NAWSA        SUBJECT FILE                    Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON
FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL AMERICAN
WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION

DR. ANNA HOWARD SHAW
THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL AMERICAN
WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

ADDRESS

TO THE

Legislature of New-York,

ADOPTED BY THE

STATE WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION,

HELD AT ALBANY,
Tuesday and Wednesday, February 14 and 15, 1854.


PREPARED BY
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON,
Of Seneca Falls, N.Y.

ALBANY:
WEED, PARSONS AND COMPANY.
1854


ADDRESS

TO THE

Legislature of New-York,

ADOPTED BY THE

STATE WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION,

HELD AT ALBANY,
Tuesday and Wednesday, February 14 and 15, 1854.

PREPARED BY
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON,
Of Seneca Falls, N.Y.

ALBANY:
WEED, PARSONS AND COMPANY.
1854.

ADDRESS.
To the Legislature of the State of New.York:
"The thinking minds of all nations call for change.  There is a deep-lying
struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless, grinding collision of the New
with the Old."

THE tyrant, Custom, has been summoned before the bar of
Common Sense.  His Majesty no longer awes the multitude--
his sceptre is broken--his crown is trampled in the dust--the
sentence of death is pronounced upon him.  All nations, ranks
and classes have, in turn, questioned and repudiated his
authority; and now, that the monster is chained and caged,
timid woman, on tiptoe, comes to look him in the face, and to
demand of her brave sires and sons, who have struck stout
blows for liberty, if in this change of dynasty, she, too shall
find relief.
Yes, gentlemen, in republican America, in the 19th century,
we, the daughters of the revolutionary heroes of '76, demand
at your hands the redress of our grievances--a revision of
your state constitution--a new code of laws.  Permit us then,
as briefly as possible, to call your attention to the legal disabilities
under which we labor.
1st. Look at the position of woman as woman.  It is not
enough for us that by your laws we are permitted so live and
breathe, to claim the necessaries of life from our legal protectors--
to pay the penalty of our crimes; we demand the full recognition
of all our rights as citizens of the Empire State.  We are
persons; native, free-born citizens; property-holders, tax-payers; 
yet we are denied the exercise of our right to the elective franchise.
We support ourselves, and, in part, your schools, colleges,
churches, your poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the
navy, the whole machinery of government, and yet we have no

4 
voice in your councils.  We have every qualification required
by the constitution, necessary to the legal voter, but the one of
sex.  We are moral, virtuous and intelligent, and in all
respects quite equal to the proud white man himself, and yet
by your laws we are classed with idiots, lunatics and negroes;
and though we do not feel honored by the place assigned us,
yet, in fact, our legal position is lower than that of either; for
the negro can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess 
himself of $250; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity,
and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than  nine-
tenths a fool; but we, who have guided great movements of 
charity, established missions, edited journals, published works
on history, economy and statistics; who have governed nations,
led armies, filled the professor's chair, taught philosophy and
mathematics to the savans of our age, discovered planets,
piloted ships across the sea, are denied the most sacred rights
of citizens, because, forsooth, we came not into this republic
crowned with the dignity of manhood!  Woman is theoretically
absolved from all allegiance to the laws of the state.  Sec. 1,
Bill of Rights, 2 R.S., 301, says that no authority can, on any
pretence whatever, be exercised over the citizens of this state
but such as is or shall be derived from, and granted by, the people
of this state.
Now, gentlemen, we would fain know by what authority you
have disfranchised one-half the people of this state?  You
who have so boldly taken possession of the bulwarks of this
republic, show us your credentials, and thus prove your exclusive
right to govern, not only yourselves, but us.  Judge
Hurlburt, who has long occupied a high place at the bar in this
state, and who recently retired with honor from the bench of
the Supreme Court, in his profound work on human rights, has
pronounced your present position rank usurpation.  Can it be
that here, where are acknowledged no royal blood, no apostolic
descent, that you, who have declared that all men were created
equal--that governments derive their just powers from the consent
of the governed, would willingly build up an aristocracy
that places the ignorant and vulgar above the educated and refined--
the alien and the ditch-digger above the authors and


5
poets of the day--an aristocracy that would raise the sons above
the mothers that bore them?  Would that the men who can
sanction a constitution so opposed to the genius of this government,
who can enact and execute laws so degrading to womankind,
had sprung, Minerva-like, from the brains of their fathers,
that the matrons of this republic need not blush to own their
sons!  Woman's position, under our free institutions, is much
lower than under the monarchy of England.  "In England
"the idea of woman holding official station is not so strange as
"in the United States.  The Countess of Pembroke, Dorset
"and Montgomery held the office of hereditary sheriff of
"Westmoreland, and exercised it in person.  At the assizes at
"Appleby, she sat with the judges on the bench.  In a reported
"case, it is stated by counsel, and substantially assented to
"by the court, that a woman is capable of serving in almost all
"the offices of the kingdom, such as those of queen, marshal,
"great chamberlain and constable of England, the champion
"of England, commissioner of sewers, governor of work
"house, sexton, keeper of the prison, of the gate house of
"the dean and chapter of Westminister, returning officer for
"members of parliament, and constable, the latter of which is
"in some respects judicial.  The office of the jailor is frequently
"exercised by a woman.  In the United States a woman may
"administer on the effects of her deceased husband, and she
"has occasionally held a subordinate place in the post office
"department.  She has therefore a sort of post mortem, post
"mistress notoriety; but with the exception of handling letters
"of administration and letters mailed, she is the submissive
"creature of the old common law."  True, the unmarried woman
has a right to the property she inherits and the money
she earns, but she is taxed without representation.  And here
again you place the negro, so unjustly degraded by you, in a 
superior position to your own wives and mothers; for colored
males, if possessed of a certain amount of property and certain 
other qualifications, can vote, but if they do not have these
qualifications they are not subject to direct taxation; wherein they
have the advantage of a woman, she being the subject to taxation for
whatever amount she may possess.  (Constitution of N.Y.,

6
article 2, sec. 2.)  But, say you, are not all women sufficiently
represented by their fathers, husbands and brothers?  Let your
statue books answer the question.
Again we demand, in criminal cases, that most sacred of all
rights, trial by jury of our own peers.  The establishment
of trial by jury is of so early a date that its beginning is
lost in antiquity; but the right of trial by a jury of one's
own peers is a great progressive step of advanced civilization.
No rank of men have ever been satisfied with being
tried by jurors higher or lower in the civil or political scale
than themselves; for jealousy on the one hand, and contempt
on the other, has ever effectually blinded the eyes of justice.
Hence, all along the pages of history, we find the king, the noble,
the peasant, the cardinal, the priest, the layman, each in turn
protesting against the authority of the tribunal before which
they were summoned to appear.  Charles the First refused to
recognize the competency of the tribunal which condemned
him: For how, said he, can subjects judge a king?  The stern
descendants of our Pilgrim Fathers refused to answer for their
crimes before an English Parliament: For how, said they, can
a king judge rebels?  And shall woman here consent to be
tried by her liege lord, who has dubbed himself law-maker,
judge, juror, and sheriff , too?--whose power, though sanctioned
by Church and State, has no foundation in justice and
equity, and is a bold assumption of our inalienable rights.  In
England a parliament-lord could challenge a jury where a
knight was not empanneled.  An alien could demand a jury
composed half of his own countrymen; or, in some special
cases, juries were even constituted entirely of women.  Having
seen that man fails to do justice to woman in her best estate,
to the virtuous, the noble, the true of our sex, should we trust
 to his tender mercies the weak, the ignorant, the morally insane?
It is not to be denied that the interests of man and
woman in the present undeveloped state of the race, and under
the existing social arrangements, are and must be antagonistic.
The nobleman cannot make just laws for the peasant; the slaveholder
for the salve; neither can man make and execute just
laws for woman, because in each case, the one in power fails to


7
apply the immutable principles of right to any grade but his
own.  Shall an erring woman be dragged before a bar of grim-
visaged judges, lawyers and jurors, there to be grossly questioned
in public on subjects which women scarce breathe in
secret to one another?  Shall the most sacred relations of life
be called up and rudely scanned by men who, by their own
admission, are so coarse that women could not meet them even
at the polls without contamination? and yet shall she find
there no woman's face or voice to pity and defend?  Shall the
frenzied mother, who, to save herself and child from exposure
and disgrace, ended the life that had just begun, be dragged
before such a tribunal to answer for her crime?  How can
man enter into the feelings of that mother?  How can he
judge of the mighty agonies of soul that impelled her to such
an outrage of maternal instincts?  How can he weigh the
mountain of sorrow that crushed that mother's heart when she
wildly tossed her helpless babe into the cold waters of the
midnight sea?  Where is he who by false vows thus blasted
this trusting woman?  Had that helpless child no claims on
his protection?  Ah, he is freely abroad in the dignity of manhood,
in the pulpit, on the bench, in the professor's chair.  The
imprisonment of his victim and the death of his child, detract
not a tithe from his standing and complacency.  His peers
made the law, and shall law-makers lay nets for those of their
own rank?  Shall laws which come from the logical brain of
man take cognizance of violence done to the moral and affectional
nature which predominates, as is said, in woman?
Statement of New-York, who daughters, guarded by your
affection, and lapped amidst luxuries which your indulgence
spreads, care more for their nodding plumes and velvet trains
than for the statute laws by which their persons and properties
are held--who, blinded by custom and prejudice to the degraded
position which they and their sisters occupy in the civil scale,
haughtily claim that they already have all rights they want,
how, think ye, you would feel to see a daughter summoned
for such a crime--and remember these daughters are but human--
before such a tribunal?  Would it not, in that hour, be
some consolation to see that she was surrounded by the wise

8
and virtuous of her own sex; by those who had known the depth
of a mother's love and the misery of a lover's falsehood; to know
that to these she could make her confession, and from them
receive her sentence?  If so, then listen to our just demands
and make such a change in your laws as will secure to every 
woman tried in your courts, an impartial jury.  At this moment
among the hundreds of women who are shut up in prisons in
this state, not one has enjoyed that most sacred of all rights--
that right which you would die to defend for yourselves--trial
by a jury of one's peers.
2d. Look at the position of woman as wife.  Your laws relating
to marriage--founded as they are on the old common
law of England, a compound of barbarous usages, but partially
modified by progressive civilization--are in open violation of
our enlightened ideas of justice, and of the holiest feelings of
our nature.  If you take the highest view of marriage, as a
Divine relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify,
then of course human legislation can only recognize it.  Man
can neither bind nor loose its ties, for that prerogative belongs
to God alone, who makes man and woman, and the laws of
attraction by which they are united.  But if you regard marriage
as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws
which control all other contracts.  Do not make it a kind of
half-human, half-divine institution, which you may build up
but cannot regulate.  Do not, by your special legislation for
this one kind of contract, involve yourselves in the grossest
absurdities and contradictions.
So long as by your laws no man can make a contract for a
horse or piece of land until he is twenty-one years of age, and
by which contract he is not bound if any deception has been
practiced, or if the party contracting has not fulfilled his part of
the agreement--so long as the parties in all mere civil contracts
retain their identity and all the power and independence they
had before contracting, with the full right to dissolve all partnerships
and contracts for any reason, at the will and option of
the parties themselves, upon what principle of civil jurisprudence 
do you permit the boy of fourteen and the girl of twelve,
in violation of every natural law, to make a contract more


9
momentous in importance than any other, and then hold
them to it, come what may, the whole of their natural lives,
in spite of disappointment, deception and misery?  Then,
too, the signing of this contract is instant civil death to one
of the parties.  The woman who but yesterday was sued on
bended knee, who stood so high in the scale of being as to
make an agreement on equal terms with a proud Saxon man,
to-day has no civil existence, no social freedom.  The wife
who inherits no property holds about the same legal position
that does the slave on the southern plantation.  She can own
nothing, sell nothing.  She has no right even to the wages she
earns; her person, her time, her services are the property of
another.  She cannot testify, in many cases, against her husband.
She can get no redress for wrongs in her own name in
any court of justice.  She can neither sue nor be sued.  She
is not held morally responsible for any crime committed in the
presence of her husband, so completely is her very existence
supposed by the law to be merged in that of another.  Think
of it; your wives may be thieves, libellers, burglars, incendiaries,
and for crimes like these they are not held amenable to the
laws of the land, if they but commit them in your dread presence.
For them, alas! there is no higher law than the will of
man.  Herein behold the bloated conceit of these Petruchios of
the law, who seem to say:

"Nay, look not big, nor stamp, nor state, nor fret,
I will be master of what is mine own;
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything;
And here she stands, touch her whoever dare;
I'll bring my action on the proudest he,
That stops my way, in Padua."

How can man ever look thus on woman?--She, at whose
feet Socrates learned wisdom--she, who gave to the world a
Saviour, and witnessed alike the adoration of the Magi and the 
agonies of the Cross.  How could such a being, so blessed and
honored, ever become the ignoble, servile, cringing slave, with
whom the fear of man could be paramount to the sacred

10
dictates of conscience and the holy love of Heaven?  By the
common law of England, the spirit of which has been but too
faithfully incorporated into our statute law, a husband has a 
right to whip his wife with a rod not larger than his thumb, to
shut her up in a room, and administer whatever moderate
chastisement he may deem necessary to insure obedience to his
wishes, and for her healthful moral development!  He can forbid
all persons harboring or trusting her on his account.  He
can deprive her of all social intercourse with her nearest and
dearest friends.  If by great economy she accumulates a small
sum, which for future need she deposit, little by little, in a
savings bank, the husband has a right to draw it out, at his 
option, to use it as he may see fit.
"Husband is entitled to wife's credit or business talents
"(whenever their intermarriage may have occurred); and goods
"purchased by her on her own credit, with his consent, while
"cohabitating with him,can be seized and sold in execution against
"him for his own debts, and this, though she carry on business
"in her own name."--7 Howard's Practice Reports, 105, Love[?]
agt. Robinson and Witbeck, sheriff, &c.
"No letters of administration shall be granted to a person convicted
"of infamous crime ; nor to any one incapable by law of
"making a contract ; nor to a person not a citizen of the United
"States, unless such person reside within this state ; nor to any
"one who is under twenty-one years of age ; nor to any person
"who shall be adjudged incompetent by the surrogate to execute
"duties of such trust, by reason of drunkenness, improvidence,
"or want of understanding, nor any married woman ; but where
"a married woman is entitled to administration, the same may
"be granted to her husband in her right and behalf."
There is nothing that an unruly wife might do against which
the husband has not sufficient protection in the law.  But not
so with the wife.  If she have a worthless husband, a confirmed
drunkard,a villian or a vagrant, he has still all the rights of a
man, a husband and a father.  Though the whole support of 
the family be thrown upon the wife, if the wages she earns be
paid to her by her employer, the husband can receive them
again.  If, by unwearied industry and perseverance, she can


11
earn for herself and children a patch of ground and a shed to
cover them, the husband can strip her of all her hard earnings,
turn her and her little ones out in the cold northern blast, take
the clothes from their backs, the bread from their mouths ; all
this by your laws may he do, and has he done, oft and again,
to satisfy the rapacity of that monster in human form, the rum-
seller.
But the wife who is so fortunate as to have inherited property,
has, by the new law in this state, been redeemed from
her lost condition.  She is no longer a legal nonentity.  This
property law, if fairly construed, will overturn the whole code
relating to woman and property.  The right to property implies
the right to buy and sell, to will and bequeath, and herein
is the dawning of a civil existence for woman, for now the
"femme covert" must have the right to make contracts.  So,
get ready, gentlemen ; the "little justice" will be coming to
you one day, deed in hand, for your acknowledgment.  When
he asks you "if you sign without fear or compulsion," say yes,
boldly, as we do.  Then, too, the right to will is ours.  Now
what becomes of the "tenant for life?"  Shall he, the happy
husband of a millionaire, who has lived in yonder princely
mansion in the midst of plenty and elegance, be cut down in a
day to the use of one-third of this estate and a few hundred
a year, as long as he remains her widower?  And should he, in
spite of this bounty on celibacy, impelled by his affections,
marry again, choosing for a wife a woman as poor as himself,
shall he be thrown penniless on the cold world--this child of
fortune, enervated by ease and luxury, henceforth to be dependent
wholly on his own resources?  Poor man!  He would be
rich, though, in the sypathies of many women who have passed
through just such an ordeal.  But what is property without
the right to protect that property by law?  It is a mockery to
say a certain estate is mine, if, without my consent, you have
the right to tax me when and how you please, while I have no
voice in making the tax-gatherer, the legislator or the law
The right to property will, of necessirt, compel us in due time
to the exercise of our right to the elective franchise, and then
naturally follows the right to hold office.



 

12
3d. Look at the position of a woman as widow.  Whenever
we attempt to point out the wrongs of the wife, those who
would have us believe that the laws cannot be improved, point
us to the privileges, powers and claims  of the widow.  Let us
look into these a little.  Behold in yonder humble house a
married pair, who, for long years, have lived together, childless
and alone.  Those few acres of well-tilled land, with the small
white house that looks so cheerful through its vines and flowers,
attest the honest thrift and simple taste of its owners.  This
man and woman, by their hard days' labor, have made this 
home their own.  Here they live in peace and plenty, happy
in the hope that they may dwell together securely under their
own vine and fig tree for the few years that remain to them, 
and that under the shadow of these trees, planted by their own
hands, and in the midst of their household gods, so loved and
familiar, here may take their last farewell of earth.  But, alas
for human hopes! the husband dies, and without will, and
the stricken widow, at one fell blow, loses the companion of
her youth, her house and home, and half the little sum she
had in bank.  For the law, which takes no cognizance of
widows left with twelve children and not one cent, instantly
spies out this widow, takes account of her effects, and announces
to her the startling intelligence that but one-third of
the house and lot, and one-half the personal property, are hers.
The law has other favorites with whom she must share the
hard-earned savings of years.  In this dark hour of grief, the
coarse minions of the law gather round the widow's hearthstone,
and, in the name of justice, outrage all natural sense of
right; mock at the sacredness of human love, and with cold
familiarity proceed to place a moneyed value on the old arm
chair, in which, but a few brief hours since, she closed the
eyes that had ever beamed on her with kindness and affection ;
on the solemn clock in the corner, that told the hour he passed
away ;  on every garment with which his form and presence
were associated, and on every article of comfort and convenience
that the house contained, even down to the knives and
forks and spoons--and the widow saw it all--and when the
work was done, she gathered up what the law allowed her and


13
went forth to seek her another home!  This is the much talked
of widow's dower.  Behold the magnanimity of the law in
allowing the widow to retain a life interest in one-third the
landed estate, and one-half the personal property of her husband,
and taking the lion's share to itself!  Had she died first,
the house and land would all have been the husband's still.  No
one would have dared to intrude upon the privacy of his home
or to molest him in his sacred retreat of sorrow.

How, I ask you, can that be called justice, which makes such
a distinction as this between man and woman?

By management, economy and industry, our widow is able,
in a few years, to redeem her house and home.  But the law
never loses sight of the purse, no matter how low in the scale
of being its owner may be.  It sends its officers round every
year to gather in the harvest for the public crib, and no widow
who owns a piece of land two feet square ever escapes this
reckoning.  Our widow, too, who has now twice earned her
home, has her annual tax to pay also--a tribute of gratitude
that she is permitted to breathe the free air of this republic,
where "taxation without representation," by such worthies as
John Hancock and Samuel Adams, has been declared "intolerable
tyranny."  Having glanced at the magnanimity of the
law in its dealings with the widow, let us see how the individual
man, under the influence of such laws, doles out justice
to his helpmate.  The husband has the absolute right to will
away his property as he may see fit.  If he has children, he
can divide his property among them, leaving his wife her third
only of the landed estate, thus making her a dependent on the
bounty of her own children.  A man with thirty thousand dollars
in personal property, may leave his wife but a few hundred
a year, as long as she remains his widow.

The cases are without number where women, who have
lived in ease and elegance, at the death of their husbands have,
by will, been reduced to the bare necessaries of life.  The man 
who leaves his wife the sole guardian of his property and
children is an exception to the general rule.  Man has ever
manifested a wish that the world should indeed be a blank to
the companion whom he leaves behind him.  The Hindoo

14
makes that wish a law, and burns the widow on the funeral
pile of her husband; but the civilized man, impressed with a
different view of the sacredness of life, takes a less summary
mode of drawing his beloved partner after him ; he does it by
the deprivation and starvation of the flesh, and the humiliation
and mortification of the spirit.  In bequeathing to the wife just
enough to keep soul and body together, man seems to lose
sight of the fact that woman, like himself, takes great pleasure
in acts of benevolence and charity.  It is but just, therefore,
that she should have it in her power to give during her life, and
to will away at her death, as her benevolence or obligations
might prompt her to do.

4th.  Look at the position of woman as mother.  There is no
human love so generous, strong and steadfast as that of the
mother for her child; yet behold how cruel and ruthless are
your laws touching this most sacred relation.

Nature has clearly made the mother the guardian of the
child; but man, in his inordinate love of power, does continually
set nature and nature's laws at open defiance.  The
father may apprentice his child, bind him out to a trade or
labor, without the mother's consent--yea, in direct opposition 
to her most earnest entreaties, her prayers and tears.

He may apprentice his son to a gamester or rumseller, and
thus cancel his debts of honor.  By the abuse of this absolute
power, he may bind his daughter to the owner of a brothel,
and, by the degradation of his child, supply his daily wants;
and such things, gentlemen, have been done in our very midst.
Moreover, the father, about to die, may bind out all his children
wherever and to whomsoever he may see fit, and thus, in fact,
will away the guardianship of all his children from the mother.
The Revised Statutes of New-York provide that "every father,
"whether of full age or a minor, of a child to be born, or of any
"living child under the age of twenty-one years, and unmarried,
"may by his deed or last will, duly executed, dispose of the custody
"and tuition of such child during its minority, or for any
"less time, to any person or persons, in possession or remainder."
2 R.S., page 150, sec. 1.


15
Thus, by your laws, the child is the absolute property of the
father, wholly at his disposal in life or at death.

In case of separation, the law gives the children to the father;
no matter what his character or condition.  At this very time
we can point you to noble, virtuous, well educated mothers in
this state, who have abandoned their husbands for their profligacy
and confirmed drunkenness.  All these have been robbed
of their children, who are in the custody of the husband, under
the care of his relatives, whilst the mothers are permitted to see
them but at stated intervals.  But, said one of these mothers,
with a grandeur of attitude and manner worthy the noble
Roman matron in the palmiest days of that republic, I would
rather never see my child again, than be the medium to hand
down the low animal nature of its father, to stamp degradation 
on the brow of another innocent being.  It is enough that one
child of his shall call me mother.  If you are far sighted statesmen,
and do wisely judge of the interests of this commonwealth,
you will so shape your future laws as to encourage
woman to take the high moral ground that the father of her
children must be great and good.

Instead of your present laws, which make the mother and
her children the victims of vice and license, you might rather
pass laws prohibiting to all drunkards, libertines and fools, the
rights of husbands and fathers.  Do not the hundreds of laughing 
idiots that are crowding into our asylums, appeal to the
wisdom of our statesmen for some new laws on marriage--to
the mothers of this day for a higher, purer morality?

Again, as the condition of the child always follows that of
the mother, and as by the abuse of your laws the father may
beat the mother, so may he the child.  What mother cannot
bear me witness to untold sufferings which cruel, vindictive
fathers have visited upon their helpless children?  Who ever
saw a human being that would not abuse unlimited power?
Base and ignoble must that man be, who, let the provocation be
what it may, would strike a woman; but he who would lacerate
a trembling child is unworthy the name of man.  A mother's
love can be no protection to a child; she cannot appeal 
to you to save it from a father's cruelty, for the laws take no

16
cognizance of the mother's most grievous wrongs.  Neither at
home nor abroad can a mother protect her son.  Look at the 
temptations that surround the paths of our youth at every step;
look at the gambling and drinking saloons, the club rooms, the
dens of infamy and abomination that infest all our villages and
cities--slowly but surely sapping the very foundation of all
virtue and strength.

By your laws, all these abominable resorts are permitted.  It
is folly to talk of a mother moulding the character of her son,
when all mankind, backed up by law and public sentiment,
conspire to destroy her influence.  But when woman's moral
power shall speak through the ballot-box, then shall her influence
be seen and felt; then, in our legislative debates, such
questions as the canal tolls on salt, the improvement of rivers
and harbors, and the claims of Mr. Smith for damages against
the state, would be secondary to the consideration of the legal
existence of all these public resorts, which lure our youth on to
excessive indulgence and destruction.

Many times and oft it has been asked us, with unaffected
seriousness, "what do you women want?  What are you aiming
at?"  Many have manifested a laudable curiosity to know
what the wives and daughters could complain of in republican
America, where their sires and sons have so bravely fought for
freedom and gloriously secured their independence, trampling
all tyranny, bigotry and caste in the dust, and declaring to a 
waiting world the divine truth that all men are created equal.
What can woman want under such a government?  Admit a
radical difference in sex and you demand different spheres--
water for fish, and air for birds.

It is impossible to make the southern planter believe that his
slave feels and reasons just as he does--that injustice and subjection
are as galling as to him--that the degradation of living
by the will of another, the mere dependent on his caprice, at
the mercy of his passions, is as keenly felt by him as his master.
If you can force on his unwilling vision a vivid picture of
the negro's wrongs, and for a moment touch his soul, his logic
brings him instant consolation.  He says, the slave does not
feel this as I would.  Here, gentlemen is our difficulty: When


17
we plead our cause before the law makers and savans of the
republic, they cannot take in the idea that men and women are
alike; and so long as the mass rest in this delusion, the public
mind will not be so much startled by the revelations made of
the injustice and degradation of woman's position as by the
fact that she should at length wake up to a sense of it.

If you, too, are thus deluded, what avails it that we show by
your statute books that your laws are unjust--that woman is
the victim of avarice and power?  What avails it that we point
out the wrongs of woman in social life; the victim of passion
and lust?  You scorn the thought that she has any natural love
of freedom burning in her breast, any clear perception of justice
urging her on to demand her rights.

Would to God you could know the burning indignation that
fills woman's soul when she turns over the pages of your statute
books, and sees there how like feudal barons you freeman hold 
your women.  Would that you could know the humiliation she
feels for her sex, when she thinks of all the beardless boys in
your law offices, learning these ideas of one-sided justice--
taking their first lessons in contempt for all womankind--being
indoctrinated into the incapacities of their mothers, and the
lordly, absolute rights of man over all women, children and
property, and to know that these are to be our future Presidents,
Judges, Husbands and Fathers; in sorrow we exclaim, alas!
for that nation whose sons bow not in loyalty to woman.  The
mother is the first object of the child's veneration and love, and
they who root out this holy sentiment, dream not of the blighting
effect it has on the boy and the man.  The impression left
on law students, fresh from your statute books, is most unfavorable
to woman's influence; hence you see but few lawyers
chivalrous and high-toned in their sentiments towards woman.
They cannot escape the legal view which, by constant reading,
has become familiarized to their minds: "Femme covert," "dower,"
"widow's claims," "protection," "incapacities," "incumbrance,"
is written on the brow of every woman they meet.

But if, gentlemen, you take the ground that the sexes are
alike, and, therefore, you are our faithful representatives--then
why all these special laws for woman?  Would not one code
3

18
answer for all like needs and wants?  Christ's golden rule
is better than all the special legislation that the ingenuity of
man can devise: "Do unto others as you would have others
do unto you."  This, men and brethren, is all we ask at your
hands.  We ask no better laws than those you have made for
yourselves.  We need no other protection than that which 
your present laws secure to you.

In conclusion, then, let us say, in behalf of the women of this
state, we ask for all that you have asked for yourselves in the
progress of your development, since the May Flower cast anchor
side Plymouth rock; and simply on the ground that the rights
of every human being are the same and identical.  You may
say that the mass of the women of this state do not make the
demand; it comes from a few sour, disappointed old maids and
childless women.

You are mistaken; the mass speak through us.  A very
large majority of the women of this state support themselves
and their children, and many their husbands too.  Go into any
village you please, of three or four thousand inhabitants, and
you will find as many as fifty men or more, whose only business
is to discuss religion and politics, as they watch the trains
come and go at the depot, or the passage of a canal boat 
through a lock; to laugh at the vagaries of some drunken
brother, or the capers of a monkey, dancing to the music of his
master's organ.  All these are supported by their mothers,
wives or sisters.

Now, do you candidly think these wives do not wish to control
the wages they earn--to own the land they buy--the houses
they build? to have at their disposal their own children, without
being subject to the constant interference and tyranny of an idle,
worthless profligate?  Do you suppose that any woman is such
a pattern of devotion and submission that she willingly stitches
all day for the small sum of fifty cents, that she may enjoy the
unspeakable privilege, in obedience to your laws, of paying for
her husband's tobacco and rum?  Think you the wife of the
confirmed, beastly drunkard would consent to share with him
her home and bed, if law and public sentiment would release
her from such gross companionship?  Verily, no!  Think you


19
the wife, with whom endurance has ceased to be a virtue, who
through much suffering has lost all faith in the justice of both
Heaven and earth, takes the law in her own hand, severs the
unholy bond and turns her back forever upon him whom she
once called husband, consents to the law that in such an hour
tears her child from her--all that she has left on earth to love
and cherish?  The drunkards' wives speak through us, and
they number 50,000.  Think you that the woman who has
worked hard all her days, in helping her husband to accumulate
a large property, consents to the law that places this wholly at
his disposal?  Would not the mother, whose only child is bound
out for a term of years, against her expressed wishes, deprive
the father of this absolute power if she could?

For all these, then, we speak.  If to this long list you add
all the laboring women, who are loudly demanding remuneration
for their unending toil--those women who teach in our
seminaries, academies and common schools for a miserable pittance;
the widows, who are taxed without mercy; the unfortunate 
ones in our work houses, poor houses and prisons; who
are they that we do not now represent?  But a small class of
fashionable butterflies, who, through the short summer days,
seek the sunshine and the flowers; but the cool breezes of
autumn and the hoary frosts of winter will soon chase all these
away; then, they too will need and seek protection, and through
other lips demand, in their turn, justice and equity at your
hands.

APPENDIX.
_____

This Address was laid upon the members' desks, Monday morning, Feb. 20, 1854.

When the order of petitions was reached, Mr. D. P. WOOD, of Onondaga, presented the Assembly a petition signed by 5931 men and women, praying for just and equal rights of women, which, after a spicy debate, was referred to the following select committee

JAMES L. ANGLE, of Munro Co.,
GEORGE W. THORN, of Washington Co.,
DERRICK L. BOARDMAN, of Oneida Co.,
GEORGE H. RICHARDS, of New-York,
JAMES M. MUNRO, of Onondaga,
WESLEY GLEASON, of Fulton,
ALEXANDER P. SHARPE, of New-York.

In the Senate, on the same day, Mr. RICHARDS, of Warren Country, presented a petition signed by 4164 men and women, praying for the extension of the right of suffrage to women, and on his motion is was referred to the following select committee:

GEORGE YOST, of Montgomery Co.,
BEN FIELD, of Orleans Co.,
W. H. ROBERTSON, of Westchester Co.
_____

The following are the forms of the petitions, as agreed upon at the Convention held at Rochester, November 30 and December 1, 1853.  The signatures were obtained by some thirty counties, by a few individuals, during this short period:


Petition for the Just and Equal Rights of Women.

The Legislature of the State of New-York have, by the Acts of 1848 and 1849, testified the purpose of the People of this State to place Married Women on an equality with Married Men in regard to the holding, conveying and devising of real and personal property.

We, therefore, the undersigned Petitioners, inhabitants of the State of New-York, male and female, having attained the age of legal majority, believing that Women, alike married and single, do still suffer many and grievous LEGAL DISABILITIES, do earnestly request the Senate and Assembly of the State of New-York to appoint a joint committee of both Houses to revise the Statutes of New-York, and to propose such amendments as will fully establish the LEGAL EQUALITY of Women with Men; and do hereby ask a hearing before such committee by our accredited Representatives.


Petition for Woman's Right to Suffrage.

Whereas, according to the Declaration of our National Independence, Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, we earnestly request the Legislature of New-York to propose to the People of the State such amendments of the Constitution of the State as will secure to Females an equal right to the Elective Franchise with Males; and we do hereby request a hearing before the Legislature by our accredited Representatives.

The Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Memorial Collection


This Volume is
Presented to the
College of Women of the 
University of New Jersey by



on the Express Condition that it is
not to be taken from the Library

[Image of Elizabeth Cady Stanton]

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A LETTER FROM
MRS. STANTON TO GERRIT SMITH.

SENECA FALLS, DEC. 21.

GERRIT SMITH - DEAR FRIEND:

Your letter on the "Woman's Rights"
Movement, I have thoroughly read and
considered.  I thank you, in the name of
woman, for having said what you have on
so many vital points.  You have spoken
well for a man whose convictions on this subject 
are the result of reasoning and observation;
but they alone whose souls are fired through
personal experience and suffering can set
forth the heighth and depth, the source
and centre, of the degredation of women;
they alone can feel the steadfast faith in their
own native energy and power to accomplish 
a final triumph over all adverse surroundings, 
a speedy and complete success.
You say you have but little faith in this
reform, because the changes we propose
are so great, so radical, so comprehensive;
whilst they who have commenced the work
are so puny, feeble and undeveloped. -
The mass of woman are developed at least
to the point of discontent, and that, in the
dawn of this nation, was considered a most
dangerous point in the British Parliament,
and is now deemed equally so on a Southern 
plantation.  In the human soul, the
steps between discontent and action are
few and short indeed.  You, who suppose
the mass of women contented, know but
little of the silent indignation, the deep and
settled disgust with which she contemplates 
our present social arrangements.  You claim
to believe that in every sense, thought and
feeling, man and woman are the same. -
Well, now, suppose yourself a woman.  
You are educated up to that point where
one feels a deep interest in the welfare of
her country, and in all the great questions
of the day, in both Church and State; yet
you have no voice in either.  Little men, 
with little brains, may pour forth their little 
sentiments by the hour, in the forum
and the sacred desk, but public sentiment
and the religion of our day teach us that
silence is most becoming in woman.  So, 
to solitude you betake yourself, and read
for your consolation the thoughts of dead
men; but from the Bible down to, Mother
Goose's Melodies, how much complacency, 
think you, you would feel in your womanhood?  
The philosopher, the poet and the
saint, all combined to make the name woman
synonemous with either fool or devil.  Every 
passion of the human soul. which is manhood 
becomes so grand and glorious in its 
results, is fatal to womankind.  Ambition
makes a Lady Macbeth, love an Ophelia;
none but those brainless things, without
will or passion, are ever permitted to come
to a good end.  What measure of content
could you draw from the litterature of the
past?

Again, suppose yourself the wife of a 
confirmed drunkard.  You behold your 
earthly possessions all passing away; your
heart is made desolate; it has ceased to
pulsate with either love, or hope, or joy.
Your house is sold over your head, and
with it every article of comfort and decency; 
your children gather round you, one
by one, each new comer clothed in rags
and crowned with shame; is it with gladness 
you now welcome the embrace of that
beastly husband, feel his fevered breath
upon your cheek, and inhale the disgusting
odor of his tobacco and rum?  Would
not your whole soul revolt from such an
union?  So do the forty thousand drunkards' 
wives now in this State.  They, too,
are all discontented, and but for the pressure 
of law and gospel would speedily sunder 
all these unholy ties.  Yes, sir, there
are women, pure and virtuous and noble as
yourself, spending every day of all the 
years of their existence in the most intimate 
association with infamous men, kept
so by that monstrous and unnatural artifice,
baptized by the sacred name of marriage.
I might take your through the many, many 
phases of a woman's life, into those sacred
relations of which we speak, not in our
conventions, where woman feels her deepest 
wrongs, where in blank despair she
drags out days, and weeks and months,
and years of silent agony.  I might paint
you pictures of real life so vivid as to force
from you an agonized exclamation: How
can woman endure such things!  We who
have spoken out, have declared our rights,
political and civil; but the entire revolution
about to dawn upon us by the acknowledgement 
of a woman's social equality has
been seen and felt but by the few.  The
rights to vote, to hold property, to speak
in public are all important; but there are
great social rights, before which all others
sink into utter insignificance.  The cause
of woman is, as you admit, a broader and 
a deeper one than any with which you
compare it; and this to me is the very reason 
why it must succeed.  It is not a question 
of meats and drinks, of money and
lands, but of human rights, the sacred right
of a woman to her own person, to all her
God-given powers of body and soul.  Did
it ever enter into the mind of man, that
woman too had an inalienable right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of her individual
happiness?  Did he ever take in the idea
that to the mother of the race, and to her
alone, belonged the right to say when a
new being should be brought into the
world.  Has he, in the gratification of his
blind passions, ever paused to think whether
it was with joy and gladness that she gave
up ten or twenty years of the hey-day of

her existence to all the cares and sufferings
of excessive maternity?  Our present laws,
our religious teachings, our social customs
on the whole question of marriage and divorce 
are most degrading to woman; and
so long as man continues to think and write,
to speak and act, as if maternity was the
one and soul object of a woman's existence
- so long as children are conceived in weariness 
and disgust - you must not look for
high toned men and women capable of accomplishing 
any great and noble achievement.  
But when woman shall stand on 
an even pedestal with man, when the
shall be bound together, not by these withs
of law and gospel, but in holy unity and
love; then and not till then shall our efforts
at minor reforms be crowned with complete 
success,  Hence, in my opinion, is
the starting point; here is the battle
ground where our independence must be
fought and won.  A true marriage relation
has far more to do with the elevation of 
woman than the style and cut of her dress.
Dress is a matter of taste, of fashion; it
is changeable, trancient, and may be doffed
or donned at the will of the individual;
but institutions, supported by laws, can be
overturned but by revolution.  We have
no reason to hope that pantaloons would
do more for us than they have done for 
man himself.  The Negro slave enjoys the
most unlimited freedom in his attire, not
surpassed even by the fashions of Eden in 
its palmiest days; yet in spite, of his dress
and his manhood too, he is a slave still. -
Was the old Roman in his toga less of a
man than he now is in swallow-tail and
tights?  Did the flowing robes of Christ
himself render his life less grand and beautiful?  
In regards to drers, where you claim
to be so radical, you are far from consistent.

Believing as you do in the identity of 
the sexes, that all the difference we see in
tastes, in character, is entirely the result of
education - that "man is woman and woman 
is man" - why keep up these distinctions 
in dress?  Surely, whatever dress is
convenient for one sex must be for the other 
also.  Whatever is necessary for the
perfect and full development of man's 
physical being, must be equally so for woman.  
I fully agree with you that woman
is terribly cramped and crippled in her
present style of dress.  I have not one 
word to utter in its defence; but to me it
seems that if she would enjoy entire freedom 
she should dress just like man.  Why
proclaim our sex on the housetops-seeing
that is a badge of degredation and deprives 
us of so many rights and privileges
wherever we go.  Disguised as a man, the
distinguished French woman "George

Sands" has been able to see life in Paris,
and has spoken in political meetings with
great applause, as no woman could have
done.  In male attire, we could travel by
land or sea; go through all the streets and
lanes of out cities and towns by night and
day, without a protector; get seven hundred 
dollars a year for teaching, instead of
three, and ten dollars for making a coat
instead of two or three, as we now do. -
All this we could do without fear of insult,
or the least sacrifice of decency or virtue.
If nature has not made the sex so clearly
defined as to be seen throughout any disguise, 
why should we make the difference 
so striking?  Depend upon it, when men
and women in their every day life see and
think less of sex and more of mind, we
shall all lead far purer and higher lives. -
Your letter, my noble cousin, must have
been written in a most desponding mood,
as all the great reforms of the day seem to
you on the verge of failure.  What are
the experiences of days and months and
years, in the life time of a mighty nation?
Can one man in his brief hour hope to see
the beginning and end of any reform?

When you compare the public sentiment
and social customs of our day with what
they were fifty years ago, how can you 
despair of the temperance cause?  With
a Maine Law, and divorce for drunkenness,
the rumseller and drunkard must soon
come to terms.  Let woman's motto be
"No union with Drunkards," and she will 
soon bring this long and well fought battle
to a triumphant close.

Neither should you despair of the anti-slavery 
cause; with its martyrs, its runaway 
slaves, its legal decisions in almost
every paper you take up, the topic of debate 
in our national councils, our political
meetings and our literature, it seems as if
the nation were all alive, on this question.
True, four millions of slaves groan in their
chains still, but every man in this nation
has an higher idea of individual rights than
he had twenty years ago.  As to the cause
of woman, I see no signed of failure.  We
already have a property law, which in its
legitimate effects must elevate the femme
covery into a living breathing woman - a
wife into a property-holder, who can make
contracts, buy and sell.  In a few years we
shall see how well it works.

It needs but a little forethought to perceive
that in due time these large property holders 
must be represented in the government:
and when the mass of women see that there
is some hope of becoming voters and law-makers, 
they will take to their rights as
naturally as the negro to his heels when he
is sure of success.  Their present seeming
content is very much like Sambo's on the
plantation.  If you truly believe that man
is woman, and woman is man; if you believe 
that all the burning indignation that
fires your soul at the sight of injustice and
oppression, if suffered in your own person,
would nerve you to a life-long struggle for
liberty and independence, then know that
what you feel, I feel too, and what I feel, the
mass of woman feels also.  Judge by yourself, 
then, how long the women of this nation 
will consent to be deprived of their social, 
civil and political rights; but talk not 
to us of failure.  Talk not to us of chivalry 
that died long ago.  Where do you see
it?  No gallant knight presents himself at
the bar of justice to pay the penalty of our
crimes.  We suffer in our own persons, on
the gallows and in prison walls.  From
Blackstone down to Kent, there is no display 
of gallantry in your written codes.  In
social life, true, a man in love will jump to 
pick up a glove or boquet for a silly girl of
sixteen, whilst at home, he will permit his
aged mother carry pails of water and
arm-fulls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty 
pound baby, hour after hour, without ever
offering to relieve her.  I have seen a great 
many men priding themselves on their good
breeding - the gentlemen, born and educated, 
who never manifested one iota of spontaneous 
gallantry towards the women of their
own household.

Divines may preach thanksgiving sermons 
on the poetry of the arm chair and
the cradle; but when they lay down their
newspapers, or leave their beds a cold
night, to attend to the wants of either, I
shell begin to look for the golden age of 
chivalry once more.  If a short dress is to
make the men less gallant than they now
are, I beg the women at our next convention 
to add at least two years more to
every skirt they wear.  And you mock us
with dependence, too.  Do not the majority 
of woman in every town support themselves 
and very many their husbands, too?
What father of a family, at the loss of his
wife, has ever been able to meet his responsibilities 
as woman has done?  When
the mother dies, the house is made desolate,
the children are forsaken - scattered to the
four winds of heaven - to the care of any
one who chooses to take them.  Go to
those aged widows, who have reared large
families of children, unaided and alone, who
have kept them all together under one roof,
watched and nursed them in health and sickness 
through all their infant years, clothed
and educated them, made them all respectable 
men and women, ask them on whom 
they depended.  They will tell you on their
own hands, and on that never dying, never 
failing love, that a mother's heart alone
can know.  It is into hands like these - to 
these, who have calmly met the terrible
emergencies of life - who without the inspiration 
of glory, or fame, or applause, through
long years have faithfully and bravely performed 
their work, self-sustained and cheered,
that we commit our cause.  We need not
wait for one more generation to pass away,
to find a race of women worthy to assert the 
humanity of women, and that is all we claim 
to do.

Affectionately, yours,
E. C. STANTON

[*Mrs. Stanton to
Gerrit Smith
1854*]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
By Harriot Stanton Blatch

The editor of the Journal suggests
as my theme, "What was 
Elizabeth Cady Stanton like sixty
years ago? What was she most interested
in? What was she tackling?"

In 1869 Elizabeth Cady Stanton was
just fifty-four years old. She had the
build and brains of her father, Judge
Daniel Cady; the social charm of her
mother, Margaret Livingstone; the
rugged health snow white hair, dancing
blue eyes and optimism of both parents
combined.

She had already won her spurs in the
woman movement, having called the first
Woman Rights Convention in 1848.
Here she demanded votes for women in
the famous IX resolution. She addressed
the New York legislature in 
1854, her theme being the right of a
married woman to her wages.

And, now, of the closing years of the
decade of the sixties. That was a
tumultuous time in American politics,
and every reform reflected the antagonisms
between state-rights and centralization.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton registered
the change in the political atmosphere.
She founded the National Woman Suffrage
Association in 1869, and steered its 
course as president for a quarter of a
century. The suffrage campaign in
Kansas, which she waged with Governor
Robinson in 1867, taught her not
only the wisdom of Federal action, but
the need of a suffrage paper. In January,
1868, the Revolution was founded.
Of the name of this first political newspaper
of our movement, Mrs. Stanton
argued: "There could not be a better
name than Revolution. The establishing 
of woman on her rightful throne is
the greatest revolution the world has
ever known or ever will know. To
bring it about is no child's play" . . .

Borne through cross currents by the
seaworthy National Woman Suffrage Association,
and flying the pennant "Revolution,"
Mrs. Stanton reached the national
capital and inaugurated on January 19
and 20, 1869, the long series of annual
Washington conventions. Up to that
time the endeavor had been to force the
Republicans to accept changes in the
wording of their Constitutional Amendments
to the end of enfranchising women
as well as Negroes. Criticism was bitter.
Mrs. Stanton replied: "No, we 
are right in our position. We demand
in the reconstruction, suffrage for all the 
citizens of the Republic. I would not 
talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.
There is where Wendell Phillips
failed. He should have passed, when
slavery was abolished, from the abolitionist
to the statement."

Having failed to "broaden the narrow
demands of men," Mrs. Stanton, clear,
logical, far-seeing, realized that "An
amendment wholly our own was called
for." In January, 1869, she rejoices to 
Lucretia Mott, "Hon. George W. Julian
has acceded to our wish, and will
propose a XVI Amendment basing suffrage
on citizenship without any discrimination
founded on sex. I feel an 
added dignity!" The following year,
1870, came the second Washington convention,
and before a Congressional
Committee, Mrs. Stanton, as president
of the National Woman Suffrage Association,
inaugurated, brilliantly, the
custom of annual hearings by making
one of her scholarly arguments for the
Julian amendment.

Mrs. Stanton in middle life

Then, seeing that a national organization
was not enough, a newspaper
not enough, national conventions and
hearings not enough, a definite suffrage
amendment before Congress not enough
to bring victory while popular support
wide and deep was lacking, Mrs. Stanton
started her career as a Lyceum lecturer.
In the next twelve years she
carried her evangel from coast to coast,
from Great Lakes to Gulf. Owing to
the bitter criticism heaped upon her, she
was, from the first, one of the best advertised
lecturers in the lyceum field, 
and consequently most sought after, most
highly paid.

She roused the West on education, on
woman's emancipation, child care, politics,
divorce. She interpreted its liberal 
spirit to the East, and in large measure
harmonized the points of view which
made possible in the end the winning
of suffrage.

A Jury of Our Peers
_____

Editors Woman's Journal:

Among other reasons not mentioned in your last Journal, why a woman should not be electrocuted is that she is never tried by a jury of her peers and this was considered far back in English history as one of the [mvnt??] [iacud??] rights of (over)

of every individual.  Kings demanded juries from the royal families; nobles, [jurors] from the nobility; commoners from the commoners; but[?] women must enjoy this sacred right.

Who are their peers?  According to our State contributions, "Idiots," "Lunatics," "Criminals,"

2

& "minors."  The first three classes are impossible.  Hence our peers must be the "minors" & me have a right to demand a jury of boys from sixteen to twenty one.

Well, when we dec what a nice sense of (over)

of justice neatly manifest in the [Genge?} Junior Republic, we might be satisfied; but unfortunately in a few years they will belong to the ruling class, & there again we have no peers.  Men opposed to extending to us the right of suffrage generally rank us with the "angels."  Thus the only hope to cheer us on our

3

earthly pilgrimage is [is] that woman [they] will at last be trial by a jury of her [Woman] peers. in the courts of Heaven.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
250 West 94th Street
March 31sy, 1899

E. C. Stanton

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON

MANUSCRIPTS IN BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
HIGGINSON PAPERS  GALATEA COLLECTION

1868, NOV. 4 - to Stephen S. Foster - about invitation to
convention of New England Woman Suffrage
Assn. #122

1868,May 22 - #120
to T.W.Higginson

1868, Nov. 3 - to T.W.Higginson #121

1868, Jan.13 - Ibid - #119

Life Sketch

of

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

by her Granddaughter

NORA STANTON BARNEY

Civil Engineer and Architect

Published on
the 100th Anniversary 
of the day that
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
submitted the first resolution
in the world demanding the
Elective Franchise for Women
Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19, 1848

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born
in Johnstown, New York, on November
12th, 1815.  Her family
was wealthy, judged by contemporary
standards, and she could have
lead a life of ease and luxury, but
the seed of divine discontent was
within her.  The sad lot of most
women penetrated her soul at an
early age, and she chose,  instead, a
life of continual work, hardship and
battle.  She had to contend with opposition
within the family, also.  Her
determination to speak in public, and
her stand for the enfranchisement of
her sex caused her father to disinherit
her.  Yet she was never bitter
and her dignity, humour, unbounded
health and energy carried her
through the ocean of ridicule, frustrations,
prejudice and intolerance
to the ripe age of 86 years.
She was ageless, and could enthrall
my English and French cousins
and me with stories of her youth
as easily as she could move a vast
audience with her oratory and logic.

Her lectures and writings covered the
whole field of human progress—
"Motherhood", "Sex", "Our Boys",
"Our Girls", "Woman Suffrage",
"Dress Reform", "Woman, the
Church and the Bible".  She was a
diligent Greek scholar and a great
student of the Bible.  She inveighed
against the degraded position accorded
to women by the orthodox
churches of her generation.  She was
a Unitarian, and a firm believer in
the brotherhood of man and the
right to political and economic equality
of all human beings regardless of
color or sex or race.
Seneca Falls was her home for 16
years from 1847.  The little town
seethed with activity from the day
she set her foot there, and on July
19 and 20, 1848, the long-discussed
plans of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Lucretia Mott to hold a Woman's
Rights Convention were realized.
One hundred well-known men and
women attended and signed the
"Declaration of Sentiments", but it

was Mrs. Stanton who moved the resolution
that women should be granted
the elective franchise, a motion seconded
by Frederick Douglass.  A storm
of protest arose, but the motion was
carried by a small margin.  Over the
cries of ridicule and denunciation
heaped on the Convention and its
sponsors by pulpit and press arose
the clarion voice of Wendell Phillips.
—"This is the inauguration of the
most momentous reform yet
launched upon the world, the first
organized protest against the injustice
that has brooded for ages over
the character and destiny of half the
human race"—, and Frederick Douglass
in "Lone Star" and Horace Greeley
in New York Tribune published
the only editorials in praise of the
Convention and its objectives.

Often reformers of one generation
become the conservatives of the next.
This was not true of Mrs. Stanton.
She wrote a letter which was read at
the celebration of the 50th anniversary
of the 1848 Convention, which


ended as follows:
". . . My message today to our coadjutors
is that we have a higher duty than
the demand for suffrage.  We must now,
at the end of fifty years of faithful service,
broaden our platform and consider
the next step in progress, to which the
signs of the times clearly point,—namely,
co-operation, a new principle in industrial
economics.  We see that the right
of suffrage avails nothing for the masses
in competition with the wealthy classes,
and worse still, with each other.

"Women all over the country are
working earnestly in many fragmentary
reforms, each believing that her own,
if achieved, would usher in a new day
of peace and plenty.  With woman suffrage,
temperance, social parity, rigid
Sunday laws and physical culture, could
any, or all, be successful, we should see
changes in the condition of the masses.
We need all these reforms and many
more to make existence endurable.  What
is life today to the prisoner in his cell,
to the feeble hands that keep time with
machinery in all our marts of trade, to
those that have no abiding place, no
title to one foot of land on this green
earth?  Such are the fruits of competition.
Our next experiment is to be made
on the broad principle of co-operation.
At the end of fifty years, whose achievements
we celebrate here today, let us
reason together as to the wisdom of laying
some new plank in our platform.

"The co-operative idea will remodel

codes and constitutions, creeds and catechisms,
social customs and conventionalism,
the curriculum of schools and
colleges.  It will give a new sense of justice,
liberty and equality in all the relations
of life.  Those who have eyes to
see recognize the fact that the period for
all the fragmentary reforms is ended.
"Agitation of the broader questions of
philosophical Socialism is now in order.
This next step in progress has been foreshadowed
by our own seers and prophets,
and is now being agitated by all the
thinkers and writers of all civilized countries.
"The few have no right to the luxuries
of life, while the many are denied its
necessities.  This motto is the natural outgrowth
of the one so familiar on our
platform and our official paper, 'Equal
Rights for All'.  It is impossible to have
'equal rights for all' under our present
competitive system.  'All men are born
free, with an equal right to life, liberty
and happiness'.  The natural outgrowth
of this sentiment is the vital principles
of the Christian religion.  'Love thy
neighbor as thyself'.  In broad, liberal
principles, the suffrage association
should be the leader of thought for women,
and not narrow its platform, from
year to year, to one idea, rejecting all
relative ideas as side issues.
"Progress is the victory of a new
thought over old superstitions!"
If she were living today, she would
no doubt be a champion of civil

rights and just as many unpopular
causes as in 1848.  She would be demanding
the full emancipation of
woman and equality of rights under
law, inveighing against intolerance
and bigotry, imperialism and monopoly,
and championing the rights of
the common man throughout the
world.
Until 1900, she held the pre-eminent
position in the feminist movement,
not only in her own country
but throughout Europe too.  During
the last years of her life, she was universally
known as "The Grand Old
Woman of America".  Some of the
high lights of her long life were:
In 1848, was the principal organizer
of the first Woman's Rights Convention,
and moved the woman suffrage
resolution.
In 1854, the first woman to address
the New York legislature from
the speaker's rostrum.
She was president of New York
State Woman Suffrage Society in
1854.

She helped form the first National
organization for woman's rights—
The National Woman's Suffrage Association,
and was its president from
its inception almost continuously for
20 years (1869-1890).

When later the American Woman
Suffrage Association merged with the
National Woman's Suffrage Association
to become the National American
Woman Suffrage Association,
she was elected president.

She made the principal address at
the great Cooper Union mass meeting
in 1861, calling on Lincoln to
free women as well as the Negro, and
enfranchise both.

She ran for Congress in New York
State in 1866.

In 1869, when the family finances
were at a low ebb and the education
of the five younger children in jeopardy,
she registered with the Lyceum
bureau, and toured the country from
Maine to Texas on the famous Orpheum
Circuit, earning from $100.00
to $200.00 per lecture.  She did not


stop this arduous work until Bob,
her youngest, was graduated from
Cornell University in 1881.

She and Packer Pillsbury edited
the periodical, "The Revolution,"
from 1868 to 1871.

She made the principal address
when the Woman Suffrage Amendment
was first introduced in Congress
in 1878.  She wrote her coworker, Susan
B. Anthony, who was lecturing
in the West, an account of it.  This
amendment was identical with that
finally passed in 1919 as the 19th
Amendment (sometimes erroneously
named the Susan B. Anthony Amendment).

The three first volumes of the "History
of Woman Suffrage" early editions,
bear the legend, "Edited by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony, Matilda, Joslyn, Gage."

She initiated the International
Woman Suffrage Committee in 1882,
in England.

On her 80th birthday in 1895,
there was a huge celebration at the

Metropolitan Opera House of New
York City, with memorials and presents
from every state, and many from
abroad.  In the Smithsonian Institute
at Washington, there stands a large
goblet presented to her by the Woman
Suffrage League on which is engraved,
"Defeated Day by Day, but
unto Victory Born".

The reforms she advocated and for
which she was ridiculed have largely
come to pass:
Higher education for women;
woman's political enfranchisement;
dress reform; short skirts; the abandonment
of corsets; the abandonment
of swaddling clothes and tight bandages
for babies; the abandonment
of seclusion for women during pregnancy;
getting up soon after childbirth,
and continuing one's duties;
liberal divorce laws; a single standard
of morals; equal guardianship;
property rights, etc.

But some of her demands of 1848
still remain unaccomplished, as for
instance, complete emancipation of


women so that they may have equality
of rights under the law, and the
full protection of the Constitution.

And with all this public activity,
she bore and reared seven children,
five boys and two girls.

There is a letter from an admirer
of hers, my grandfather, writing
from Washington, January 16, 1857, 
to my aunt Margaret Livingston
Stanton, then five years old.  He said:
"Tell your mother that I have seen
a throng of handsome ladies, but that
I had rather see her than the whole
of them:—but I intend to cut her
acquaintance unless she writes me a
letter."

My memories of my Queenmother,
as all of us grandchildren called her,
are of a delightful person to live with
and play with.  Backgammon, chess
and checkers were our almost nightly
amusement.  I have memories of
men and women, colored and white,
of high and low estate, seeking her
counsel and advice.  The mornings
she spent writing endless letters and

articles.  During those years, 1897 to 
1902, she wrote her autobiography, 
"Eighty Years and More", and also 
"The Women's Bible" (her delightful 
commentaries on the women 
characters of the Bible and her interpretations).  
Indefatigable to the end, 
the day before she died, she wrote a 
letter to Theodore Roosevelt urging 
him to include sponsoring woman 
suffrage in his inaugural address.

A great writer, author, feminist, 
philosopher, orator and reformer, 
friend of Phillips, Douglass, Garrison, 
Greeley, Whittier, the Brights 
and McLarens and feminists throughout 
the world, passed on into history 
the 26th day of October, 1902.


The author lived with her during the last 
years of her life, at 26 West 61st Street 
and 250 West 94th Street, New York City.

[*gift of*]

Additional copies can be obtained by
writing Box 436, Greenwich, Conn.
Price 25 cent, postage paid.

1  8

We trust you will place the
enclosed on display as an
appropriate contribution
to Equal Rights Day,
July 19, 1948

WOMEN'S TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT.
______
Annual Meeting of the Women's New-York State
Temperance Society.

Reported for The New-York Tribune.

ROCHESTER, Wednesday, June 1, 1853.

The Women's New-York State Temperance Society met
here this morning at 10 o'clock, pursuant to adjournment.
Several of the different State and many counties of this
State were represented by Delegates.  The meeting was
opened with prayer by Rev. C. C. Foote, of Michigan.

Mrs. Elizabeth C. Stanton, of Seneca Falls, President of
the Society, read the annual address, an able production,
which we should be glad to publish entire could we spare
the room.  Mrs. Stanton said:

A little more than one year ago, in this same hall, we
formed the first Women's State Temperance Society. We
believed that the time had come for woman to speak out
on this question, and to insist on her right to be heard in
the councils of Church and State,  It was proposed at
that time that we, instead of forming a society, should go
en masse into the State Temperance Society.  We were as-
sured that in becoming members by paying the sum of $1,
we should thereby secure the right to speak and vote in
their meetings.

We who had watched the jealousy with which man had
ever eyed the slow aggressions of woman, warned you
against the insidious proposition made by agents from that
society.  We told you they would no doubt gladly receive
the dollar, but that you would never be allowed to speak
or vote in their meetings.  Many of you thought us suspi-
cious and unjust toward the temperance men of the Em-
pire State.  The fat that Abby Kelly had been permitted
to speak in one of their public meetings, was brought up as
an argument by some agent of that society to prove our
fears unfounded.  We suggested that she spoke by favor
and not right and our rights there are equal to speak and
vote, we well knew would never be acknowledged.  A long
debate saved you from that false step; and our predictions
have been fully realized in the treatment our delegates re-
ceived at the annual meeting, held at Syracuse last July,
and at the recent meeting in New York.

In forming our Society, the mass of us being radical and
liberal, we had chosen no platform - we are no respecters
of persons, all are alike welcome here without regard to
sect, sex, color or caste.  There have been, however, many
objections made to one feature in our constitution, and
that is, that although we admit men as members with equal
rights to speak and vote in our meetings, we claim the of-
fices for woman alone.  We felt, in starting, the necessity
of throwing all the responsibility on woman, which we
knew she never would take if there were any men at hand
to think, act, and plan for her.  The result has shown the
wisdom of what seemed so objectionable to many.

This, however, was a temporary expedient, and a seem-
ing violation of Man's rights, which deters many true
friends of the cause from becoming members of the So-
ciety; and as the officers of our Society are not well-
skilled in the practical business of getting up meetings,
raising funds, &c., and have fairly learned how to stand
and walk alone, it may perhaps be worth while to consider
the propriety of expunging this objectionable feature of the
Constitution.

Our experience thus far as a society has been most en-
couraging.  We number over two thousand members.
We have four agents who have traveled in various parts of
the State, and I need not say what is well known to all
present that their labors thus far have given entire satis-
faction to the society, and the public.  I was surprised and
rejoiced to find that women, without the least preparation 
or experience, who had never raised their voices in public,
one year ago, should with so much self reliance, dignity
and force enter at once such a field of labor, and so ably
perform the work.  In the metropolis of our country, in
the capital of our State - before our Legislature, and in the 
country school house they have been alike earnest and faith-
ful to the truth.  In behalf of our society I thank you for your
unwearied labors during the past year.  In the name of
humanity, I bid you go on and devote yourselves humbly 
to the cause you have espoused.  The noble of your sex
everywhere rejoice in your success and feel in themselves
a new impulse to struggle upward and onward, and the
deep, thorough, silent gratitude that ascends to Heaven
from the wretched outcast, the wives, the mothers and the
daughters of the brutal drunkards, is well known to all who
have listened to their tales of woe, their bitter experience,
the dark, sad passages of their tragic lives.  *  *  *  We 
have every reason to believe that in our heart of the people
we are approved, and by their purses we shall be sustained.
It has been objected to our Society, that we do not confine
ourselves to the subject of temperance, but talk too much
about woman's rights, divorce, and the church.  It could be
easily shown how the consideration of this great question
carries us legitimately into the discussion of these various
subjects  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

We have been obliged to preach Woman's rights, because
many instead of listening to what we had to say on Tempe-
rance, have questioned the rights of a Woman to speak on
any subject.  In all Courts of Justice, if the rights of the
speaker to be t ere be questioned, all business waits until
that point be settled.  Now it is not settled in the mass of
minds that woman has any rights on this footstool, and
much less a right to stand on an even pedestal with man,
look him in the face as an equal, and rebuke the sins of her
day and generation.  Let it be clearly understood then
that we believe it is Woman's duty to speak whenever she
feels the impression to do so, that it is her right to be pres-
ent in all the councils of Church and State.  The fact that 
our agents are Women settles the question of our charac-
ter on this point.  Again - in discussing the question of Tem-
perance, all lecturers from the beginning have made men-
tion of the drunkards' wives and children, of widows'
groans and orphans tears - now, shall these classes of suf-
ferers be introduced but as themes for a rhetorical flourish;
the pathetic touches of the speaker's eloquence?  shall we
passively shed tears over their condition, or by giving them
their rights bravely open to them the doors of escape from
a wretched and degraded life?  Is it not legitimate in this 
to discuss the social degradation, the legal disabilities of 
the drunkard's wife?  If in showing her wrongs, we prove 
the rights of all womankind to the elective franchise, to a
criminal cases to be tried by peers of her own choosing,
shall it be said that we transcend the bounds of our subject?

Mrs. Mary C. Vaughn, of Oswego, read an able report of
the Executive Committee, in which the effectual labors of 
the Society for the past year and the growth of public 
sentiment in favor of the Maine Law, were faithfully de-
eveloped.

The report was accept, subject to the discussions of the
members of the Convention.

Mr. Bloomer said that one idea had struck him on the
reading of the report, which was applicable to all similar
reports; that as a general thing the rise and progress of
Temperance sentiments were too favorably represented.
Undoubted statistics would show that the interest and
strength of the Rum party were on the increase.  There
were more social drinkers, and so far as legislative in-
fluence was concerned it was more in favor of the Rum
party than ever.  He wished the friends from abroad would
state whether the cause was on the advance or the in back
ground.

Lucy Stone, of Mass., said: That though the growth of 
Temperance principles when estimated by the amount of
rum drank, might not be as great as in the past, yet that 
during the last year efficient and noble workers had come
into the field; and though the opposition might be stronger
than ever before, yet that the increased moral force exerted
would more than counterbalance the former.  The success
of a cause does not always depend on numbers so much as
on the powers exerted to overcome the opposition.  She
thought the Secretary's report was not too flattering in its
estimates.

Miss Emily Clark, of Leroy, said that the experience of
her last year's labors, was that the liquor traffic was never
stronger than at the present time; that it was gaining rapid-
ly, and artfully insinuating itself wherever it could enter,
but that the Temperance reform has made able advance-
ments.

Mrs. C. H. J. Nichols, of Vermont, said the cause was
advancing nobly.  She had a wide field of observation, an
extensive exchange list, and she watched ever glimmer-
in of truth; for she thought that every straw chronicled
the wave of progression.  Man had done all he could, but
woman now came into the field with a helping hand, a
sympathizing heart, a child-like trust and faith in the om-
nipotence of God, and the cause must triumph.  She felt
that the ultimate success of Temperance was certain.

The report was adopted by the Convention.

The President then appointed the following committees:

Committee to Nominate Officers for the Ensuing Year - Mrs. 
Lemira Kedsie, Rochester; Mrs. Lydia F. Fowler, New 
York City; Mrs. Lydia Jenkins, Waterloo; Mrs. Amy 
Post, Rochester; Mr. D. C. Bloomer, Seneca Falls; Mr.
Wm. H. Hallowell, Rochester; Mr. Frederick Douglass, 
Rochester.

Committee on Business - Miss Emily Clark, LeRoy; Mrs.
Mary Hallowell, Rochester, Mrs. Robie, Buffalo; Mrs.
C. J. H. Nichols, Brattleboro, Vermont; Rev. Samuel J. 
May, Syracuse; Rev. Wm. H. Channing, Rochester.

Finance Committee - Miss Susan B. Anthony, Rochester; 
Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, Seneca Falls; Mrs. H. Attilia Albro, 
Rochester.

As there were several article in the Constitution of the
Society on which all could not agree, the following Com-
mittee were appointed to review that instrument, and bring
in a report at the afternoon session, on which the Conven-
tion could take action: Mrs. Mary C. Baughn, Oswego;
Dr. Clark Rochester; Mrs. Mary H. Hallowell, Rochester;
Mrs. J. W. Stebbins, Rochester,; Mrs. Amelia Bloomer,
Seneca Falls; Miss Susan B. Anthony, Rochester; Mrs. 
Lemira Kedsie, Rochester; Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Seneca
Falls, Frederick Douglass, Rochester.

Delegates from the various Temperance Societies were in-
vited to present their credentials for delegation.  The fol-
lowing were rendered: Mrs. Elizabeth H. Dart, Palmyra;
Mrs. Martha M. Christie, Horseheads; Mrs. Ann M. Pink-
ney, Palmyra; Mrs. Hunter, Oberline Ohio, Almira Vail, 
Weedsport; Mr. Le Baron, New York City.

Friends for various States and Societies were present,
who were interested in the cause of Temperance, though
not regular delegates.

The Convention adjourned to meet at 2 o'clock.


AFTERNOON SESSION.

The meeting was called to order, Mrs. Alliry in the Chair.
Prayer was offered by Rev. Mr. Channing.  The Report of
the Treasurer was read by Mrs Alliry.  The Society had
received through its agents, it memberships and sale of
Tracts for the year $1,761 16; had expended $1,530 54, and
had remaining in the Treasury $230 62.

The Report was adopted.

Mrs. Albro read a report from the Weedsport Auxiliary
Society, which was adopted.

Mrs. Stanton read a letter from Hon. Gerrit Smith, in 
which that gentleman full indorse the Women's Tempe-
rance movement.

William H. Channing offered the following resolution:

Whereas, Woman equally with men are endowed by their Creator
with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;
and

Whereas, Women equally with men are entitled by all the essential 
principles of this Republic to be protected and guided by a govern-
ment which derives its just powers from the consent of the governed
and,

Whereas, By amendment I of the Constitution of the U. S. A. the 
people are forever and every where guarranteed the right of peacefully
assembling to petition Government for a redress of grievances; and
Whereas, Women are, the whole people, the chief sufferers from
grievances caused by Intemperance: therefore

Resolved, That whenever and wherever the enactment of a prohibitory 
laws against the traffic in intoxicating drinks is submitted to the suff-
frages of the people, it is the duty and right of women to meet in
primary assemblies of women to record their votes in favor of such
legislation and governmental action as will best protect themselves, their
sisters, brothers, husbands, sons and fathers from the intolerable
grievances of drunkenness.

Mrs. Nichols and Lucy Stone eloquently defended the
points of the resolution.

The Committee to review the Constitution made their 
report, and were divided in sentiment.  The majority re-
ported to change the name of the Society, and have it a
People's Society, and to strike out of change the clause 
which provides that men shall not be allowed to hold
offices in the Society.

The minority reported in favor of some slight changes in
the present Constitution, but nothing changing its essential
features.

The question was then mooted whether persons not
members of the Society should be allowed to express their
opinions on the subject.  The President said whoever had
a ray of light, or truth to present, should have a hearing.
A warm discussion arose on the question of amending the
Constitution, in which Mr. Christy of Horseheads, J. W. 
Stebbins, George W. Clark, Frederick Douglass, Miss 
Brown, tMiss Clark, Mrs. Albro, Mrs. Vaughn, Muss An-
thony and Mrs. Jenkins participated.

Miss Brown argued that, if the Society would utter a pro-
test against the delegates in the Brick Church of New-York
for their expulsion of the delegate of the Women's State
Temperance Society, on the ground that they were women,
she thought conscientiously that their platform should be
broad enough to admit all on equal footing.  She enforced
her views at some length.

Miss Clark thought that if gentlemen were allowed to be
officers, women would throw off responsibility, and they
needed more thrown on them to induce them to act at all.

Mrs. Jenkins, of Waterloo, agreed with Miss Brown, and 
argued that right and justice before expediency should rule t
he action of the Society.

Mr. B. Robie, of Buffalo, thought that as women had more
time than men, therefore they should have the offices.
The men of her city would give money to the furtherance
of Temperance, but said they had no time to help get up
meetings.

Mr. Clark contended that it is not good for man to be
alone; that both should walk together hand in hand, heart
with heart.

Mr. Christy though man was a selfish and ambitious ani-
mal, and if allowed he would take power entirely out
of the hands of women.

Mr. Comstock, of Elmira, opposed the minority report.

Mrs. Albro said she had been agent twelve months, and
she thought the glory of the cause had been in conse-
quence of the Society being a Women's movement.

Mrs. Vaughn had visited over twenty Counties the last
year, and had never heard any one dissent from the present
Constitution save in two instances.  She was in favor of
the minority, as was Miss Wright, another agent of the So-
ciety.

Frederick Douglass spoke in favor of the majority re-
port.

Mrs. Nichols thought that if woman had risen to the de-
velopment which she has achieved with a mill-stone around
her neck, she would never sink when she had thrown it
from her.

Miss Anthony made able speech in favor of the ma-
ority report.

Miss Pellet, of Syracuse, believed in admitting both
sexes everywhere - at school, college, and in the lecture-
room.

After further discussion, it was decided to adjourn the 
session until evening, after voting to lay the question on
the table to be decided the next morning before 10 o'clock.


EVENING SESSION.

Corinthian Hall was well filled with an attentive audi-
ence.  The Convention was called to order by the Presi-
dent, and Miss Susan B. Anthony read an interesting letter 
from the Hon. Neal Dow, of Maine.

Mrs. Stanton, from Business Committee, read the follow-
ing resolution:

Resolved, That Woman, as an intelligent, responsible being, equally 
with Man endowed by her Creator with capacities and energies for the 
good use which she is equally with Man answerable to society and 
God, has an equal right with man to cooperate publicly, as privately, 
in every movement, which seeks the elevation, refinement, purity, 
peace and progress of humanity; and that as daughter, sister, wife, or 
mother, Woman has no right to be or to appear to be indifferent to the 
triumph of the Temperance reform.

Miss Brown thought the resolution bore its own testi-
mony on its face - Is the Temperance cause good?  Then 
every man and woman should engage in it.

Lucy Stone said if we look over this Republic, we shall 
see drunkards here and there all over the country and the 
consciousness must come to almost every worker that there 
has been a failure in the efforts to stay the waves of 
drunkeness.  When the friends of sobriety first commenc-
ed their labors they tried to induce men by pledges to drink 
rum only on the 4th of July.  Then came total abstinenee; 
then came multitudes of cold water armies, with their 
banners and songs of touching melody; but these fell on 
the ear of man as on the dull cold ear of death.  Still the 
men took the bottle.  The sons and daughters came; but 
the wine-bibber looked in their faces and laughed at their 
efforts.  Then came laws and no one could buy in quanti-
ties less than 28 gallons; the man could not drink his single 
glass of rum, but he could save his earnings till he acquir-
ed enough to buy that quantity, and then he could lie drunken till 
he had drained the dregs.  Then came the Maine Law.  But still 
in Boston where the law is in force, there are shops all 
over the city with signs of brandy, gin and rum, so 
that this law has not stopped the traffic.  Yet there is still 
a barrier to be raised, which to my mind would be more 
effectual in removing or staying the evil than all the others 
that have been tried and failed.  To this effect I offer the 
following resolution on my own responsibility, and would 
not involve this Society or any one but myself for it:

"Resolved, That it is cruel and unnatural that any law should com-
pel a man or woman to live as the husband or wife of a confirmed 
drunkard, common justice and a true idea of those holy ties of which 
human law take no cognizance, demand not only legal separation 
for habitual drunkenness, but the right for those who ask it.

I would say make this temperance question a matter of 
divorce, and the battle is half or wholly achieved.

I have seen the daughter give up her heart unreservedly 
at the altar to a husband, but the sun of her love 
went down in darkness-the man had forgotten his plighted 
vows - he had buried all his affections in the wine cup, 
gone down to the lowest depths.  Has women no right to 
divorce herself from the betrayer of her hopes - the one 
who has blighted her affections, cast mildew over her 
path?  Shall she be compelled to linger every by his side?
Shall she continue to remain the drunkard's wife?  What
father would give up the rich love of a daughter for all the
wealth of Golconda, and place here where she would drag
out her days as the wife of one who spurned everything that
is holy - chain her as a slave to an imbruted drunkard?

Mrs. Nichols, of Vermont, said the divorce of the human
law from the law of God was the first sin; and it creeps
into every channel of social life - in our every institution.
She was opposed to making drunkenness a ground of di-
vorce, because she knew scores of cases where the drunk-
are became again clothed in his right mind.  She had ap-
pealed to many noble women who had borne up under the
influence of drunken husbands, who had sustained and fed
their own children, for these women to declare to her in
all candor whether they would desire to have a divorce for
this cause, and they invariable told her that it was unne-
cessary.  Only secure to the temperate wife the control of
her children, the right to her own earnings, the legal right
to secure homesteads, and they have said they would wait
till the Maine Law should roll its tide of glory from the
North-East to the South-West to restore to them a husband
who, when not under the influence of alcohol, had one of
the best and kindest hearts.

The Convention adjourned to meet at 9 o'clock Thurs-
day morning, June 2.


WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTION,
AT WORCESTER,

The following letter from Mrs. ELIZABETH C. STAN-
TON, of New York was read by Mrs. COE:-

LETTER FROM MRS. ELIZABETH C. STAN-
TON.
SENECA FALLS, Saturday, Oct. 11, 1851.

DEAR PAULINA:
Many accuse us of being too sever on the fallen
Adams of our race; for surely, say they, there is
nothing antagonistic in the relation between Man and
Woman.  We all know that the interests of the whole
human family are identical; that no injustice is per-
pertrated that does not react, in some way, upon the 
head of the oppressor.  But who looks at his true,
substantial, permanent interest?  Are we not like
grown up children, wholly absorbed with the tempo-
rary, the transient?  To me, there is just as much an-
tagonism in the present position of Man and Woman,
as in that of master and slave, capitalist and labor-
er, teacher and pupil, parent and child.  How abu-
sive and oppressive may Man be, in all these rela-
tions, and will ever be, so long as physical force and 
selfish interest take the place of moral appeal and
universal benevolence!  We are still in the physical
force dispensation, when might makes right, and
Man is but living out the law of his lower nature, in
preying upon the weak and defenceless.  But we do
not blame him, nor hold him responsible; he is blind
-ly following his interests, and not his reason.  It is 
not in the deliberate counsel of his well, deeming it for
our highest food that he has enacted the unjust laws
that disgrace his statute books; it is not be direct
fiat that he has assigned us the social position we
now occupy.  No, he has not thought of us, nor
made any provision in all his arrangements for us, but 
as we are incidentally connected with his pleasure or
profit.  He has merely sought out some strong posi-
tion, and there entrenched himself.  True, prompted 
by feelings of chivalry, he has occasionally broken a
lance, given some flaming Fourth of July toast at the
mouth of a cannon, or written a sonnet in favor of the
ideal Woman; but the real one he has regarded very
much as the wolf does the lamb, or the eagle the
hare as he carries to his eyrie.  And even so with Wo-
man; she in her turn oppresses her children and
hirelings.  Now, what we want is protection; not for
iron, wool, or cotton, but for humanity.  We need a
righteous civil Government - a Government to protect
the weak against the strong - to protect Woman, not
from the wild beasts or the devouring elements, but
from her self-styled protector, Man.  Such a Govern-
ment can be formed only be the due infusion of the
feminine element into our national councils.  Man
starts up in alarm at the bare mention of Woman's
Rights.  He seems to think that there is a fixed num-
ber of rights for the whole human family, laid down
in some great reservoir, and that in proportion as you
increase the claimants, you decrease the hoard of those 
already in possession.  Native-born Americans! do
you not put your votes into the ballot-box just as 
fully and certainly now as you did before you admit-
ted foreigners to share in the right to the elective
franchise?  Do you not enjoy your religious opinions
just as well as since you have allowed Quakers and
Baptists to enjoy theirs?  And think you the proper-
ty you inherit, and the wages you earn, would be less
valuable to you, if every woman in the land had the
same right to hers?

We have already gone far enough in our reform
to see that there are two essential requisites in the 
condition of those women who are to carry it on, 
namely, health and wealth.

First, Health.  Napoleon said there was no such
ihng as making a soldier of a sick man.  Neither
can we have high-minded, noble, virtuous, brave wo-
men, so long as ignorant mothers and Parisian fools
are to decide on the size and cut of the frame-
work.  We have but little to hope from a generation
of women, whose vital organs are forced to perform
their revolutions in one-half the space required by
Nature.  Liberal dame! she has been gross enough
to make the manifestations of mind and matter har-
monize, and notions of freedom cannot be infused into
hearts that have no room to beat.  A woman with
lapped ribs and a diseased liver may make a religious 
enthusiast, a gloomy misanthrope, or a sentimental
voluptuary; but not a reformed of stern virtue -
clear in judgment and courageous in action.  There
is now a demand for a new type of womanhood.

We are daily assuming new positions - taking up
us new duties, and claiming the exercise of our civil
and political rights.  Let us see to it that we fit our-
selves for the places of trust we design to fill.

Second, Wealth.  Money is power.  To bring this
question before the people, we must have our conven-
tions, agents and papers; and funds are needful to do
this.  Many have never heard of this question of Wo-
man's Rights, and many more, from a want of an in-
telligent understanding of it, have met it with a sneer.
From the time of Judas down to our own day, man
has been remarkable for carrying the purse, and many
a woman, in her hour of need, has been betrayed by
its golden charms.  Now, man will not, of course,
help along a cause that he blindly supposes hostile to
his own interests.  So, what money we have, we must
make; and the question is, how are we to get this
last essential requisite?

I answer, by a change of employments.  The mass
of women in this country support themselves, and
although they work a life long, and, as a general
thing, sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, but very
few have, by their own industry, amassed fortunes.
And why:?  Because the employments they have
chosen are unprofitable, slavish and destructive.  In 
the Bill of Rights, in our glorious Declaration of In-
dependence - rights which our fathers decided belong-
ed to all Humanity - we find a right to life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness.  Now, if this pursuit
we take possession of all those profitable posts, where
the duties are light, which have heretofore been mo-
nopolized by man, we shall be only taking what be-
longs to us.  It is time we opened our eyes, and dived 
sufficiently deep into the abstruse science of survey-
ing to be able to define at least the boundaries of our
own sphere, and we shall no doubt find it extended
somewhat beyond the kitchen-door or garden-gate.
Yes, in proportion as we emerge from the thraldom
of ignorance and slavery, we shall find its limits 
gradually receding.  If, in the pursuit of happiness, 
we take possession of all the post-offices, daguerreo-
type rooms, telegraph offices, book, china, silk, lace
stores, &c., &c, we have an abundant excuse for what
seems the beginning of a most aggressive warfare, in
the fact that we have heretofore been crowded by
these lordly monopolizers almost off the footstep.
They have not only taken possession of the earth
and the fullness thereof, but they have created a pub-
lic sentiment, making Woman a kind of connecting
link between themselves and the angels, and assigned
her a sphere somewhere between mid earth and heaven.
But we, finding ourselves here, and unfortunately 
endowed with animal wants, quite like those of man, 
and having been provided with no chart of compass
to find that better land, and in search of it have in-
volved ourselves in more troubles than ever the


children of Israel experienced in their forty years' wandering, have at length decided to come to a dead halt, survey the ground, and retake, if possible, some of our lost possessions.  On looking round, my eye rests on one of those moving palaces on our Hudson River.  Now, what is a captain on one of these steamers called upon to do, that a woman might no do?  In case any passengers, for disorderly conduct, are to be put ashore, why, the captain merely gives the orders, and the hands execute.  In the discharge of any special duties of this sort, we might with the same propriety avail ourselves of the superior muscular power of hardy men, as we now do of their superior wisdom in discharging for us the high duties which belong to the exercise of the right to elective franchise.  Then there is the conductor on the railroad; a most enviable post, plenty of air, exercise, and two dollars a day.  Is not that better than starving on sixpence?  But, say you, these employments are too public for Women, inconsistent with true delicacy and refinement.  Talk of bread and not delicacy to the starving.  So long as life, with many is but one long struggle to keep the soul in its clay tenement, if any woman has the bad taste to prefer a pleasant sail on the beautiful river, or a swift trip on a train of cars, to stitching pantaloons in a garret, or cooking good dinners over a hot stove in a cellar, pray allow her, in the pursuit of her happiness, the same freedom of choice you claim for yourselves.  Suppose, in return for all Man's disinterested benevolence in bounding our sphere in a nut-shell, we prescribe one for him.  We say, Shame on you, with your noble brows, broad shoulders, brawny arms, to stand there behind a counter, selling a yard of tape, a child's dress, a woman's garter, or a baby's shoe!  Why do you not shoulder your axes and go off into the interminable forests of our Western Territories, and lay at your feet the lofty cedars and oaks that have so long waited your coming?  There, mid tall trees, vast rivers, and plains, in communion with great Nature, by hardship, honest toil, and a healthy enterprise, learn what it is to be man.  We hear much about the designs of the Creator.  I have an idea that we can understand his designs quite as well as man can.  They say we were all intended for mothers, 'to sit in the shade,' to be delicate and helpless, and to cheer man with our soft smiles in the hard labors of life.  The thirty thousand sewing women in New York city would, no doubt gladly seek some shady nook, where they might enjoy elegant leisure, perfect peace and rest, and they would smile sweetly, too, upon the band of chivalric men who would supply their every want.  But if the Women of our land are to be exempt from incessant toil, the All-Wise must have intended that every man should be a worker, out in the open air, in the broad sunshine, creating wealth, not merely exchanging it, digging it out from the bowels of the earth, and turning the vast plains, mighty rivers, and majestic forests of the new world into living gold.

Yours, truly,      E. C. STANTON
_____


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