Women are equal with men legally and wages have not adjusted themselves, and the law has had no control over the feelings and opinions of men and women. Those who were large-minded enough to respect labor asked no warrant from legislation, and those who were small-minded enough to undervalue woman's work because it was woman's, do so still despite the statutes, and would if women voted at every election. Men were equal with each other before the law, but that did not compel the respect of foolish men, nor did their wages adjust themselves to equality on that account. If there were more men working in a trade in a given place than the demand for their products required, the wage would fall, and so it must with women. But reasons entered into the market value of woman's work that did not enter into that of men. Mrs. Dall mentions but one trade in which the wages were lower for women, and there they competed with men. Those seven women working with the seventy men in New Haven were not expected to be called upon to support a family by their earnings. If they were girls, in the natural course of things they were expected to leave the work whenever they were ready to marry. If one of them married one of the seventy men, the firm of employers would lose her services entirely; but the man who married her would be depended upon to work more steadily than before, and he would also have more incentive to do better work in order to command still higher wages. The long cry of Suffrage has not been able to bring about "equal pay for equal work," even where legislation to that effect has been introduced into Trades Unions and State laws. This has still rested, and must rest, with the employer, and his action must be governed by quality and demand and supply. The attempt to secure "equal wages" among men has resulted in bringing down the wages of all to the point of the poorer workers. The general laws of trade, like those of government, are based on principles of universal equity, and however strenuously temporary deviations may be pressed, they return at last to the natural position. This is not saying that there is not great injustice toward labor by capital, and toward capital by labor, but that the foundation principles tend to govern the mutual relations, and forcing that is contrary to these cannot be permanently successful. If the work of women for any reason is unequal, the wages will be, and the mere fact that some particular women work for some particular time the same number of hours, and as well as do the men in the same establishments, does not do away with the fact that women's work in general is not as steady as men's, and is not expected to meet the same emergency of family support. No one can believe more fully than I in equal wages for work that is really equal; but it seems to me that private contract, and not public action, must regulate the matter of special wage.

Government reports show that the average age of the working-girl in this country is but twenty-two years, and that after twenty the number falls off rapidly. Unskilled labor must forever take the place of that which is withdrawn, which is another and most valid reason for lower wages. That lower wages are the result of natural causes, and not of unnatural feeling, is shown in many ways. Woman teachers at the West, where teachers were needed, received as good pay as did men. In New York I heard Superintendent Jasper, I think it was, say: "I am in favor of equal pay for equal work, for the two sexes; but we cannot give it here. We can get twice as many good women teachers as men teachers, and when we need men we must pay at a higher rate." This does not extend to the highest grade of teachers, superintendents, and professors in colleges, where men compete with one another. There the compensation is the same for equal work. In the highest forms of work women compete on equal terms. In literature women are paid, for books or articles, the same prices that men receive. In art this is true. It is the picture or statue or musical ability that counts. Singers receive as much for the soprano as for the tenor voice. Actresses are paid according to "drawing" power, and woman dancers and acrobats, alas! command the highest price.

There is, among others, this fundamental difference between the business life of men and women. For men who pursue occupations outside the home, there are women to manage that home. For women who pursue occupations outside the home, there are, not men, but other women, to manage the home. The final domestic care of the world must come upon women. The final attention to social life must come upon women. In behalf of the women who are constrained, or who choose, to sacrifice their share in this part of the world's necessary work, some other women must do double duty. That this rule has seeming exceptions does not make it less the universal rule.

Nothing, not even "industrial emancipation," is gotten for nothing.

When the count cited above from the Suffrage indictment was written, the factory system had been established in this country twenty-six years. From the Revolution down to 1822, the women of the land had been busy in the homes making the household and personal wear. Sixteen years after the introduction of machinery into Lowell, Mass., 12,507 operatives were at work there, the majority of whom were women, American women and girls. New York State also had its mills. "Fanny Forester" (afterward Mrs. Judson) worked in a mill near her home in that State. She went there, as did hosts of New England girls, Lucy Larcom and Harriet Robinson among the number, to relieve the home, but especially to gain the means of education, for themselves and for their brothers and sisters. The towns afforded better libraries, and there were evening classes that they could attend, things not to be had in the farming districts. In 1850, in twenty-five States, the factory census reported 32,295 men and 62,661 women workers. In 1860 there were 46,859 men and 75,169 women. Hosiery machinery at this time was giving employment to three times as many women as men. But the emigrant, and not the American man, had been the means of turning out the native woman worker; it was the foreign-born woman who worked for "unequal pay." In 1846, the sewing-machine had been invented. Previous to that time, 61,500 women were employed making boys' clothing by hand for the market, which was twice the number of men so employed, while the woman tailor was as familiar a figure as the dress-maker in every village, where she went from house to house.

In 1861 came our Civil War, with its awful sacrifice of young men. With that also came the heavy money loss, and consequent inability of many men, even where life and limb had been spared, to support their families in the homes. That great conflict, with its stern necessities, its lessons of mutual helpfulness, its military discipline, which taught the value of organization, did more than could ten thousand conventions, even had they been working with knowledge and system, to instruct women in love for work for others. It nerved them to labor for self-support and for the support of those who were now dependent upon them' because the strong arm had fallen and the willing heart had ceased to beat. Before the year 1861 had closed, there were a million women in this country earning their daily bread by honorable labor. As time went on, and the slaughter continued, and the nation's debt piled up, and prices became almost fabulous, more and more women asked through blinding tears, "What can I do?" Every trade was thrown open to women, and the laws had placed the married woman where she could compete on equal terms with her unmarried sister, even though she still had the advantage of a husband's support.

A great pother has lately been made by Suffrage workers in New York because a bill was proposed prohibiting married women from teaching in the public schools. This has been the unwritten law in many places for years. The practice was adopted to offset the maintenance of married women. Teachers should receive more pay, but so should poets and artists, and we all hope the time will come when brain work will have more tangible market value.

The sewing-machine had thrown women out of employment, as with it one woman could do the work of many. The number of work-seekers was enlarged by the influx, from the desolated South, of women whose entire living had been swept away. This army of uneducated workers from all sections were compelled not only to compete with men but with themselves as well. They sought, and could seek, only the lighter employments. Suffragists had their wish in regard to man's relinquishment of the "profitable employments," but not in the way they intended. The women for whose sake those profitable employments had been "monopolized" were now not only allowed by law but compelled by circumstance to toil from sun to sun at the best they could find to do; their frailer organizations were forced to bear "the double curse of work and pain." A nobler army of martyrs never turned their sorrows into blessings by the spirit in which they met them, than the American women who put their shoulders to the wheels of business that were moving in a hundred ways.

In 1843 a humble beginning at industrial education for girls had been made by the Female Guardian Society. In 1854 Peter Cooper established the Cooper Union with its generous facilities for women in industry and the arts. The Young Women's Christian Association was founded in Normal, Illinois, in 1872, and its work in the industrial branch spread, before many years, to every city and town in the land. Men originated for women the first "Woman's Protective Union." In twenty-five years it had reported legal suits won for 12,000 women, and $41,000 collected. In 1869 the great organization of the Knights of Labor was founded, and in its body of rules was one "to secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work." Failure proves that labor cannot, any more than paper, be coined into money by the mere fiat of a government or an organization.

But the great impulse to industrial education came through the Centennial Exposition held at Philadelphia in 1876. While the land was filled with the hum of preparation, as their contribution to that indication of peaceful progress, the Suffrage Associations were rolling up another petition in which to set forth their wrongs. After General Hawley, manager of the Exposition, had courteously refused to receive it in a public meeting, it was "pressed upon the Nation's heart" by delegates who pushed their way into Independence Hall. Outside that historic building, under the broiling sun, with Matilda Joslyn Gage to hold an umbrella over her, Miss Anthony read aloud a "Declaration of Independence" that re-echoed the sentiments of their first Declaration. It began by saying: "While the nation is buoyant with patriotism, and all hearts are attuned to praise, it is with sorrow we come to strike the one discordant note"—a typical and prophetic sentence.

From 1876 girls, as well as boys, received manual training in the public schools, and when that proved impracticable, the way was found to open industrial schools that should include classes for girls. Every State, and almost every city and town of any size, had them. It was not long ere multitudes of societies and organizations furnished means for women's education in business and mechanic arts. The growth of the philanthropy of self-help is one of the wonders of the past twenty-five years, and women, without the ballot, have largely assisted in developing it.

John Graham Brooks, in a lecture delivered in New York in the winter of 1895-6, on "Some Economic Aspects of the Woman Question," said: "Woman who used to do her work in the house now does it in the factory, and the same work, doing her work under absolutely new and different conditions, a change so great that it closes finally one argument that I hear again and again by those opposed to woman suffrage—namely, that the place for woman is in the home."

One condition under which she works that is not "absolutely new and different" is that of sex. Whatever as a woman she could not do in the home she cannot do abroad as a working-woman. She is in business as a business woman, not as a business man. Economic equality in such things as she can do is as unlike to a similarity in work which ignores sex conditions as a business corporation is to the government under whose laws it exists and by which its rights are defended. But even the external conditions are not so changed as might at first appear. The statistical proof of the youth of the majority of workers, the comparatively small number out of the whole population who go into business, and the fact that the domestic work for these very workers must be done by women, all show this.

The United States Census of 1890 shows that not quite four million women are "engaged in gainful occupations." Of these more than one and a half million are in domestic service, and nearly half a million in professional service, mainly as teachers. The most striking gain has been made in the lighter forms of profitable labor—by stenographers, typewriters, telegraph and telephone operators, cashiers, bookkeepers, etc. In 1870 there were 19,828 of these; in 1890, there were 228,421. The invention of the type-writing machine appears to be the ballot that has mainly produced this result. Carrol D. Wright says that in twenty cities examined in the United States he found, among 17,000 working-women, that 15,887 were single, 1,038 were widows, and 745 were married. This tells the same story. The mass of these women, like the mass of men, are working, not for public influence or station, but for the owning and holding of a home. The latest effort in self-help for the working class is the wise one of building them good homes. The best renting property has been found to be that which gives privacy and those distinctions that mark the family.

The latest report of the New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor shows that of 8,040 persons who registered for employment in New York city, 6,458 were men, and 1,582 were women. Of these, the foreign-born numbered 4,804, of whom 3,674 were men and 1,140 were women. The native-born numbered 3,234, of whom 2,796 were men, and 442 were women. The list included every trade and profession, from that of day laborer to that of clergyman, from that of school teacher to that of domestic servant, and showed that in the city where more women are employed than in any other place, the proportion of women to men was less than one fifth, and of native American to foreign-born women two fifths.

Mr. Brooks would favor suffrage because "in this new career there are reasons for every whit of protection." He mentions, as proof of woman's changed attitude as an industrial unit, that the Supreme Courts of Illinois and California have decided against special legislation for women. They did so on the ground that "they were now earning their livelihood under men's conditions, and should not have special legislation in business relations." If Mr. Brooks thinks that women wish the ballot to restore the special legislation, he does not know the Suffrage demand for equality. In England, when the laws were under discussion that forbid the employment of women more than a certain number of hours, and of children under certain ages, the Woman Suffrage leaders protested against the former as an infringement of personal rights and the ability to make contracts. But the special legislation for business women goes on, because, after all, the State knows that they are business women, and not business men, and the Suffrage quarrel in regard to privilege versus right goes on also.

Before the Committee of the Constitutional Convention, Mrs. Ecob, of Albany, said: "You speak of chivalry. We scorn the word! What has your chivalry done for the weaker sex? Women are the unpaid laborers of the world—outcasts in government." Mrs. Hood, of Brooklyn, on the same occasion said: "Who dares insult our American manhood by declaring that men will be less courteous to mother, wife, and sister, because they are political equals? Woman's equality in the industrial world has to-day produced a nobler, better chivalry than was ever conceived by the knights of old."

These two Suffrage leaders will have to settle between themselves the question which they have placed in dispute. It serves to point the moral of dilemma that attends an attempted adjustment of unnatural claims. Meantime government is caring for the weak, and chivalry is doing justice. The Labor Law that went into effect in this State on September 1st provided that children be classified so that those under fourteen years should not be employed in mercantile pursuits. Children between the ages of twelve and fourteen will be permitted to work in vacation, if they can show that they have attended school through the year. The girls between fourteen and twenty-one are not to be allowed to work more than ten hours a day. Their employment before 7 A.M. and after 10 P.M. is forbidden. Women and children are not allowed to work in basements, without permits from the Health Board as to the condition of the basement. Seats are to be provided for woman employees, forty-five minutes given them for luncheon, and proper lunch and toilet rooms to be secured. Penalties, ranging from a fine of $20 for the first offence to imprisonment, are prescribed for violation of the law. In his last report, published in January 1897, the New York Commissioner of Labor considers the low wages and petty wrongs of working women and girls in New York City. He advises the formation of unions among themselves for their better protection.

Mr. Brooks does not agree with those who claim that possession of the ballot would raise wages. Mrs. Ames and Dr. Jacobi think it would only raise them through the indirect influence of the greater respect in which the worker would be held. This is safe ground again, because it is debatable; but the domestic servants of those who hold the former opinion might give them an object-lesson. Unfranchised as the servants are, they have only to make a threat of leaving to secure better wages.

Harriette A. Keyser, who was the special Suffrage champion of the working- woman before the Committee of the Constitutional Convention, gave not one fact or figure to show that the working-woman, where she had the ballot, had already been helped by it, or that it was likely to help her, or how and why it might help her. Among the generalities she uttered was the following; "But the greatest value of the working-woman, to my mind, is that without her economic value this present demand for equal suffrage could never be made. Indeed, the suffrage of the world is due to her. Do I mean by this that every working-woman in the country sees her own value so clearly that she demands enfranchisement? I could not say this with truth. I make this statement irrespective of what any individual working-woman may think. It is based upon what she is. As through the last half century the contention for equal rights has continued, the working-woman has been the great object-lesson. It was not from women of leisure, having all the rights they want, that inspiration has been received. It has been caught from the patient worker, healing the sick, writing the book, painting the picture, teaching the children, tilling the soil, working in the factory, serving in the household. Every stroke of these workers has been a protest against a disfranchised individuality." Miss Keyser has mentioned most of the classes in this country, for, so far as my experience goes, there is no such thing as a leisure class, in the sense of an idle class, of women. Women are almost universally industrious, and it is a mistake to suppose that their early industry in the house was not as much appreciated and counted in the general fund of work as their more public activity now. It is well for Miss Keyser to make her estimate of the Suffrage value of the working-woman one that shall have no reference to the expressed views of the working-woman herself; because the working-woman seems almost universally not only unconscious of but indifferent to her attitude as a great object-lesson in favor of the ballot. But here is something new. Suffragists have first claimed that there could be no working-woman unless there was a ballot in woman's hand; then they claimed that, although there was a working-woman despite the fact that she had not been enfranchised, she was made by the agitation for the ballot; and now comes Miss Keyser to say that, not only is the working-woman not due to the ballot, or to ballot-seeking, but "the suffrage of the world is due to her," for "without her economic value this present demand for equal suffrage could never have been made!" Tar baby ain't sayin' nuthin'.

Dr. Jacobi, in "Common Sense," says: "Whatever may be the personal privileges of their lot, whatever the legal protection accorded to their earnings, the public status of such a class remains strictly that of aliens. At the present moment this vast and constantly growing army of women industrials constitutes an alien class. The privation for that class of political right to defend its interests is only masked, but not compensated, by its numerous inter-relations with those who have rights." So they are conceded to have personal privileges, and legal protection for earnings. The alienism is then purely political, and works no hardship but what Suffragists conceive to be in the mental attitude of the worker.

Foreign capitalists who own land or plant in the United States are unfranchised. We have large numbers of men working in trades and professions who never have been naturalized, but we do not dream that all these constitute an alien class of industrials. No distinction is made in business opportunity between the voter and non-voter. Neither is any social distinction made regarding worker or employer on account of the relations of either to the ballot. Market value is not measured by suffrage, except in dishonorable transactions, and the women "with ballots in their hands" are not the Government's preferred creditors. The men in the District of Columbia are not conscious of lower wages and industrial ostracism. Again, Dr. Jacobi says: "The share of women in political rights and life—imperfect and deferred during the predominance of militarism— has become natural, has become inevitable, with the advent of industrialism, in which they so largely share."

Industrialism has no more power to change the basis of government than the abolition movement had when certain advocates of it shouted that it was "sinful to vote or hold office, because the government was founded upon physical force and maintained itself by muskets." Industrialism is bringing into this country some of the gravest problems it has ever met. The sympathy of the people is on the side of labor that uses honorable means; but Cleveland and Leadville are among the places that suggest afresh the fact that industrialism must be kept in order for its own sake, for the sake of general peace, and for the sake of its increasing ranks of "alien" women who look to it for "every whit of protection," save that which their own self-respect and that of public opinion can win them.

Again, Dr. Jacobi says: "Notwithstanding the repression of women's civil rights, and their absolute exclusion from even the dream of a political sphere, the women of France engage more freely than anywhere else in business and industry." There is a moral here deeper than can be read at a glance. The first thought suggested is, that industrial success for woman is not in the least dependent upon the vote. The second is, that industrial progress does not command the vote. The third is, that American freedom has worked in the opposite direction from French unstable republicanism. And the fourth is, that industrious France stands appalled at the lack of increase of its population. There are many forces that sap its national life, but perhaps the most conspicuous is the socialistic and anarchistic tendency of its labor organizations. The woman-suffrage idea was first openly proclaimed during the French Revolution. In 1851 the annual Suffrage Convention in this country was called by Paulina Wright Davis, to meet in Worcester, Mass. Ernestine Rose read to the convention two letters addressed to that body through her, written by Jeanne Deroine and Pauline Roland, from a Paris prison. During the revolutionary movements of 1848, these women had played conspicuous roles. One of them had attempted to nominate the mayor in her native city, the other to be a candidate for the Legislative Assembly. They wrote: "Sisters of America! Your socialist sisters of France are united with you in the vindication of the right of woman to civil and political equality. We have, moreover, the profound conviction that only by the power of association based on solidarity—by the union of the working-classes of both sexes in organized labor, can be acquired, completely and pacifically, the civil and political equality of woman, and the social right for all."

I know the feud, and the grounds for it, between socialism and anarchy. But both are enemies of the social order, and both are favorers of woman suffrage. How "pacifically" the labor movement that originated in France in 1848, and spread throughout Europe, was likely to proceed, we may judge by its constant outbreaks kindred to the recent bomb-throwing in Paris. In the German Working-man's Union, Hasenclever, for many years the leading socialist in the German Reichstag, said: "The Woman Question would be taken by the developed, or, more correctly speaking, the communistic state, under its own control, for in this state" (which was to consist of men and women with equal vote) "when the community bears the obligation of maintaining the children, and no private capital exists, the woman need no longer be chained to one man. The bond between the sexes will be merely a moral one, and if the characters do not harmonize could be dissolved." The "Social Democrat" of Copenhagen has for mottoes: "All men and women over twenty-one should vote." "There should be institutions for the proper bringing up of children." All the communistic and anarchistic labor organizations in Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, and England proclaim woman suffrage as a prime factor, and the disruption of the family as its corollary.

There are many who remember the visit to this country of the socialist, Dr. Aveling, and his (so-called) wife, the daughter of Karl Marx. His legal wife had been left in England. Miss Marx said, in reply to the question of a Chicago lady, that love was the only recognized marriage in Socialism, consequently no bonds of any kind would be required. Divorces would be impossible; for when love ceased, separation would naturally ensue.

At a meeting of the Woman's Council held in Washington, in 1888, Mrs. Stanton said: "I have often said to men of the present day that the next generation of women will not stand arguing with you as patiently as we have for half a century. The organizations of labor all over the country are holding out their hands to women. The time is not far distant when, if men do not do justice to women, the women will strike hands with labor, with socialists, with anarchists, and you will have the scenes of the Revolution of France acted over again in this republic."

Mrs. Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in her lecture in this country two years ago on "The Economic Emancipation of Woman," said that she rejoiced in every co-operative working-woman's dwelling, because it was a blow aimed at the isolated home, and she has just repeated in New York her proposition for the institutional care of children. Alice Hyneman Rhine, in her article on "Woman's Work in America," says of socialistic labor, "It aims to benefit woman by recognizing her as a perfect equal of man, politically and socially; by fixing woman's means of support by the state so as to render her independent of man." "Freedom," a radical socialistic newspaper published in Chicago, where Emma Goldman and her ilk have revealed the true inwardness of such movements, recommends as the first step "equal rights for all, without distinction of race or sex," and the abolition of "class rule." Our most radical socialistic Labor National Convention in New York, this year, had four woman delegates.

The Knights of Labor who first put "equal pay for equal work" into their platform, appeared in their late convention, under the lead of Sovereign, who declared that Gov. Altgeld "was one of the finest types of American manhood to-day." They seem to be drifting toward that phase of Socialism to which Alice Hyneman Rhine referred. There are no greater tyrants than some of the Labor organizations, and one evidence of this is the fact that they prevent the colored man from doing any work outside of a few of the least noble occupations.

With such edged tools as these are our American women playing when they demand, in the name of democracy, in the name of the family, in the name of the working-woman, that the word "sex" shall be inserted in the United States Constitution, and the word "male" be stricken from every State constitution that now contains it.



CHAPTER VII.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE PROFESSIONS.

The sixth count in the Declaration of Sentiments reads: "He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known."

That statement contains another evidence of the untruthfulness of a half truth. First, it is an unwarrantable assumption, of which no proof is offered, that man had closed against woman any avenue to wealth and distinction, or that he felt toward woman the selfish and monopolizing spirit implied in such accusation. Second, but three of the avenues, all of which he was said to have closed against her, are mentioned. Whatever may be the truth about those three, the no less honorable, although less arduous, avenues to wealth and distinction were as open to her as to him. As educator, author, artist, in painting, music, and sculpture, she could freely attain to the same coveted end. The Suffragists did not decry man's "monopoly" of the honorable and profitable but severe professions of civil engineering, seamanship, mining engineering, lighthouse keeping and inspecting, signal service, military and naval duty, and the like. These, and the drudgery of the world's business and commerce, man was welcome to keep.

But, most of all, this Suffrage indictment contains, as do all the rest, another tacit untruth when it assumes that woman's work has not in the past been as honorable to herself and as profitable to the world as has that of man. By setting up a false standard for achievement, and attempting to make everything conform to it, the Suffrage movement has done incalculable harm. It is not progressing to push into an unwonted place merely because it is unwonted, and because you can push in. It is progress to enter it in response both to an inward and an outward need.

When the first Suffrage convention had adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, Lucretia Mott offered a resolution, which was also adopted, declaring that "the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of men and women for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce."

The most remarkable thing about this resolution is, that it was promulgated by a woman who was at that very time a gifted and eloquent preacher, so that to her, who cared for it so highly, man had not closed that avenue to wealth and distinction. As she had a husband to support her and her children, she was much more free to attain those desirable ends than most of the ministers who were preaching for humanity's sake and the gospel's, at salaries ranging from five hundred to two thousand dollars a year, and who had families to support out of their slender pittance. If any woman was in a position to "overthrow the monopoly of the pulpit," surely she was. Stately and beautiful of mien, fervent in spirit, eloquent in language, one who had learned the Hebrew and Greek that she might read the Scriptures in the original tongues, what did she lack? Not only was no pulpit of another faith than hers ever opened to her, but more than half those of her own form of worship were closed against hearing the inner voice as interpreted by her. In that schism that rent the Society of Friends as no other religious body has ever been rent, she threw in her fortunes, or led others to throw in their fortunes (for she had been preaching nine years when the division occurred), with that portion that placed the "inner light" above all Scripture. When the Friends came from the London meeting to testify against the teachings of the schismatics, they besought Lucretia Mott to return to the faith of her childhood, but she resisted from conviction that she was right. Elias Hicks, her leader, had instigated the members of his congregation to refuse to pay their taxes to the Government during and following the war of 1812, on the ground that they represented an encroachment of the secular power on Christian liberty, and were used to support war, which was sin. Lucretia Mott preached that "no Christian can consistently uphold a government based on the sword, or relying on that as an ultimate resort." The country has always suffered from this doctrine. The Tory Quakers of the Revolution called publicly upon Friends "to withstand and refuse to submit" "to instructions and ordinances" not warranted by "that happy Constitution under which we have long enjoyed tranquillity and peace." Thomas Paine, whose parents were Friends, in "The Crisis," says: "The common phrase of these people is, 'Our principles are peace.' To which it may be replied, 'and your practices are the reverse.'" Another striking instance of this disagreement between principle and practice is seen in Lucretia Mott's behavior. From the platform where she demanded the ballot for woman, she proclaimed that all voting was sinful. That bodies of people who so held should continue to enjoy the Government's protection of themselves and their property, through the sacrifices made by those who carried on government by giving willingly their money and their strength, is a proof of our wonderful freedom.

Elizabeth Fry and most of the English Friends would not mention the name of Mrs. Mott. Mrs. Stanton once asked her what she would have done after the Hicksite faction had been voted out of meeting at the World's Conventicle of Friends in London, if the spirit had moved her to speak when the chairman and members had moved that she be silent, and she answered, "Where the spirit of God is, there is liberty." This is the liberty of anarchy, and it had its due weight in the Suffrage movement. Mrs. Stanton, in the course of a eulogy pronounced at Mrs. Mott's funeral, said: "The 'vagaries' of the Anti-slavery struggle, in which Lucretia Mott took a leading part, have been coined into law; and the 'wild fantasies' of the Abolitionists are now the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the National Constitution.... The 'infidel' Hicksite principles that shocked Christendom are now the cornerstones of the liberal religious movement in this country." The vagaries of the Anti- slavery struggle are exactly those that were not coined into law. The wild fantasies of the Abolitionists were rejected by those whose sober judgment and steady courage made possible the last constitutional amendments. And no truer is it that the "infidel" Hicksite principles are the corner-stones of any genuine movement of Christian liberality. While the Friends mourn that infidelity and Roman Catholicism have made inroads upon their progress in some places, they have steadily advanced in the other direction from that pointed out by Lucretia Mott. Their educated and paid ministry, their First-day schools, their missions, home and foreign, their music, and simple but set forms, their reports to London of "conversion and profession of faith," and their rapid growth where these things have taken place, all indicate the truth of this. The large meeting at Swartmore College, in the summer of 1896, is another evidence.

The proportion of woman preachers to the different denominations is as follows: The Hicksite-Quakers (as against the orthodox) have the most. So have the German Methodists (United Brethren) as against the orthodox Methodists. The Free-Will Baptists, as against the orthodox Baptists, ordain more woman preachers. The Universalist preceded the Unitarian church in so doing. The Presbyterian and Congregational churches, as a body, have taken no steps in that direction. In the Congregational denomination any separate body of worshippers can ordain whom it sees fit. The Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches have orders which band women as religious workers and remove them more or less from the ordinary life of the world, but they have taken no steps toward ordaining women for the ministry.

We may note that the denominations that have been foremost in building colleges for woman, and in promoting her general advancement in professions and trades, as well as in social and philanthropic matters, are the ones whose pulpits she has not entered. They are also those by which she is most cordially welcomed to speak on all Christian and philanthropic themes. Where her influence is most broadly felt, she has not been taken out of the ordinary life that she was meant to share and to sway. It was from the great denominations that she first crossed the threshold of home to carry home love and principle to foreign countries. In missions she has served in every conceivable form of public benevolence, side by side with man. Real reforms work from within. If the time comes when the other branches of the Christian Church feel as do a few at present, that the exercise of the ministerial office is consistent and appropriate for woman, one that compels no sacrifice of the life and work that are, and must be, peculiarly her own, the ballot will not be needed to place her or to keep her in their pulpits. Whatever may be thought of the profession of the ministry for woman, it must certainly be acknowledged that it is the one farthest removed from political thought and action. If any class of women should be glad to be exempted from the vote, it is the woman preachers.

In her book, "Common Sense," Dr. Jacobi says: "The profession of medicine was thrown open to women when, in 1849, the year following the Revolution, and the passage of the Married Woman's Property Rights Bill, New York State for the first time, at Geneva, conferred a medical diploma on a woman, Elizabeth Blackwell. She was, or rather she became, the sister-in- law of Lucy Stone; and the work of these two women, the one in medicine, the other for equal suffrage, constituted the two necessary halves of one idea."

In 1848, when the first Suffrage convention was held, twelve women were studying medicine in different parts of the country. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was studying that year in Geneva, and when members of the convention wrote to congratulate her, she said, in the course of her reply: "Much has been said of the oppression that woman suffers; man is reproached with being unjust, tyrannical, jealous. I do not so read human life." Dr. Blackwell estimates that within ten years of that time three hundred women had been graduated in medicine. In an address delivered in 1889 before the London Medical School for women in London, Dr. Blackwell said: "I believe that the department of medicine in which the great and beneficent influence of women may be specially exerted is that of the family physician. Not as specialists, but as the trusted guides and wise counsellors in all that concerns the physical welfare of the family, they will find their most congenial field of labor." All this was the exact opposite of the spirit that prevailed in the Association with which Lucy Stone was identified. She declaimed against man's injustice; and when it was proposed, after the civil war had taught the power of organization, to have a constitution and by-laws for the Suffrage movement, Lucy Stone said that she had felt the "thumb-screws and the soul-screws," and did not wish to be placed under them again. "Our duty is merely agitation." After a stormy quarrel, she left to form a new association in New England. Elizabeth Blackwell's name is conspicuous for its absence from Suffrage annals. In the letter referred to she wrote: "The exclusion and constraint woman suffers is not the result of purposed injury or premeditated insult. It has arisen naturally, without violence, because woman has desired nothing more, has not felt the soul too large for the body. But when woman, with matured strength, with steady purpose, presents her lofty claim, all barriers will give way, and man will welcome, with a thrill of joy, the new birth of his sister spirit."

The way in which barriers have fallen, and have been removed by men, in order that woman may enter the noble profession of medicine, is one of the strange stories of this half century. The Civil War, which taught us so much, helped greatly in this. There were some genuine obstacles in the way of woman's education in medicine, and that they were genuine is proved by the fact that, as rapidly as arrangements can be made so that woman can have thorough training by and with her own sex, this is being done. This trend is in opposition to Suffrage action. Dr. Clemence Lozier, who was so long at the head of the Suffrage association in New York City, was the most persistent urger of mixed clinics, and marched in to them at Bellevue, at the head of her classes, defying the delicate instincts of both men and women.

The struggle of the "new" school, which was really as old as Hippocrates, who said four hundred years before Christ that some remedies acted by the rule of "contraries," and some by the rule of "similarity," was long and hard compared with that of the entrance of woman upon the practice of medicine, although the latter involved sex questions and the former only forms, and professional prejudice did not die with woman's adoption of it.

Dr. Jacobi says: "We are perfectly well aware that industrial and professional competition are entirely different matters from popular sovereignty. But when we find the same instincts aroused, the same opposition excited, the same arguments advanced, and the same determination manifested, by trades unions, to exclude women from trades, by learned societies to exclude them from professions, by universities to exclude them from learning, and by voters to exclude them from the polls, we cannot avoid asking whether the difference in the cases is not balanced by the identity in the mental attitude of the opponents." The best trades unions have admitted women to their protective and wage associations, or, better still, have helped them to form their own; the worst trades unions, the socialistic and anarchistic, have claimed for them the right to vote. The learned societies are admitting them professionally as fast as they make themselves worthy. The men who hold out against their admission to men's universities are precisely the class of men who have been most active in assisting to found for them equal colleges of their own, and they are also the men who are most strenuous against their admission to the polls. In medicine, while co-education is deemed better than ignorance, the tendency is to separate the sexes in study as fast as facilities can be made equal. The opponents of woman's progress and those of woman suffrage are of opposite classes, and their mental attitudes are entirely different. How much harm the struggle for "popular sovereignty" for women has done in hindering the progress of industrial and professional competition, can be judged somewhat by the success of the latter and the failure of the former in the highest fields. It is a significant fact that women do not avail themselves of opportunities open to them in the professions to the extent that it has been claimed they would. The medical examination advertised in January, 1896, by the New York State Civil Service Commission for woman candidates, failed for lack of applicants, although the salaries of women in the State hospitals range from $1,000 to $1,500 a year.

The entrance of woman upon the legal profession raised constitutional questions as to the enactment of law; and so here, as in the matter of the school suffrage, we see how carefully republicanism guarded the post at which must stand the sentinels of liberty. If it might involve law- enforcement, woman could not practise law or vote on the school question; but the Supreme Court of the United States decided that "the practising of any profession violates no law of the Federal Constitution."

The study of law must prove of great benefit to woman, though here again it has already been shown that it is possible that the greatest practical advantage she will derive from entrance into this noble profession will be from acquiring knowledge of her country's laws, and how to take care of her own property. Widows and unmarried women have almost invariably placed their moneyed interests in the hands of a man, when it would have been better for all concerned that they should have spent some patient thought on the details of their own affairs. The first woman who was admitted to the bar in this State (New York) was a teacher in the Albany Normal College, and she still remains there, and the women's classes for legal study in New York City have been largely composed of those who had no intention of claiming admittance to the bar. That women can and do enter all these professions with credit to themselves, and that they thus enhance the feeling of pride in their sex, which is a strong impulse with women, is matter for profound congratulation, and is evidence that the animus of the Suffrage movement is not that which stirs society.



CHAPTER VIII.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND EDUCATION.

The seventh count in the Suffrage indictment declared: "He has denied her facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her."

Among the resolutions passed in the first Suffrage convention was one demanding: "Equal rights in the universities," and the first petition presented by Suffrage advocates contained a clause asking that entrance to men's colleges be obtained for women by legal enactment. We note that this is far from being a demand for education for women equal to that given to men in the universities. Men have founded colleges for women, men and women have worked together in securing for woman every facility and opportunity for education of the highest grade; but the "barrier of sex" is not broken down in education. But few of the older colleges for men admit women, and those few, so far as I have learned from conversation with members of their faculties, speak of the arrangement as an experiment, and give the need for economy, combined with a desire to assist women, as a reason for making that experiment. Meantime the knocking at men's literary portals by Suffrage advocates has gone on as vigorously as if women could obtain education in no other way.

In the first Suffrage convention ever held in Massachusetts these two resolutions were adopted: "That political rights acknowledge no sex, and therefore the word 'male' should be stricken from every State constitution;" and "That every effort to educate woman, until you accord to her her rights, and arouse her conscience by the weight of her responsibilities, is futile, and a waste of labor."

The State in which these sentiments were uttered abounded in fine schools for girls, among which were Mount Holyoke and Wheaton seminaries.

A rapid survey of some of the educational conditions that led to the state of things existing when Suffrage associations were formed, will be in place. Learning seemed incompatible with worship early in the Christian era. The faith that worked by love was "to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness." That great battle between the felt and the comprehended, which in this era we have named the conflict between science and religion, was decided in the mind of the apostle to the Gentiles when he wrote: "We know in part, and we prophesy in part; when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away." He recalled the accusation, "Thou art beside thyself, much learning hath made thee mad," and he hastened to assure the unlettered fishermen and the simple and devout women who were followers of Christ, that "all knowledge" was naught if they had not love; that even faith was vain if it led to the rejection of the diviner wisdom that a little child could understand.

The great learning of Augustine and the Fathers brought into the Church pagan speculations of God and morality, as well as pagan knowledge in art, science, and literature. The Church became corrupted, and a great outcry was made against the learning itself, which was falsely supposed to be the cause of the degeneration of faith. Symonds says that during the Dark Ages that followed upon this first battle between faith and sight, the meaning of Latin words derived from the Greek was lost; that Homer and Virgil were believed to be contemporaries, and "Orestes Tragedia" was supposed to be the name of an author. Milman says that "at the Council of Florence in 1438, the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople, being ignorant, the one of Greek, and the other of Latin, discoursed through an interpreter." It was near the time of the Reformation that a German monk announced in his convent that "a new language, called Greek, had been invented, and a book had been written in it, called the New Testament." "Beware of it," he added, "It is full of daggers and poison."

But the tradition of the love that book revealed had crept into the heart of the world, and now awoke. Through what struggles the "spirit of all truth" promised by Christ was leading, and would lead the world, the history of civilization can tell. Women shared in some degree the outward benefits of the Revival of Learning. They became in not a few instances Doctors of Law and professors of the great universities that sprang up, as well as teachers, transcribers, and illuminators in the great nunneries. I could give a long and honorable list of names of woman writers and artists, in many lands, from Mediaeval to modern times; and one of the interesting things revealed by such a record would be the number who were working with, or were directly inspired and helped by, a father or a brother. The Court contained some women who, like Lady Jane Grey, upheld the model of purity while acquiring the learning that naturally accompanied wealth. But elegant letters had again become the associate of moral and religious corruption in the courts, and the "ignorance of preaching" arose to combat it, in Cromwell, the Roundheads, the Dissenters, the Covenanters.

Yet sound learning was not to die that Christian truth might live. Of the band of Pilgrims and Puritans that came first to our shores, about one in thirty was college-bred. While subordinating book-knowledge to piety, they had learned scarcely less the dangers of ignorance. Their first college was founded because of "the dread of having an illiterate ministry to the churches when our ministers shall lie in dust." Charles Francis Adams says, in regard to the establishment of Harvard College: "The records of Harvard University show that, of all the presiding officers during the century and a half of colonial days, but two were laymen, and not ministers of the prevailing denomination." He further says that "of all who in early times availed themselves of such advantages as this institution could offer, nearly half the number did so for the sake of devoting themselves to the gospel. The prevailing notion of the purpose of education was attended with one remarkable consequence—the cultivation of the female mind was regarded with utter indifference."

It was attended with still another remarkable consequence, the effect of which is felt up to this hour. Only men who were fitted for a profession were given a college education. It is well within my memory when it began to be seriously said: "A college education is good for a boy, whether he intends to follow a profession or not; it will make him a better business man, or even a better farmer." The country girl is now, as a rule, better educated than her brother. It also happened in those earlier days, that the artist and the musician were expected to attain knowledge by intuition, save in technical branches.

The minister was, almost of necessity, like a magistrate in these semi- religious colonies. The fact of the breaking up into various sects, which we sometimes incline to look upon with regret as defeating Christian unity, really saved the essentials of that unity by preventing the clerical magistrate from establishing a church resting upon state authority. It was obligatory that the civil rulers should be learned, even at the expense of those who carried on the business and the home.

During the first two hundred years of our existence it would have been almost absurd to expect that women would be extensively educated outside the home. The country was poor, and struggling with new conditions, and great financial crises swept over it. There were wars and rumors of wars. Until after 1812-15 American independence was not an assured fact. Whatever may be said of the present, woman's place in America then was in the home, and nobly did she fill that place. That she had not been wholly uninstructed in even elegant learning, is evidenced by the share she took in literature and in the discussion of religious and public matters, and in such personal records as that of Elder Faunce, who eulogized Alice Southworth Bradford for "her exertions in promoting the literary improvement and the deportment of the rising generation." Dame schools were early established for girls, and here were often found the sons of the farmer and the mechanic. These were established in Massachusetts in 1635. Late in 1700, girls were admitted through the summer to "Latin schools" where boys were taught in winter, and in 1789 women began to be associated with men as teachers. In 1771 Connecticut founded a system of free schools in which boys and girls were taught. In 1794 the Moravians founded a school for girls at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Here were educated the sisters of Peter Cooper, the mother of President Arthur, and many women who became exponents of culture.

New England began before this to have fine private schools for girls, but no great step was taken until Miss Hart (afterward Mrs. Willard) had become so successful with her academy teaching in her native town of Berlin, Connecticut, and in Hartford, that three States simultaneously invited her to establish schools within their borders. She went to Massachusetts, but afterward, at the solicitation of Governor Clinton, of New York, she removed her school to Troy, in 1821. It was a new departure, and there was ignorant prejudice to overcome. Governor Clinton, in an appeal to the legislature for aid, said: "I trust you will not be deterred by commonplace ridicule from extending your munificence to this meritorious institution." They were not deterred. An act was passed for the incorporation of the proposed institute, and another which gave to female academies a share of the literary fund. The citizens of Troy contributed liberally, and the success of an effort in woman's high education was assured.

As early as 1697 the Penn Charter School was founded, and it has lived until to-day. Provision was made "at the cost of the people called Quakers," for "all children and servants, male and female, the rich to be instructed at reasonable rates, the poor to be maintained and schooled for nothing." They also provided for "instruction for both sexes in reading, writing, work, languages, arts and sciences." The boys and girls have been taught separately, the girls' school being much behind the boys', neither Latin nor other ancient language forming a part of their curriculum. Friends are just beginning to discuss giving higher education to girls. This is a fact especially significant in our discussion, because it has always been claimed that the Quaker doctrine that "souls have no sex" led them to place woman on an "equality" with man before other sects had thought of allowing that they were equals. Lucretia Mott, Susan Anthony, Abby Kelley, and a great body of the women who adopted the resolution that set forth the uselessness of educating woman until she could vote, and who clamored for her entrance to men's institutions, were all of this sect that has kept its women generally far behind in the acquisition of knowledge.

In 1845 Mrs. Willard was invited to address the Teachers' Convention that met in Syracuse. She prepared a paper in which she set forth the idea that, "women, now sufficiently educated, should be employed and furnished by the men as committees, charged with the minute cares and supervision of the public schools," but declined the honor tendered her of delivering it in person. Sixty gentlemen from the convention visited her at the hotel, and, at their earnest request, she read the essay, which met with their emphatic approval of the plan she proposed. The employment of women in the common schools, and the system of normal schools, were projected by her.

A Teachers' Convention was held in Rochester in 1852. Miss Anthony, though a teacher, was not in attendance upon it, but she records that she went in and listened for a few hours to a discussion of the causes that led to their profession being held in less esteem than those of the doctor, lawyer, and minister. In her judgment, the kernel of the matter was not alluded to, so she arose and said: "Mr. President." She records that "at length President Davies stepped to the front and said in a tremulous, mocking tone," "What will the lady have?" "I wish, sir," she said, "to speak to the question." "What is the pleasure of the convention?" asked Mr. Davies. A gentleman moved that she be heard; another seconded the motion; whereupon, she records, "a discussion, pro and con, followed, lasting full half an hour, when a vote was taken of the men only, and permission was granted by a small majority." She adds that it was lucky for her that the thousand women crowding that hall could not vote on the question, for they would have given a solid "No." The president then announced "The lady can speak." "It seems to me, gentlemen," said she, "that none of you quite comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which you complain. Do you not see that, so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you. Would you make it more lucrative, increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of educating our future Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen."

Several thoughts arise in regard to this scene, which was so strongly in contrast with the conduct of Mrs. Willard or any of the great educators. Miss Anthony gave no reason for her belief that the entrance of woman upon the other professions would raise either the status or the wages of those engaged in the teacher's profession, and as a matter of fact they have not done so. It was not the society that cast scorn at woman's "lack of brains" which assisted to remove the natural prejudice against her assuming duties that had been deemed unsuited to her physique and her necessary work.

Meantime, one year before the Rochester meeting was held, the first college for women had been chartered at Auburn, New York, under the name of "Auburn Female University." In 1853 it was transferred to Elmira, and it was formally opened in 1855. It was placed under the care of the Congregational Church, but its charter required that it should have representative trustees from five other denominations. Its course of study for the degree of A. B. was essentially the same that was then pursued in the men's colleges of the State. It was expected to rely upon endowment, which put woman's education upon a new and more secure footing.

Suffrage leaders lose no opportunity to represent the Church as an enemy to woman's advancement. Nothing can be further from the truth; and in striking evidence stand the colleges, which, while unsectarian in spirit and in method, have been established and cared for by special religious denominations. Dr. Jacobi, in her book "Common Sense," takes up the tale and says: "The Mount Holyoke Seminary, the immediate successor of that at Troy, was opened in 1837 by Miss Lyon, in spite of the opposition of the clergy." Many besides the clergy were opposed to the plan for which Miss Lyon was endeavoring to raise money. Her idea that the entire domestic work of the establishment could be done by pupils and teachers, was thought unwise and hopeless. In that noble school, where thousands of women have been educated, a great number have become missionaries. When a Suffrage convention in session in Worcester wrote to Miss Lyon, asking her to interest herself in the wrongs of her sex, she answered, "I cannot leave my work." Neither was Vassar College founded from any impulse or suggestion of Suffrage agitators, but in a spirit exactly the opposite. The real impetus to its founding came from Milo Parker Jewett, who was born in Vermont in 1808, and was graduated at Dartmouth College and at Andover Theological Seminary. He was active in the formation of the common-school system of Ohio, and in 1839 he founded The Judson Female Institute in Marion, Alabama. He established a seminary for girls in Poughkeepsie in 1855. He had studied law, and became the friend and legal adviser of Matthew Vassar, who, being unmarried, was casting about for a method of disposing of his fortune. He suggested to Mr. Vassar an endowed college for women, and visited the universities and libraries of Europe with a plan of organization in mind. Mr. Vassar gladly accepted this great enlargement upon an idea that had lain dormant in his own mind, and Vassar College was founded, Dr. Jewett becoming its first president in 1862.

I may claim to have been beside the cradle of Vassar College; for when Dr. Jewett resigned the presidency in 1864, my father named the successor who was appointed, Dr. John H. Raymond, his life-long friend. Dr. Raymond came to Rochester to discuss a plan of work, and, knowing my father's interest, I was on tiptoe to hear about the new college. At my earnest solicitation, he and Dr. Raymond and Prest. Anderson permitted me to be present at their discussions. I learned to comprehend the value of womanliness to the world by the estimate that those noble educators put upon it. It was evident that they were arranging for those for whose minds they felt respect. They made no foolish remarks about the superiority, inferiority, or equality of the sexes, and had no contempt to throw upon the old education of tutor, and library, and young ladies' seminary. They did not sneer at the "female mind," but they did talk of the feminine mind as of something as distinct in its essence from the masculine mind as the feminine form is distinct in its outlines. To "preserve womanliness" was a task they felt they must fulfil, or the women for whose good they labored would one day call them to account. The dictum so frequently in the mouths of Suffrage leaders, "There is no sex in brain," would have been abhorrent to them. In their view, there was as much sex in brain as in hand; and the education that did not, through cultivation, emphasize that fact, would be a lower and not a higher product. They laid that intellectual corner-stone in love, and in the faith that the same womanly spirit which, when there was not college education enough to go round, had said, "Give it to the boys, because their work must be public," would find, through the glad return the boys were making, a way to teach the world still higher lessons of womanly character and influence. Since that time, college after college has arisen without a dream on the part of the founders, faculties, or students that "every effort to educate woman, until you accord to her the right to vote, is futile and a waste of labor," and it may well be that the women educated in these colleges will decide that, because political rights do acknowledge sex, therefore the word "male" should not be stricken from any State constitution.

Before the committee of the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1894, Mr. Edward Lauterbach, who was arguing in favor of woman suffrage, said: "It was only after the establishment of the Willard School at Troy, only after its noble founder, believing that women and men were formed in the same mould, successfully tried the experiment of educating women in the higher branches, that steps for higher education became generally taken." If Mr. Lauterbach imagines that Mrs. Willard was in the most distant way an advocate of woman's doing the same work as man in the same way, he is unfamiliar with her life and work. Mrs. Willard, in setting forth her ideal of woman's education, said "Education should be adapted to female character and duties. To do this would raise the character of man.... Why may not housewifery be reduced to a system as well as the other arts? If women were properly fitted for instruction, they would be likely to teach children better than the other sex; they could afford to do it cheaper; and men might be at liberty to add to the wealth of the nation by any of the thousand occupations from which women are necessarily debarred." Old-fashioned wisdom, but choicely good. Mr. Lauterbach further said: "What wonder that, being so fully equipped in every mental attribute, in every intellectual qualification, they will be able not only to cast a vote but to take practical part in the administration of the government?"

A female Solon would be a woman still, and in a democracy the intellectual is not the only qualification needed. This certainly was the belief of Mrs. Willard, and in 1868, when the Suffrage leaders were holding a convention in Washington, and were urging that Congress should pass a sixteenth amendment admitting women to suffrage, Almira Lincoln Phelps, sister of Mrs. Willard, herself an educator and an author of text-books, wrote to Isabella Beecher Hooker: "Hoping you will receive kindly what I am about to write, I will proceed without apologies. I have confidence in your nobleness of soul, and that you know enough of me to believe in my devotion to the best interests of woman. I can scarcely realize that you are giving your name and influence to a cause which, with some good, but, as I think, misguided women, numbers among its advocates others with loose morals.... If we could with propriety petition the Almighty to change the condition of the sexes, and let men take a turn in bearing children and in suffering the physical ailments peculiar to women, which render them unfit for certain positions and business, why, in this case, if we really wish to be men, and thought God would change the established order, we might make our petition; but why ask Congress to make us men? Circumstances drew me from the quiet domestic life while I was yet young, but success in labors which involved publicity, and which may have been of advantage to society, was never considered as an equivalent to my own heart for such a loss of retirement. In the name of my sainted sister, Emma Willard, and of my friend Lydia Sigourney, and, I think I might say, in the name of the women of the past generation who have been prominent as writers and educators (the exception may be made of Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and a few licentious French writers) in our own country and in Europe, let me urge the high-souled and honorable of our sex to turn their energies into that channel which will enable them to act for the true interests of their sex."

In a woman's club, last winter, a New York teacher, Miss Helen Dawes Brown, a graduate of Vassar College, founder of the Woman's University Club and also one of the founders of Barnard College, in a speech said in part: "The young girl who doesn't dance, who doesn't play games, who can't skate and can't row, is a girl to be pitied. She is losing a large part of what Chesterfield calls the 'joy and titivation of youth.' If our young girl has learned to be good, teach her not to disregard the externals of goodness. Let our girls, in college and out, learn to be agreeable. A girl's education should, first of all, be directed to fitting her for the things of home. We talk of woman as if the only domestic relations were those of wife and mother. Let us not forget that she is also a granddaughter, a daughter, a sister, an aunt. I should like to see her made her best in all these characters, before she undertakes public duties. The best organization in the world is the home. Whatever in the education of girls draws them away from that, is an injury to civilization."

At the close of an article in the "Outlook," written by Elizabeth Fisher Read, of Smith College, she said, speaking of their last adaptation of athletics: "From the beginning, the policy of Smith College has been, not to duplicate the means of development offered in men's colleges, but to provide courses and methods of study that should do for women what the men's courses did for them. Emphasis has been put, not on the resemblances between men and women, but rather on the differences. The effort has not been to turn out new women, capable of doing anything man can do, from walking thirty miles to solving the problems of higher mathematics. Instead of this, the college has tried to develop its students along natural womanly lines, not along the lines that would naturally be followed in training men."

This sounds strangely like Mrs. Willard, who would be the first to rejoice in the new education and in the old spirit that it can develop. Of course Suffrage claims to have the same end in view. Every college woman must decide for herself where she will stand on the question. So far, there never has been any open affiliation between the colleges and the Suffrage movement. We wait to hear a final verdict.

A contributor to the Suffrage department of the Woman's Edition of the Rochester "Post-Express," March 26, 1896, said: "Will Rochester give to its daughters the same advantages as to its sons, or will it say to the girls who have no money to leave home and seek in Smith and Wellesley the culture they cannot procure here: 'You cannot be thoroughly educated; you have no money; you can have no education; sit and spin; bake and brew—but don't bother about higher education,' or will the University of Rochester recognize the one splendid opportunity that awaits it, the one last chance to take its proper place and become all that the highest American standards demand for a University?"

The time has not yet fully come when these same sentimentalists shall say to the faculty and trustees of Vassar, Wellesley and Smith: "Will you not give to the boys of Poughkeepsie, Northhampton, and Wellesley the same advantages as to the girls? Or will you say to them: 'You cannot be thoroughly educated; you have no money; you can have no education; work in the shop or on the farm, but don't bother about higher education.'" This is Suffrage logic, and there is no more reason why the educational institutions in which men study from the age of eighteen to twenty-two should be invaded by women of that age, than why women's institutions should be invaded by men. Yet this would be the destruction of our women's colleges. When Miss Anthony headed a delegation that went bodily to force co-education on Rochester University, she was told that classes open to women had been connected with the college for years.

The kind of education best suited to the idea of Suffrage is a training in political history and present political issues; but the women who have talked loudly and vaguely of the right of suffrage for years have been the last to present such knowledge. I have read their "History," attended their conventions, glanced at their magazines, but never have come upon the discussion of a single public issue. I think those most familiar with it will bear me out if I make the statement that their principal periodical, "The Woman's Journal," edited by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Mr. Blackwell, and Alice Stone Blackwell, has not contained any presentations of questions of public policy in the past ten years.

Those whose names are signed to the Suffrage Woman's Bible, and who are therefore responsible for that disgraceful effusion, have little right to claim to be intelligent instructors of their sex. With an ignorance that is monumental, Frances Ellen Burr glories in the fact that "the Revising Committee refer to a woman's translation of the Bible as their ultimate authority for the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew text," and they add that "Julia Smith, this distinguished scholar," is the only person, man or woman, who ever made a translation of the Bible without help. They say: "Wycliff made a translation from the Vulgate assisted by Nicholas of Hereford. He was not sufficiently familiar with Hebrew and Greek to translate from those tongues. Coverdale's translation was not done alone. Tyndale, in his translation, had the assistance of Frye, of William Roye, and also of Miles Coverdale. Julia Smith translated the whole Bible absolutely alone, without consultation with any one"! Again they say, "King James appointed fifty-four men of learning to translate the Bible. Seven of them died, and forty-seven carried the work on. Compare this corps of workers with one little woman performing the Herculean task without one suggestion or word of advice from mortal man "! Yes, compare it! Uncultured Julia Smith, stirred by the Millerite prophecies, did the best she could to enlighten her own mind, and should be honored for so doing; but what is to be said of the women who in this day, in cool print, are willing to show that they have no comprehension of her grotesque errors or of the difficulties that beset a real scholar in his noble task? Protest at woman's educational deprivation comes with ill-grace from those who have thus revealed their own lack of knowledge of the oldest literature in the world, the model of poetry and prose, the guardian of the purity of our English speech.

Educated women desire that woman should do all that strength and time allow in the care of the public schools. The school suffrage ought to be a boon for them. But it does not, so far, look as if women could make it so. The figures of the school vote of women in Connecticut, for three years, occasion serious question whether the use of the ballot is the way in which woman is to effect anything. In Staten Island, ignorance in women voted out education, and a tremendous effort had to be made to vote it in again. The number of men who voted at the last general election in Connecticut was about 164,000. The women outnumber the men, but the following table represents the school vote in the State of Emma Willard. It certainly does not represent the amount of interest taken in education, nor in the common schools:

COUNTIES. 1893. 1894. 1895.

Hartford. 1293 1186 689 New Haven. 973 949 570 New London. 364 873 185 Fairneld. 273 198 126 Windham 176 182 148 Litchfield 159 85 50 Middlesex 60 136 101 Tolland 372 137 37

This gives the results from all but three or four towns in the State. Aside from any other considerations, the uncertainty attending the vote of an element whose first call is elsewhere than at the polls, is a menace to the welfare of the schools as well as of republican institutions.

One of the grievances of the Suffrage leaders lay in the fact that the literary women of the country would express no sympathy with their efforts. Poets and authors in general were denounced. Gail Hamilton, who had the good of woman in her heart, who was better informed on public affairs than perhaps any woman in the United States, and whose trenchant pen cut deep and spared not, always reprobated the cause. Mrs. Stowe stood aloof, and so did Catherine Beecher, though urged to the contrary course by Henry Ward Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker. In a letter to Mrs. Cutler, Catherine Beecher said: "I am not opposed to women's speaking in public to any who are willing to hear, nor am I opposed to women's preaching, sanctioned as it is by a prophetic apostle—as one of the millennial results. Nor am I opposed to a woman's earning her own independence in any lawful calling, and wish many more were open to her which are now closed. Nor am I opposed to the organization and agitation of women, as women, to set forth the wrongs suffered by great multitudes of our sex, which are multiform and most humiliating. Nor am I opposed to women's undertaking to govern boys and men—they always have, and they always will. Nor am I opposed to the claim that women have equal rights with men. I rather claim that they have the sacred superior rights that God and good men accord to the weak and defenceless, by which they have the easiest work, the most safe and comfortable places, and the largest share of all the most agreeable and desirable enjoyments of this life. My main objection to the Woman-Suffrage organization is this, that a wrong mode is employed to gain a right object. The right object sought is, to remedy the wrongs and relieve the sufferings of great multitudes of our sex; the wrong mode is that which aims to enforce by law, instead of by love. It is one which assumes that man is the author and abettor of all these wrongs, and that he must be restrained and regulated by constitutions and laws, as the chief and most trustworthy methods. I hold that the fault is as much, or more, with women than with men, inasmuch as we have all the power we need to remedy the wrongs complained of, and yet we do not use it for that end. It is my deep conviction that all reasonable and conscientious men of our age, and especially of our country, are not only willing but anxious to provide for the good of our sex. They will gladly bestow all that is just, reasonable, and kind, whenever we unite in asking in the proper spirit and manner. In the half a century since I began to work for the education and relief of my sex, I have succeeded so largely by first convincing intelligent and benevolent women that what I aimed at was right and desirable, and then securing their influence with their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and always with success. Why not take the shorter course, and ask to have the men do for us what we might do for ourselves if we had the ballot? Now if women are all made voters, it will be their duty to vote, and also to qualify themselves for that duty. But already women have more than they can do well in all that appropriately belongs to them, and, to add the civil and political duties of men, would be deemed a measure of injustice and oppression by those who are opposed."

Miss Beecher, like Mrs. Willard and Mrs. Phelps, made text-books for the use of her own seminaries, and her Arithmetic, and Mental and Moral Philosophy, and Applied Theology, were among the educational forces of her day. It is one of the significant signs of the times that science and education, as well as philanthropy, are occupying themselves just now with childhood and motherhood and housewifery. Mrs. Willard's high ideal of womanliness is beginning to be set forth by the electric light of modern thought.



CHAPTER IX.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE CHURCH.

The eighth count in the Suffrage indictment reads: "He allows her in Church, as well as in State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church."

More than thirty years later than this, Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, and Mrs. Gage wrote in the preface to their "History of Woman Suffrage:" "American men may quiet their consciences with the delusion that no such injustice exists in this country as in Eastern nations. Though, with the general improvement in our institutions, woman's condition must inevitably have improved also, yet the same principle that degrades her in Turkey insults her here. Custom forbids a woman there to enter a mosque, or call the hour for prayers; here it forbids her a voice in Church councils or State legislatures.... The Church, too, took alarm, knowing that with the freedom and education acquired in becoming a component part of the Government, woman would not only outgrow the power of the priesthood, and religious superstitions, but would also invade the pulpit, interpret the Bible anew from her own standpoint, and claim an equal voice in all ecclesiastical councils. With fierce warnings and denunciations from the pulpit, and false interpretations of Scripture, women have been intimidated and misled, and their religious feelings have been played upon for their more complete subjugation. While the general principles of the Bible are in favor of the most enlarged freedom and equality of the race, isolated texts have been used to block the wheels of progress in all periods; thus bigots have defended capital punishment, intemperance, slavery, polygamy, and the subjection of woman. The creeds of all nations make obedience to man the corner-stone of her religious character. Fortunately, however, more liberal minds are now giving us higher and purer expositions of the Scriptures."

It is fifteen years since these statements were made, and we have now the first instalment of "the Bible interpreted anew from her own standpoint," which presumably issues, in their view, from more liberal minds, and is higher and purer than the old one. In the Introduction to that Suffrage Woman's Bible (which is as yet only a commentary on the Pentateuch), Mrs. Stanton says: "From the inauguration of the movement for woman's emancipation the Bible has been used to hold her in her' divinely appointed sphere' prescribed by the Old and New Testaments. The canon and civil law, Church and State, priests and legislators, all political parties and religious denominations, have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man,—an inferior being, subject to man. Creeds, codes, Scriptures, and statutes are all based on this idea. The fashions, forms, ceremonies, and customs of society, church ordinances, and discipline, all grow out of this idea.... So perverted is the religious element in her nature, that with faith and works she is the chief support of the Church and Clergy,—the very powers that make her emancipation impossible."

I know that many believers in Suffrage are also believers in the Bible and in denominational Christianity. Mrs. Helen Montgomery says, in the Woman's edition of the Rochester "Post-Express," that one reason for her favorable consideration of it is, that "Two-thirds of the membership of the Christian church cannot express their conviction at the polls, since women may not vote." "Much of the callousness of politicians to church opinion," she adds, "comes from the knowledge that that opinion is backed by few votes." I also know that many of those who disbelieve in Suffrage may also disbelieve in the Bible, the clergy, and the Church. I further recognize the fact that the church and religion are not synonymous terms. I have no attacks to make, and no special pleading to do. I am discussing the question of Suffrage as I find it in the writing and the speech of its proposers and its present conspicuous advocates. Each American woman has this mighty problem before her, and she must settle it according to her own conscience and best enlightenment.

Mrs. Stanton admits with shame that woman is one of the chief supporters of the Church. Mrs. Montgomery says with delight that she forms two-thirds of the Christian Church. Individual members of Suffrage organizations may be in sympathy with Christianity, or against it; but the movement itself cannot be on both sides of this question. What is its record? I will endeavor to trace it, and will then, as best I may, attempt to say a few words upon the general subject of the "subordination of woman."

In the course of the first clause of their accusation, the women say: "Claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry." In view of the fact that Paul frequently alludes to the teaching and ministrations of women, it has come to be generally thought among Christian scholars, I believe, that this injunction that they "keep silence in the churches," referred to the propriety of their conduct in the moral,—or rather the immoral,—atmosphere by which the Church at Corinth was surrounded. This seems reasonable, because it may be observed that, in writing to Timothy, who was in Macedonia, to Titus, who was in Crete, and to the Church at Ephesus, while he repeats his general injunctions of woman's submission to man, and especially to her husband, he says nothing relative to her public work in the church. But if Paul had been writing to the church in New England, in 1634, and in New York in 1774, his injunction to silence might well have been applied to the first woman preachers to whom Americans were called upon to listen. When Anne Hutchinson, in Boston, preached that "the power of the Holy Spirit dwelleth perfectly in every believer, and the inward revelations of her own spirit, and the conscious judgment of her own mind are of authority paramount to any word of God," she shook the young colony to its foundation, as no man had shaken it. The militia that had been ordered to the Pequot war refused to march, because she had proclaimed their chaplain to be "under a covenant of works, and not under a covenant of grace." Her influence, and not her ballot, if she had one, threatened anarchy in the state, and caused a schism in the church such as might have crushed out the life from the infant body to which Paul was writing.

In 1774 appeared the next public woman preacher, Ann Lee. She proclaimed that God was revealed a dual being, male and female, to the Jews; that Jesus revealed to the world God as a Father; and that she,—Ann Lee, "Mother Ann,"—was God's revelation of the Mother, "the bearing spirit of the creation of God." She founded the sect of Shakers, whose main articles of belief, besides the one above mentioned, were: community of goods; non- resistance to force, even in self-defence; the sinfulness of all human authority, and consequently the sinfulness of participation in any form of government; absolute separation of the sexes, and consequently no marriage institution. Her mission as "the Christ of the Second Appearing," began with her announcement of God's, wrath upon all marriage, and the public renunciation of her own. In New York, as in New England, her proclamations against government and war tended directly to anarchy, and in the momentous year 1776 she was for that reason imprisoned in Poughkeepsie, whence she was released by Governor Clinton's pardon.