Volume IV Part 21 (1/2)

I remember, Mrs. Minor (turning to that lady), how we discussed these questions in those early years. We weren't sleepy in our talk as we were being cut off inch by inch from the protection of the Const.i.tution. I remember how Mrs. Stanton said in a public address: ”If you continue to deny to women the protection of this amendment, you will finally come to the point when it will cease to protect even black men,” and we have lived to see that day.

The address on The Coming s.e.x by Mrs. Eliza Archard Connor, a well-known journalist of New York, was declared by the press to be in its delivery ”the gem of the convention.” She said in part:

It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race. They have keener sympathies and quicker intuitions than men. They have a gift of language that not even their worst enemies will deny, and these are just the qualities which go to make the orator.... The time is coming when we shall need all our eloquence, all our intellectual power and all our love. The day is approaching when men will come with ballots in their hands, begging women to use them....

Wherever you go, wake women up, tell them to learn everything.

Tell them to study with all their might history, civil government, political economy, social and industrial science--for the time is coming when they will need them all....

This is the work before us. This is the meaning of the desperate unrest and unhappiness of women. It is this that has drawn us here to enter our protest against the wicked, old, one-legged order of things. Our honored Miss Anthony has gone through fire and hail while she worked for her convictions. All of us have wrought as best we might for the higher education of women, for their pecuniary independence, for their civil and political rights, fighting the world, the flesh and the devil.

My own work has been in the field of journalism. For nearly twenty years I have faced here every form of disability because I am a woman, have met defeat after defeat, till the iron has entered my soul. Yet every day I have thanked G.o.d that I have been permitted to bear my share in the tremendous struggle for the development of women in the nineteenth century. Struggle means development; it can come in no other way, and this will be the grandest since creation began--the crowned, perfected woman.

For this the cry of womanhood has risen out of the depths through the centuries. Up through agony and despair it has come, through sin and shame, through poverty and martyrdom, through torture which has wrung drops of blood from woman's lips, still up, up, till it has reached the great white throne itself.

The enrollment committee reported a list of about one hundred thousand names of persons asking for woman suffrage. The treasurer announced the receipts for 1888 to be $12,510. All of the expenses of the great International Council had been paid and a balance of nearly $300 remained.

The resolutions might be described as an epitomized recital of wrongs and a Bill of Rights.

WHEREAS, Women possessed and exercised the right of suffrage in the inauguration of this Government; and,

WHEREAS, They were deprived of this right by the arbitrary Acts of successive State Legislatures in violation of the original compact as seen in the early const.i.tutions; therefore,

_Resolved_, That it is the duty of the several States to make prompt rest.i.tution of these ancient rights, recognized by innumerable precedents in English history, and to-day by the gradual extension of the suffrage over vast territories.

WHEREAS, Woman's t.i.tle deed to an equal share in the inheritance left her by the fathers of the Republic has been examined and proved by able lawyers; and,

WHEREAS, This right is already exercised in some form in one hundred localities in different parts of the world; therefore,

_Resolved_, That s.e.x is no longer considered a bar to the exercise of suffrage by civilized nations.

_Resolved_, That it is the duty of Congress to pa.s.s a declaratory act, compelling the several States to establish a ”republican form of government” within their borders by securing to women their right to vote, thus nullifying the fraudulent Acts of Legislatures and making our Government h.o.m.ogeneous from Maine to Oregon.

_Resolved_, That the question of enfranchising one-half the people is superior to that of Indian treaties, admission of new States, tariff, international copyright or any other subject before the country, and that it is the foremost duty of the Fiftieth Congress at this, its last session, to submit an amendment to the Const.i.tution forbidding States to disfranchise citizens on account of s.e.x.

_Resolved_, That as a question of ethics the difference between putting a fraudulent ballot in the box and keeping a rightful ballot out is nothing, and that we condemn the action which prevents women from casting a ballot at any election as a shameful evidence of the corruption of dominant political parties in this country.

WHEREAS, The Legislature of Was.h.i.+ngton Territory has twice voted for woman suffrage--women for the most part having gladly accepted and exercised the right, Governor Squire in his report to the Secretary of the Interior in 1884 having declared that it met the approval of a large majority of the people; and,

WHEREAS, In 1887, after the women had voted for three and a half years, the Territorial Supreme Court p.r.o.nounced the law invalid on the ground that the nature of the bill must be described in the t.i.tle of the act; and,

WHEREAS, In January, 1888, another bill pa.s.sed by the Legislature gave to this law an explicit t.i.tle; and the bill, again granting suffrage to women, was signed by Governor Semple, thus triumphantly showing the approval of the people, the Legislature and the Governor; and,

WHEREAS, The Territorial Supreme Court, in August, 1888, again rendered a decision against the right of the women of the Territory to vote, basing their decision upon the false a.s.sumption that Congress had never delegated to the Territories the right to define the status of their own voters; and,

WHEREAS, This decision strikes a blow at the fundamental powers of the United States Congress, confounding laws delegated to the Territories by the Organic Act of 1852, which vests in their Legislatures the power to prescribe their qualifications for voting and holding office--with State governments which limit legislative enactments by const.i.tutions of their own making--thus setting at naught the will of the people; therefore,

_Resolved_, That we earnestly and respectfully pet.i.tion Congress that in pa.s.sing an enabling act or acts for the admission of the other Territories there be incorporated a clause allowing women to vote for delegates to their const.i.tutional conventions, and at the election for the adoption of the const.i.tution, in every one where the Legislature has granted woman suffrage and such law has not been repealed by a subsequent Legislature.

WHEREAS, In the year 1873 our leader, Susan B. Anthony, was deprived of the right of trial by jury, by a Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, simply because she was a woman, it is the duty of all women to resent the insult thus offered to womanhood and demand of the men of this closing century of const.i.tutional government such condemnation of this infamous decision of Judge Ward Hunt[74] as shall teach the coming generation of voters that the welfare of the republic demands that women be protected equally with men in the exercise of citizens.h.i.+p; and,