At the earnest request of Mrs. Stanton, who had now reached the age of seventy-six, she was permitted to retire from the presidency, and Miss Anthony, aged seventy-two, was elected in her place. The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw was made vice-president-at-large. Lucy Stone, who was now seventy-four, begged to be released as chairman of the executive committee, which was then abolished, the duties being transferred to the business committee consisting of all the officers of the association. Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Stone were made honorary presidents.

This was Mrs. Stanton's last appearance at a national convention after an attendance of forty years, but she never failed to take an active interest in the proceedings and to send her speech to be read by Miss Anthony. This also was the last time Lucy Stone appeared upon the national platform, as she died the next year, and Miss Anthony alone, of this remarkable trio of women, was left to carry forward the great work.

The addresses of this convention were up to the high standard of those which had preceded them during the past years, and no organization in existence, of either men or women, can show a more brilliant record of oratory. As Mrs. Stanton, Lucy Stone and Miss Anthony came on the platform the first evening they were enthusiastically applauded. The mental and physical vigor of Mrs. Stanton was much commented upon as in a rich and resonant voice she read the speech which she had that morning delivered before the Judiciary Committee of the House. It was entitled The Solitude of Self, and is considered by many to be her masterpiece.

Lucy Stone discussed The Outlook with clear vision. She contrasted the woman of the past, her narrow life, her limited education, her inferior position, with the educated, ambitious, independent woman of to-day, and urged that the latter should be equal to her opportunities, lay aside all frivolous things and labor unceasingly to secure for her sex an absolute equality of civil and political rights.

In the half-humorous address of Mrs. Caroline Hallowell Miller (Md.) on The Golden Rule, she said:

I am firmly convinced that our present powerless—I may almost say ignominious—position arises not so much, as many aver, from the lukewarmness of our own sex as from the supreme and absolute indifference of men. With a few honorable exceptions, men do not care one iota whether we vote or not....

Now if only men would take to betting on this question of woman suffrage, if we could open it up as a field of speculation, if we could manipulate it by some sort of patent process into stocks or bonds and have it introduced into Wall Street, we should very soon find ourselves emancipated. I keep on hoping that, by some fortuitous chance, fate may eventually execute for us as brilliant a coup d'etat as did General Butler for the colored slaves when he made them contraband of war, so that we shall just tumble into freedom as they did very soon thereafter. Until then let us trust in God, keep our powder very dry and our armies well drilled and disciplined.

In an inspiring address on The True Daughters of the Republic, Mme. Clara Neymann (N. Y.) pointed out the splendid material progress of our country under the guidance of men, and urged that women should be the power to lift it up to an equally exalted spiritual plane. The paper of Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.) on Wyoming, in which as a Territory women had voted for twenty years and as a State for two years, presented a most convincing array of statistics proving the benefits of equal suffrage. Ex-Governor John W. Hoyt of Wyoming came to the platform and corroborated these statements, paying a fine tribute to the political influence of women. He was followed by Mrs. Lida A. Meriwether (Tenn.), whose reputation as a humorist was fully sustained in her clever portrayal of Dreams that Go by Contraries. Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt (N. Y.) gave a brilliant address on The Mission of a Republic.

In discussing The Value of Organizations for Women, Mrs. Elizabeth Lyle Saxon (La.) said:

Among the various organizations of women the suffrage society must rank first, for its demands have reached out and embraced every reform which comes under the head of right, justice or charity; and I am firmly persuaded that if the demand for the ballot, the full right of citizenship, had not been made the foundation of all other advantages, our organization would have fallen apart and drifted into the more conservative and popular lines along which less courageous women have successfully worked....

Financial independence has been gained by many women, who, proud of their own success, never try to benefit others, and fail to comprehend the debt they owe to the brave, unselfish ones who first made demands for them and who never ceased their efforts until one after another the barriers were removed and opportunities secured for thousands which they never could have found themselves. It was this stanch band of pioneers, defying criticism, scorn and hate, who forced open college doors, invaded the law courts and stubbornly contested every inch of ground so persistently held by fraud or force from the daughters of the great republic....

Organized as women now are, they could pour such an overwhelming moral influence into the political life of the country as to become its saving grace; for when women vote they will show good men, who have weakly shrunk from political duty, that they have a moral and clean constituency to stand with them.

The platform proceedings of the convention closed with Miss Shaw's splendid delineation of The Injustice of Chivalry.

Every suffrage convention for the last twelve years had been preceded by a handsome reception at the Riggs House. This well-known and commodious hotel had been the convention headquarters, and it also had been the winter home of Miss Anthony, where she remained as a guest of the proprietor, C. W. Spofford, and his wife, being thus enabled to do a vast amount of congressional and political work, such as never has been done since. The hotel now had passed into other hands and the Washington Post, in speaking of this matter, said: "The delegates feel like lost sheep without Mrs. Spofford's hospitality at the Riggs House, which has always been headquarters for suffragist and all women's conventions. Probably no one but those in the inner circle will ever know just how much Mrs. Spofford has done for the advancement of women in every direction. Whatever was hers was at the disposal of the leaders, and in the absence of so much assistance it is appreciated more nearly at its real worth."



The new club house of Wimodaughsis was opened for a reception to the delegates by the District W. S. A., with Miss Anthony, Lucy Stone, Mrs. Stanton, Henry B. Blackwell, and Miss Shaw, president of Wimodaughsis, as guests of honor. All made clever little speeches toward the close of the evening, which were supplemented with remarks by Senator Joseph M. Carey (Wy.), Representatives J. A. Pickler (S. D.), Martin N. Johnson (N. D.) and the Rev. Dr. Corey of the Metropolitan church.

The hearing on January 17 was held for the first time before a Judiciary Committee of the House, the majority of which was Democratic.[85] The Washington Star said: "The new members of the committee were apparently surprised at receiving such a talk from a woman and there was the most marked attention on the part of every one present. Their surprise was still greater when they found that Mrs. Stanton was not a phenomenal exception, but that every woman there could make an argument which would do credit to the best of public men."

The hearing before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage was held the morning of February 20. Four of the greatest women this nation ever produced addressed this committee, asking for themselves and their sex a privilege which is freely granted without the asking to every man, no matter how humble, how ignorant, how unworthy, who is not included within the category of the insane, the idiotic, the convicted criminal—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Isabella Beecher Hooker. Mrs. Stanton (N. Y.) gave her address, The Solitude of Self, in place of the old arguments so many times repeated, saying in part:

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul—our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment—our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government.

Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same—individual happiness and development.

Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some special duties and training. In the usual discussion in regard to woman's sphere, such men as Herbert Spencer, Frederick Harrison and Grant Allen uniformly subordinate her rights and duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities of these incidental relations, some of which a large class of women never assume. In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man, by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother or a son, some of which he may never undertake. Moreover he would be better fitted for these very relations, and whatever special work he might choose to do to earn his bread, by the complete development of all his faculties as an individual. Just so with woman. The education which will fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human usefulness, will best fit her for whatever special work she may be compelled to do.

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear—is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself....

To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect, of credit in the market place, of recompense in the world of work, of a voice in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Shakespeare's play of Titus and Andronicus contains a terrible satire on woman's position in the nineteenth century—"Rude men seized the king's daughter, cut out her tongue, cut off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands." What a picture of woman's position! Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection....

How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible!

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position. Conceding then that the responsibilities of life rest equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer....

In music women speak again the language of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and are worthy interpreters of their great thoughts. The poetry and novels of the century are theirs, and they have touched the keynote of reform in religion, politics and social life. They fill the editor's and professor's chair, plead at the bar of justice, walk the wards of the hospital, speak from the pulpit and the platform. Such is the type of womanhood that an enlightened public sentiment welcomes to-day, and such the triumph of the facts of life over the false theories of the past.

Is it, then, consistent to hold the developed woman of this day within the same narrow political limits as the dame with the spinning wheel and knitting needle occupied in the past? No, no! Machinery has taken the labors of woman as well as man on its tireless shoulders; the loom and the spinning wheel are but dreams of the past; the pen, the brush, the easel, the chisel, have taken their places, while the hopes and ambitions of women are essentially changed.

We see reason sufficient in the outer conditions of human beings for individual liberty and development, but when we consider the self-dependence of every human soul, we see the need of courage, judgment and the exercise of every faculty of mind and body, strengthened and developed by use, in woman as well as man....

With the earnest persuasiveness for which she had been noted nearly half a century, Lucy Stone (Mass.) said:

I come before this committee with the sense which I always feel, that we are handicapped as women in what we try to do for ourselves by the single fact that we have no vote. This cheapens us. You do not care so much for us as if we had votes, so that we come always with that infinite disadvantage.

But the thing I want to say particularly is that we have our immortal Declaration of Independence and the various bills of rights of the different States (George Washington advised us to recur often to first principles), and in these nothing is clearer than the basis of the claim that women should have equal rights with men. A complete government is a perfectly just government....

What I desire particularly to impress upon this committee is the gross and grave injustice of holding thirty millions of women absolutely helpless under the Government. The laws touch us at every point. From the time the girl baby is born until the time the aged woman makes her last will and testament, there is not one of her affairs which the law does not control. It says who shall own the property, and what rights the woman shall have; it settles all her affairs, whether she shall buy or sell or will or deed....

Persons are elected by men to represent them in Congress and the State Legislatures, and here are these millions of women, with just the same stake in the Government that men have, with a class interest of their own, and with not one solitary word to say or power to help settle any of the things which concern them.

Men know the value of votes and the possession of power, and I look at them and wonder how it is possible for them to be willing that their own mothers, sisters, wives and daughters should be debarred from the possession of like power. We have been going to the Legislature in Massachusetts longer than Mrs. Stanton has been coming here. We asked that when a husband and wife make a contract with each other, as for instance, if the wife loan the husband her money, the contract should be considered valid just as it would be between any other parties—for now in case the husband fails in business, she can not get her money—and the Legislature very kindly gave us leave to withdraw. Then we asked that when a man dies and the wife is left alone, with the whole burden of life on her shoulders, the law might give her more than forty days in which to stay in her home without paying rent. But we could not defeat one of our legislators, and they cared not a cent for our petition and less than a cent for our opinion; and so when we asked for this important measure they gave us leave to withdraw.

They respect the wants of the voter, but they care nothing about the wants of those who do not have votes. So, when we asked for protection for wives beaten by their husbands, and that the husband should be made to give a portion of his earnings to support the minor children, again we had leave to withdraw....

I can think of nothing so helpless and humiliating as the position of a disfranchised person. I do not know whether I am treading on dangerous toes when I say that, after the late war the Government in power wished to punish Jefferson Davis, and it considered that the worst punishment it could inflict upon him was to take away his right to vote. Now, the odium which attached to him from his disfranchisement is just the same as attaches to women from their disfranchisement. The only persons who are not allowed to vote in Massachusetts are the lunatics, idiots, felons and people who can not read and write. In what a category is this to place women, after one hundred years and at the close of this nineteenth century? And yet that is history. In Massachusetts we are trying to get a small concession—the right to vote in the cities and towns in which we live in regard to the taxes we have to pay. In 1792, in Newburyport, Mass., it was not thought necessary to give women education. At that time there were no schools for girls; the public money was not so used, and when one man said he had five daughters, and paid his taxes like other men, and his girls were not allowed to attend school, and that they ought to give the girls a chance, another man said, "Take the public money and educate shes? Never!"

Remember this was one hundred years ago. Some of the fathers urged that the girls should be educated in the public schools, and so the men—God forgive them!—said, "We will let the girls go in the morning between 6 and 8 o'clock, before the boys want the schoolhouse." Just think of the time those girls would have to rise in order to have a little instruction before the boys got there! This plan did not work well, and the teacher was directed not to teach females any longer. Every descendant of those men now feels ashamed of them; and I think that in one hundred years the children of the men who are now letting us come here, year after year, pleading for suffrage, will feel ashamed. Men would rather lose anything than their votes; they would fight for their right of suffrage, and if anybody attempted to deprive them of it there would be war to the knife and the knife to the hilt. We come here to carry on our bloodless warfare, praying that the privilege granted in the foundation of the Government should be applied to women....

What we look forward to is part of the eternal order. It is not possible that thirty millions of women should be held forever as lunatics, fools and criminals. It is not possible, as the years go on, that each person should not at least have the right to look after his or her own interests. As the home is at its best when the father and mother consult together in regard to the family interests, so it is with the Government. I do not think a man can see from a man's point of view all the things that a woman needs, or a woman from her single point of view all the things that a man needs. Now men have brought their best, and also brought their worst, into the Government, and it is all here, but the thing you have not at all is the qualities which women possess, the feminine qualities. It has been said that women are more economical, peaceful and law-abiding than men, and all these qualities are lacking in the Government today.... But whether this be so or not, it is right that every class should be heard in behalf of its own interest....

Now, gentlemen, I hope you will try to make this case your own. It is simple justice and fair play, and it is also a fundamental principle of the Government. Here we are trying to have a complete republic, and yet there are twelve millions of disfranchised adults. I believe that among the great people—and by the people I do not mean men, but men and women, the whole people—nothing creates such disrespect for a fundamental principle as not to apply it. The Government was founded upon the principle that those who obey the laws should make them, and yet it shuts out a full half. As long as this continues to be done, it certainly tends to create disrespect for the principle itself. Do you not see it? Why not reach out a hand to woman and say, "Come and help us make the laws and secure fair play"?

At the close of this argument Miss Anthony said: "We have with us one not so old in our cause as Mrs. Stone—I never call myself old because I shall be young until the crack of doom—and that is Mrs. Hooker, a sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. The world has always made special place for the family of Beechers."

Mrs. Hooker (Conn.) spoke very briefly, saying: "You all know those old Jewish words in the Decalogue, 'Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee.' If we want to help the republic, if we want to perpetuate the institutions our fathers brought across the water, we must honor the mothers equally with the fathers in the Government. To-day the laws compel our sons the moment they are twenty-one to come to us and say: 'My mother, I owe you much; sometimes I think all that is good in me has come from you, but to-day you will retire and I will rule. I will no longer listen to your counsel; but I will make the laws for you and my sisters, and you must obey them. Henceforth I am your ruler.' Now, friends, a Government can not last long which teaches its sons disrespect to its mothers. It is in line with our principles that we recognize the mother element in the Government as well as in the family."

Miss Anthony closed the hearing with a strong appeal for a report from the committee which should recommend Congress to submit a Sixteenth Amendment and allow the women of the country to carry their case to the State Legislatures. The committee seemed much impressed by the arguments, but evidently there was no change of opinion.[86]

A hearing was granted February 17 by the House Judiciary Committee, with delegates present from twenty-six States. Addresses were made in part as follows:

MRS. CHAPMAN CATT: ... You know that in these modern years there has been a great deal of talk about natural rights, and we have had an innumerable host of philosophers writing books to tell us what natural rights are. I believe that to-day both scientists and philosophers are agreed that they are the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to free speech, the right to go where you will and when you please, the right to earn your own living and the right to do the best you can for yourself. One of the greatest of those philosophers and writers, Herbert Spencer, has accorded to woman the same natural rights as to man. I believe every thoughtful man in the United States to-day concedes that point.

The ballot has been for man a means of defending these natural rights. Even now in some localities of the world those rights are still defended by the revolver, as in former days, but in peaceable communities the ballot is the weapon by means of which they are protected. We find, as women citizens, that when we are wronged, when our rights are infringed upon, inasmuch as we have not this weapon with which to defend them, they are not considered, and we are very many times imposed upon. We find that the true liberty or the American people demands that all citizens to whom these rights have been accorded should have that weapon....

MRS. LIDA A. MERIWETHER (Tenn.): "Oh, Caesar, we who are about to die salute you!" was the gladiators' cry in the arena, standing face to face with death and with the Roman populace. All over this fair city, youth and beauty, freshness and joy, stand with welcoming hands, calling you to all pleasures of ear and eye, of soul and sense. But here, into the inner sanctuary of your deepest, gravest thought, come, year after year, a little band of women over whose heads the snows of many winters and of many sorrows have sifted. Here "we who are about to die salute you." We do not come asking for gifts of profit or preferment for ourselves; for us the day for ban or benison has almost passed. But we ask for greater freedom, for better conditions for the children of our love, whom we shall so soon leave behind. In the short space allowed each petitioner we have not time to ask for much. But in my State the grandmothers of seventy are growing weary of being classed with the grandsons of seven. They fail to find a valid reason why they should be relegated to perpetual legal and political childhood.

Years ago, when the bugle call rang out over this unhappy land, as the men rallied to the standard of their State, we, the wives and mothers, who had no voice in bringing about those cruel conditions, were called to give up our brightest and best for cannons' food. We furnished the provisions, ministered on the battlefield, nursed in the hospital; we, equally with our brothers, regarded "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" only as gifts held in trust to spend and be spent for home and State. And to-day when we see the wayfaring man, who probably hails from a penal institution of the Old World, who honors no home, no country and no political faith, freely enjoying the right to say who shall make and who shall enforce the laws by which we women are governed, we grow weary of being classed as perpetual aliens upon our nation's soil.

The honest, industrious, bread-winning women of Tennessee do not enjoy the knowledge that the pauper of their State is their political superior. Four years ago we saw it practically demonstrated that when a great moral issue was at stake the male pauper could cast his ballot without hindrance from the penal code, but if the widow or the single woman, who earned and owned property and paid her quota of the tax for his support, should attempt to cast a counteracting ballot, her penalty would be fine or imprisonment.

Year after year we have journeyed to the Mecca of the petitioner—the legislative halls. There we have asked protection for our boys from the temptation of the open saloon; we have asked that around our baby girls the wall of protection might be raised at least a little higher than ten years; we have asked for reform schools for boys, where they should not be thrown in daily contact with old and hardened criminals. Year after year we have pleaded for better conditions for the children to whom we have given the might of our love, the strength and labor of our lives; but in not one instance has that prayer been granted. And at last we have found the reason why. A senator in a sister State said to a body of petitioners: "Ladies, you won't get your bill, but your defeat will be a paying investment if it only teaches you that the politician, little or big, is now, always was, and always will be, the drawn image, pocket edition, safety valve and speaking-trumpet of the fellow that voted him in."

Gentlemen, we ask your help to the end that not we, perhaps, but the daughters and granddaughters whom we leave behind, may be counted with "those that voted him in."

MRS. JEAN BROOKS GREENLEAF (N. Y.): Soon after I came to Washington to make it my home for two years, one clear, bright morning I drove up to this Capitol with a friend. As we ascended the hill on the left we warmly expressed our admiration for the beautiful structure within whose walls we are now standing, and were enthusiastic in our admiration for those who so nobly planned that, with the growth of the nation, there could be a commensurate outstretching of its legislative halls without loss to the dignity of the whole. We drove slowly around the front and commenced the descent on the opposite side, when I called to the driver to stop in order that we might feast our eyes on the inspiring view which lay before us. There rose Washington Monument so simple yet so grand, and I recalled the fact that in its composition it fitly represented the Union of the States. My heart swelled and my eyes overflowed as I thought of the grand idea embodied in this Government, the possibilities of this country's future. The lines of "My country, 'tis of thee," rose to my lips, but they died there.

Whence came my right to speak those words? True I was born here; true I was taught from my earliest youth to repeat the glorious words of Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman and other patriots; but when I grew to womanhood I had to learn the bitter lesson that these words applied only to men; that I simply counted as one in the population; that I must submit to be governed by the laws in the selection of whose makers I had no choice; that my consent to be governed would never be asked; that for my taxation there would be no representation; that, so far as my right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was concerned, others must judge for me; that I had no voice for myself; that I was a woman without a country, and only on the plane of political equality with the insane, the idiot, the pauper, Indians not taxed, the criminal, and the unnaturalized foreigner.

Honorable gentlemen, women come here annually to ask that these wrongs be righted. To-day we have come again to entreat that, as you have extended this building to meet the needs of the people, you will extend your thought of the people and make it possible that the principle underlying the Government of this country may be embodied in a law which will make the daughters of the land joint heirs with the sons to all the rights and privileges of an enfranchised people. In the name of the women of the State of New York, I ask it.

MISS ALICE STONE BLACKWELL (Mass.): Except where there is some very strong reason to the contrary, it is generally admitted that every man has a right to be consulted in regard to his own concerns. The laws which he has to obey and the taxes he has to pay are things that do most intimately concern him, and the only way of being directly consulted in regard to them, under our form of government, is through the ballot. Is there any very good reason why women should not be free to be consulted in this direct manner? Let us consider a few of the reasons which are generally given against this freedom of women, and see whether they are good.

It is said that women do not need to vote, because they are virtually represented by their husbands, fathers and brothers. The first trouble with this doctrine of virtual representation is that it is not according to numbers. I know a man who had a wife, a widowed mother, four unmarried daughters and five unmarried sisters. According to this theory his vote represented himself and all those eleven women. Yet it counted but one, just the same as the vote of his next-door bachelor neighbor without a female relative in the world.

Then, again, suppose that all the women in one family do not think alike. A member of our Massachusetts Legislature had two daughters. One was a suffragist, the other was so much opposed that she used to burn the Woman's Journal as soon as it came in the house. How was that man to represent both his daughters by his single vote on the suffrage question? Instead of two daughters he might have had three, one a Republican, one a Democrat and the other a Prohibitionist. How could he have represented all of them by his one vote unless he had voted "early and often?"

Again, in order to represent the women of his family a man may have to go without representation himself. There was a case of an old gentleman in Chicago, a Greenbacker, who had three daughters, all of whom were Republicans. When election day approached his three daughters said to him that he was the natural representative of their family—he had always told them so, and they fully agreed with him—and they pointed out to him how very wrong it would be, when that family consisted of three Republicans and only one Greenbacker, with but one ballot to represent the family, that it should be cast for the Greenback candidate. The old gentleman was conscientious and consistent and, although he was a man of strong Greenback convictions, he actually voted the Republican ticket in order to represent his daughters. It was the nearest he could come to representing them under this theory. But did it give that family any accurate or adequate representation? Evidently not. The Greenback candidate was entitled to one vote from that family, and he did not get it; and the Republican candidate was entitled to three ballots, and he got only one. And then, in order to represent his daughters, that chivalrous father had to go without any representation himself. It is evident that the only fair way to get at public sentiment in such a case is for each member of the family to have one vote, and thus represent himself or herself.

Another proof that women are not virtually represented is to be found in the laws as they actually exist. These one-sided laws were not made because men meant to be unjust or unkind to women, but simply because they naturally looked at things mainly from their own point of view. It does not indicate any special depravity on the part of men. I have no doubt that if women alone had made the laws, those laws would be just as one-sided as they are to-day, only in the opposite direction.

It is said that if women are enfranchised, husbands and wives will vote just alike, and you will simply double the vote and have no change in the result. Then, in the next breath, it is said that husbands and wives would vote for opposing candidates, and then there would be matrimonial quarrels. If they vote just alike there will be no harm done, and this good may be done—the women will be broadened by a knowledge of public affairs, and husband and wife will have a subject of mutual interest in which they can sympathize with each other. In cases where husband and wife do not think alike as to who will make the best selectmen, for instance, you will admit that is hardly sufficient to cause them to quarrel; but if they should think differently on very many other points, they would quarrel anyway, so that politics would not make much difference with them.

Then it is said that women do not want to vote, and in proof it is said they do not vote generally for school committeemen where allowed to do so. We all know that the size of the vote cast at any election is just in proportion to the amount of interest that election calls forth. At a Presidential election nearly all the voters turn out; in an ordinary State election only about half; at a municipal election only a small fraction of the men take the trouble to vote. The Troy Press states that at a recent election in Syracuse for a board of education, out of about 3,000 qualified voters only 40 voted.

Then, it is said that this movement is making no progress; that while the movements along other lines are largely succeeding, there has been no advance along this line. Twenty-five years ago, with insignificant exceptions, women could not vote anywhere. To-day they have school suffrage in twenty-three States, full suffrage in Wyoming, municipal suffrage in Kansas, and municipal suffrage for single women and widows in England, Scotland and most of the British provinces. The common sense of the world is slowly but surely working toward the enfranchisement of women.

MRS. ANNIE L. DIGGS (Kan.): You remember the time when the theoretical objection was often urged that if the suffrage was given to women, men would cease to show them the proper respect. For instance, the weighty argument was made that they would not raise their hats when they met women on the street, and that they would not give up their seats in the cars. But, gentlemen, you should just see how they take off their hats to us in Kansas, and how every man of them gets up and offers us his seat when we come into a street car!

It was also urged that if the ballot were put into the hands of women it would be detrimental to the interests of the home. There is not a man in the State to-day who would venture to go before a Kansas audience and urge that objection. There is not a man there who would be willing to jeopardize his political, social or business interests by casting any kind of obloquy upon the women who have exercised the right of the elective franchise for the last five years. This is the result of success. We have Municipal Suffrage. One little ounce of fact outweighs whole tons of theory....

THE REV. ANNA HOWARD SHAW (Penn.): Yesterday I noticed in a report of our hearing before the Judiciary Committee of the House the headline, "Appeals to Deaf Ears". And I said, "Has it come to this, that when earnest and sincere women of this great country make an appeal to the heads of the Government it is dubbed an 'Appeal to Deaf Ears'?" Time was when the British Government thought our ancestors had not sufficient merit in their cause to be heard, and when they made an "appeal to deaf ears". But the time came when those ears were unstopped and they heard, and what they heard was the cry of victory by a free people. We may be appealing to deaf ears to-day, but the time is coming when it will not be so. Men will hear and, hearing, they will answer, because ultimately men desire the right. If I were asked what I conscientiously believe the real condition of the hearts of most men to be, I should say they are positively ignorant in regard to the justice of this matter, and if it could be brought properly before them, they would stand on the side of justice and right for women.

Therefore I desire only to say that I know from my travels all over the country, conferring with the intelligent women to bring before them this great principle, that the good work is going on. It may be deafness yesterday and partial hearing to-day, but it will be full hearing to-morrow. To-day we may be blind to the truth; to-morrow we shall see the whole truth. We may not have another centennial before we shall see justice for all human kind.

You know, gentlemen, that this Government exists for only three things, and in those every woman is as much interested as every man. It exists for the administration of justice, for the protection of person and property, and for the development of society. Just as you and all men have persons and property to protect, so we women have. We are because of our nature and because it seems as if the Almighty had intended it should be so, more interested than men in the development of society. Wherever there is any movement for the uplifting of society you will find women in the forefront. There never has been any great movement in this nation when women have not stood side by side with the noblest and truest men.

We do to-day nine-tenths of the philanthropic work, nine-tenths of the church work, and form three-fourths of the church membership. We are the teachers of the young; we are the mothers of the race. If you want the noblest men you must have the noblest mothers. "Eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive" the kind of men and women God had in view when He created man in His own likeness and gave to male and female dominion over the world, to subdue it and to bring out of it the best things.

You who talk of a great Government in which the voice of God is heard must remember that, if "the voice of the people is the voice of God," you never will know what that is until you get the voice of the people, and you will find it has a soprano as well as a bass. You must join the soprano voice of God to the bass voice in order to get the harmony of the Divine voice. Then you will have a law which will enable you to say, "We are a people justly ruled, because in this nation the voice of the people is the voice of God, and the voice of the people has been heard."

Mrs. Ellen M. Bolles (R. I.) said in the course of her remarks: "The conditions surrounding women to-day are quite different from what they were in the days of our grandmothers. Women are becoming property earners and owners, as they were not in those former times before they began asking for the ballot. Twenty-five per cent. or more of the women of this country are property owners. Nearly nine-tenths of the laws are made for the protection of property and of those who own it and who earn wages. Now it seems to me that this twenty-five per cent. of the women should have a voice in the making of laws for the protection of their property and of their right to earn a living...."

Mrs. Colby thus closed her address on Wyoming: "Having thus shown that the twenty-two years' experience of woman suffrage has been satisfactory to the citizens of Wyoming; that it has conduced to good order in the elections and to the purity of politics; that the educational system is improved and that teachers are paid without regard to sex; that Wyoming stands alone in a decreased proportion of crime and divorce; and that it has elevated the personal character of both sexes—what possible good is there left to speak of as coming to that State from woman suffrage save its position as the vanguard of progress and human freedom. Not the Bartholdi statue in New York harbor, but Wyoming on the crest of the continent, the first true republic, represents Liberty enlightening the world."

Short addresses were made also by Mrs. Caroline McCullough Everhard, Mrs. Mary Jewett Telford, the Rev. Mila F. Tupper, Mrs. Marble, Dr. Frances Dickinson, Miss H. Augusta Howard, Mrs. Saxon, Mrs. Hannah J. Bailey, Mrs. Evaleen L. Mason and Mrs. Olive Pond Amies.[87]

The Post, in an account of the Senate hearing, said: "Miss Anthony called attention to Senator Hoar as the gentleman who had presented the first favorable suffrage report to the Senate in 1879. Everybody shouted "Stand up," and as he retired deeper into his leather chair they continued to cry, "Up, up!" It was a tableau when the Senator found his feet, and at the same time was confronted with a round of applause and a volley of white handkerchiefs waved at him in Chautauqua style. He capped the climax by moving at once a favorable report. Laurel wreaths and bouquets would have been Senator Hoar's portion if they had been available, but the women all assured him afterward of their sincere appreciation. The hearing was held in the ladies' reception room, which was completely filled."

These matchless arguments had no effect upon the Democratic members of the committee, but Senator Warren of Wyoming made a favorable report for himself, Senators Hoar of Massachusetts, Quay of Pennsylvania and Allen of Washington, which concluded by saying: "The majority of the members of this committee, believing that equal suffrage, regardless of sex, should be the legitimate outgrowth of the principles of a republican form of government, and that the right of suffrage should be conferred upon the women of the United States, earnestly recommend the passage of the amendment submitted herewith."

Senators Vance of North Carolina and George of Mississippi filed the same minority report which already had done duty several times, although the former was said to have declared that the speeches of the women surpassed anything he ever had heard, and that their logic, if used in favor of any other measure, could not fail to carry it.

FOOTNOTES:

[85] David B. Culberson, Tex.; William C. Oates, Ala.; Thomas R. Stockdale, Miss.; Charles J. Boatner, La.; Isaac H. Goodnight, Ky.; John A. Buchanan, Va.; William D. Bynum, Ind.; Alfred C. Chapin, N. Y.; Fernando C. Layton, O.; Simon P. Wolverton, Penn.; Case Broderick; Kan.; James Buchanan, N. J.; George W. Ray, N. Y.; H. Henry Powers, Vt.

[86] Zebulon B. Vance, N. C.; John G. Carlisle, Ky.; J. Z. George, Miss.; George F. Hoar, Mass.; John B. Allen, Wash.; Matthew S. Quay, Penn.; Francis E. Warren, Wyo.

[87] After the convention had adjourned Miss Sara Winthrop Smith (Conn.) made an argument on Federal Suffrage before the Judiciary Committee of the House. See Chap. I for general statement of position taken by its advocates.



CHAPTER XIII.

THE NATIONAL-AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1893.

At the close of the Twenty-fifth annual meeting the Washington Evening News said: "There will be an exodus from Washington during the next three days—an exodus of some of the intellectually powerful and brilliant women who participated in what was agreed to be the brightest and most successful convention ever held by the National Suffrage Association. Whatever may be the opinion of the world at large upon the feasibility or desirability of granting the franchise to women, none who attended their annual reunion of delegates or listened to the addresses of their orators and leaders, can deny that the convention was composed of clever, sensible and attractive women, splendidly representative of their sex and of the present time."

After complimentary notices of the leading members, it continued: "'One very pleasant thing connected with our business committee is the beautiful relations existing among its members,' said one of the officers the other evening. 'We all have our opinions and they often differ, but we are absolutely true to each other and to the cause. We are most of us married, and all of us have the co-operation of our husbands and fathers. Of the business committee of nine, six are married. For the past two years we have had one man on our board, the Hon. Wm. Dudley Foulke, but as a rule men have not the time and thought to give this subject, as they are engaged in more remunerative employment.' The self-control and good-nature prevailing even in the heated debate on the religious liberty interference resolution have already been alluded to in our columns."

Miss Susan B. Anthony presided over the convention, Jan. 16-19, 1893, held in Metzerott's Music Hall and preceded by the usual religious services Sunday afternoon. The sermon was given by the Rev. Annis F. Eastman (N. Y.), an ordained Congregational minister, from the text in Isaiah, "Take away the yoke."

The memorial service, which was of unusual impressiveness, opened with the reading by Miss Anthony of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's tribute to the distinguished dead of the past year who advocated equality of rights for women—George William Curtis, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ernestine L. Rose, Abby Hutchinson Patton and others.[88] Of Mr. Curtis she said:

If the success of our cause could be assured by the high character of the men who from the beginning have identified themselves with it, woman would have been emancipated long ago. A reform advocated by Garrison, Phillips, Emerson, Alcott, Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Samuel J. May and George William Curtis must be worthy the consideration of statesmen and bishops.

For more than one generation Mr. Curtis maintained a brave attitude on this question. As editor of Harper's Magazine, and as a popular lecturer on the lyceum platform, he was ever true to his convictions. Before the war his lecture on Fair Play for Women aroused much thought among the literary and fashionable classes. In the New York Constitutional Convention in 1867, a most conservative body, Mr. Curtis, though a young man and aware that he had but little sympathy among his compeers, bravely demanded that the word "male" should be stricken from the suffrage article of the proposed constitution. His speech on that occasion, in fact, philosophy, rhetoric and argument never has been surpassed in the English language. From the beginning of his public life to its close Mr. Curtis was steadfast on this question. Harper's Magazine for June, 1892, contains his last plea for woman and for a higher standard for political parties....

Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, exiled from Poland on account of her religious faith, married an Englishman and came to America, where she was one of the first and most eloquent of the women who spoke on the public platform. In 1836 she circulated petitions for the property rights of married women, in company with Mrs. Paulina Wright (Davis), and presented them to the New York Legislature. For forty years she was among the ablest advocates of the rights of women, lecturing also on religion, government and other subjects. Mrs. Abby Hutchinson Patton was lovingly referred to, the last but one of that family who had sung so many years for freedom, not only for the negro but for woman. Whittier, the uncompromising advocate of liberty for woman as well as for man, was eulogized in fitting terms.

The Hon. A. G. Riddle (D. C.) offered a fine testimonial to Francis Minor and Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, saying: "Mr. Minor was the first to urge the true and sublime construction of that noble amendment born of the war. It declares that all persons—not simply males—born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. Those who are denied or are refused the right to exercise the privileges and franchises of citizenship are less than citizens. Those who still declare that women may not vote, simply write 'falsehood' across that glorious declaration." General Butler, as a leading member of the House Judiciary Committee, in a matchless argument had asserted the right of women to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment,[89] and used all his influence to secure suffrage for women. Miss Anthony said in part:

The good of this hour is that it brings to the knowledge of the young the work of the pioneers who have passed away. It seems remarkable to those standing, as I do, one of a generation almost ended, that so many of these young people know nothing of the past; they are apt to think they have sprung up like somebody's gourd, and that nothing ever was done until they came. So I am always gratified to hear these reminiscences, that they may know how others have sown what they are reaping to-day.

One of the earliest advocates of this cause was Sally Holly, the daughter of Myron Holly, founder of the Liberty Party in the State of New York, and also founder of Unitarianism in the city of Rochester. Frederick Douglass will say a few words in regard to Sally Holly, and of such of the others as he may feel moved to speak; and I want to say that when, at the very first convention called and managed by women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton read her resolution that the elective franchise is the underlying right, there was but one man to stand with her, and that man was Frederick Douglass.

Mr. Douglass (D. C.) told of attempting to speak in Buffalo against slavery in 1843, when every hall was closed to him and he went into an abandoned storeroom:

I continued from day to day speaking in that old store to laborers from the wharves, cartmen, draymen and longshoremen, until after awhile the room was crowded. No woman made her appearance at the meetings, but day after day for six days in succession I spoke—morning, afternoon and evening. On the third day there came into the room a lady leading a little girl. No greater contrast could possibly have been presented than this elegantly dressed, refined and lovely woman attempting to wend her way through that throng. I don't know that she showed the least shrinking from the crowd, but I noticed that they rather shrank from her, as if fearful that the dust of their garments would soil hers. Her presence to me at that moment was as if an angel had been sent from Heaven to encourage me in my anti-slavery endeavors. She came day after day thereafter, and at last I had the temerity to ask her name. She gave it—Sally Holly. "A daughter of Myron Holly?" said I. "Yes," she answered. I understood it all then, for he was amongst the foremost of the men in western New York in the anti-slavery movement. His home was in Rochester and his dust now lies in Mt. Hope, the beautiful cemetery of that city. Over him is a monument, placed there by that other true friend of women, Gerrit Smith of Peterboro....

I have seen the Hutchinson family in a mob in New York. When neither Mr. Garrison, Mr. Phillips nor Mr. Burleigh, nor any one could speak, when there was a perfect tempest and whirlwind of rowdyism in the old Tabernacle on Broadway, then this family would sing, and almost upon the instant that they would raise their voices, so perfect was the music, so sweet the concord, so enchanting the melody, that it came down upon the audience like a summer shower on a dusty road, subduing, settling everything.

I can not add to the paper which Mrs. Stanton has sent. After her—silence. Your cause has raised up no voice so potent as that of Elizabeth Cady Stanton—no living voice except yours, Madame President.

How delighted I am to see that you have the image of Lucretia Mott here [referring to her marble bust on the stage]. I am glad to be here, glad to be counted on your side, and glad to be able to remember that those who have gone before were my friends. I was more indebted to Whittier perhaps than to any other of the anti-slavery people. He did more to fire my soul and enable me to fire the souls of others than any other man. It was Whittier and Pierpont who feathered our arrows, shot in the direction of the slave power, and they did it well. No better reading can now be had in favor of the rights of woman or the liberties of man than is to be found in their utterances....

Miss Clara Barton (D. C.) spoke in a touching manner of the great service rendered to humanity by Dr. Harriet N. Austin, who assisted Dr. James C. Jackson to establish the "Home on the Hillside," the Dansville (N. Y.) Sanitorium. Henry B. Blackwell told of John L. Whiting, "a power and a strength to the Massachusetts Suffrage Association for many years, one of those rare men not made smaller by wealth, and always willing to give himself, his mind, his heart, his money, to help the cause of woman." The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw said in part:

I have been asked to speak a word of Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson. It has been said by some people that we have wrongfully quoted Mr. Emerson as being on our side. His biographers appear to have put in his early statements and forgotten to include his later declarations, which were all in favor of the enfranchisement of women.

I was once sent to Concord by the Massachusetts society to hold a meeting. The churches were closed against suffrage speakers and there was not money enough to pay for a hall. Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson heard the meeting was to be given up, and she sent a message to the lady having the work in charge, saying: "Shall it be said that here in Concord, where the Revolutionary war began, there is no place to speak for the freedom of women? Get the best hall in town and I will pay for it." So on that occasion and on another Mrs. Emerson paid for the hall and sent a kind word to the meeting, declaring herself in favor of the suffrage for women, and stating that her husband's views and her own were identical on this question. She had the New England trait of being a good wife, a good mother and a good housekeeper, and Mr. Emerson's home was a restful and blessed place. We sometimes forget the wives of great men in thinking of the greatness of their husbands, but Mrs. Emerson was as great in her way as Mr. Emerson in his, and no more faithful friend to woman and to woman's advancement ever has lived among us.[90]

A word as to the Rev. Anna Oliver, the first woman to enter the theological department of Boston University. She was much beloved by her class. She was a devoted Christian, eminently orthodox, and a very good worker in all lines of religious effort. After Miss Oliver graduated she was ambitious to become ordained, as all women ought to be who desire to preach the gospel; and so after I had graduated from the theological school, the year following, we both applied to the conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church for admission. Miss Oliver's name beginning with O and mine with S, her case was presented first. She was denied ordination by Bishop Andrews. Our claims were carried to the general conference in Cincinnati, and the Methodist Episcopal Church denied ordination to the women whom it had graduated in its schools and upon whom it had conferred the degree of bachelor of divinity. It not only did this, but it made a step backwards; it took from us the licenses to preach which had been granted to Miss Oliver for four years and to myself for eight years.

But Miss Oliver was earnest in her efforts, and so she began to preach in the city of Brooklyn, and with great courage bought a church in which a man had failed as a minister, leaving a debt of $14,000. She was like a great many other women—and here is a warning for all women. God made a woman equal to a man, but He did not make a woman equal to a woman and a man. We usually try to do the work of a man and of a woman too; then we break down, and they say that women ought not to be ministers because they are not strong enough. They do not get churches that can afford to send them to Europe on a three months' vacation once a year. Miss Oliver was not only the minister and the minister's wife, but she started at least a dozen reforms and undertook to carry them all out. She was attacked by that influential Methodist paper, the Christian Advocate, edited by the Rev. Dr. James M. Buckley, who declared that he would destroy her influence in the church, and so with that great organ behind him he attacked her. She had that to fight, the world to fight and the devil to fight, and she broke down in health. She went abroad to recover, but came home only to die.[91]

The death of those less widely known was touchingly referred to by women of the different States. Miss Anthony closed the services by saying: "I am just informed that we must add to this list the revered name of Abby Hopper Gibbons, of four-score-and-ten, who with her father, Isaac T. Hopper, formed the Women's Prison Association, and who has stood for more than the allotted years of man the sentinel on the watch-tower to guard unfortunate women and help them back into womanly living."

At the first evening session Miss Anthony, in her president's address, answered the question, "What has been gained by the forty years' work?" She called attention to the woman who had preached the day before, ordained by an orthodox denomination; to the women alternate delegates to the late National Republican Convention; to the recommendation of Gov. Roswell P. Flower that women should be delegates to the approaching New York Constitutional Convention. She pointed out rapidly many other straws showing the direction of the wind, saying: "Wendell Phillips said what he wanted to do on the abolition question was to turn Congress into an anti-slavery debating society. That is what we have done with every educational, industrial, religious and political body—we have turned them all into debating societies on the woman question."

U. S. Senator Joseph M. Carey (Wy.) sent a letter reaffirming his conviction that the granting of full political rights to women would be for the best interests of the country. Mr. Blackwell sketched the successive extensions of suffrage to women, and set forth the special importance of their trying to secure the Municipal and the Presidential franchises, both of which could be granted by the Legislature. Mrs. Ellen Battelle Dietrick (Mass.) read an able paper on The Best Methods of Interesting Women in Suffrage, in which she said:

The truth is, the American woman has been so pleasantly soothed by the sweet opiate of that high-sounding theory of her "sovereignty," that until very recently she could not be aroused to examine the facts. Forty years ago the voices of a few crying in the wilderness began to prepare the way for the present awakening....

The deliverance of woman must have as its corner-stone self-support. The first step in this direction must be to explode the fallacy that marriage is a state of being supported. As men are most largely the gatherers of money, it is mistakenly assumed that they are most largely the creators of wealth. The man goes abroad and gives his daily labor toward earning his board and clothes; but what he actually receives for his work can neither be eaten nor worn. It does nothing whatever until he puts it into his wife's hands, and upon her intelligence, energy and ability depend how much can be done through the using of it. Not until her labor in transforming raw material, in cooking, sewing, and rendering a house habitable, is joined to his, can a man be said to have really received anything worth having. He begins, she completes, the making of their joint wealth. Their dependence is mutual; the position of the one who turns the money into usable material by her labor being equally important, equally valuable, with that of him who turned his labor into money; and this must be fully recognized if woman is ever to come into her true relation to man. She supports him exactly as he supports her, and this is equally the case with the wife who herself produces directly, or the one who gives her time and intelligence to direct the production of others....

Closely allied to the fallacy that man supports woman is the fallacy that man protects woman, and has a right to control her by virtue of this protection. There was a period in the world's transition from savagery to civilization when mankind had so little conception of the mutuality of human interests that war was a perpetual condition of society. Originally women also were fighters; just as the lioness or tigress is as capable as her mate of self-defense and protection of her young, so the savage woman, when necessity required, was equally capable of conducting warfare in the same cause. But long before men had given up killing each other for the better business of trading with and helping each other woman had ceased to be a fighter. She was the first to see the advantages of peace, both because she was the earliest manufacturer and trader and because it cost her more in the production of every soldier than it cost man. Instinct directed her toward peace long before reason made it possible for her to explain why she hated war, and she hated it as an occupation for herself long before it occurred to her to despise it as an occupation for man. To-day the love of peace and hatred for war which she is rapidly spreading through the world is the real protector of woman; she is a self-protector by virtue of this proclivity, and, as war is equally the enemy of man, here again woman gives to man as much as she receives. Whatever force the argument based on the right of soldiers to rule may once have had is rapidly passing away. The era of the destroyer is dying, the epoch of the Creator is coming in....

The subjugation of woman doubtless arose from an honest desire of man to protect her. His mistake lay in assuming that his mind and will could do private and public duty for both. Woman's mistake lay in assuming that she might with safety permit man's mind and will to discharge the duties nature meant to be fulfilled by her own. Unhappily nature has a way of allowing the human race to learn by its own experience, even though the lesson consume ages of time; and she has also a rule that unused faculties and functions fall into a state of atrophy. It was by such a substitution of masculine for feminine will that woman fell so far behind him whom she originally led in the race, industrial and intellectual. If they are ever to march side by side as true comrades and free partners, it must be by a voluntary resumption of independence in feminine mind and will. In this man can assist by stimulating her spirit of independence, or he can discourage it by a contrary course, but the final result lies with woman herself. She alone can free herself from the habits of thought and action engendered by thousands of years of slavery.

The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made by millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.

In the address of Mrs. Ruth C. D. Havens (D. C.) on The Girl of the Future, which was greatly enjoyed, she said:

The training and education of the girl of the present have seldom been discussed except from one standpoint—her suitable preparation for becoming an economical housekeeper, an inexpensive wife, a willing and self-forgetful mother, a cheap, unexacting, patient, unquestioning, unexpectant, ministering machine. The girl's usefulness to herself, to her sex and race, her preferences, tastes, happiness, social, intellectual or financial prosperity, hardly have entered into the thought upon this question....

If woman would be a student, a scientist, a lecturer, a physician; if she would be a pioneer in a wilderness of scoffers to make fair roads up which her sex might easily travel to equal educational and legal rights, equal privileges and pay in fields of labor, equal suffrage—she must divide her eager energies and give the larger half to superior homekeeping, wifehood and motherhood, in order that her new gospel shall be received with any respect or acceptance. And probably no class of women have been such sticklers for the cultivation of all woman's modest, unassuming home duties as have been the great, ambitious teachers on this suffrage platform....

But this will not be the training of the girl of the future. It is not the sort of preparation to which the boy of the present is urged. "Jack of all trades, good at none" is the old epithet bestowed upon a man who thus diffuses his energies. You do not expect a distinguished lawyer to clean his own clothes, a doctor to groom his horse, a teacher to take care of the schoolhouse furnace, a preacher to half-sole his shoes. This would be illogical, and men are nothing if not logical. Yet a woman who enters upon any line of achievement is invariably hampered, for at least the early years, with the inbred desire to add to the labor of her profession all the so-called feminine duties, which, fulfilled to-day, are yet to be done to-morrow, which bring to her neither comfort, gain nor reputation, and which by their perpetual demand diminish her powers for a higher quality of work....

Everywhere there is too much housekeeping. It is not economy of time or money for every little family of moderate means to undertake alone the expensive and wearing routine. The married woman of the future will be set free by co-operative methods, half the families on a square, perhaps, enjoying one luxurious, well-appointed dining-room with expenses divided pro rata. In many other ways housekeeping will be simplified. Homes have no longer room for people—they are consecrated to things. Parlors and bedrooms are full of the cheap and incongruous or expensive and harmonious belongings of a junk shop. Plush gods hold the fort. All the average house needs to make it a museum is the sign, "Hands off." ...

The girl of the future will select her own avocation and take her own training for it. If she be a houseworker, and many will prefer to be, she will be so valuable in that line as to command much respect and good wages. If she be an architect, a jeweler, an electrical engineer, she will not rob a cook by mutilating a dinner, or a dressmaker by amateur cutting and sewing, or a milliner by creating her own bonnet. The house helper will not be incompetent, because the development and training of woman for her best and truest work will have extended to her also, and she will do housework because she loves it and is better adapted to it than to any other employment. She will preside in the kitchen with skill and science.

The service girl of the future will be paid perhaps double or treble her present wages, with wholesome food, a cheerful room, an opportunity to see an occasional cousin and some leisure for recreation. At present this would be ruinous, and why? Because too frequently the family has but one producer. The wife, herself a consumer, produces more consumers. Daughters grow up around a man like lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin. Every member of every family in the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother, for a child can hardly be born with cheerful views of living whose mother's life has been, for its sake, a double burden. From this root spring melancholy, insanity, suicide. The production of human souls is the highest production of all, the one which requires most preparation, truest worth, gravest care and holiest consecration. If the girl of the future recognizes this truth, she will have made an advance indeed. But apart from the mother every member of the family should be a material producer; and then there will be means sufficient for the producer in the kitchen to get such remuneration for her skill as will eliminate the incompetent, shirking, migratory creature of today....

I hardly need say to this audience that the girl of the future will vote. She will not plead for the privilege—she will be urged to exercise the right, and no one will admit that he ever opposed it, or remember that there was a time when woman's ballot was despised and rejected of men. She will not be told that she needs the suffrage for her own protection, but she will be urged to exercise it for the good of her country and of humanity. It will not be known that the Declaration of Independence was once a dead letter. No one will believe that it ever was declared that the Constitution did not protect this right. It will be incredible that women were once neither people nor citizens, and yet were the mothers, and in so much the creators, of the men who governed them.

Mrs. Mary S. Lockwood (D. C.), member-at-large of the World's Fair Board of Lady Managers, read a carefully prepared statement of the methods and aims of that body, which began: "The Board of Lady Managers owe their existence to Susan B. Anthony and her co-workers. It was these women who went before Congress and not only asked but demanded that women should have a place in the management of this Columbian Exposition—and they got it"![92] She closed as follows:

I have been greatly impressed as I have come into this hall from day to day, and have looked upon the sweet representative face in marble of Lucretia Mott and the benign, glorified face of Mrs. Stanton, with Susan B. Anthony as the central figure of the trio, and have thought of the years they have lifted up their voices praying they might see the glory of the coming of the Lord; and I have felt if only I could bring before them the sheaves which we are gathering from the women of the earth for this great exposition; if only I could show them how their work has put the women of this nation in touch with the women of every other country, awakening them to new aspirations, new hopes, new efforts, to whom the dawn of a brighter day is visible—these pioneers would say, "Our eyes are indeed opened; a handful of corn planted on the top of the mountain has been made to shake all Lebanon."

Miss Mary H. Williams (Neb.) reported that, as chairman of a committee for this purpose, she had sent letters to forty-nine Governors of States and Territories; twenty-one replies had been received—nine in favor of full suffrage for women, two of school suffrage only, three were totally opposed and the others made evasive replies. The nine in favor were Governors Barber of Wyoming, Routt of Colorado, Mellette of South Dakota, Winans of Michigan, Thomas of Utah, Burke of North Dakota, Humphrey of Kansas, Colcord of Nevada, Knapp of Alaska. All of these were Western men and all Republicans but Winans. Tillman of South Carolina and Willey of Idaho favored school suffrage alone. Stone of Mississippi and Fleming of West Virginia answered "no". Gov. James E. Boyd of Nebraska was opposed, although he would allow women to vote on school questions. Governor Boyd's election had been contested on the ground that his father had not been properly naturalized.

Gov. Thomas M. Holt of North Carolina replied: "I am utterly opposed to woman suffrage in any shape or form. I have a wife and three daughters, all married, who are as much opposed to women going into politics as I am, and they reflex the sentiment of our Southern women generally."

Gov. Francis P. Fleming of Florida gave nine reasons why he was opposed, but concluded: "The above objections would not as a rule apply to church or school elections, and as women are usually much more pious than men and take more interest in church matters, I am inclined to think it would be well for them to vote at church elections, and am not aware of any particular objection to their voting at school elections."

The address of Mrs. Orra Langhorne (Va.) was read by her niece, Miss Henderson Dangerfield. It gave a charming picture of the oldtime Southern woman, her responsible social position, her care for her great household in her own small world; described how she was handicapped by tradition and lack of intellectual training; depicted the changed conditions since the war and her gradual awakening to the demands of modern life and the need of larger rights.

Lucy Stone was not able to be present and a letter from her was read by her husband, Mr. Blackwell:

DEAR FRIENDS:—Wherever woman suffragists are gathered together in the name of equal rights, there am I always in spirit with them. Although unable to be present in person, my glad greeting goes to you, every one, to those who have borne the heat and burden of the day, and to the strong, brave, younger workers who have come to lighten the load and help bring the victory. The work still calls for patient perseverance and ceaseless endeavor; but we have every reason to rejoice when there are so many gains and when favorable conditions abound on every hand. The end is not yet in sight, but it can not be far away. The road before us is shorter than the road behind.

This was her last message to the association. She passed away in October of this year, having labored nearly half a century for the enfranchisement of women.

Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, in an address entitled Comparisons Are Odious, showed the contrast between the Government's treatment of the Sioux Indians, exempted from taxation and allowed to vote, and of law-abiding, intelligent women in the same section of the country, compelled to pay taxes and not allowed to vote.[93] Miss Elizabeth Upham Yates closed the evening with a brilliant address.

Before adjourning Miss Anthony read Gov. Roswell P. Flower's certificate appointing her a member of the Board of Managers of the State Industrial School at Rochester, N. Y. She took considerable satisfaction in pointing out that it referred to her as "him," because she had always contended that, if the masculine pronoun in an official document is sufficient to send a woman to the jail or the gallows, it is sufficient to enable her to vote and hold office.

On the last evening, the Hon. Carroll D. Wright, U. S. Commissioner of Labor, delivered a valuable address on The Industrial Emancipation of Women, in which he said:

Until within a comparatively recent period, woman's subjection to man has been well-nigh complete in all respects, whether such subjection is considered from a social, political, intellectual or even a physical point of view. At first the property of man, she emerged under civilization from the sphere of a drudge to that of a social factor and, consequently, into the liberty of cultivating her mental faculties....

Industrial emancipation, using the term broadly, means the highest type of woman as the result, the word "industrial" comprehending in this sense all remunerative employment. The entrance of woman into the industrial field was assured when the factory system of labor displaced the domestic or hand labor system. The age of invention, with the wonderful ramifications which invention always has produced, must be held accountable for bringing woman into a field entirely unknown to her prior to that age. As an economic factor, either in art, literature or industry, she was before that time hardly recognizable. With the establishment of the factory system, the desire of woman to have something more than she could earn as a domestic or in agricultural labor, or to earn something where before she had earned nothing, resulted in her becoming an economic factor, and she was obliged to submit to all the conditions of this new position. It hardly can be said that in the lower forms of industrial pursuits she superseded man, but it is true that she supplemented his labors....

Each step in industrial progress has raised her in the scale of civilization rather than degraded her. As a result she has constantly gone up higher and gained intellectual advantages, such as the opening to her of the higher institutions of learning, which have in turn equipped her for the best professional employment. The moral plane of the so-called workingwoman certainly is higher than that of the woman engaged in domestic service, and is equal to that of any class of women in the community....

As women have occupied the positions of bookkeepers, telegraphers and many of what might be called semi-professional callings, men have entered engineering, electrical, mechanical and other spheres of work which were not known when women first stepped into the industrial field. As the latter have progressed from entire want of employment to that which pays a few dollars per week, men, too, have progressed in their employments, and occupied larger fields not existing before....

Woman is now stepping out of industrial subjection and coming into the industrial system of the present as an entirely new economic factor. If there were no other reasons, this alone would be sufficient to make her wages low and prevent their very rapid increase.... The growing importance of woman's labor, her general equipment through technical education, her more positive dedication to the life-work she chooses, the growing sentiment that an educated and skilful woman is a better and truer companion in marriage than an ignorant and unskilful one, her appreciation of the value of organization, the general uplifting of the principle of integrity in business circles, woman's gradual approach to man's powers in mental achievement also, her possible and probable political influence—all these combined, working along general avenues of progress and evolution, will bring her industrial emancipation, by which she will stand on an equality with man in those callings in life for which she may be fitted. As she approaches this equality her remuneration will be increased and her economic importance acknowledged....

If woman's industrial emancipation leads to what many are pleased to call "political rights," we must not quarrel with it. It is not just that all other advantages which may come through this emancipation shall be withheld simply because one great privilege on which there is a division of sentiment may also come.

One of the greatest boons which will result from the industrial emancipation of woman will be the frank admission on the part of the true and chivalric man that she is the sole and rightful owner of her own being in every respect, and that whatever companionship may exist between her and man shall be as thoroughly honorable to her as to him.

Miss Harriet May Mills (N. Y.) gave a paper on The Present Political Status of Woman, which showed the trained mind and logical method of thought one would expect from a graduate of Cornell University. The last address of the convention was given by the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, entitled The America Undiscovered by Columbus. This, like so many of Miss Shaw's unsurpassed lectures, will be lost to posterity because unwritten and not stenographically reported.

In her report as vice-president-at-large Miss Shaw announced that she had given during the year 215 lectures for which she had received pay, twenty-five of these for suffrage associations and the rest for temperance and literary organizations, but on every occasion it had been a suffrage lecture. In addition she had given gratuitously to the service of this cause lectures which at her regular price would have amounted to $1,265. She also related the following incident: "I was present at the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Denver, and Miss Willard introduced me as a fraternal delegate from the National Suffrage Association. I made my little speech and the whole convention arose and waved their handkerchiefs at the message sent by this body. One woman jumped to her feet and moved that a telegram be returned from that convention, giving its sisterly sympathy. Miss Willard got up and said, 'Shoo, ladies; this is different from what it was in Washington in 1881, when you refused to let me have Miss Anthony on my platform. Things are coming around, girls.'"

The corresponding secretary, Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery, announced that thirty-three State associations were auxiliary to the national. Miss Adelaide Johnson was introduced as the sculptor who had modeled the fine busts of Lucretia Mott, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony, which were on the platform. Miss Laura Clay reported on the work that had just been commenced in the Southern States, which she considered a most hopeful field. In the discussion on Press Work, when it was proposed that the association start an official paper, Miss Anthony said with much feeling: "I had an experience in publishing a paper about twenty-five years ago and I came to grief. I never hear of a woman starting a suffrage paper that my blood does not tingle with agony for what that poor soul will have to endure—the same agony I went through. I feel, however, that we shall never become an immense power in the world until we concentrate all our money and editorial forces upon one great national daily newspaper, so we can sauce back our opponents every day in the year; once a month or once a week is not enough.

The resolutions presented by the chairman, Mrs. Dietrick, were adopted without dissent,[94] except the last:

WHEREAS, The Constitution of the United States promises noninterference with the religious liberty of the people; and

WHEREAS, Congress is now threatening to abridge the liberties of all in response to ecclesiastical dictation from a portion of the people; therefore,

Resolved, That this association enters a protest against any national attempt to control the innocent inclinations of the people either on the Jewish Sabbath or the Christian Sunday, and this we do quite irrespective of our individual opinions as to the sanctity of Sunday.

Resolved, That we especially protest against this present attempt to force all the people to follow the religious dictates of a part of the people, as establishing a precedent for the entrance of a most dangerous complicity between Church and State, thereby subtly undermining the foundation of liberty, so carefully laid by the wisdom of our fathers.

This precipitated the discussion as to the opening of the World's Fair on Sunday which had been vigorously waged during two preceding conventions without resulting in definite action. It was now continued during three sessions and then, by majority vote, indefinitely postponed. Mrs. Avery, chairman of the Columbian Exposition Committee,[95] closed her report as follows: "As we are to be represented in so many ways during the World's Fair—i. e., at the World's Congress of Representative Women, in the Suffrage Congresses, in the meetings to be held in the auditorium of the Woman's Building, in the program to be presented by us for the approval of the Committee on General Meetings of the Board of Lady Managers—I would strongly urge against attempting to hold a separate Suffrage Congress, either national or international, during the Exposition." This was agreed to.

The Congressional Committee, through Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, reported that 375 letters had been sent to members of Congress asking for an expression on the question of woman suffrage. Of those who responded fifty-nine were in favor of full suffrage; twenty-five of qualified suffrage; sixty-five wholly opposed. The remainder did not reply, although stamps were enclosed. This committee also arranged for the printing, purchasing and distributing of 23,000 copies of the Senate and House hearings. The report concluded: "The time has come when women wanting legislation must proceed exactly as men do who want it. No man procures an office for himself or a friend, nor does any man or association get an Act passed, unless the claim is persistently pressed, not only upon the members of the committee in charge of it but upon his friends and acquaintances in Congress. There is no use in supposing the justice or right of a question, without persistent work, is going to bring about a reform."[96]

Mrs. Colby, chairman of the Committee on Federal Suffrage, appointed to urge the legal right of women to vote for Representatives under the U. S. Constitution, reported that she had sent a copy of Francis Minor's argument to every member of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, with a personal letter asking for an opinion, and that not one replied. Petitions were sent from twenty States, including suffrage associations, temperance societies, granges, etc. Letters asking an opinion were written to nineteen Senators who were considered friendly to the enfranchisement of women, and only one answered, Joseph N. Dolph of Oregon. Miss Sara Winthrop Smith (Conn.) opened the discussion.[97]

The motion of Miss Alice Stone Blackwell to amend the constitution so that it would not be obligatory to hold every annual convention in Washington, was amended by Mrs. Avery to the effect that "the annual delegate convention shall be held in Washington during the first session of each Congress, in order to influence national legislation; the meeting of the alternate conventions to be left an open question." Miss Anthony was greatly opposed to holding any of the national meetings outside of Washington, and in a forcible speech she said:

The sole object, it seems to me, of this organization is to bring the combined influence of all the States upon Congress to secure national legislation. The very moment you change the purpose of this great body from National to State work you have defeated its object. It is the business of the States to do the district work; to create public sentiment; to make a national organization possible; and then to bring their united power to the capital and focus it on Congress. Our younger women naturally can not appreciate the vast amount of work done here in Washington by the National Association in the last twenty-five years. The delegates do not come here as individuals but as representatives of their entire States.

We have had these conventions here for a quarter of a century, and every Congress has given hearings to the ablest women we could bring from every section. In the olden times the States were not fully organized—they had not money enough to pay their delegates' expenses. We begged and worked and saved the money and the National Association paid the expenses of delegates from Oregon and California in order that they might come and bring the influence of their States to bear upon Congress.

Last winter we had twenty-three States represented by delegates. Think of those twenty-three women going before the Senate committee, each making her speech, and showing these Senators the interest in all these States. We have educated at least a part of three or four hundred men and their wives and daughters every two years to return as missionaries to their respective localities. I shall feel it a grave mistake if you vote in favor of a movable convention. It will lessen our influence and our power; but come what may, I shall abide by the decision of the majority.

Miss Anthony was strongly supported by Miss Shaw, Mrs. Colby, Mrs. Louisa Southworth, Mrs. Rosa L. Segur, Mrs. Olivia B. Hall, Mrs. Jean Brooks Greenleaf and others.