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POLITICAL SCIENCE STUDY SERIES
Vol.
4.
SPEECHES
of
George William Curtis
AND
Henry Ward Beecher
PUBLISHED FOR
THE NATIONAL AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION
107 WORLD BUILDING, NEW YORK
Entered at Post-office, New York, N. Y., as second-class mail matter.
Issued quarterly, $1.45 per annum. 25 cents single copy.
EX LIBRIS
Carrie Chapman Catt
I have six honest serving men,
They taught me an I knew,
Their names are Why&What&When
And How&Where&Who.
Section
No.
SPEECHES
of
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
HENRY WARD BEECHER
New York:
THE NATIONAL-AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION
107 WORLD BUILDING
1898
Equal Rights for Women,
George William Curtis
1
Fair Play for Women,
George William Curtis
38
Woman's Duty to Vote,
Henry Ward Beecher
61
The
Convention resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole on the report of the Committee on the Right of Suffrage and the Qualifications to Hold Office, Mr.
Alvord,
of Onondaga, in the Chair.
The
Chairman
announced the question to be on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Cayuga Mr. C.C.
Dwight.
Mr.
Curtis
offered the following amendment:
“In the first section, strike out the word ‘male,’ and wherever in that section the word ‘he’ occurs, add ‘or she,’ and wherever the word ‘his’ occurs, add ‘or her.’”
Mr.
Curtis
—In proposing a change so new to our political practice, but so harmonious with the spirit and principles of our government, it is only just that I should attempt to show that it is neither repugnant to reason nor hurtful to the state. Yet I confess some embarrassment, for while the essential reason of the proposition seems to me to be clearly defined, the objection to
The historical fact is that the usurping class, as Gibbon calls them, have always regulated the position of women by their own theories and convenience. The barbaric Persian, for instance, punished an insult to the woman with death, not because of her, but of himself. him.
And the civilized English Blackstone only repeats the barbaric Persian when he says that the wife and husband form but one person—that is, the husband. Sir, it would be extremely amusing, if it were not tragical, to trace the consequences of this theory on human society and the unhappy effect upon the progress of civilization of this morbid estimate of the importance of men. Gibbon gives a curious instance of it, and an instance which recalls the spirit of the modern English laws of divorce. There was a temple in Rome to the Goddess who presided over the peace of marriages. “But,” says the historian, “her very name, Viriplaca—the appeaser of husbands—show that repentance and submission were always expected from the wife,”—as if the offense usually came from her. In the “Lawe's resolution of Women's Rights,” published in the year 1632, a book which I have not seen, but of which there are copies in the country, the anonymous and quaint author says and with a sly satire: “It is true that man and woman are one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name: it is carried and recarried with the new associate: it beareth no sway—it possesseth nothing during coverture. A woman as soon as she is married is called
covert:
in Latine,
nupla
—that is, veiled; as it were, overclouded and shadowed; she hath lost her streame. I may more truly farre away, say to a married woman, her new self is her superior; her companion, her master. * * See here
From this theory of ancient society, that woman is absorbed in man, that she is a social inferior and a subordinate part of man, springs the system of laws in regard to woman which in every civilized country is now in course of such rapid modification, and it is this theory which so tenaciously lingers as a traditional prejudice in our political customs. But a State which, like New York, recognizes the equal individual rights of all its members, declaring that none of them shall be disfranchised unless by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers, and which acknowledges women as property-holders and taxable, responsible citizens, has wholly renounced the old Feudal and Pagan theory, and has no right to continue the evil condition which springs from it. The honorable and eloquent gentleman from Onondaga said that he favored every enlargement of the franchise consistent with the safety of the State. Sir, I heartily agree with him, and it was the duty of the committee in proposing to continue the exclusion of women, to show that it is necessary to the welfare and safety of the State that the whole sex shall be disfranchised. It is in vain for the Committee to say that I ask for an enlargement of the franchise and must therefore show the reason. Sir, I show the reason upon which this franchise itself rests, and which, in its very nature, forbids
I have no wish to refine curiously upon the origin of government. If any one insists, with the honorable gentleman from Broome that there are no such things as natural political rights, and that no man is a born voter, I will not now stop to argue with him; but as I believe the honorable gentlemen from Broome is by profession a physician and surgeon, I will suggest to him that if no man is born a voter, so no man is born a man—for every man is born a baby. But he
is
born with the right of becoming a man without hindrance; and I ask the honorable gentlemen, as an American citizen and political philosopher, whether, if every man is not born a voter, he is not born with right of becoming a voter upon equal terms with other men? What else is the meaning of the phrase which I find in the New York
Tribune
of Monday, and have so often found there: “The radical basis of government is equal right for all citizens.”
There are, as I think we shall all admit, some kinds of natural rights. This Summer air that breathes benignant around our national anniversary, is vocal with the traditional eloquence with which those rights were asserted by our fathers. From all the burning words of the time I quote those of Alexander Hamilton, of New York, in reply, as my honorable friend the Chairman of the Committee will remember, to the Tory farmer of Westchester: “The sacred rights of mankind are not not
deal in glittering generalities, and the Declaration of Independence was
not
the passionate manifesto of a revolutionary war, but the calm and simple statement of a new political philosophy and practice.
The rights which they declared to be inalienable are indeed what are usually called natural, as distinguished from political rights, but they are not limited by sex. A woman has the same right to her life, liberty and property that a man has, and she has consequently the same right to an equality of protection that he has; and this,
Every person, then, is born with an equal claim to every kind of protection of his natural rights which any other person enjoys. The practical question, therefore, is, How shall this protection be best attained? and this is the question of government which, according to the Declaration, is established for the security of these rights. The British theory was that they could better be secured by an intelligent few than by the ignorant and passionate multitude. Goldsmith expressed it in singing:
“For just experience shows in every soil,
That those who think must govern those who toil.”
But nobody denies that the government of the best is the best government; the only question is how to find the best, and common sense replies:
“The good, ‘tis true, are heaven's peculiar care,
But who but heaven shall show us who they are?”
Our fathers answered the question of the best and surest protection of natural right by their famous phrase,
Now these terms cannot rightfully be arbitrary. But the argument of the honorable gentleman from Schenectady, whose lucid and dignified discourse needs no praise of mine, and the arguments of others who have derived government from society, seemed to assume that the political people may exclude and include at their pleasure; that they may establish purely arbitrary tests, such as height, or weight, or color, or sex. This was substantially the squatter sovereignty of Mr. Douglas, who held that the male white majority of the settlers in a territory might deprive a colored minority of all their rights whatever; and he declared that they had the right to do it. The same right that this Convention has to hang me at this moment to that chandelier, but no other right. Brute force, sir, may do anything; but we are speaking of rights, and of rights under this government, and I deny that the people of the State of New York can rightfully, that is, according to right reason and the principles of this government derived from it,
permanently
exclude any class of persons or any person whatever from a voice in the government, unless it can be
The Chairman of the Committee asked Miss Anthony the other evening whether, if suffrage were a natural right, it could be denied to children? Her answer seemed to me perfectly satisfactory. She said simply, “all that we ask is an equal and not an arbitrary regulation. If
you
have the right,
we
have it.” The honorable Chairman would hardly deny that to regulate the exercise of a right according to obvious reason and experience is one thing, to deny it absolutely and forever is another. And this is the safe practical rule of our government, as James Madison expressed it, that “it be derived from the great body of the people, not from an inconsiderable portion or favored class of it.” When Mr. Gladstone, in his famous speech that startled England, said, in effect, that no one could be justly excluded from the franchise, except upon grounds of personal unfitness or public danger, he merely echoed the sentiment of Joseph Warren, which is gradually seen to be the wisest and most practical political philosophy: “I would have such a government as should give every man the greatest liberty to do what he chooses, consistent with restraining him from doing any injury to another.” Is not that the kind of government, sir, which we wish to propose for this State? And if every person in New York has a natural right to life, liberty and property, and a co-existent claim to a share in the government which defends them, regulate only by perfectly equitable conditions, what are the practical grounds upon
It is alleged that women are already represented by men. Where are they so represented, and when was the choice made? If I am told that they are virtually represented, I reply with James Otis, that “no such phrase as virtual representation is known in law of Constitution. It is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd.” I repeat, if they are represented, when was the choice made? Nobody pretends that they have ever been consulted. It is a mere assumption to the effect that the interest and affection of men will lead them to just and wise legislation for women as well as for themselves. But this is merely the old appeal for the political power of a class. It is just what the British Parliament said to the colonies a hundred years ago. “We are all under the same government,” they said; “Our interests are identical; we are all Britons; Britannia rules the wave; God save the King, and down with edition and Sons of Liberty.” The Colonies chafed and indignantly protested, because the assumption that therefore fair laws were made was not true.; because they were discovering for themselves what every nation has discovered—the truth that shakes England to-day, and brings Disraeli and the Tory party to their knees, and has already brought this country to blood, that there is no class of citizens, and no single citizen who can safely be intrusted with the permanent and exclusive possession of political power. “There is no instance on record,” says Buckle, in his history of civilization in
We ask women to confide in us, as having the same interests with them. Did any deposit ever say anything else? and if it be safe or proper for any intelligent part of the people to relinquish exclusive political power to any class, I ask the Committee who propose that women should be compelled to do this, to what their
power, and what they would do if any class attempted to usurp that power? They know, as we all know, as our own experience has taught us, that the only security of natural right is the ballot. They know, and the instinct of the whole loyal land knows, that when we had abolished slavery, the emancipation could be completed and secured only by the ballot in the hands of the emancipated class. Civil rights were a mere mocking name until political power gave them substance. A year ago Governor Orr, of South Carolina, told us that the rights of the freedmen were safest in the hands of their old masters. “Will you walk into my parlor? said the spider to the fly.” New Orleans, Memphis, and countless and constant crimes, showed what that safety was. Then, hesitating no longer, the nation handed the ballot to the freedmen, and said, “protect yourselves!” And now Governor Orr says that the part of wisdom for South Carolina is to cut loose from all parties and make a cordial alliance with the colored citizens. Governor Orr knows that a man with civil rights merely is a blank cartridge. Give him the ballot, and you add a bullet, and make him effective. In that section of the country, seething with old hatreds and wounded pride and a social system upheaved from the foundation, no other measure could have done for real pacification in a century what the mere promise of the ballot has done in a year. The one formidable peril in the whole subject of reconstruction has been the chance that Congress would continue in
If I am asked what do women want the ballot for? I answer the question with another, what do men want it for? Why do the British workmen at this moment so urgently demand it? Look into the British laws regulating labor and you will see why. They want the ballot because the laws affecting labor and capital are made by the capitalist class alone and are therefore unjust. I do not forget the progressive legislation of New York in regard to the rights of women. The property bill of 1860 and its supplement, according to the New York
Tribune,
redeemed five thousand women from pauperism. In the next year Illinois put women in the same position with men as far as property rights and remedies are concerned. I mentioned these facts with pleasure, as I read that Louis Napoleon will, under certain conditions, permit the French people to say what they think. But if such reforms are desirable they would certainly have been sooner and more wisely affected could women have been a positive political power. Upon this point one honorable gentleman asked Mrs. Stanton whether the laws both for men and women were not constantly improving, and whether, therefore, it was not unfair to attribute the character of the laws about women to the fact that men made them. The reply is very evident. If women alone made the laws, legislation for both men and women would undoubtedly be progressive. Does the honorable gentleman think, therefore, that women only should make the laws?
It is not true, Mr. Chairman, that in the ordinary and honorable sense of the words women are represented. Laws are made for them by another class and upon the theories which that class, without the fear of political opposition, may choose to entertain, and in direct violation of the principles upon which, in their own case, they tenaciously insist. I live, sir, in the county of Richmond. It has a population of some 27,000 persons. They own property and manage it. They are taxed and pay their taxes, and they fulfil the duties of citizens with average fidelity. But if the Committee had introduced a clause into the section they propose to this effect: “Provided that idiots, lunatics, persons under guardianship, felons, inhabitants of the county of Richmond and persons convicted of bribery, shall not be entitled to vote”—they would not have proposed a more monstrous injustice nor a grosser inconsistency with every fundamental right and American principle than in the clause they recommend; and in that case, sir, what do you suppose would have been my reception had I returned to my friends and neighbors, and had said to them, “the Convention thinks that you are virtually represented by the voters of Westchester and Chautauqua.”
Mr. Chairman, I have no superstition about the ballot. I do not suppose it would immediately right all the wrongs of women, any more than it has righted all those of men. But what political agency has righted so many? Here are thousands of miserable men all around us; but they have every path opened to them; kind
of advantage it gives to one sex, it would give to the other. It would arm it with the most powerful weapon known to political society; it would maintain the natural balance of the sexes in human affairs, and secure to each fair play within its sphere.
But, sir, the Committee tell us that the suffrage of women would be a revolutionary innovation—it would disturb the venerable traditions. Well, sir, about the year 1790, women were first recognized as school teachers in Massachusetts. At that time the New England “schoolmarm,” and I use the word with affectionate respect, was a revolutionary innovation. She has been abroad ever since, and has been by no means the least efficient, but always the most modest and unnoticed of the great civilizing influences in this country. Innovation—why, sir, when Sir Samuel Romilly proposed to abolish the death penalty for stealing a handkerchief, the law officers of the Crown said it would endanger the whole criminal law of England. When the bill abolishing the slave trade passed the House of Lords, is
new, in the extent proposed. It is as new as the harvest after the sowing, and it is as natural. The reduction of rights, long denied or withheld, never made a social convulsion. That is produced by refusing them. The West Indian slaves received their liberty, praying upon their knees; and the influence of the enfranchisement of women will glide into society as noiselessly as the dawn increase into day.
Or shall I be told that women, if not numerically counted at the pools, do yet exert an immense influence upon politics, and do not really need the ballot? If this argument were seriously urged, I should suffer my eyes to move through this chamber and they would show me many honorable gentlemen of reputed political influence. May they, therefore, be properly and justly disfranchised? I ask the honorable Chairman of the Committee, whether he thinks that a citizen should have no vote because he has influence? What gives influence? Ability, intelligence, honesty. Are these to be excluded from the polls? Is it only stupidity, ignorance and rascality which ought to possess political power?
Or will it be said that women do not want the ballot and ought to be asked? And upon what principle ought they to be asked? When natural rights or their means of defence have been immemorially denied to a large class, does humanity, or justice, or good sense require that they should be registered and called to vote upon their own restoration? Why, Mr. Chairman, it might one
woman who is taxed of her equal representation, or one innocent person of the equal protection of his life and liberty?
Shall nothing ever be done by statesmen until wrongs are so intolerable that they take society by the throat? Did it show the wisdom of British Conservatism that it waited to grant the Reform bill of 1832 until England hung upon the edge of the civil war? When women and children were worked sixteen hours a day in English factories, did it show practical good sense to delay a “short time” bill until hundreds of thousands of starving workmen agreed to starve yet more, if need be, to relieve the overwork of their families, and until the most pitiful procession the sun ever shone upon, that of the factory children, just as they left their work, marched through the streets of Manchester, that burst into sobs and tears at the sight? Yet if, in such instances, where there was so plausible an adverse appeal founded upon vested interests and upon the very theory of the government, it was unwise to wait until a general public outcry imperatively demanded the reform, how wholly needless to delay in this State a measure which is the natural result of our most cherished principles, and which threatens to disturb or injure nothing whatever.
But I shall be told, in the language of the Report of the Committee, that the proposition is openly at war with the distribution of functions and duties between the sexes. Translated into English, Mr. Chairman, this means that it is unwomanly to vote. Well, sir, I know that at the very mention of the political rights of women, there arises in many minds a dreadful vision of a mighty exodus of the whole female world, in bloomers and spectacles, from the nursery and the kitchen to the polls. It seems to be thought that if women practically took part in politics, the home would be left a howling wilderness of cradles and a chaos of undarned stockings and buttonless shirts. But how is it with men? Do they desert their workshops, their plows and offices, to pass their time at the polls? Is it a credit to a man to be called a professional politician? The pursuits of men in the world. to which they are directed by the natural aptitude of sex, and to which they must devote their lives, are as foreign from political functions as those of women. To take an extreme case: there is nothing more incompatible with political duties in cooking and taking care of children than there is in digging ditches or making shoes, or in any other
The reply to the assertion that participation in political power is unwomanly, and tends to subvert the family relation, is simply and unanswerable. It is that we cannot know what is womanly until we see the folly of insisting that the theories of men settle the question. We is
womanly in the same sense that we know what is manly, only when women have the same equality of development and the same liberty of choice as men. The amendment I offer is merely a prayer that you will remove from women a disability, and secure to them the same freedom of choice that we enjoy. If the instincts of sex, of maternity, of domesticity, are not persuasive enough to keep them in the truest sense women, it is the most serious defect yet discovered in the divine order of nature.
When, therefore, the Committee declare that voting is at war with the distribution of functions between the sexes, what do they mean? Are not women as much interested in good government as men? There is fraud in the Legislature; there is corruption in the Courts; there are hospitals, and tenement-house, and prisons; there are gambling-houses, and billiard-rooms, and brothels; there are grog-shops at every corner, and I know not what enormous proportion of crime in the state proceeds from them; there are forty thousand drunkards in the State, and their hundreds of thousands of children—all these things are subjects of legislation, and under the exclusive legislation of men the crime associated with all these things becomes vast and complicated. Have the wives and mothers and sisters of New York less vital interest in them, less practical knowledge of them and their proper treatment than the husbands and fathers? No man is so insane as to
But if women vote, they must sit on juries. Why not? Nothing is plainer than that thousands of women
But, the objectors continue, would you have women hold office? If they are capable and desirous, why not? They hold office now most acceptably. In my immediate neighborhood a postmistress has been so faithful an officer for seven years, that when there was a rumor of her removal, it was a matter of public concern. This is a familiar instance in this country. Scott's “Antiquary” shows that a similar service was not unknown in Scotland. In Notes and Queries ten years ago (Vol. II., Sec. 2, 1856, pp. 83, 204), Alexander Andrews says: “It was by no means unusual for females to serve the office of overseer in small rural parishes,” and a communication in the same publication (1st series, Vol. II., p. 383), speaks of a curious entry in the Harleian Miscellany (MS. 980, fol. 153): “The Countees of Richmond, mother to Henry VII., was a Justice of the Peace. Mr. Atturney said if it was so, it ought to have been by commission, for which he had made many an hower's search for the record, but could never find it, but he had seen many arbitriments that were made by her. Justice Joanes affirmed that he had often heard from his mother of the Lady Bartlett, mother to the Lord Bartlett, that she was a Justice of the Peace, and did set usually upon the bench with the other Justices in Gloucestershire; that she was made so by Queen Mary, upon her complaint to her of the injuries she sustained by some of that county, and desiring for redness thereof; that as she, herself, was Chief-Justice of all gladio cineta.”
The Countess of Pembroke was hereditary Sheriff of Westmoreland, and exercised her office. Henry the Eight granted a commission of inquiry, under the great seal, to Lady Ann Berkeley, who opened it at Gloucester and passed sentence under it. Henry Eight's daughter, Elizabeth Tudor, was Queen of England, in name and in fact, during the most illustration epoch of English history. Was Elizabeth incompetent? Did Elizabeth unsex herself? Or do you say that she was an exceptional woman? So she was, but no more an exceptional woman than Alfred, Marcus Aurelius or Napoleon were exceptional men. It was held by some of the old English writers that a woman might serve in almost any of the great offices of the Kingdom. And indeed if Victoria may deliberate in council with her ministers, why may not any intelligent English woman deliberate in Parliament or any such American woman in Congress?
I mention Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, Catherine, and all the famous Empresses and Queens, not to prove the capacity of women for the most arduous and responsible office, for that is undeniable, but to show the hollowness of the assertion that there is an instinctive objection to the fulfillment of such offices by women. Men who say so, do not really think so. The whole history
The capacity for making laws is necessarily assumed when women are permitted to hold and manage property and to submit to taxation. How often the woman, widowed or married or single, is the guiding genius of the family—educating the children, directing the estate, originating, counselling, deciding. Is there anything essentially different in such duties and the powers necessary to perform them from the functions of legislation? In New Jersey the Constitution of 1776 admitted to vote all inhabitants of a certain age, residence and property. In 1797, in an act to regulate elections the ninth section provides: “Every voter shall openly and in full view deliver his or her ballot, which shall be
But would you, seriously, I am asked, would you drag women down into the mire of politics? No, sir, I would have them lift us out of it. The duty of this Convention is to devise means for the improvement of the government of this State. Now the science of government is not an ignoble science, and the practice of politics is not necessarily mean and degrading. If the making and administering of law has become so corrupt as to justify calling politics filthy, and a thing with which no clean hands can meddle without danger, may we not wisely remember, as we begin our work of purification, that politics have been wholly managed by men? How can we purify them? Is there no radical method, no force yet untried, a power not only of skilful cheeks which I do not undervalue, but of controlling character? Mr. Chairman, if we sat in this chamber with closed windows until the air became thick and fetid, should we not be fools if we brought in deodorizers—if we sprinkled chloride of lime and burned assafœtida, while we disdained the great purifier? If we would cleanse the foul chamber, let us throw the windows wide open, and the sweet summer air would sweep all impurity away and fill our lungs with fresher life. If we would purge politics let us turn upon them the great stream of the purest human influence we know.
But I hear some one say, if they vote they must do military duty. Undoubtedly when a nation goes to war it may rightfully claim the service of all its citizens, men and women. But the question of fighting is not the blow merely, but its quality and persistence. The important point is, to make the blow effective. Did any brave Englishman who rode in the jaws of death at Balaklava serve England on the field more truly than Florence Nightingale? That which sustains and serves and repairs the physical force is just as essential as the force itself. Thus the law, in view of the moral service they are supposed to render, excuses clergymen from the field, and in the field it details ten per cent. of the army to serve the rest, and they do not carry muskets nor fight. Women, as citizens, have always done, and always will do, that work in the public defence for which their sex peculiarly fits them, and men do no more. The care of the young warriors, the nameless and innumerable duties of the hospital and home, are just as essential to the national safety as fighting in the field. A nation of men alone could not carry on a contest any longer than a nation of women. Each would be obliged to divide its forces and delegate half to the duties of the other sex.
But while the physical services of war are equally divided between the sexes, the moral forces are stronger with women. It was the women of the South, we are constantly and doubtless very truly told, who ustained the rebellion, and certainly without the women of the North the government had not been saved. From the
I again appeal to my honorable friend the Chairman of the Committee. He was made the land ring with his cry of universal suffrage and universal amnesty. Suffrage
Mr. Chairman, I have thus stated what I conceive to be the essential reasonableness of the amendment which I have offered. It is not good for man to be alone. United with woman in the creation of human society, their rights and interests in its government are identical; nor can the highest and truest development of society
Mr. Curtis's
amendment, in Committee of the whole, received 24 Ayes against 63 Nays; and on the final vote in the Convention, 19 Ayes against 125 Nays.
Ladies and Gentlemen
:—It is pleasant to see this large assembly, and this generous spirit, for it is by precisely such meetings as this that public opinion is first awakened, and public action is at last secured. Our question is essentially an American question. It concerns women, but it is not one of chivalry, nor of gallantry. It is a demand for equal rights, and will therefore be heard. Whenever a free and intelligent people asks any question, involving human rights, or liberty, or development, it will ask louder and louder, until it is answered. The conscience of this nation sits in the way like a sphinx, proposing its riddle of true democracy. President and parties, conventions, caucuses and candidates, failing to guess it, are remorselessly consumed. Forty years ago, that conscience asked, “Do men have fair play in this country?” A burst of contemptuous laughter was the reply. “Fair play! It is the very country of fair play;” and the indignant land, drunk with prosperity and ease, turned its back. Louder and
That same conscience sits in the way to-day. It asks another question,—“Do women have fair play in this country?” As before, a sneer or a smile of derision may ripple from one end of the land to the other; but that question will swell louder and louder, until it is answered by the ballot in the hands of every citizen, and by the perfect vindication of the American fundamental principle, that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” [Applause.] By its very nature, however, the progress of this reform will differ from every other political movement. Behind every demand for the enlargement of the suffrage, hitherto there was always a threat. It involved possible anarchy and blood. When the question agitated England, in 1832, Sir Wm. Napier said that the country guivered on the verge of civil war. The voice of the disfranchised class was muttering thunder around the horizon, and by the lightning of its eyes, the British statesmen read the necessity of speedy action. But this reform hides no menace. It lies wholly in the sphere of reason. It is a demand for justice, as the best political policy; an appeal for equality of rights
As Sidney Smith said sixty years ago, in urging the claims of women to a higher education, “Nothing is more common or more stupid than to take the actual for the possible—to believe that all which
is
is all that can be; first, to laugh at every proposed deviation from practice as impossible, then, when it is carried into effect, to be astonished that it did not take place before.” That I suppose is the reason why—now that the Fifteenth Amendment is officially adopted—we discover that there were so many original Abolitionists, and while were piously grateful for their number, we can only wonder that, being so many, they did not earlier do their work. [Applause]
I say that the movement is a plea for justice, and I assert that the equal rights of women, not as citizens, but as human beings, have never been acknowledge. There is no audacity so insolent, no tyranny so wanton, no inhumanity so revolving, as the spirit which
Gibbon, certainly as profound a student of the history of the race as any that we know, says distinctly, “that the wisest or the strongest of the sexes has always usurped the cares and duties of the state, and has confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.” And Montaigne, the shrewdest and most passionless of the observers and critics of society, says, “Women are not at all to blame when they refuse the rules of life that are introduced into the world, forasmuch as the men made them without their consent.”
This is true of every condition of society and of every period. Edward, Lear, the artist, traveling in Greece, says that he was one day jogging along with an Altanian peasant, who said to him, “Women are really better than donkeys for carrying burdens, but not so good as mules.” This was the honest opinion of barbarism—the honest feeling of Greece to-day.
You say that the peasant was uncivilized. Very well. Go back to the age of Pericles. It is the high noon of Greek civilization. It is Athens—“the eye of Greece—mother of arts.” There stands the great orator—himself incarnate Greece—speaking the oration over the Pelopoanesian dead. “The greatest glory of woman,” he says, “is to be the least talked of among men.” So said Pericles, when he lived. Had Pericles lived to-day he
These were the old Greeks. Will you have Rome? The chief monument of Roman civilization is its law—which underlies our own; and Buckle quotes the great commentator on that law as saying that it was the distinction of the Roman law that it treated women not as persons, but as things. Or go to the most ancient civilization; to China, which was old when Greece and Rome were young. The famous French Jesuit missionary, Abbé Huc, mentions on of the most tragical facts recorded—that there is in China a class of women who hold that if they are only true to certain vows during this life, they shall, as a reward, change their form after death and return to earth as men. This distinguished traveler also says that he was one day talking with a certain Master Ting, a very shrewd Chinaman, whom he as endeavoring to convert. “But,” said Ting, “what is the special object of your preaching Christianity?” “Why, to convert you, and save your soul,” said the Abbé. “Well, then, why do you try to convert the women?” asked Master Ting. “To save their souls,” said
Such were the three old civilizations. Do you think we can disembarrass ourselves of history? Our civilization grows upon roots that spring from the remotest past; and our life, proud as we are of it, is bound up with that of Greece and Rome. Do you think the spirit of our society is wholly different? Let us see. It was my good fortune, only a few weeks ago, to be invited to address the students of Vassar College at Poughkeepsie, which you will remember is devoted exclusively to the higher education of women. As I stood in those ample halls, and thought of that studious household, of the observatory and its occupants, it seemed to me that, like the German naturalist, who, wandering in the valley of the Amazon, came suddenly upon the
Victoria Regia
—the finest blossom on the globe—so there, in the valley of the Hudson, I had come upon one of the finest flowers of our civilization. But in the midst of my enthusiasm I was told by the President that this was the first fully endowed college for women in the world; and from that moment I was alarmed. From behind every door, every tree, I expected to see good Master Ting springing out with his “Hi! hi! you laugh at us Chinese barbarians; you call yourselves in America the head of civilization; you claim that the glory of
Within the last fortnight an advocate, pleading for his client before a jury, spoke of him as a man who owned his wife! Nor have I seen a single word of comment or surprise in the press of this city. Take any familiar illustration of the same feeling. You open your morning paper, and read that on the previous evening there was a meeting of intelligent and experienced women, with some that were not so, which is true of all general meetings of men and women; and these persons demanded the same liberty of choice, and an equal opportunity with all other members of society. As we read the report we see that there was a great deal of extravagant rhetoric and weak argument and sentimental appeal, which only shows more and more that it was exactly like the public meetings of men.
If only those persons could properly hold meetings and speak in public who talk nothing but reason and common-sense, the flood-gates of popular oratory in
But in the very next column of the same morning paper we find another report, describing a public dinner, at which men only were present. And we read that after the great orators had made their great speeches, in the course of which they complimented woman so prettily, to the delight of the few privileged ladies who stood behind the screens, or looked over the balcony, or peeped in through the cracks of the windows and doors; and when the great orators had retired with the President, amid universal applause, the first Vice-President took the head of the table, punch was brought in, and well towards morning, when the “army,” and “navy,” and “the press,” and the “Common Council,” had been toasted and drank, with three times three, and Richard Swiveller, Esq., had sung his celebrated song, “Queen of my soul!” the last regular toast was proposed—“Woman—Heaven's last, best gift to man,” which was received
This report is not read with great derision or laughter. It is not felt that by this performance women have been insulted and degraded. Gulliver does not take these men on his hands, and smile or sneer at them as unmanly and vulgar; and these very gentlemen who took part in the dinner, and who—thanks to these gentlemen at this table, [pointing to the reporters’ table]—read, the very next morning, with profound complacency, the report of their evening's proceedings, presently turn to the column in which the report of the woman's meeting is recorded, and instantly rail at the shameless women who renounce their sex, and immodestly forget the sphere to which God had appointed them. And just here, in this feeling, is the spring of the latent hostility—the jesting indifference to the question. It is that political enfranchisement is not considered necessary to the discharge to those duties, which men choose to regard as the proper duties of women. I know of no subject upon which so much intolerable nonsense
Here, at this moment, in this audience, I have no doubt there is many a man who is exclaiming with fervor—“Home, the heaven-appointed sphere of woman.” Very well. I don't deny it, but how do you know it? How
can
you know it? There is but one law by which any sphere can be determined, and that is perfect liberty of development. If a man says to me that it is the nature of molten lead to run into bullets, and I know nothing about lead, I may believe him until I suddenly detect a bullet mould in his pocket. Then I see that it is the interest of that man that molten lead should run into bullets; and what he calls the nature of lead is merely his own advantage. So I look into history and into the society around me, and I see that the position of women which is most agreeable upon the whole to men is that which they call the “heaven-appointed sphere” of woman. It may or may not be so; all that I can see thus far is that men choose to have it so. Or another gentleman remarks that it is a beautiful ordinance of Providence that pear-trees should grow like vines. And when I say, “Is it so?” he takes me into his garden, and shows me a poor, tortured pear-tree, trained upon a trellis. Then I see that it is the beautiful design of Providence that pear-trees should grow like vines, precisely as Providence ordains that Chinese
You see these flowers upon this table. If your good fortune takes you beyond the city at this moment you will see them everywhere. May-day is but just gone by; and the fields, the woods, the river banks, renew their summer splendor. Now, if ever, you understand the exquisite music of Shakespare's song:
“Hark! hark! the lark at haven's gate sings,
And Phœbus ‘gins arise;
His steeds to water at those springs
On chalic'd flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes.”
Has nature ordained that the lark shall rise fluttering and singing to the sun in spring? But how should we ever know it, if he were prisoned in a case with wires of gold never so delicate, or tied with a silken string however slight and soft? Is it the nature of flowers to open to the south wind? How could we know it but that, unconstrained by art, their winking eyes respond to that soft breath? In like manner, what determines the sphere of any morally responsible being, but perfect liberty of choice and liberty of development? Take those away, and you have taken away the possibility of determining the sphere. How do I know my sphere as
When men gravely assemble to assert their rights and their claims to what they feel to be justly theirs—to the widest personal liberty, to the amplest education, to the pursuit of every honorable profession, to an equal share in the political control of society, to do, in fact, whatever God has given them the will and the power innocently to do, can you conceive anything more comical than a sudden protest from women that they are forgetting their sphere—deserting the duties which providence had assigned them—and becoming unmanly and vulgar?
There is something quite as comical, and that is men saying it to women. It is not the business of either sex to theorize about the sphere of the other. It is the duty of each to secure the liberty of both. Give women, for instance, every opportunity of education that men have. If there are some branches of knowledge improper for them to acquire—some which are in their nature unwomanly—they will know it a thousand-fold better than men. And if, having opened the college, there be some woman in whom the love of learning extinguishes all other love, then the heaven-appointed sphere of that woman is not the nursery. It may be the laboratory, the library, the observation; it may be the platform or the Senate. And if it be either of these, shall we say that education has unsphered and unsexed her? On the contrary, it has enabled that woman to
It is not the duty of men to keep women ignorant that they may continue to be women. But they have as much right to restrict their liberty of choice in education, as in any other direction.
The Woman's rights movement is the simple claim, that the same opportunity and liberty that a man has in civilized society shall be extended to the woman who stands at his side—equal or unequal in special powers, but an equal member of society. She must prove her power as he proves his. When Rosa Bonheur paints a vigorous and admirable picture of Normandy horses, she proves that she has a hundred-fold more right to do it than scores of botchers and bunglers in color, who wear coast and trousers, and whose right, therefore, nobody questions. When the Misses Blackwell, or Miss Zachyzewska, or Miss Hunt, or Miss Preston, or Miss Avery, accomplishing themselves in medicine, with a firm hand and a clear brain, carry the balm of life to suffering men, women and children,it is as much their right to do it—as much their sphere—as it is that of any long-haired, sallow, dissipated boy in spectacles, who hisses them as they go upon their holy mission. [Great applause.]
And so when Joan of Arc follows God and leads the army; when the maid of Saragossa loads and fires the cannon; when Mrs. Stowe makes her pen the heaven-appealing tongue of an outraged race; when Grace Darling and Ida Lewis, pulling their boats through the pitiless
But have women, then, no sphere, as women? Undoubtedly they have, as men have a sphere as men. If a woman is a mother, God gives her certain affections, and cares springing from them, which we may be very sure she will not forget, and to which, just in the degree that she is a true woman, she will be fondly faithful. We need not think that it is necessary to fence her in, nor to suppose that she would try to evade these duties and mi.
But the sphere of the family is not the sole sphere either of men or women. They are not only parents, they are human beings, with genius, talents, aspirations, ambition. They are also members of the state, and from the very equality of the parental function which perpetuates the state, they are equally interested in its welfare. Has the mother less concrn than the father, in the laws that regulate the great social temptations which everywhere yawn for their children, or in the general policy of the government which they are summoned to support? Is she less entitled to the fruits of her industry than he, and if it be best that some arrangement be made by law for the common support of the family, is there any just reason why she should not be consulted in making the law as well as he? The woman earns property and owns it. Society taxes her, and tries her, and sends her to the jail or to the gallows. Can it be improper that she be tried by her peers, or inexpedient that she have a voice in making the law that taxes her?
Is it said that she influences the man now? Very well; do you object to that? And if not, is there any reason why she should not do directly what she does indirectly? If it is proper that her opinion should influence a man's vote, is there any good reason why it should not be indpendently expressed? Or is it said
The other day a young man and his sister graduated at Oberlin with exactly equal rank and ability. They became teachers of the same grade, in the same town—perhaps in the same school. He was paid three or four times as much as she; and when she asked that her salary might be raised, she was replaced by a young man—her pupil—and he was paid a third more than she had been. If women had a vote, I think that school-committee elected by the people would have a miraculous gift of sight, and suddenly see that exactly equal labor and ability are worth exactly equal wages. Or look into the Statutes of Massachusetts. There is one that provides that no married woman can be guardian, even of her own children by a former marriage, until her husband files in the Probate Court his written consent to her assuming the office. The late statute authorized that husband by will to appoint a guardian for his children who might be the window or another;
I have no more superstition about the ballot than about any other method of social improvement and progress. But all experience shows that my neighbor's ballot is no protection for me. We see that voters may be bribed, dazzled, coerced; and where there is practically universal suffrage among men, we often see, indeed, corruption, waste and bad laws. But we nowhere see that those who once have the ballot are willing to relinquish it, and many of those who most warmly oppose the voting of women, also most earnestly advocate the unconditional restoration of political rights to the guiltiest of the late rebel leaders, because they know that to deprive them of the ballot places them at a terrible disadvantage. If, then, it is what I may call an American political instinct that any class of men which monopolizes the political power will be unjust to other classes of men, how much truer is it that one sex as a class will be unjust to the other. And if the usurping sex, as Gibbon calls it, is physically the stronger, then, just in the degree that it becomes honorable, enlightened, civilized, will it see that no class ca safely monopolize political power, and will gladly welcome every restraint upon its own tendency to abuse it.
Yes, I am told, but practical politics is a system of
Besides, if we speak of the public welfare, surely we ought to have learned by heart the great lesson which has been written in blood in this country, that nothing is so demoralizing to a people as persistence in obvious and proved injustice—a public policy inconsistent with our fundamental principles. I know, as every man knows, many a woman of the noblest character, of the highest intelligence, of the purest purpose, the owner of property, the mother of children, devoted to her family and to all her duties, and for that reason profoundly interested in public affairs. And when this woman says to me, “You are one of the governing class, your government is founded upon the principle of expressed consent of all, as the best security of all. I have as much stake in it as you, perhaps more than you, because I am a parent, and wish more than many of my neighbors to express my opinion and assert my influence by a ballot. I am a better judge than you or any man
“Gay without toil and lovely without art,
They spring to cheer the sense and glad the heart;
Nor blush, my fair, to own you copy these,
Your best, your sweetest empire is to please.”
No, no. At least I will not insult her. I can say nothing. I hang my head before that woman as when in foreign lands I was asked—“You are an American? What is the nation that forever boasts of the equal liberty of all its citizens, and is the only great nation in the world that traffics in human flesh!”
Or is it said that women do not wish to vote; that it depends wholly upon themselves, and that whenever a majority of them demand political equality, it will be granted? But this is a total surrender of the objection.
The very moment women passed out of the degradation of the Greek household, and the contempt of the Roman law, they began their long and slow ascent, through prejudice, sophistry and passion, to their perfect equality of choice and opportunity as human beings; and the assertion that when a majority of women ask for equal political rights they will be granted, is a confession that there is no conclusive
And if women do not care about the question, it is high time that they did, both for themselves and for men. The spirit of society cannot be just, nor the laws equitable, so long as half of the population are politically paralyzed. And this movement, so well begun twenty-two years ago by women whose names will be always honored in its history, for their undismayed fidelity to the welfare of their sex—this movement is now fully organized for the very purpose of interesting men and women in the question. It is a pacific agitation
But it was a drum-beat that echoed over every mountain, and penetrated every valley, and roused the heart of the land to throb in unison. To that rub-a-dub, a million men appeared at Lincoln's call, with millions of women supporting them. To that rub-a-dub the brave and beautiful and beloved went smiling to their graves. To that rub-a-dub Grant forced his fiery way through the wilderness; following its roll Sherman marched to the sea, and Sheridan scoured the Shenandoah. The rattling shots of the Kearsarge sinking the Alabama were only the far-off echoes of that terrible drum-beat. To that rub-a-dub Jefferson Davis fled from Richmond, and the wall of the Rebellion and of slavery crumbled at last and forever, as the walls of Jericho before the horns of Israel. That tremendous rub-a-dub, played by the hearts and hands of a great people, fills the land to-day with the celestial music of liberty, and to that people, still thrilling with that music, we appeal!
We can be patient. Our fathers won their independence
It may be asked why, at such times a this, when the attention of the whole nation is concentrated upon the reconstruction of our States, we should intrude a new and advanced question. I have been asked, “Why not wait for the settlement of the question that now fills the minds of men? Why divert and distract their thoughts?” I answer, because the question is one and the same. We are not now discussing merely the question of the vote for the African, or of his status as a new-born citizen. That is a fact which compels us to discuss the whole underlying question of government. That is the case in court. But when the judge shall have given his decision, that decision will cover the whole question of civil society, and the relations of every individual in it as a factor, an agent, an actor.
Now, if you look back, you shall see that the history of the development of man for the last thousand years—before that, but more obviously and noticeably since—has been collection for the sake of distribution. In order to guard interest against brute force, it was needful that guilds, and franchises, and fraternities, and professions should be established. Just as when we light a candle in flaring winds we take every precaution, not to hide the light, but to protect it until it has strength to
All the world over, the question to-day is, Who has a
And now, this being the world-tide and tendency, what is there in history, what is there in physiology, what is there in experience, that shall say to this tendency, marking the line of sex: “Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther?” I roll the argument from off my shoulders, and I challenge the man that stands with me, beholding that the world-thought to-day is the emancipation of the citizen's power and the preparation by education of the citizen for that power, and objects to extending the right of citizenship to every human being, to give me the reasons why. (Applause.) To-day this nation is exercising its conscience on the subject of suffrage for the African. I have all the time favored that: not because he was an African, but because he was
To-day, politicians of every party, especially on the eve of an election, are in favor of the briefest and most expeditious citizenizing of the Irishmen. I have great respect for Irishmen—when they do not attempt to carry on war! (Laughter.) The Irish Fenian movement is a ludicrous phenomenon past all laughing at. Bombarding England from the shores of America! (Great laughter.) Paper pugnation! Oratorical destroying! But when wind-work is the order of the day, commend me to Irishmen. (Renewed laughter.) And yet I am in favor of Irishmen voting. Just so soon as they give pledge that they come to America, in good faith, to abide here as citizens, and forswear the old allegiance, and take on the new, I am in favor of their voting. Why? Because they have learned our Constitution? No; but because voting teaches. The vote is a school-master. They will learn our laws, and learn our Constitution, and learn our customs ten times quicker when the responsibility of knowing these things is laid upon them, that when they are permitted to live in careless respecting them. And this nation is so strong that it can stand the incidental mischiefs of thus teaching the wild rabble that emigration throws on our shores
And yet, while I take this broad ground, that no man, even of the Democratic party (I make the distinction because a man may be a democrat and be ashamed of the party, and a man may be of the party and not know a single principle of democracy), should be debarred from voting, I ask, is an Irishman just landed, unwashed and uncombed, more fit to vote than a woman educated in our common schools? Think of the mothers and daughters of this land, among whom are teachers, writers, artists, and speakers. What a throng could we gather if we should from all the West call our women that as educators are carrying civilization there! Thousands upon thousands there are of women that have gone forth from the educational institutions of New England to carry light and knowledge to other parts of our land. Now, place this great army of refined and cultivated women on the one side, and on the other side the rising cloud of emancipated Africans, and in front of them the great emigrant band of the Emerald Isle, and is there force enough in our government to make if safe to give to the African and the Irishman the franchise? There is. We shall give it to them. (Applause.) And will our force all fail, having done that? And shall we take the fairest and best part of our society; those to whom we owe it that we ourselves are civilized; our teachers; our companions; those to whom we go for
If, therefore, you refer to the initial sentence, and ask me why I introduce this subject to-day, when we are already engaged on the subject of suffrage, I say, This is the greatest development of the suffrage question. It is more important that woman should vote than that the black man should vote. It is important that he should vote, that the principle may be vindicated, and that humanity may be defended; but it is important that woman should vote, not for her sake. She will derive benefit from voting; but it is not a selfish ground that I claim the right of suffrage for her. It is God's growing and least disclosed idea of a true human society that man and woman should not be divorced in political affairs any more than they are in religious and social affairs. I claim that woman should vote because society will never know its last estate and true glory until you accept God's edict and God's command—long raked over and covered in the dust—until you bring it out, and lift it up, and read this one of God's Ten Commandments, written, if not on stone, yet in the very heart and structure of mankind.
Let those that God joined together not be put asunder.
(Applause.)
When men converse with me on the subject of suffrage, or the vote, it seems to me that the terminology withdraws their mind from the depth and breadth of the case to the mere instruments. Many of the objections that are urged against woman's voting are objections against the mechanical and physical act of suffrage. It is true that all the forces of society, in their final political deliverance, must needs be born through the vote, in our structure of government. In England it is not so. It was one of the things to be learned there that the unvoting population on any question in which they are interested and united are more powerful than all the voting population or legislation. The English Parliament, if they believed to-day that every working man in Great Britain staked his life on the issues of universal suffrage, would not dare a month to deny it. For when a nation's foundations are on a class of men that do not vote, and its throne stands on forces that are coiled up and liable at any time to break forth to its overthrow, it is a question whether it is safe to provoke the exertion of those forces or not. With us, where all men vote, government is safe; because, if a thing is once settled by a fair vote, we will go to war rather than to give it up. As when Lincoln was elected, if an election is valid, it must stand. In such a nation as this, an election is equivalent to a divine decree, and irreversible, but in Great Britain an election means not the will of the people, but the will of rulers and a favored class, and there is always under them a great wrong class, that, if they get stirred up by the thought that they are wronged, will burst out with an explosion
It is not the vote that I am arguing, except that that is the outlet. What I am arguing, when I argue that woman should vote, is that she should do all things back of that which the vote means and enforces. She should be a nursing mother to human society. It is a plea that I make, that woman should feel herself called to be interested not alone in the household, not alone in the church, not alone in just that neighborhood in which she resides, but in the sum total of that society to which she belongs; and that she should feel that her duties are not discharged until they are commensurate with the definition which our Savior gave in the parable of the good Samaritan. I argue, not woman's right to vote; I argue woman's
duty to discharge citizenship.
For the sake, then, of such questions as these, that have come to their birth, I feel it to be woman's
duty
to act in public affairs. I do not stand here to plead for your
rights
. Rights, compared with duties, are insignificant—are mere baubles—are as the bow on your bonnet. It seems to me that the voice of God's providence to you to-day is, “Oh messenger of mine, where are the words that I sent you to speak? Whose dull, dead ear has been raised to life by that vocalization of heaven, that has given to you more than to any other one?” Man is sub-base. A thirty-two feet six-inch pipe is he. But what is an organ played with the feet, if all the upper part is left unused? The flute, the hautboy, the finer trumpet stops, all those stops that minister to the intellect, the imagination and the higher feelings—these must be drawn, and the whole organ played from top to bottom! (Applause.)
More than that; there are now coming up for adjudication public questions of education. And who, by common consent is the educator of the world? Who has been? Schools are to be of more importance than railroads—not to undervalue railroads. Books and newspapers are to be more vital and powerful than exchequers and banks—not to undervalue exchequers and banks. In other words, as society ripens, it has to ripen in its three departments, in the following order: First, duty
of taking part in public affairs in the era in which justice and humanity, and education, and taste, and virtue are to be more and more a part and parcel of public procedure.
We are near the end of the time when men will talk to us about
isms.
I have lived to see the day when Grace Church has preached politics, and I am prepared to say, “Now, Lord, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” (Great applause.) We have seen the time when humanity was so ostracised and was so vagabond that no man that valued his reputation, or his life even, dared to preach it. But that time has gone. The sepulchre is open, and the Christ has come out, and is a living Saviour and no man now, rolling the door back, can again shut in the Saviour of the world. It is too late. He has flown. And those regal ideas that struggle for liberty have come forth, and spread their wings to soar high, and yet brood low over all the nations, and you Heralds,
and such like newspapers, and fear that the sacred garments of religion will be soiled by those who in the pulpit dabble with politics—let them prepare themselves, for there is to be more dabbling with politics that they ever saw before in all their lives. (Great laughter and applause.)
In such a state of society, then, as the present, I stand, as I have said, on far higher ground in arguing this question than the right of women. That I believe in; but that is down in the justice's court. I go to the supreme bench and argue it, and argue it on the ground that the nation needs woman, and that woman needs the nation, and that woman can never become what she should be, and the nation can never become what it should be, until there is no distinction made between the sexes as regards the rights and duties of citizenship —until we come to the 28th verse of the third chapter of Galatians:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
And when that day comes; when the Heavenly Kingdom is ushered in with its myriad blessed influences; when the sun of righteousness shall fill the world with its beams, as the natural sun, coming from the far South, fills the earth with glorious colors and beauty; then it will come to pass that there shall be no nationality, no difference of classes, and no difference of sexes. Then all shall be one in Christ Jesus.
I urge, then, that woman should perform the duty of a citizen in voting. You may, perhaps, ask, before I go any further, “What is the use of preaching to us that we
ought
to do it, when we are
not permitted
to do it?” That day in which the intelligent, cultivated women of America say, “We have a right to the ballot,” will be the day in which they will have it. (Voices—“Yes.” “That is so.”) There is no power on earth that can keep it from them. (Applause.) The reason you have not voted is because you have not wanted to. (Applause.) It is because you have not felt that it was your duty to vote. You have felt yourselves to be secure and happy enough in your privileges and prerogatives, and have left the great mass of your sisters, that shed tears and bore burdens, to shift for themselves. You have felt that you had rights more than you wanted now. O, yes, it is as if a beauty in Fifth avenue, hearing one plead that bread might be sent to the hungry and famishing, should say, “What is this talk about bread for? I have as much bread as I want and plenty of sweetmeats, and I do not want your loaves.” Shall one that is glutted with abundance despise the wants of the starving, who are so far below them that they do not hear their cries, not one of which escapes the ear of Almighty God? Because you have wealth, and knowledge, and loving parents, or a faithful husband, or kind brothers, and you feel no pressure of need, do you feel no inward pressure of humanity for others? Is there no part of God's great work in providence that should lead you to be discontented with your ease and privileges until you are enfranchised? You ought to vote;
I. Woman has more interest than man in the promotion of virtue and purity and humanity. Half, shall I say?—Half does not half measure the proportion of those sorrows that come upon woman by reason of her want of influence and power. All the young men that, breaking down, break fathers’ and mothers hearts; all those that struggle near to the grave, weeping piteous tears of blood, it might almost be said, and that at last, under paroxysms of despair, sin against nature, and are swept out of misery into damnation; the spectacles that fill our cities, and afflict and torment villages—what are these but reasons that summon woman to have a part in that regenerating of thought and that regenerating of legislation which shall make vice a crime, and vice-makers criminals? Do you suppose that, if it were to turn on the votes of women to-day whether rum should be sold in every shop in this city, there would be one moment's delay in settling the question? What to the oak lightening is, that marks it and descends swiftly upon it, that woman's vote would be to miscreant vices in these great cities. (Applause.)
Ah, I speak that which I do know. As a physician speaks from that which he sees in the hospital where he ministers, so I speak from that which I behold in my professional position and place, where I see the undercurrent of life. I hear groans that come from smiling faces. I witness tears that when others look upon the face are all swept away, as the rain is when one comes after a
II. The household, about which we hear so much said as being woman's sphere, is safe only as the community around about it is safe. Now and then there may be a Lot that can live in Sodom but when Lot was called to emigrate, he could not get all his children to go with him. They had been intermarried and corrupted. A Christian woman is said to have all that she needs for her understanding and to task her powers if she will stay at home and mend her husband's clothes, if she has a husband, and take care of he children, if she has children. The welfare of the family, it is said, ought to occupy he time and thoughts. And some ministers, in descanting upon the sphere of woman, are wont to magnify the glory and beauty of a mother teaching some future chief-justice or some president of the United States. Not one whit of glory would I withdraw from such a canvas as that but I aver that the power to teach these children largely depends upon the influences that surround the household; so that she that would
That was not the kind of woman that brought me up —a woman that never thought of anything outside of her own door-yard. My mother's house was as wide as Christ's house; and she taught me to understand the words of him that said, “The field is the world; and whoever needs is your brother.” A woman that is content to wash stockings, and make Johnny-cake, and to look after and bring up her boys faultless to a button, and that never thinks beyond the meal-tub, and whose morality is so small as to be confined to a single house, is an under-grown woman, and will spend the first thousand years after death in coming to that state in which she ought to have been before she died. (Laughter.) Tell me that a woman is fit to give an ideal life to an American citizen, to enlarge his sympathies, to make him wise in judgment, and to establish him in patriotic regard, who has no thought above what to eat and drink, and wherewithal to be clothed! The best housekeepers are they that are the most widely beneficent. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these thing shall be added unto you.” God will take care of the stockings, if you will take care of the heads! (Laughter and applause.) Universal beneficence never hinders anybody's usefulness in any particular field of duty. Therefore, woman's sphere should not be limited to the household. The public
III. Woman brings to public affairs peculiar qualities, aspirations, and affections which society needs. I have had persons say to me, “Would you, now, take your daughter and your wife, and walk down to the polls with them?” If I were to take my daughter and my wife and walk down to the polls with them, and there was a squirming crowd of bloated, loud-mouthed, blattering men, wrangling like so many maggots on cheese, what do you think would take place, but that, at the moment I appeared with my wife and daughter walking by my side with conscious dignity and veiled modesty, the lane would open, and I should pass thorugh the red sea unharmed? (Great applause.) Where is there a mob such that the announcement that a woman is present, does not bring down the loudest of them? Nothing but the sorcery of rum prevents a man from paying unconscious, instant respect to the presence of a woman.
I am asked, “Would you take your wife and daughter into the vulgarity of politics?” Now, to take your wife and daughter into the vulgarity of politics is to cleanse politics of its vulgarity. (Applause.) Politics is vulgar, because you are not there, woman; and that is one of the reasons why you must be there. You may surround the polls with as many inspectors of election as the room would hold, and station a line of policemen or military all the way from the door to the ballot-box, and corruption will creep through them; but put a revered mother, a beloved wife, or an honored sister there, and corruption will look upon them, and veil its face,
IV. The history of woman's co-operative labors thus far justifies the most sanguine anticipations, such as I have alluded to. Allusion has been made to the purification of literature. The influence of woman has been a part of the cause of this, unquestionably; but I would not ascribe such a result to any one cause. God is a great workman, and has a chest full of tools, and never uses one tool, but always many; and in the purification of literature, the elevation of thought, the advancement of the public sentiment of the world in humanity, God has employed more than that which has been wrought in their departments. And that which the church has long ago achieved for herself, that which the family has achieved—that, in more eminence and more wondrous and surprising beauty, the world will achieve for itself in public affairs, when man and woman co-operate there, as now they are co-operating in all other spheres of taste, intellection and morality.
Let me now pass, without touching upon some other points which I had marked, to a consideration of a few of the objections that are made to a woman's mixing in public affairs as a voter and as a citizen.
I. It is said, “A woman's place is at home.” Well, now, since compromise are coming into vogue again, will you compromise with me, and agree that until a woman has a home she may vote? (Laughter.) That is only fair. It is said, “She ought to stay at home, and attend to home duty, and minister to the wants of father, or husband, or brothers.” Well, may all orphan women, and unmarried women, and women that have no abiding place of residence vote? If not, where is the argument? But, to look at it seriously, what is the defect of this statement? It is the impression that staying at home is incompatible with going abroad. Never was there a more monstrons fallacy. I light my candle, and it gives me all the light I want, and it gives all the light you want to you, and to you, and to you, and to every other one in the room; and there is not one single ray that you get there which cheats me here; and a woman that is doing her duty right in the family, sheds a beneficent influence out upon the village in which she dwells, without taking a moment's more time.
My cherry-trees are joyful in all their blossoms, and thousands go by them and see them in their beauty day by day; but I never mourn the happiness that they bestow on passers-by as having been taken from me. I am not cheated by the perfume that goes from my flowers into my neighbor's yard. And the character of a true woman is such that it may shine everywhere without
Why, I set a candle in my window in the country, that they who come up the lane may see how to drive and reach my house, and clear down to the road that modest candle sheds its light; but does it cheat me? Does it fail to do its work inside because it sends its long line of light outside? Some men seen to think that, if woman should get the rights that she is clamoring for, she would do nothing but put a reticule on her arm, and start out every morning with a bundle of tracts, discussing all manner of questions. Oh no, she is not a man! If she were a man she would go about with noisy inefficiency, buzzing and bustling, and making a great ado about nothing; but, being a woman, she goes about what she has to do, and does it so quietly as scarcely to be noticed. And is she not a skillful manager? Does she not know how to give up and conquer? Does she not know how to touch the subtile springs of action? Has she not the element of foresight? It is called “tact.” I do not care what you call it, it is blessed. For next to having your own way, is thinking that you have it. (Laughter.) Some of the sweetest experiences of my life were when my father, who was two-thirds a woman—a woman with man's enamel on—took my side when I meant to go to sea, and made it all so plain and right that, when I came
II. It is said, “It will destroy woman's delicacy if she goes into politics.” Certainly, if she goes into partnership with some politicians. One base politician is corruption enough to spoil a whole village; and I would not have her inoculated with it for the world. But I do not propose that she should change her sex. I would a great deal rather have a man that was born a man than a woman that has become a man. Unsexing is poor business. I have seen that tried to be women and women that tried to be men; and commend me to women that are women by nature, and men that are men by nature, and to no mixture. (Applause.) If you come into public affairs with the same kind of ratioeinactive force that men do, you will be no better there than men; but if you do not divest yourself of those intuitions of the moral sense, and that foresight, that tact, which you employ in other spheres, then your as a woman
that you are summoned to take part in those affairs. If you lay aside the woman, then you are not needed. It is to get another sort of influence in public affairs that we plead for woman's entrance there.
But it is said, “She ought to act through her father, or husband, or son.” Why ought she? Did you ever frame an argument to show why the girl should use her father to vote for her, and the boy who is younger, and not half so witty, should vote for himself? It does not admit of an argument. If the grandmother, the mother, the wife, and the eldest daughter, are to be voted for by the father, the husband, and the eldest brother, then why are not the children to be voted for in complete family relation by the patriarchal head? Why not go back to the tribal custom of the desert, and let the patriarch do all the voting? To be sure, it would change the whole form of our government; but, if it is good for the family, it is just as good for classes. I should like to see one man go to another and claim the right to vote for him. Suppose I should go to men that are working for me, and say, “Boys, you are nothing but workmen, and I am the owner of a fancy farm, which I pay roundly for, and you ought to let me vote
In a frontier settlement is a log cabin, and it is in a region which is infested by wolves. There are in the family a broken-down patient of a man, a mother, and three daughters. The house is surrounded by a pack of these voracious animals, and the inmates feel that their safety requires that the intruders should be driven away. There are three or four rifles in the house. The man creeps to one of the windows, and to the mother and daughter it is said, “You load the rifles, and hand them to me, and let me fire them.” But they can load all the four rifles, and he cannot fire half as fast as they can load; and I say to the mother, “Can you shoot?” She says, “Let me try”; and she takes a gun, and points it at the wolves, and pulls the trigger, and I see one of them throw his feet up in the air. “Ah!” I say, “I see you can shoot! You keep the rifle, and fire it yourself.” And I say to the eldest daughter, “Can you shoot?” “I guess I can,” she says. “Well, dare you?” “I dare do anything to save father and the family.” And she takes one of the rifles, and pops over another of the pack. And I tell you, if the wolves knew that all the women were firing, they would flee from that cabin instanter. (Laughter.) I do not object to a woman loading a man's rifle and letting him shoot; but I say that, if there are two rifles, she ought to load one of them herself and shoot. And I do not see any use in a woman's influencing a man, and loading him
It is said, again, “Woman is a creature of such an excitable nature that, if she were to mingle with men in public affairs, it would introduce a kind of vindictive acrimony, and politics would become intolerable.” O, if I really thought so, if I thought that the purity of politics would be sullied, I would not say another word! (Laughter.) I do not want to take anything from the celestial graces of politics! (Renewed laughter.) I want Fernando Wood and the aldermen of New York to understand that I would not on any account demoralize politics; and, if I believed that bringing our mothers and wives and daughters into politics would have a tendency to lower its moral tone in the slightest degree, I would give up the argument. (Laughter and applause.) I will admit that woman is an excitable creature, and I will admit that politics needs no more excitement; but, sometimes, you know, things are homœopathic. A woman's excitement is apt to put out a man's; and if she should bring her excitability into politics, it is likely that it would neutralize the excitement already there, and that there would be a grand peace! (Laughter.)
But, not to trifle with it, woman is excitable. Woman is yet to be educated. Woman is yet to experience the reactionary influence of being a public legislator and thinker. Add let her sphere be extended beyond the family and the school, so that she should be interested in, and actively engaged in promoting the welfare of the whole community, and in the course of three generations the reaction on her would be such that the excitement
It is said, furthermore, “Woman might vote for herself, and take office.” Why not? A woman makes as good a postmistress as a man does postmaster. Woman has been tried in every office from the throne to the position of the humblest servant; and where has she been found remiss? I believe that multitudes of the offices that are held by men are mere excuses for leading an effeminate life; and that with their superior physical strength it behooves them better to be actors out of doors, where the severity of climate and the elements is to be encountered, and leave indoor offices to women, to whom they more properly belong.
But, women, you are not educated for these offices. I hear bad reports of you. It is told me that the trouble in giving places to women is that they will not do their work well; that they do not feel the sense of conscience. They have been flattered so long, they have been called “women” so long, they have had compliments instead of rights so long, that they are spoiled; but when a generation real
women than virile old women in public stations. (Laughter and applause.) For my own sake, give me a just, considerate, true, straight-forward, honest-minded, noble-hearted woman, who has been able, in the fear of God, to bring up six boys in the way they should go, and settle them in life. If there is anything harder in this nation than that, tell me what it is. A woman that can bring up a family of strong-brained children, and make good citizens of them, can be President without any difficulty. (Applause.)
Let me now close with one single thought in connection with this objection. I protest in the name of my country-women against the aspersion which is cast upon them by those who say that woman is not fit to hold office or discharge public trusts. The name of what potentate to-day, if you go around the world, would probably, in every nation on the earth, bring down most enthusiasm and public approbation? It I know, here in your midst, shall mention the name of Queen Victoria, your cheers will be a testimony to your admiration of
It is a controversy to-day between woman aristocratic and woman democratic (applause); and I claim that what it is right for an aristocratic woman to do—what it is right for a duchess, or a queen, or am empress to do—it is right for the simplest and plainest of my countrywomen to do, that has no title, and no credientials, except the fact that God made her a woman. All that I claim for the proudest aristocrat I claim for all other woman. (Applause.) I do not object to a woman being a queen, or a president, if she has the qualifications which fit her to be one. And I claim that, where there is a woman that has the requisite qualifications for holding any office in the family, in the church, or in the state, there