Elizabeth Cady Stanton Address before 1st Convention National Women Suffrage Assoc. Washington, Jan. 19-20, 1869 [*252 In opening the first Convention held by the National Woman Suffrage Association in Washington after the Civil War, Jan. 19 + 20, 1869, Mrs. Stanton as President gave this address*] .1. In response to the call of the National woman's suffrage association read by our Secretary, we have assembled here to day to consider the progress of our cause throughout the country & the best mode of pressing forward the work in the future. I am glad to announce that delegates from many states are here ready to report what has been done in their several localities. The call contains one point of great & special importance to which I would invite your serious con- sideration. The executive committee recommend the friends of .2. woman's suffrage, to concentrate their efforts on a sixteenth amendment of the Federal Constitution, rather than on special action in their several states. There are two ways in which the women of this nation can secure the right of suffrage, one is by carrying the measure step by step year by year, [in the states;] amending state constitutions - the other by thrusting it at once on Congress, keeping it there a disturbing element until poli- ticians shall be compelled to make it a party question, thus ensure its success. .3. In the first case we should not only have the labor of going into every school district town, moved to teach ignorant unthinking women that they need the ballot; the men of their class how to use it, but we should place educated refined women, such as grace this platform to day in the humiliating position of supplicants at the feet of [foreign] serfs, peasants, plantation slaves paupers knaves drunkards all the ragged ignorant foreign and native riff raff in the country, praying them at 'their' good pleasure to grant the mothers, wives, & daughters of this 4 republic the rights privileges and immunities of American citizens. This will be our position in appealing to the people of the several states Let those who have the stomach for such work (I confess I have not) canvass every state from Maine to California & humbly ask Tom, Dick, Harry, to recognize such women as Lucretia Mott, Susan B Anthony & Anna Dickinson as their political equals, let them listen to their vulgar slang & puerile objections & party with them on their low plain until stung into that dignified self respect in which it is the first duty of every woman to day to entrench herself. This the the one point in our future work to which I ask 5 special attention because it is one few men see or feel & the one too on which woman can be the most easily roused to a sense of her degradation. In the other case we should hold protracted meeting in Washington with hearings before Joint Committees, & have our demands considered by the picked men of [Washington] the nation by such as Sumner Thurman Trumbull Carpenter Hamlin Paterson Pomeroy Julian Brooks Butler Lawrence Bingham to have our rights debated on the broad principles of justice on the theory of our government & not tried by the traditions & prejudices of the great unlettered, unwashed masses 5 1/2 Then too there is a poetic justice in compelling the same class who in the beginning put up the barriers against woman's enfranchisement to be the honored instruments now to take them down. We know that our Republican bretheren are growing very sensitive just now lest in enfranchising the women by passing a sixteenth amendment of the Federal constitution, they might violate the time honored state rights doctrine of the Democracy. But if on the eve of another Presidential Campaign they could be made to believe that they could construct the votes of the women as certainly as the colored vote, possibly their scruples might, for party success, be allayed a second time, [*258*] 6 Beside the two modes to which I have referred some of our friends suggest still a third which is by an appeal to the courts. They say there is nothing in the constitution [to day] to prevent women voting to day; that we should go to the polls & insist on exercising the right & if denied then test the law & get a decision of the whole matter in the Supreme Court of the United States. As the friends of woman suffrage in Missouri have taken the necessary steps to this end & the President of that association is with us to speak on that point. I shall leave to her the elaboration of that plan. You have heard by Mrs Wilburs very able report the steady progress that has been made from time to time on this [*259] 7 on this question, as we are about to merge our society into a broader union organization and as at the close of this session I retire from an official position that I have held many years as President of several different woman's associations, I may properly take a brief, general view of the grand steps [we have taken] achieved in the last quarter of a century towards the recognition of woman's individual sovereignty in the state, the church, & the home, As the faith of even the greatest souls will sometimes [*260*] 8 fail to penetrate the thick clouds of darkness in which our mortal lives are enclosed, it is nice occasionally to pause, & contrast the present with the past, to see what has been achieved, & thus gain new hope & inspiration for the work before us. When in 1848 Lucretia Mott and I, with a few other friends called the first woman's rights convention ever held in any country by the statute laws of all the states, except Louisiana where they had the Napoleon code, the civil & political condition of all married women was as degraded [*261*] 9. as that of the slaves on the southern plantation. Like them she had no rights of person, property, wages, children. The spirit of the old common law of England crystallized in our codes held all married women slaves in theory & save only by the humanity of husbands in special cases in practice also. The husband & wife [were] having been declared by Blackstone to be one (& that one the husband), all the marriage & divorce laws were based on that idea & the customs of barbarous ages [were] have been enforced in the 19th century. To day woman's individual sovereignty 10 in the state is recognized. She has the right in many states at her own pleasure to trample all odious marriage [laws] contracts beneath her feet, she can hold property, do business in her own name, control her earnings, keep a bank account, make contracts wills, sue & be sued, sit on juries, be mistresses of schools, commissioners & notary publics, vote in Kansas on schools & license laws & in Wyoming on all questions [?] there the ballot in her own right hand, that badge of nobility in this country, that sceptre of power, to the American citizen. [The right] With a prescience & persistency, that seemed like special inspiration, the right blow was struck 11. at the state in the very first convention, resting our claims not on the granting of certain favors or the redress of certain wrongs but, in demanding at the outset full political equality with the men of the nation, as will be seen in the following resolution. Resolved, "That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." That resolution I penned & presented in opposition to all the friends of the movement, even good Lucretia Mott, .12. [of the convention] said it was an extravagant demand [to] and would make our whole movement ridiculous. Though I had never spoken in public before yet, with the help of Frederick Douglass (whose moral sense had been quickened by the property law qualification for colored men in the state of New York), I carried that resolution. Twenty years of education have showed us that that resolution *crossed out 'struck'* touched the very center of women's wrongs and overtopped all the rest presented on that occasion. In that first convention in Seneca Halls, NY, we struck the key note of women's freedom the world over & to day leading men & women .13. Priests, Politicians, Philosophers & Philanthropists in all nations & 100,000 petitioners in the British [?] must echo back that demand that when first uttered was laughed at from Maine to California. That the battle in the state is newly fought [today, that it may be safely trusted with politicians with those who know how to organize popular thought, & lead numbers] is seen in the fact that Priests & Politicians, those who know how to organize popular thought, & lead numbers, are all vieing with each other, to see who to day shall stand at the helm of this movement. The province of those who lead thought differs widely from those who lead. (over) 14. In the church the woman’s individual sovereignty is recognized. The Methodist church has taken the initiative & fundamental step towards woman’s full equality, in the marriage relation, where the last & hardest battle for freedom remains to be fought. By a late ecclesiastical canon that denomination have abolished the word “obey” from their marriage ceremony. All praise to the Methodist church. I wonder if the Reverend Fathers see the deep significance & far reaching consequences of that noble act. In extending to women the right to vote on the question of lay delegation, the Methodist church has taken another step in the right direction. In many churches women are permitted to vote on all business 15 matters, to speak & pray in their public meetings, to fill the office of Deaconess & even to be ordained as pastors of congregations (to draw salaries) & administer the ordinances. To sing in the choir & play on the organ are privileges they have long enjoyed as Paul never chanced to say ”I suffer not a woman to sing in the churches.” Leading minds too in the church are now giving new & more liberal interpretations of holy writ recognizing the equality of the sexes making the declarations of Paul, Moses subordinate to the greater facts of progressive humanity 15 1/2 And yet how the Priests & papers howled twenty years ago when we made the first demand that christian men & women should enjoy equal rights in the church Clergy & religious Journals made one howl all over the country, to day, in those churches, where their rights are not accorded the women are in a condition of chronic rebellion. The most amazing, ludicrous ever [?] have been enacted at the very altars in some of our churches. I can recall one in my native town, in the Presbyterian church of which I am a member 16 The last stronghold of woman’s degradation, where her [?] chains are gilded and unseen when the Satan of lust hides mid luxury, silks, diamonds, is in the sacred enclosure of home. Political equality and religious liberty have always preceded social freedom, hence the subjection of woman to man, as dependent mistress or wife, says John Stuart Mill is the last form of slavery that will be abolished (because it’s heaviest chains are gilded & oft unseen — crossed out) from the earth. In demanding for woman the rights of citizens & saints in the state, the church we have been [?] the way all along for the higher, far more important 17 right: the sovereignty of her own person in the home. Conservatives who always see the last result of a new measure, more clearly than the radicals themselves said long ago, this woman’s rights movement is the inauguration of a social revolution which will abolish the institution of marriage!! That is the objection we are obliged to meet every day. That is the one that harmed our [?] friends in their late campaign in Vermont. That is the one Miss Anthony & I have met a thousand times in the West this winter & that is the one that most of the new workers in our cause to day declare we have nothing to do with & will not meet or answer. Lucy Stone struck a bold blow at the old institution 15 years ago when she accepted 18 the civil obligations of wife under protest repudiating even the name of her husband so sacredly did she hold her individual sovereignty against all human laws & customs. When the divorce laws were under consideration in the New York Legislature in 61, another blow was struck in the same direction by Ernestine L. Rose, Lucretia Mott, and myself that came near making New York as free soil for fugitive wives as Indiana & Connecticut are to day On that occasion we all pressed the justice of the bill then finding which provided divorce for cruel treatment Imprisonment, desertion, drunkness. & so convincing were the arguments & appeals made on that occasion that the bill lacked but a few votes of being carried. Did either of us protest against marriage per se? 19 Certainly not only against the present form that makes man master, woman slave The only [social, civil or political] revolution that we would Inaugurate is to make woman a self supporting, dignified, independent equal partner with man in the home the church & the state & one logically & naturally follows the other & the ballot is the key to all. The true social relation of man & woman is the momentous problem with which earnest minds are struggling today & though cowards & knaves turn from the subject & try to suppress the discussion, before the awful facts of life we all stand hardened or appalled. .20. The social vice with its festering wide spread corruption, disease , death of soul, body alike; our asylums for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the maimed, the halt, the idiot, the lunatic, the wholesale infanticide seduction, rape, divorce, incest in high places:-- lily hands strangling the moral monstrosities of a forced maternity:-- wives running to Indiana & Connecticut. like slaves to their Canada, paramours shot in broad daylight, our courts of justice -- with all sorts of vulgarity-- knavery and obscenity & leading Jeremiahs made the hunting ground of christian women who have dared to [shelter] feed & shelter these fugitives from marriages worse than plantation slavery, all these things & ten times more too horrible to consider like hidious ghosts of the outraged sentiments .21. sentiments, affections & amibitions of womanhood rise up on every side proclaiming that the dynasty of brute force must now yield to moral hisses & woman be set free: the absolute sovereign of her own person, her own affections, and her own home. In view of the moral slough in which the race is blindly floundering to day, pray do not insult the 19th century with any further talk of the headship of man in the family, -- for by his selfish indulgences gross appetites & bloated vices, he has forfeited all claims to that position. Look at the behavior of leading lawyers & Editors in the McFarland Richardson trial to which the attention of the entire nation is called today. Listen to x Horace Greeley 22 Every scoundrel who looks upon woman as an instrument of his lust & [?] aided one in distress except with intent to make her his prey rushes instinctively to the conclusion that Richardson was a seducer. He wants no evident of this but such as he finds in his own breast. And every one accustomed to look on a wife merely as a species of property where of the title cannot be alienated by abuse anymore than if she were a horse or a dog natural inclines to the same verdict. [*This is one of the grandest speeches I ever heard from the lips of man or woman-- I am proud that you are a woman--*] 276 22 the opinions of men in society & at home as well as in the courts & you will find that Judges lawyers Clergymen Journalist [all] alike talk as if all pure friendship between the sexes were impossible & as if every Husband owned the wife by his side without the least respect as to her feelings towards him. whatsoever On this point Horace Greeley has well said x Woman with awaking pride & self respect will not submit to the tyranny in the marriage relation they quietly endured a century ago. They may be dragged 277 .22. 1/2 into the courts a spectacle to [many] men & angels, there to be grossly questioned by vulgar unfeeling lawyers. They may have their children tore from them, their virtue [questioned] doubted, compelled to earn their own bread in the garrets & cellars of the Metropolis, but rather than live with the men they loathe & abhor when they once understand that their affections are more holy & binding than human institutions they will sacrifice ease luxury respectability, trample creeds codes customs under their feet. & sunder the ties, that bind them in false relations, like [niths?], with their own hands. Men may as well begin 278 . 23. to shape their ideas, lives & laws in harmony with this new development of womanhood. [Hanting?] paramours, divorce cases, & four weeks testimony on points that concern not the world to know, spread out in our daily Journals, serve[s] only to rouse the indignation of every woman who has two grains of pride to white heat against the whole idea on which all these persecutions are based. “The husbands right of property in woman” Southern laws protected the master in shooting any one who “tampered” with his slave & sent him a freeman to Canada. Public sentiment said the slave was contented & happy drudging in the rice fields, with the stripe 23 1/2 on his back, to come & go at the beck of his owner,- that nothing in his own suit could possibly suggest that any change whatever in his condition might be desirable He could never dream-- that beyond his narrow horizon of darkness & despair there might lay a world of light & love & freedom that it was not only his right but his duty to secure & enjoy. By northern laws, as seen in the cases of [Lukles] & [Coles], & probably M'Farland, the Husband may shoot the man that 'tampers' with his wife She is supposed to love & adore 24 to love & adore her Husband, like the slave to be contented & happy, the normal condition of slaves & women; but no matter what the character of the Husband, though an or a drunken debauched shiftless bloated drunkard, leaving wife & children in poverty & says: to suffer hunger & cold in a New York attic, victim of his daily outbursts of brutality & [ ] in of his stolid indifference and neglect let him be & do what he chooses, no other man shall have mercy on these helpless ones & the woman shall continue to be his wife as long as she lives say the laws of New York though her flesh crawl & her soul sicken whenever he enters her presence. Such is man's idea of the sacredness of the marriage institution 25 Do we not oh! women of the republic need to raise a higher purer better standard than this, on which to base the home, the church, & the state, for the family underlies all other institutions & how can you cement its ties but in the purity & virtue of both man & woman. In the present degradation of the mother of the race we have the cause of our social anarchy, [ ] bigotry, & political corruption. the art, the stratagem, the intrigue of our social life, necessary weapons of a subject class, are reflected in our commerce & legislation. The sorrow, self sacrifice despair [ ] of the unhappy mother are handed down, reappearing in every generation in weakness, deformity 292 26 depravity, in the unhappy victims that crowd our prisons & asylums all special reforms are hopeless surface work, but diffusing out the ocean until we begin here & there can be no vital change, until men & women understand and observe the great immutable laws that govern the most sacred of all human relations. John Stuart Mill says that one great result he looks for in the enfranchisement of humans, is a remedy for the present reckless propagation of the race by which so many evils are multiplied & perpetuated in an ignorance, folly to day 293 27 In closing I would say a word in defence of Susan B Anthony & myself against the complaints of Boston friends. They may be are [injurious?] offenses in word & deed, saying many things that should not be said & doing many things that should not be done, to all of which we plead guilty, the apostle Paul makes the same confession. But in the twenty years of faithful service in the cause of women, who can point to one duty left undone, one deadly breach not filled, one point of attack not seen & met. True we have oftimes rushed into the battle unarmed & unequipped, with [ ] 28 the pulpit, the press, temperance associations educational conventions Labor Congresses, agricultural fairs, persistently maintaining the right of women to an equal place & voice in all these assemblies, & now suppose that our outgoing, & incoming, were not always just as Mrs. Grundy thought they should be, what of it? Our revolutionary Fathers fought some of their battles with hoes & pitchforks before West Point was thought of & are not our liberties the sweeter to day for the irregularities with which the enthusiasm & necessities of the Fathers betrayed them? Perhaps George Washington in an hour of need might not have refused to fight 285 29 Great Britain beside George Francis Frain or to use his money in starting a paper to advocate the cause of of the Colonies. Away with these peccadilloes & personalities Let us rejoice in what is done, no matter for blunders blunders are human, it is a huge blunder that the majority of the people in the world were ever born, but nevertheless let us rejoice over the minority & make the best of what remains. These are not the times to carp & criticize one another but to be grateful for the signs of progress in the old world & the new. With the right to vote & sit on juries here & a bill for woman's suffrage [passed?] to a second reading by a large 296 30 majority in the British parliament with the good news that has just come to us from the youngest civilization of the West, already echoed back from old England shores, verily the new day for which we have so long waited & watched is dawning: -- lo! the sunlight on the wild mountain tops of Wyoming is gilding the venerable [?] of St Paul Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.