Volume IV Part 6 (1/2)

We do not appeal to you as Republicans or as Democrats. We were reared with our brothers under the political belief and faith of our fathers, and probably as much influenced by that rearing as they were. We shall go to strengthen both the parties, neither the one nor the other the more, probably. So this is not a partisan measure; it is a just measure, which is our due, because of what we are, men and women both, by virtue of our heritage and our one Father, our one Mother eternal.

MRS. HELEN M. GOUGAR (Ind.): I maintain there is no political question paramount to that of woman suffrage before the people of America to-day. Political parties would have us believe that tariff is the great question of the hour. It is an insult to the intelligence of the present to say that when one-half of the citizens of this republic are denied a direct voice in making the laws under which they shall live, that the tariff, the civil rights of the negro, or any other question which can be brought up, is equal to the one of giving political freedom to women.

I ask you to let me have a voice in the laws under which I shall live because the older empires of the earth are sending to the United States a population drawn very largely from their asylums, penitentiaries, jails and poor-houses. They are emptying those men upon our sh.o.r.es, and within a few months they are intrusted with the ballot, the law-making power in this republic, and they and their representatives are seated in official and legislative positions. I, as an American-born woman, enter my protest at being compelled to live under laws made by this cla.s.s of men while I am denied the protection that can only come from the ballot. While I would not have you take this right from those men whom we invite to our sh.o.r.es, I do ask you, in the face of this immense foreign immigration, to enfranchise the tax-paying, intelligent, moral, native-born women of America.

....We have in our State the signatures of over 5,000 of the school teachers asking for woman's ballot. I ask you if the Government does not need the voice of those 5,000 educated teachers as much as it needs the voice of the 240 criminals who are, on an average, sent out of the penitentiary of Indiana each year, to go to the ballot-box upon every question, and make laws under which those teachers must live, and under which the mothers of our State must keep their homes and rear their children?

On behalf of the mothers of this country I demand that their hands shall be loosened before the ballot-box, and that they shall have the privilege of throwing the mother heart into the laws which shall follow their sons not only to the age of majority, but even after their hair has turned gray and they have seats in the United States Congress; yes, to the very confines of eternity. This can be done in no indirect way; it can not be done by silent influence; it can not be done by prayer. While I do not underestimate the power of prayer, I say give me my ballot with which to send statesmen instead of modern politicians into our legislative halls. I would rather have that ballot on election day than the prayers of all the disfranchised women in the universe!

....Our forefathers did not object to taxation, but they did object to taxation without representation, and we object to it.

We are willing to contribute our share to the support of this Government, as we always have done; but we demand our little yes and no in the form of the ballot so that we shall have a direct influence in distributing the taxes.

I am amenable to the gallows and the penitentiary, and it is no more than right that I shall have a voice in framing the laws under which I shall be rewarded or punished. It is written in the law of every State in this Union that a person tried in the courts shall have a jury of his peers; yet so long as the word ”male” stands as it does in the Const.i.tution of the United States and the States, no woman can have a jury of her peers. I protest in the name of justice against going into the court-room and being compelled to run the gauntlet of the gutter and saloon--yes, even of the police court and of the jail--as is done in selecting a male jury to try the interests of woman, whether relating to life, property or reputation....

The political party that presumes to fight the moral battles of the future must have the women in its ranks. We are non-partisan.

We come as Democrats, Republicans, Prohibitionists and Green-backers, and if there were half a dozen other political parties some of us would affiliate with them. We ask this beneficent action upon your part, because we believe the intelligence and justice of the hour demand it. We ask you in the name of equity and humanity alone, and not in that of any party....

You ask us if we are impatient. Yes; we are impatient. Some of us may die, and I want our grand old standard-bearer, Susan B.

Anthony, whose name will go down to history beside those of George Was.h.i.+ngton, Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Phillips--I want that woman to go to Heaven a free angel from this republic. The power lies in your hands to make all women free.

MRS. CAROLINE GILKEY ROGERS (N. Y.): It is often said to us that when _all_ the women ask for the ballot it will be granted. Did _all_ the married women pet.i.tion the Legislatures of their States to secure to them the right to hold in their own name the property which belonged to them? To secure to the poor forsaken wife the right to her earnings? _All_ the women did not ask for these rights, but _all_ accepted them with joy and gladness when they were obtained, and so it will be with the franchise. Woman's right to self-government does not depend upon the numbers that demand it, but upon precisely the same principles on which man claims it for himself. Where did man get the authority which he now exercises to govern one-half of humanity; from what power the right to place woman, his helpmeet in life, in an inferior position? Came it from nature? Nature made woman his superior when it made her his mother--his equal when it fitted her to hold the sacred position of wife. Did women meet in council and voluntarily give up all their right to be their own law-makers?

The power of the strong over the weak makes man the master. Thus, and thus only, does he gain the authority.

It is all very well to say, ”Convert the women.” While we most heartily wish they could all feel as we do, yet when it comes to the decision of this great question they are mere ciphers, for if it is settled by the States it will be left to the men, not to the women, to decide. Or if suffrage comes to women through a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Const.i.tution, it will be decided by Legislatures elected by men only. In neither case will women have an opportunity of pa.s.sing upon the question. So reason tells us we must devote our best efforts to converting those to whom we must look for the removal of the barriers which now prevent our exercising the right of suffrage....

MRS. MARY SEYMOUR HOWELL (N. Y.): We ask for the ballot for the good of the race. Huxley says: ”Admitting, for the sake of argument, that woman is the weaker, mentally and physically, for that very reason she should have the ballot and every help which the world can give her.” When you debar from your councils and legislative halls the purity, the spirituality and the love of woman, then those councils are apt to become coa.r.s.e and brutal.

G.o.d gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a better land, and by our love and our intellect to help make our country pure and n.o.ble, and if you would have statesmen you must have stateswomen to bear them....

MRS. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE (N. Y.): It is often said that we have too many voters; that the aggregate of vice and ignorance among us should not be increased by giving women the right of suffrage.

In the enormous immigration which pours upon our sh.o.r.es every year, numbering nearly half a million, there come twice as many men as women. What does this mean? It means a constant preponderance of the masculine over the feminine; and it means also, of course, a preponderance of the voting power of the foreign men as compared to the native born men. To those who fear that our American inst.i.tutions are threatened by this gigantic inroad of foreigners, I commend the reflection that the best safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign influence is to put the ballot in the hands of the American born woman, and of all other women also, so that if the foreign born man overbalances us in numbers we shall be always in a majority on the side of the liberty which is secured by our inst.i.tutions....

MRS. ELIZABETH BOYNTON HARBERT: From the great State of Illinois I come, representing 200,000 men and women of that State who have recorded their written pet.i.tions for woman's ballot, 90,000 of these being citizens under the law, male voters; those 90,000 have signed pet.i.tions for the right of woman to vote on the temperance question; 90,000 women also signed those pet.i.tions; 50,000 men and women signed the pet.i.tions for the school vote, and 60,000 more have signed pet.i.tions that the full right of suffrage might be accorded to woman.

This growth of public sentiment has been occasioned by the needs of the children and the working women of that great State. I come here to ask you to make a niche in the statesmans.h.i.+p and legislation of the nation for the domestic interests of the people. You recognize that the masculine thought is more often turned to material and political interests. I claim that the mother-thought, the woman-element needed, is to supplement the statesmans.h.i.+p of American men on political and industrial affairs with domestic legislation.

In her closing address Miss Anthony took up the question of obtaining suffrage for women through the States instead of Congress and said:

My answer is that I do not wish to see the women of the thirty-eight States of this Union compelled to leave their homes to canva.s.s each one of these, school district by school district.

It is asking too much of a moneyless cla.s.s. The joint earnings of the marriage co-partners.h.i.+p in all the States belong legally to the husband. It is only that wife who goes outside the home to work whom the law permits to own and control the money she earns.

Therefore, to ask of women, the vast majority of whom are without an independent dollar of their own, to make a thorough canva.s.s of their several States, is asking an impossibility.

We have already made the experiment of canva.s.sing four States--Kansas in 1867, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, Nebraska in 1882--and in each, with the best campaign possible for us to make, we obtained a vote of only one-third. One man out of every three voted for the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the women of his household, while two out of every three voted against it....

We beg, therefore, that instead of insisting that a majority of the individual voters must be converted before women shall have the franchise, you will give us the more hopeful task of appealing to the representative men in the Legislatures of the several States. You need not fear that we shall get suffrage too quickly if Congress submits the proposition, for even then we shall have a long siege in going from Legislature to Legislature to secure the vote of three-fourths of the States necessary to ratify the amendment. It may require twenty years after Congress has taken the initiative step, to obtain action by the requisite number, but once submitted by Congress it always will stand until ratified by the States.

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's paper on Self-Government the Best Means of Self-Development was read to the committee. A few extracts will serve to show its broad scope:

The basic idea of a republic is the right of self-government, the right of every citizen to choose his own representatives and to have a voice in the laws under which he lives. As this right can be secured only by the exercise of the suffrage, the ballot in the hand of every qualified citizen const.i.tutes the true political status of the people in a republic.