Volume IV Part 42 (1/2)

Since our last convention the area of disfranchis.e.m.e.nt in the possessions of the United States has been greatly enlarged. Our nation has undertaken to furnish provisional governments for Hawaii and the Philippine Islands, Cuba and Porto Rico. Hitherto the settlers of new Territories have been permitted to frame their own provisional governments, which were ratified by Congress, but to-day Congress itself a.s.sumes the prerogative of making the laws for the newly-acquired Territories. When the governments for those in the West were organized there had been no practical example of universal suffrage in any one of the older States, hence it might be pardonable for their settlers to ignore the right of the women a.s.sociated with them to a voice in their governments.

But to-day, after fifty years' continuous agitation of the right of women to vote, and after the demand has been conceded in one-half the States in the management of the public schools; after one State has added to that of the schools the management of its cities; and after four States have granted women the full vote--the universal reports show that the exercise of the suffrage by women has added to their influence, increased the respect of men, and elevated the moral, social and political conditions of their respective commonwealths. With those object-lessons before Congress, it would seem that no member could be so blind as not to see it the duty of that body to have the provisional governments of our new possessions founded on the principle of equal rights, privileges and immunities for all the people, women included. I hope this convention will devise some plan for securing a strong expression of public sentiment on this question, to be presented to the Fifty-sixth Congress, which is to convene on the first Monday of December next....

During the reconstruction period and the discussion of the negro's right to vote Senator Blaine and others opposed the counting of all the negroes in the basis of representation, instead of the old-time three-fifths, because they saw that to do so would greatly increase the power of the white men of the South on the floor of Congress. Therefore the Republican leaders insisted upon the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to secure the ballot to the negro men. Only one generation has pa.s.sed and yet nearly all of the Southern States have by one device or another succeeded in excluding from the ballot-box very nearly the entire negro vote, openly and defiantly declaring their intention to secure the absolute supremacy of the white race, but there is not a suggestion on their part of allowing the citizens to whom they deny the right of suffrage to be counted out from the basis of representation. Some of the Northern newspapers have been growing indignant upon the subject, declaring that a vote in South Carolina counts more than two votes in New York, in the election of the President and the House of Representatives.

It seems to me that a still greater violation of the principle of ”the consent of the governed” is practiced in all the States of the Union where women, though disfranchised, are yet counted in the basis of representation, and I think the time has come when this a.s.sociation should make a most strenuous demand for an amendment to the Const.i.tution of the United States forbidding any State thus to count disfranchised citizens....

The increased discussion of the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women in the newspapers throughout the country evidences the larger demand of the public for information on this line, and a vast amount of educational work is being done in this way.... The presentation of the woman question in the New York _Sunday Sun_ each week by Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, with the articles it has elicited from the opposition, is of incalculable value; and when we add to the number of people who read the _Sun_ the vast numbers who read the copies of these articles made by the many newspapers between the two oceans, we see what an immense reading audience is gained by getting our question into that one of the best New York dailies.

We must remember that these papers never would have copied Mrs.

Harper's or any other literary woman's productions had they been first published in one of our special organs; therefore one very important branch of press work is to gain access to the metropolitan dailies. Then there is the immense work done by Mrs.

Elnora M. Babc.o.c.k for the State of New York, and by the chairmen of the different State press committees, as well as that done by our national organizer from the headquarters. Never has the press of the entire nation been kept so alive with discussions upon the woman suffrage question as during the past year, and my hope is that we may yet have upon every one of the great city papers a strong, educated suffrage woman, as editor of a woman's page or, better still, as writer of suffrage articles to be inserted without a special heading which would advertise to the general reader that they were about women.

Though we have not obtained the suffrage in any of the States where we had hoped to do so during the past year, the failures have been by very small majorities. In South Dakota, where eight years ago a woman suffrage amendment was lost by a majority of over 23,000, at the election of 1898 the opposing majority was reduced to 3,000; while in Was.h.i.+ngton, where the question was submitted for the second time, it was lost by a majority less than one-half as large as that of nine years ago. In California both Houses of the Legislature pa.s.sed the School Suffrage Bill, which the Governor refused to sign, repeating the action of 1894.

The suffrage bills in the Territorial Legislatures of Oklahoma and Arizona were carried by very fine majorities through both lower Houses, but were lost in both upper Houses (as will be stated by our national organizer, who led our suffrage hosts in each case) through a shameful surrender to the temptation of bribery from the open and avowed enemies of woman's enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, the liquor organizations.

None of these so-called defeats ought to discourage us in the slightest degree. Our enemies, the women remonstrants, may comfort themselves with the thought that the liquor interest has joined in their efforts, but we surely can solace ourselves with the fact that the very best men voted in favor of allowing women to exercise their right to a voice in the conditions of home and State. So we have nothing to fear but everything to gain by going forward with renewed faith to agitate and educate the public, until the vast majority of men and women are thoroughly grounded in the great principle of political equality....

I thank you, friends, for your cordial words of welcome. We are glad to come here. I always feel a certain kins.h.i.+p to Michigan since the const.i.tutional amendment campaign of 1874, in which I a.s.sisted. I remember that I went across one city on a dray, the only vehicle I could secure, in order to catch a train. A newspaper said next day: ”That ancient daughter of Methuselah, Susan B. Anthony, pa.s.sed through our city last night, with a bonnet looking as if she had just descended from Noah's Ark.” Now if Susan B. Anthony had represented votes, that young political editor would not have cared if she were the oldest or youngest daughter of Methuselah, or whether her bonnet came from the Ark or from the most fas.h.i.+onable man milliner's.

There are women's clubs all over the country; did you ever hear of one organized for other than an uplifting purpose? (Several voices: ”Yes, the Anti-Suffrage a.s.sociations!”) Well, even the ”antis” wish to keep the world just as it is; they do not aim to make it worse. Some persons have tried to belittle the resolution pa.s.sed by the Colorado Legislature recently, testifying to the good results of equal suffrage, by declaring that the members were afraid of the women. I never heard before of a Legislature that voted solidly in a certain way for fear of women. We have with us to-day Mrs. Welch, the president of the Colorado Equal Suffrage a.s.sociation, of whom it is said that the Legislature was so afraid. [Miss Anthony led forward Mrs. Welch, a pretty little woman in a very feminine bonnet, who shrank away slightly from the compelling hand, and showed shyness in every line of her figure, as she felt the eyes of the audience' concentrated upon her.] At the time of the first recognition of women in the early Granger days, when the farmers used to harness up their horses to their big wagons and take all their women folks to the meetings, I used to say that I could tell a Grange woman as far off as I could see her, because of her air of feeling herself as good as a man. Now look at this woman from Colorado!

MRS. WELCH: When I came before the Executive Committee this morning, and they said they were proud of me as a free woman, I felt almost ashamed to be a free woman. I thought of all the tears and sorrows and struggles of Miss Anthony and wondered if she ever would possess the ballot for which she had done so much, and I so little.

MISS ANTHONY: I am glad you have it. We are not working for ourselves alone; that is one reason why our society does not grow as fast as some others.

The paper of the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer (R. I.) was a strong, philosophical presentation of our Duty to the Women of Our New Possessions:

....Prof. Otis T. Mason, author of that important book, ”Woman's Share in Primitive Culture,” tells us that ”the longer one studies the subject the more he will be convinced that savage tribes can now be elevated chiefly through their women.” Why is this true? For the reason that the savage is in the stage of social order through which all civilized nations have pa.s.sed at some period--the stage of the mother-rule more or less modified by partial masculine domination. It is a well-known fact of human history and prehistoric record that the Matriarchate, or the mother-rule, preceded the Patriarchate, or the father-rule. ”All the social fabrics of the world are built around women. The first stable society was a mother and her child.” The reason why the primitive descent of name and property, and the first fixed stake of home life, was the expression of this maternal relations.h.i.+p is obvious. Motherhood was demonstrated by nature before fatherhood was definitely known. Inheritance of name by the female line was alone possible; and that, as well as the female holding and transmitting of property, was a family or tribal or clan relations.h.i.+p, women always retaining rule and wealth not so much as individuals as custodians of communal life and possessions.

Not only was the mother with the child the first founder of human society, but the woman in savage life was the first inventor and originator of all life-sustaining industries....

When man also began to ”settle down”--whether from personal choice or from social pressure--when he, too, began to learn and practice the industrial arts heretofore solely in the hands of women, he began to press his more personal and individualistic claims of recognition and of property-owning against the family wealth of which the woman was the custodian.

As man more and more a.s.sumed the burden of the world's industries outside the home (which before had been woman's care alone), and as woman became more and more absorbed in purely domestic concerns, man's individualism a.s.sumed greater and greater power within the family life, and he gradually acquired the despotic family heads.h.i.+p which marked the ancient patriarchal order of Rome. This was not a social descent, but an immense social uplift, in the age in which it was natural. Professor Mason says, and with profound truth, ”Matrimony in all ages is an effort to secure to the child the authenticity of the father.” It was necessary for social growth that offspring should have two parents instead of one; that the division of labor should be more equal, and man be fastened to domestic needs by bonds he could not break, and through labors which were peaceful as well as arduous. For that process his individualism, developed through ages of free wandering and purely militant life, must be not only tamed somewhat, but harnessed to the home life.

To accomplish that mighty social uplift by which offspring secured two parents instead of one, woman's subjection to man was paid as the price of the higher form of family unity. Nor was her subjection to man in the ruder ages of the world wholly an evil to herself. It has been said that ”woman was first the wife of any, second the wife of many, and third one of many wives.” Each of these steps was an advance in her s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p. All were stepping-stones to the monogamic union which is the standard of our civilization, and the realized ideal of all our best and wisest men and women....

Bebel says, ”Woman was the first human being to taste of bondage.” True, and her bondage has been long and bitter; but the subjection of woman to man in the family bond was a vast step upward from the preceding condition. It gave woman release from the terrible labor-burdens of savage life; it gave her time and strength to develop beauty of person and refinement of taste and manners. It gave her the teaching capacity, for it put all the younger child-life into her exclusive care, with some leisure at command to devote to its mental and moral, as well as physical, well-being. It led to a closer relations.h.i.+p between man and woman than the world had known before, and thus gave each the advantage of the other's qualities. And always and everywhere the subjection of woman to man has had a mitigation and softening of hards.h.i.+ps unknown to other forms of slavery, by reason of the power of human affection as it has worked through s.e.x-attraction.

As soon, however, as the slavery of woman to man was outgrown and obsolete it became (as was African slavery in a professedly democratic country like our own) ”the sum of all villainies.” And to-day there is no inconsistency so great, and therefore no condition so hurtful and outrageous, as the subjection of women to men in a civilization which like ours a.s.sumes to rest upon foundations of justice and equality of human rights....

To-day these considerations (especially the failure fully to apply the doctrine of equality of human rights to women, even in the most advanced centers of modern civilization) have an especial and most fateful significance in relation to the women of the more backward races as they are brought into contact with our modern civilization. I said the peoples with whom we are now being brought as a nation into vital relations.h.i.+p may be still in the matriarchate. If they are not, most of them are certainly in some transition stage from that to the father-rule. Not all peoples have had to pa.s.s through the entire subjection of women to men which marked our ancestral advance. The more persistent tribal relations.h.i.+p and collective family life have sometimes softened the process of social growth which was so harsh for women under the old Roman law and the later English common law.

It may be that the dusky races of Africa and of the islands of the sea, as well as our Aryan cousins of India, may pa.s.s more easily through the stages of attachment of man's responsibility to the family life than we, with our tough fiber of character, were able to do. If so, in the name of justice they should have the chance!

But if we, who have not yet ”writ large” in law and political rights that respect for woman which all our education, industry, religion, art, home life and social culture express; if we, who are still inconsistent and not yet out of the transition stage from the father-rule to the equal reign of both s.e.xes; if we lay violent hands upon these backward peoples and give them only our law and our political rights as they relate to women, we shall do horrible injustice to the savage women, and through them to the whole process of social growth for their people. When we tried to divide ”in severalty” the lands of the American Indian, we did violence to all his own sense of justice and co-operative feeling when we failed to recognize the women of the tribes in the distribution. We then and there gave the Indian the worst of the white man's relations.h.i.+p to his wife, and failed utterly, as in the nature of the case we must have done, to give him the best of the white man's relation to his wife.

When in India, as Mrs. Garrett Fawcett has so finely shown, we introduce the technicalities of the English law of marriage to bind an unwilling wife to her husband, we give the Hindoo the slavery of the Anglo-Saxon wife, but we do not give him that spirit of Anglo-Saxon marriage and home-life which has made that slavery often scarcely felt, and never an unmixed evil. If, to-day, in the Hawaiian Islands or in Cuba we fail to recognize the native women, who still hold something of the primitive prestige of womanhood, fail to recognize them as ent.i.tled to a translation, under new laws and conditions, of the old dignity of position, we shall not only do them an injustice, but we shall forcibly give the Hawaiian and Cuban men lessons in the wrong side and not the right side of our domestic relations. Above all, if in the Philippines we abruptly and with force of arms establish the authority of the husband over the wife, by recognizing men only as property-owners, as signers of treaties, as industrial rulers and as domestic law-givers, we shall introduce every outrage and injustice of women's subjection to men, without giving these people one iota of the sense of family responsibility, of protection of and respect for woman, and of deep and self-sacrificing devotion to childhood's needs, which mark the Anglo-Saxon man.

In a word, if we introduce one particle of our belated and illogical political and legal subjection of women to men into any savage or half-civilized community, we shall spoil the domestic virtues that community already possesses, and we shall not (because we can not so abruptly and violently) inoculate them with the virtues of civilized domestic life. Nature will not be cheated. We can not escape, nor can we roughly and swiftly help others to escape, the discipline of ages of natural growth.

This all means that we need another Commission to go to all the lands in which our flag now claims a new power of oversight and control--a Commission other than that so recently sent to the Philippines--to see what may be done to bring order to that distracted group of islands. We need a Commission which shall study domestic rather than political conditions, and which shall look for the undercurrents of social growth rather than the more showy political movements. We should have on that Commission two archaeologists, a man and a woman, and I can name them--Otis T.