of Confederation, with the National Constitution. This is in direct line of the growth of human liberty. The Declaration of Independence says, "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." Are you making a single law which does not touch me as much as it does you?

Questions are upon you which you can not solve without the moral sentiment of womanhood. You need us more than we need suffrage. In our large cities the vicious element rules. The reserve force is in the womanhood of the nation. Woman suffrage is necessary for the preservation of the life of the republic. To give women the ballot is to increase the intelligent and law-abiding vote. The tramp vote is entirely masculine. By enfranchising the women of this country, you enfranchise humanity.

Mrs. Colby thus described to the committee the recent vote in Nebraska on a woman suffrage amendment:

The subject was well discussed; the leading men and the majority of the press and pulpit favored it. Everything indicated that here at last the measure might be safely submitted to popular vote. On election day the women went to the polling places in nearly every precinct in the State, with their flowers, their banners, their refreshments and their earnest pleadings. But every saloon keeper worked against the amendment, backed by the money and the power of the liquor league. The large foreign vote went almost solidly against woman suffrage. Nebraska defies the laws of the United States by allowing foreigners to vote when they have been only six months on the soil of America. Many of these, as yet wholly unfamiliar with the institutions of our country, voted the ballot which was placed in their hands. The woman suffrage amendment received but a little over one-third of the votes cast.

Men were still so afraid women did not want to vote that only one thing remained to convince them we were in earnest, and that was for us to vote that way. So the next session we had another amendment introduced, to be voted on by the men as before, but not to take effect until ratified by a majority of the women. We were willing to be counted if the Legislature would make it legal to count us. It refused because the question, it said, had already been settled by the people. Although we had worked and pleaded and done all that women could do to obtain our rights of citizenship, yet the Legislature looking at "the people" did not see us, and refused to submit the question again. Having failed to obtain our rights by popular vote, we now appeal to you.

Miss Anthony related the unsuccessful efforts of Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick and other ladies of Louisiana to have women placed on the school boards of that State, due wholly to their disfranchisement. In a forcible speech Mrs. Sewall declared:

In coming here my sense of justice is satisfied, for we belong to this nation as well as you. This room, this building, this committee, the whole machinery of government is supported in part by the money of women and is for their protection as well as for that of men....

Our question should never be partisan. We do not wish to go before our State Legislatures crippled with the fact that an amendment has been submitted by one party rather than the other. The Republican party gave the ballot to the negro and claimed its vote in return. We do not wish any party to feel it has a right to our vote. The Senate now has a majority of Republicans and the House of Democrats, consequently any measure which is passed by this Congress will be unpartisan. This question should receive support of both parties by the higher laws of the universe. Another name for life is helpfulness. Separation of parts belonging to one whole is death. Separation of parties on questions not of partisan interest is death to many issues. It is in your power to bring the parties together by that higher law of the universe on this proposition to submit a Sixteenth Amendment to our Legislatures, that without entanglement of partisan interests this question can be decided.

The committee were so interested in the address of Madame Neymann that the time of the hearing was extended in order that she might finish it. She said in part:

Why Americans, so keen in their sense of what is right and just, should be so dull on this question of giving woman her due share of independence, I can not comprehend. Is not this the land where foreigners flock because they have heard the bugle call of freedom? Why then is it that your own children, the patriotic daughters of America, who have been reared and nurtured in free homes, brought up under the guidance and amidst the blessings of freedom--why is it that you hold them unworthy of the honor of being enrolled as citizens and voters? England, Canada and even Ireland have gone ahead of us, and was not America destined by its tradition to be first and foremost in this important movement of making women the equal, the true partner of man?

In a free country the national life stands in direct relation to the home life, the public life reacts upon the family, and the family furnishes the material for the State. The lives and the characters of our children are influenced by the manners and methods of our Government, and to say that mothers have no right to be concerned in the politics of the country is simply saying that the life and character of our children are of no concern to us.

The citizen's liberty instead of being sacrificed by society has to be defended by society. Who defends woman's individuality in our modern State? Universal suffrage is the only guarantee against despotism. Every man who believes in the subjection of woman will play the despot whenever you give him an opportunity.

We have no right to ask if it is expedient to grant suffrage to women. We recognize that the principle is just and justice must be done though the heavens fall. It is small minds that bring forth small objections. The man who believes in a just principle trusts and confides in it, and thus we ask you to confide in suffrage for women.

On May 6, 1886, the committee report, made by the Hon. John W. Stewart (Vt.), stated that the resolution was laid on the table. The following minority report was submitted:

In a Government by the people the ballot is at once a badge of sovereignty and the means of exercising power. We need not for our present purpose define the right to vote, nor inquire whence it comes. Whether it is a natural or a political right, one arising from social relations and duties, or a necessity incidental to individual protection and communal welfare, is immaterial to the discussion. Let the advocates of man's right to participate in governmental affairs choose their own ground and we will be content. The voting franchise exists, and it exists because it has been seized by force or because of some right antedating its sanction by law. Nativity does not confer it, because aliens exercise it; it does not arise from taxation, for many are taxed who can not vote and many vote who are not taxed. Ability to bear arms is not the test of the voting franchise, as many legally vote who were never able to bear arms, and others who have become unable to do so by reason of sickness, accident or age; nor does education mark the line, for the learned and the illiterate meet at the ballot box.

With us a portion of the adult population have assumed to exercise the right, admitted to exist somewhere, of governing, and have forced another portion into the position of the governed. That this assumption is just and wise is averred by some and denied by others. If we call upon these rulers for a copy of their commission they present one written by themselves.

Children, idiots and convicted felons properly belong to the governed and not to the governing class, as they are intellectually or morally unfit to govern. Necessity only places them there; necessity is an absolute monarch and will be everywhere obeyed. To this governed class has been added woman, and we beg the House and the country to inquire why. They are also "people" and we submit that they are neither moral nor intellectual incapables, and no necessity for their disfranchisement can be suggested; on the contrary, we believe that they are now entitled to immediate and absolute enfranchisement.

First: Because their own good demands it. Give woman the ballot and she will have additional means and inducements to a broader and better education, including a knowledge of affairs, of which she will not fail to avail herself to the uttermost; give her the ballot and you add to her means of protection of her person and estate. The ballot is a powerful weapon of defense sorely needed by those too weak to wield any other, and to take it from such and give to those already clothed in strength and fully armed, would appear to be unjust, unfair and unwise to one unaccustomed to the sight. Long usage "sanctions and sanctifies" wrongs and abuses, and causes cruelty to be mistaken for kindness.

The history of woman is for the most part a history of wrong and outrage. Created the equal companion of man, she early became his slave, and still is so in most parts of the world. In many so-called Christian nations of Europe she is to-day yoked with beasts and is doing the labor of beasts, while her son and husband are serving in the army, protecting the divine right of kings and men to slay and destroy. In the farther East she is still more degraded, being substantially excluded from the world. Man has not been consciously unjust to woman in the past, nor is he now, but he believes that she is in her true sphere, not realizing that he has fixed her sphere, and not God. This is as true of the barbarian as of the Christian, and no more so. If the "unspeakable Turk" should be solicited to open the doors of his harem and let the inmates become free, he would be indignant, doubtless, and would swear by the beard of the Prophet that he never would so degrade lovely woman, who, in her sphere, was intended to be the solace of glorious, superior man.

Yet, as man advances, woman is elevated, and her elevation in turn advances him. No liberty ever given her has been lost or abused or regretted. Where most has been given she has become best. Liberty never degrades her; slavery always does. For her good, therefore, she needs the ballot.

Second: Woman's vote is needed for the good of others. Our horizon is misty with apparent dangers. Woman may aid in dispelling them. She is an enemy of foreign war and domestic turmoil; she is a friend of peace and home. Her influence for good in many directions would be multiplied if she possessed the ballot. She desires the homes of the land to be pure and sober; with her help they may become so. Without her what is the prospect in this regard?

We do not invite woman into the "dirty pool of politics," nor does she intend to enter that pool. Politics is not necessarily unclean; if it is unclean she is not chargeable with the great crime, for crime it is. Politics must be purified or we are lost. To govern this great nation wisely and well is not degrading service; to do it, all the wisdom, ability and patriotism of all the people is required. No great moral force should be unemployed.

But it is sometimes said that women do not desire the ballot. Some may not; very many do not, perhaps a majority. Such indifference can not affect the right of those who are not indifferent. Some men, for one or other insufficient reason, decline to vote; but no statesman has yet urged general disfranchisement on that account. It may be true, and in our judgment it is, that those individuals who so fail to appreciate the rights and obligations of freemen as to deliberately refuse to vote should be disfranchised and made aliens, but their offense should not be visited on vigilant and patriotic citizens. Neither male nor female suffragists can be forced to use the ballot, and while the individuals of each class may fail to appreciate the privilege or recognize the duty the franchise confers, in the main it will result otherwise.

The conservative woman who feels that her present duties are as burdensome as she can bear, when she realizes what she can accomplish for her country and for mankind by the ballot, will as reverently thank God for the opportunity and will as zealously discharge her new obligations, as will her more radical sister who has long and wearily labored and fervently prayed for the coming of the day of equality of rights, duties and hopes.

E. B. TAYLOR. W. P. HEPBURN. L. B. CASWELL.

I concur in the opinion of the minority that the resolution ought to be adopted.

A. A. RANNEY.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] John Randolph Tucker, Va.; Nathaniel J. Hammond, Ga.; David B. Culberson, Tex.; Patrick A. Collins, Mass.; George E. Seney, O.; William C. Oates, Ala.; John H. Rogers, Ark.; John R. Eden, Ill.; Risden T. Bennett, N. C.; Ezra B. Taylor, O.; Abraham X. Parker, N. Y.; Ambrose A. Ranney, Mass.; William P. Hepburn, Ia.; John W. Stewart, Vt.; Lucien B. Caswell, Wis.

[29] See History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 715.

[30] This had been done when Miss Anthony voted in Rochester, N. Y., in 1872.

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