Volume II Part 107 (1/2)
Mrs. TAPPAN gave an interesting account of some of the Indian tribes in Mexico and California, who, she thought, had in one sense a higher idea of the capacity of woman than their more civilized brethren. The Navajos, on one occasion, when a United States Commission composed of General Sherman, General Terry, and other officers of the army, went to them to treat with them on behalf of the Government, refused to enter the officer's quarters for the purpose of discussion or decision of their difficulties, unless their squaws were permitted to partic.i.p.ate in the deliberations, and the officers were obliged to allow the women to come in.
The evening session of the convention was called to order by LUCY STONE. Steinway Hall was filled with an earnest and interested a.s.sembly, numbering about a thousand persons.
Mrs. CHURCHILL, of Providence, R. I., was the first speaker. She spoke at some length, and a.s.serted the undoubted right of women to the suffrage. She referred to the fear which men entertained, or pretended to entertain, of women neglecting every other duty attaching to them simply because they should get suffrage. Men do not find voting so exceedingly incompatible with the other duties of life that they should have such fear of woman suffrage. Women are not asking for _bon-bons_ in this matter. They are demanding that which belongs to them. They are not children, nor idiots, and they ought to have the same right of action as is accorded to sane men.
The address of Mrs. JULIA WARD HOWE was as follows: This mighty edifice of the ideal society has many mansions, whose doors open one after the other in the ruins of the ages. When Providence has removed the mysterious seal from one of these doors those who know the signs of the times gladly enter. And soon the halt and the lame and the blind hear of the new refuge, the new benefaction, and make haste to crowd its halls and parlors.
America itself was at first such a refuge. The derided Puritans rode there n.o.bly across the highway of the ocean. By and by it leaked out that civil and religious liberty had made a good thing of it, and then the Old World began to sneak over into the s.p.a.cious domain of the New. And now it comes with such a tide that we can scarcely build cities and railroads fast enough for its accommodation. America is to the nations a house of G.o.d--a divinely appointed city of refuge. Poorly have we administered that house of G.o.d, because we ourselves were undivine. But we have improved a little--we have learned some lessons--we have opened some doors. And every lesson that we have learned has shown us more and more of the grand but terrible labor which lies before us. What one should be, and know, and intend, in order to come up to the standard of an American, that is something which as yet puts most of us to the blush, not for being so much, but so little children of the New World; for this may the Old World deride us.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Julia Ward Howe.]
I can not see this New World as it ought to be, in my remotest vision, without many changes in what it is. Looking towards this great aim of building a Christian state, I see the position of woman as wrong and harmful. Wrong to herself since she is pushed one remove further from the divine than man--she, born of the same humanity and divinity with himself. Wrong to society since she, with special gifts and powers for its aid and advancement, is forcibly restrained to the functions which man deigns to allow her; her att.i.tude to law, labor and life being determined by him through the old principle of barbarism, the predominance of physical force.
Which shall I treat first, the wrong done to the individual or that done to society? I will start with the individual. And from the start I will say that the very instinct of secondariness, so often postulated as a reason for the social subjection of women, is, on the part of those who urge it, either an invention or an error. The instinct, as I understand it, is all the other way.
The little girl does not know in herself any inferiority to the boy. He can perhaps beat her, but while he may consider this a mark of superiority, she is too wise to accept it as such. In their lessons she flies where he walks. She cries for his floggings oftener than he can laugh at her failures. She needs less machinery than he to arrive at the same mental and moral results. Nature has given him a mental hammer, but it has given her a mental needle, and she has embroidered the rainbow before he has forged the thunder. How does he overtake her swift steps?
How tame and bind her fiery soul?
Now I confess that he has an accomplice greater than himself. The girl, coming upon the full consciousness of womanhood, comes also upon that of its opposite. The primal divine unity of the race makes itself felt in her dreamy bosom. She is but half of the ideal--the perfect human being--the other half is not yet hers; she must seek diligently till she find it. Do not laugh. The pilgrimage of Psyche is performed by every maiden soul; but love, the supreme G.o.d, in the little child is not always found. So far, so good. The woman often finds a mate; sometimes has quite a selection of mates offered her. If she finds the complement of her incomplete being, what more can she want? What wrong is done her? This simply. If her single life was incomplete, that of her partner without her was no less so. The need of marriage was equal with both. Nay, but for the aid of vices to which the male part of society give system and culture, the need of marriage on his part will be more imperative than on hers. Its natural burdens fall with fivefold force on her. She must bear the children. She must give the flower of her life to services full of weariness and of anguish. Now, however the matter may stand between man and woman, the State's need of marriage is imperative. And as the State commands marriage, and as the woman contracts marriage as an obligation to the State, the State is bound by every sacred obligation of justice to render the contract an equal one. And here comes up again the barbaric element--the predominance of physical force. ”Shall this softer, gentler, more fragile creature be the equal of the ruder, stouter man?” ”Yes,” says your Christianity, ”She is a divine inst.i.tution, as you are; she desires the same culture, the same respect, the same authority.” ”No,” says your barbarism, ”I can oppress her, and I will. We won't call it oppression, if you please. We'll call it protection. I'll keep her money, and her children, and her body, and her soul. I'll keep them all for her.
She can ask me for what she wants. I shall always know whether it is best for her to have it or no.”
Now, here it is true physical ascendency of the man which renders the a.s.sumption of this position possible. Great as this power is, he has taken pains to increase it by an immense array of aids and appliances. He has kept the woman ignorant of all the technologies of the world. Fatal renewal of the Hebrew myth, he has eaten of the tree of knowledge, has kept the fruit for himself. Society can not be governed without law and logic. The use of these the man has monopolized, encouraging in the woman the natural gifts and accomplishments which give him most delight--dress and dance, and the sweet voice and graceful manner, and, above all the ready acquiescence in his sovereign pleasure. But let her ask him for the methods by which she may a.n.a.lyze his actions and his intuitions, and he says, ”No.” No college door shall open for her, no nursery of law, medicine or theology. Philosophy, the science of sciences--which Dictrina taught to Socrates, who teaches it to the world to-day--that would give her the key to all the rest. She may get it, if she can.
We have brought our theoretical woman up to the period of marriage and maternity. Here the intensity of personal feeling and interest monopolize her. Her nursery is full of pains and pleasures, but its delights predominate, and though she will need more than ever the help of outside culture and sympathy, she is yet tied by her affections even more than by her duties to a centre of feeling too intense to generate a wide circle. Here, too, the enforced inequality of inst.i.tutions pursues her. The children, born at such cost of suffering, are not hers in the eye of the law. The right to them which nature puts primarily in the mother, society has long vested almost absolutely in the father.
In case of any difference between them he will say, ”I am the father--my will must be obeyed.” And what he will say in private the law will say in public. Mrs. Stone records a piteous case in which an unborn child was willed by its dying father to relatives in a foreign country in which the widowed mother suffered the pains of childbirth, that other hearts than hers might be gladdened by her dearly-bought treasure. This young woman was described as in a maze of bewilderment at the presence on the statute-book of a law so miraculously wicked. We all hope that in such laws there comes a great deal of dead letter, but the dead letter itself stinks and is corrupt. The book of justice should be purged of such unhallowed corpses.
In the nursery the mother is called upon to set forward the same injustice which presided over her own education. ”Preaching down a daughter's heart,” the beautiful phrase of Tennyson, becomes the duty of every woman who finds in her daughter saliency of intellect and individuality of will. Mediocrity is the standard!
”Seek not, my child, to go beyond it. Thou hast thy little allotments. The French must be thy cla.s.sics, the house accounts thy mathematics. Patchwork, cooking, and sweeping thy mechanics; dress and embroidery thy fine arts. See how small the spheres. Do not venture outside of it, nor teach thy daughters, when thou shalt have such to do so.”
And so we women, from generation to generation, are drilled to be the apes of an artificial standard, made for us and imposed upon us by an outsider; a being who, in this att.i.tude, becomes our natural enemy.
Mrs. LUCY STONE said: There have always been good and able men ready to second us, and to say their best words for our cause.
Among the first of these is Mr. George William Curtis, whom I have now the pleasure to introduce.
_Ladies and Gentlemen:_--It is pleasant to see this large a.s.sembly, 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 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. Presidents 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. Louder and louder grew that question, until it was one great thunderburst, absorbing all other questions; and then the country saw that its very life was bound up in the answer; and, springing to its feet, alive in every nerve, with one hand it snapped the slave's chain, and with the other welded the Union into a Nation--the pledge of equal liberty.
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 fundamental principle, that ”governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” 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. 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 among citizens as the best security of the common welfare. It is a plea for the introduction of all the mental and moral forces of society into the work of government. It is an a.s.sertion that in the regulation of society, no cla.s.s and no interest can be safely spared from a direct responsibility. It encounters, indeed, the most ancient traditions, the most subtle sophistry of men's pa.s.sions and prejudices. But there was never any great wrong righted that was not intrenched in sophistry--that did not plead an immemorial antiquity, and what it called the universal consent and ”instinct” of mankind.
I say that the movement is a plea for justice, and I a.s.sert that the equal rights of women, not as citizens, but as human beings, have never been acknowledged. There is no audacity so insolent, no tyranny so wanton, no inhumanity so revolting, as the spirit which says to any human being, or to any cla.s.s of human beings, ”You shall be developed just as far as we choose, and as fast as we choose, and your mental and moral life shall be subject to our pleasure!”
Edward Lear, the artist, traveling in Greece, says that ”he was one day jogging along with an Albanian 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--the mother of art.” There stands the great orator--himself incarnate Greece--speaking the oration over the Peloponnesian dead. ”The greatest glory of woman,” he said, ”is to be the least talked of among men;” so said Pericles, when he lived. Had Pericles lived to-day he would have agreed that to be talked of among men as Miss Martineau and Florence Nightingale are, as Mrs. Somerville and Maria Mitch.e.l.l are, is as great a glory as to be the mother of the Gracchi.
Women in Greece, the mothers of Greece, were an inferior and degraded cla.s.s. And Grote sums up their whole condition when he says, ”Every thing which concerned their lives, their happiness, or their rights, was determined for them by male relatives, and they seem to have been dest.i.tute of all mental culture and refinement.”
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, Abbe Huc, mentions one of the most tragical facts recorded--that there is in China a cla.s.s of women who hold that if they are only true to certain bonds 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 was 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 Abbe. ”Well, then, why do you try to convert the women?”
asked Master Ting. ”To save their souls,” said the missionary.
”But women have no souls,” said Master Ting; ”you can't expect to make Christians of women,”--and he was so delighted with the idea that he went out shouting, ”Hi! hi! now I shall go home and tell my wife she has a soul, and I guess she will laugh as loudly as I do!”