Volume IV Part 37 (1/2)

So the dawn of the day that shall mean freedom for woman and the enn.o.bling of the race was first seen by Wyoming, on the crest of our continent, and the clarion note was sounded forth, ”Equality before the law.” For a quarter of a century she was the lone watcher on the heights to sound the tocsin of freedom. At last Colorado, from her splendid snow-covered peaks, answered back in grand accord, ”Equality before the law.” Then on Utah's brow shone the sun, and she, too, exultantly joined in the trio, ”Equality before the law.” And now Idaho completes the quartette of mountain States which sing the anthem of woman's freedom. Its echoes rouse the sleepers everywhere, until from the rock-bound coast of the Atlantic to the golden sands of the Pacific resounds one resolute and jubilant demand, ”Equality before the law,” and lo, the whole world wakes to the sunlight of liberty!

Mrs. Mary C. C. Bradford, in speaking for Colorado, said:

Civilization means self-realization. The level is being slowly but surely raised and the atmosphere improved. Freedom for the individual, properly guarded, is the ideal to-day. When woman is free, the eternal feminine shows itself to be also the truly human. Witness Wyoming, with its magnificent school system, its equal pay for equal work. Witness Colorado, where women cast 52 per cent. of the total vote though the State contains a large majority of men. What does this show if not that women wish to vote? We women believe that election day administers to each of us the sacrament of citizens.h.i.+p, and we go, most of us, prayerfully and thankfully to partake in this outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace....

The first time I went to vote I was out of the house just nine minutes. The second time I took my little girl along to school, stopped in to vote, and then went down town and did my marketing; and I was gone twenty minutes. While I was casting my vote the men gave my little one a flower. They always decorate the polling-places with flowers now, for they know women love beauty.

The tone of political conventions has improved since suffrage was granted to women. So has the character of the candidates....

There is no character-builder like responsibility. Every woman's club in the State has been turned into a study club, and the women are examining public questions for themselves. This is one of the best results of equal suffrage.

When women obtained the ballot they wanted to know about public affairs, and so they asked their husbands at home (every woman wants to believe that her husband knows everything), and the husbands had to inform themselves in order to answer their wives'

questions. Equal suffrage has not only educated women and elevated the primaries, but it has given back to the State the services of her best men, large numbers of whom had got into the habit of neglecting their political duties....

Mrs. Emmeline B. Wells said in describing the conditions in Utah:

After the ballot was given to women the men soon came to us and asked us to help them. We divided on party lines but not rigidly so. We helped not only the good men and women of our own party, but those of the other. If they put up a Republican or a Democrat who is not fit for the position, the women vote against him. In all the work I do for the Republicans, I never denounce the Democrats....

This year the men were more willing to have us go to the primaries than we were to go. Even the women who had not wished for suffrage voted. I do not mind going to the primaries. I am not afraid of men--not the least in the world. I have often been on committees with men. I don't think it has hurt me at all, and I have learned a great deal. They have always been very good to me. We must stand up for the men. We could not do without them.

Certainly we could not have settled Utah without them. They built the bridges and killed the bears; but I think the women worked just as hard, in their way....

When Mrs. Mell C. Woods came forward to speak for Idaho the audience arose and received her with cheers and the waving of handkerchiefs.

She brought letters of greeting from most of the women's clubs of that State, and in a long and beautiful address she said:

With her head pillowed in the lap of the North, her feet resting in the orchards of the South, her snowy bosom rising to the clouds, Idaho lies serene in her beauty of glacier, lake and primeval forest, guarding in her verdure-clad mountains vast treasures of precious minerals, with the hem of her robe embroidered in sapphires and opals.... As representing Idaho, first I wish to express the heartfelt grat.i.tude of every equal suffragist in our proud and happy State to the National a.s.sociation for the most generous help afforded us in our two years' campaign. Without the aid of the devoted women, Mrs.

DeVoe, Mrs. Chapman Catt, Mrs. Bradford and Mrs. Johns, who made the arduous journey to organize our clubs, plead our cause and teach us how to work and win, we should not be celebrating Idaho's victory to-night....

After describing the great output of the mines and the fruit-producing value of the State, she continued:

I fancy few of you know much of the conditions existing in the mining country, dotted with camps in every gulch; the preponderance of the adult males over the women of maturity; the power of the saloon element, and the cosmopolitan character of the people--men from all parts of the world, ignorant and cultured, depraved and respectable, seeking fame and fortune in the far West--no reading-rooms, no lectures, no lyceums, no spelling-bees or corn-huskings, the relaxation of the farm hand; single men away from home and its influences, forced from the draughty lobby of the hotel or tavern to the warmth and comfort of the well-appointed saloon.

The missionary suffrage work in such places was obliged to be quietly done, without any apparent advocacy on the part of men who were in reality ardent supporters of our cause, lest the saloon element should organize and, by concerted action, crush the movement as they did in the State of Was.h.i.+ngton in 1889; and California, too, owes her defeat of the amendment at least partially to this cause. Yet you may go far to find n.o.bler men than we have in Idaho, and we did not lack able champions. Our amendment was carried by more than a two-thirds majority of the votes cast upon it.

The last address, by the Rev. Ida C. Hultin (Ills.), The Point of View, was a masterly effort. She said in part:

Before any woman is a wife, a sister or a mother she is a human being. We ask nothing as women but everything as human beings.

The sphere of woman is any path that she can tread, any work that she can do. Let no one imagine that we wish to be men. In the beginning G.o.d created them male and female. The principle of co-equality is recognized in all of G.o.d's kingdom. We are beginning to find in the human race, as in the vegetable and the animal, that the male and the female are designed to be the equals of each other.

It is because woman loves her home that she wants her country to be pure and holy, so that she may not lose her children when they go out from her protection. We want to be women, womanly women, stamping the womanliness of our nature upon the country, even as the men have stamped the manliness of their nature upon it. The home is the sphere of woman and of man also. The home does not mean simply bread-making and dish-was.h.i.+ng, but also the place into which shall enter that which makes pure manhood possible.

Give woman a chance to do her whole duty. What is education for, what is religion for, but as a means to the end of the development of humanity? If national life is what it ought to be also, a means to the same end, it needs then everything that humanity has to make it sweet and hopeful. Women have moral sentiments and they want to record them. That is the only difference between voting and not voting. The national life is the reflected life of the people. It is strong with their strength and weak with their weakness.

A letter was read to the convention by Miss Anthony from Miss Kitty Reed, daughter of Speaker Thomas B. Reed, who had been with her father in California during the recent suffrage campaign. In referring to this she said:

There and elsewhere the thinking women who opposed it used this argument: There are too many people voting already; the practical effect of woman suffrage would be an increase in the illiterate vote, without a proportionate increase in the intelligent vote.

They were not in favor of it unless there could be an educational qualification. In other words, they were opposed to woman suffrage because they were opposed to universal suffrage. I have always regarded universal suffrage as the foundation principle of our government. If ”governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” does not mean that, what can it mean? So I tried to persuade these women of the truth of that which I supposed had been settled about one hundred and twenty-one years ago. It is necessary to make women believe that suffrage is a natural right rather than a privilege; that, while abstractly it seems well for an intelligent citizen to govern an ignorant one, human nature is such that the intelligent will govern selfishly and leave the ignorant no opportunity to improve.

It seems to me that the worst obstacle we have to encounter now is not the prejudice of men against women's voting, but a misunderstanding on the part of women of the real meaning of government by the people. This may be ancient history to you, but it impressed me deeply while I was in California and that is why I write it. Of course there are many women who do not think. When they hear woman suffrage spoken of, they go to their husbands and ask them what they think about it, and their husbands tell them that they are too good to vote, and those women are content. It does not occur to them to ask why, if they are too pure and good to vote, they are not excused from obeying the laws and paying taxes.