The History of Woman Suffrage Volume IV Part 6

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 Washington, 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 statesmanship 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 statesmanship 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-partnership 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.

The right of suffrage is simply the right to govern one's self.

Every human being is born into the world with this right, and the desire to exercise it comes naturally with the feeling of life's responsibilities. Those only who are capable of appreciating this dignity, can measure the extent to which women are defrauded, and they only can measure the loss to the councils of the nation of the wisdom of representative women. They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience.

It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts. If woman naturally has no will, no self-a.s.sertion, no opinions of her own, what means the terrible persecution of the s.e.x under all forms of religious fanaticism, culminating in witchcraft in which scarce one wizard to a thousand witches was sacrificed? So powerful and merciless has been the struggle to dominate the feminine element in humanity, that we may well wonder at the steady, determined resistance maintained by woman through the centuries. To every step of progress which she has made from slavery to the partial freedom she now enjoys, the Church and the State alike have made the most cruel opposition, and yet, under all circ.u.mstances she has shown her love of individual freedom, her desire for self-government, while her achievements in practical affairs and her courage in the great emergencies of life have vindicated her capacity to exercise this right....

The right of suffrage in a republic means self-government, and self-government means education, development, self-reliance, independence, courage in the hour of danger. That women may attain these virtues we demand the exercise of this right. Not that we suppose we should at once be transformed into a higher order of beings with all the elements of sovereignty, wisdom, goodness and power full-fledged, but because the exercise of the suffrage is the primary school in which the citizen learns how to use the ballot as a weapon of defense; it is the open sesame to the land of freedom and equality. The ballot is the scepter of power in the hand of every citizen. Woman can never have an equal chance with man in the struggle of life until she too wields this power. So long as women have no voice in the Government under which they live they will be an ostracised cla.s.s, and invidious distinctions will be made against them in the world of work.

Thrown on their own resources they have all the hardships that men have to encounter in earning their daily bread, with the added disabilities which grow out of disfranchis.e.m.e.nt. Men of the republic, why make life harder for your daughters by these artificial distinctions? Surely, if governments were made to protect the weak against the strong, they are in greater need than your stalwart sons of every political right which can give them protection, dignity and power....

The disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of one-half the people places a dangerous power in the hands of the other half. All history shows that one cla.s.s never did legislate with justice for another, and all philosophy shows they never can, as the relations of cla.s.s grow out of either natural or artificial advantages which one has over the other and which it will maintain if possible. It is folly to say that women are not a cla.s.s, so long as there is any difference in the code of laws for men and women, any discrimination in the customs of society, giving advantages to men over women; so long as in all our State const.i.tutions women are ranked with lunatics, idiots, paupers and criminals. When you say that one-half the people shall be governed by the other half, surely the cla.s.s distinction is about as broad as it can be....

The disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of one-half the people deprives the State of the united wisdom of man and woman--that "consensus of the competent" so necessary in national affairs--making our Government an oligarchy of males, instead of a republic of the people, thus perpetuating with all its evils a dominant masculine civilization. But in answer to this it is said that although women do not vote, yet they have an indirect influence in Government through their husbands and brothers. Yes, an "irresponsible power," of all kinds of influence the most dangerous....

The dogged, unreasonable persecutions of s.e.x in all ages, the evident determination to eliminate, as far as possible, the feminine element in humanity, has been the most fruitful cause of the moral chaos the race has suffered, under every form of government and religion.... The loss to women themselves of the highest development of which they are capable is sad, but when this involves a lower type of manhood and danger to our free inst.i.tutions, it is still more sad. The primal work in every country, for its own safety, should be the education and freedom of woman.

The arguments before the Judiciary Committee of the House were given the next morning, March 8, twelve of the fifteen members being present.[23] Miss Anthony opened the hearing with an earnest address in which she referred to the hundreds of thousands of pet.i.tions which had been sent to Congress for woman suffrage--far more than for any other measure--and continued:

Negro suffrage was again and again overwhelmingly voted down in various States--New York, Connecticut, Ohio, etc.--and you know, gentlemen, that if the negro had never had the right to vote until the majority of the rank and file of white men, particularly foreign-born men, had voted "Yes," he would have gone without it till the crack of doom. It was because of the prejudice of the unthinking majority that Congress submitted the question of the negro's enfranchis.e.m.e.nt to the Legislatures of the several States, to be adjudicated by the educated, broadened representatives of the people. We now appeal to you to lift the decision of woman suffrage from the vote of the populace to that of the Legislatures, that you may thereby be as considerate, as just, to the women of this nation as you were to the male ex-slaves.

Every new privilege granted to women has been by the Legislatures. The liberal laws for married women, the right of the wife to own and control her inherited property and separate earnings, the right of women to vote at school elections in a dozen States, the right to vote on all questions in three Territories, have all been gained through the Legislatures. Had any one of these beneficent propositions been submitted to the ma.s.ses, do you believe a majority would have placed their sanction upon them? I do not.

It takes all too many of us women, and too much of our hard earnings, from our homes and from the works of charity and education of our respective localities, even to come to Washington, session after session, until Congress shall have submitted the proposition, and then to go from Legislature to Legislature, urging its adoption; but when you insist that we shall beg at the feet of each and every individual voter of each and every one of the thirty-eight States, native and foreign, white and black, educated and ignorant, you doom us to incalculable hardships and sacrifices and to most exasperating insults and humiliations. I pray you, therefore, save us from the fate of working and waiting for our freedom until we shall have educated the ma.s.ses of men to consent to give their wives and sisters equality of rights with themselves. You surely will not compel us to wait the enlightenment of all the freedmen of this nation and all the newly-made voters from the monarchial governments of the Old World!

Liberty for one's self is a natural instinct possessed alike by all, but to be willing to accord liberty to another is the result of education, of self-discipline, of the practice of the golden rule--"Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you." Therefore we ask that the question of equality of rights to women shall be arbitrated upon by the picked men of the nation in Congress, and the picked men of the several States in their respective Legislatures.

THE REV. FLORENCE KILLOCK (Ills.): ... Called as I am into the homes of the people through the requirements of my office, I know whereof I speak when I say that I am as faithfully fulfilling its sacred duties when I come before you urging this claim, as when, on my bended knees, I plead at the throne of G.o.d for the salvation of souls.

I know too well the suffering that might be alleviated, the terrible wrongs that might be righted, the sins that might be punished, could the moral power of the women of our land be utilized--could it be brought to bear on those great questions which affect so vitally the welfare of society. The gigantic evil of intemperance is prostrating the finest powers of our country and threatening the life of social purity; it is in truth the fell destroyer of peace, virtue and domestic and national safety, and upon the unoffending the blow falls with the greatest weight.

Why should not they who suffer the most deeply through this evil, be authorized before the law of the land to protect themselves and their loved ones from its fearful ravages? Is it other than simple justice which I ask for them? I have listened to too many sad stories from heart-broken wives and mothers not to know that the demand which the women of the land make in this matter comes not from love of power, is not prompted by false ambition, springs not from unwomanly aspirations, but does come from a direful need of self-protection and an earnest desire to protect those dearer than life itself.

Gentlemen of the Judiciary Committee, in the same spirit in which I seek the aid of Heaven in my endeavor to promote the spiritual welfare of mankind, I now and here seek your aid in promoting the highest moral welfare of every man, woman and child. This you will do in giving your vote and influence for the equality of women before the law, and as you thus confer this new power upon the women of our land, like the bread cast upon the waters, it shall come to you in a higher, n.o.bler type of womanhood, in sweeter homes, in purer social life, in all that contributes to the welfare of the individual and the state.

MRS. MARY B. CLAY (Ky.): We do not come here to plead as individual women with individual men, but as a subject cla.s.s with a ruling cla.s.s; nor do we come as suffering individuals--though G.o.d knows some of us might do that with propriety--but as the suffering millions whom we represent....

We are born of the same parents as men and raised in the same family. We are possessed of the same loves and animosities as our brothers, and we inherit equally with them the substance of our fathers. So long as we are minors the Government treats us as equals, but when we come of age, when we are capable of feeling and knowing the difference, the boy becomes a free human being, while the girl remains a slave, a subject, and no moral heroism, no self-sacrificing patriotism, ever ent.i.tles her to her freedom.

Is this just? Is it not, indeed, barbarous?

If American men intend always to keep women slaves, political and civil, they make a great mistake when they let the girl, with the boy, learn the alphabet, for no educated cla.s.s will long remain in subjection. We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket-handkerchief?

Each one of you is responsible for these laws continuing as they are, and you can not avoid responsibility by saying that you did not help to make them. Great injustice is done us in the fact that we are not tried by a jury of our peers. Great injustice is done us everywhere by our not having a vote. Human nature is naturally selfish, and, as woman is deprived of the ballot, and powerless either to punish or reward, man, loving his bread and b.u.t.ter more than justice, will ever thrust her aside for the benefit of those who can help him, those with ballots in their hands.

....All that is good in the home, and largely the highest principles taught in your youth, were given by your mothers. How then it is possible for you to return this love and interest, as soon as you are capable of acting, by riveting the chains which hold them still slaves, politically and civilly?

You need woman's presence and counsel in legislation as much as she needs yours in the home; you need the a.s.sociation and influence of woman; her intuitive knowledge of men's character and the effect of measures upon the household; you need her for the economical details of public work; you need her sense of justice and moral courage to execute the laws; you need her for all that is just, merciful and good in government. But above all, women themselves need the ballot for self-protection, and as we are by common right and the laws of G.o.d free human beings, we demand that you no longer hold us your subjects--your political slaves.

MRS. MARY E. HAGGART (Ind.): When Abraham Lincoln penned the immortal emanc.i.p.ation proclamation he did not stop to inquire whether every man and every woman in Southern slavery did or did not want to be free. Whether women do or do not wish to vote does not affect the question of their right to do so. The right of man to the ballot is a logical deduction from the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. And singular to say, while this inheres in all people alike, the privilege of exercising it is withheld from women by a cla.s.s who have no right to say whether they are willing or not that women should vote.

Their right to the ballot was long ago settled beyond a quibble, by laws and principles of justice which are superior to the codes of men, who have usurped the power to regulate the voting privileges of citizens. If this right be inherent and existing in the great body of society before governments are formed, it follows that all citizens of a republic, be they male or female, are alike ent.i.tled to its exercise.

....Is there a man among you willing to resign his own right to the ballot and to place his own business interests and general welfare at the mercy of the votes of others? Would you not resent an attempt on the part of any man, or set of men, to fix your mental status, a.s.sign your work in life and lay out with mathematical precision your exact sphere in the world? And yet men undertake to adjust the limitations of the Elizabeth Cady Stantons, the Susan B. Anthonys, the Harriet Beecher Stowes, the Frances E. Willards, the Harriet Hosmers of the world, and continue to talk with patronizing condescension of female retirement, female duties and female spheres.