The History of Woman Suffrage Volume IV Part 42

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 Washington, 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 kinship 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 fashionable 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 relationship 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 relationship, 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 headship 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 relationship. 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 relationship 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 hardships 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 relationship 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 relationship 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 relationship 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.

Mason and Alice C. Fletcher....

An earnest discussion followed this paper, in which Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.), Mrs. Helen Philleo Jenkins (Mich.), Henry B. Blackwell (Ma.s.s.), Miss Octavia W. Bates (Mich.), Miss Martha Scott Anderson (Minn.), and Miss Anthony took part:

MRS. JENKINS: ....Whatever power in government may be given to the men of our new possessions in selecting their rulers, let the same privilege be accorded the women. It may be said that the women are ignorant, and need yet to be held in subjection--that they are unfit to have a voice in the new order of things. Let us not be deceived. Probably the women are no more ignorant and stupid than the ma.s.ses of men in these newly acquired regions--excepting always the few men whom circ.u.mstances have developed. The ignorant mother can guide her child quite as safely as its ignorant father. Men and women in all nations and tribes are pretty nearly on a level as to common sense and forethought for the future good of the family. Indeed, the interests of the home, protection of the children, and the morals and behavior of the community make the standard of even unlettered women one notch higher than that of their ignorant husbands. Let us of this nation hesitate before we establish a s.e.x supremacy that it may take long centuries to overcome....

Thousands of dollars are expended on a military commission; it is sent to investigate the commercial possibilities, the financial opportunities, in remote lands; but the army, the commerce, the finance are not all there is of a nation. There are more vital interests--there is something which lies at the very base of the nation, without which it could not exist--the homes, the women and the children. It is the social conditions that need special consideration in our country's dealings with these new lands.

MISS BATES: ....In the presence of the events which have transpired during the past year, and in all the discussions pertaining to the new peoples who have suddenly become our proteges, seldom if ever does one hear a word about the women, who, all will admit, are a most important factor in the civilization--or the lack of it--which we have taken under our control.

We women are here at this time to do our best to awaken the public conscience to a realizing sense of the state of affairs.

We are the result of what the religion, the education of the nineteenth century and the liberty which it has granted to women have made us. We are ready and willing and competent to befriend our less favored sisters beyond the seas, and to extend to them the benefits we enjoy, so far as they are able to receive them; but--the tragedy of it--in a certain sense we are utterly helpless to reach them and to give them what they, unconsciously to themselves, so grievously need. There is no place for the thought of the women of this land in the plans of the nation for the study of these questions.

No matter how much our speaker may think and write and publish on this subject--aye, and women like her--no matter how wise the conclusions they reach, is it at all likely that their voices will be listened to in the din and blare and clash of warring political parties, or respected in legislative halls? Or is it probable that the advocates of territorial expansion will pause a moment to ponder on the woman side of that question? We, to-day, are discussing this subject without even the shadow of a hope of putting our convictions into practice. Is it any wonder that women at large are dead to the importance of this matter?...

I am in favor of pushing the question to the utmost--not that I have any hope that such a Commission will be appointed, but because it furnishes a most valuable argument for extending the suffrage to women: first, in order that, by its possession, they may have an uncontested, legally-defined right of serving on such commissions; and, second, because of the opportunity it offers for proving to the world the necessity of commissions like this for settling questions and conditions of which women form a central and integral part. Of course if we possessed the suffrage, we should have no necessity for a discussion like the present. Everything we are saying would seem like truisms then, instead of being contested point by point, as it is to-day....

MR. BLACKWELL: ....In those islands are peoples ranging from absolute savagery to mediaeval civilization, from fighters with blow-guns and bows and arrows to fighters with Mauser rifles and modern artillery. Laws and inst.i.tutions suited to the needs of one tribe are unsuited to those of another. Side by side are Catholicism, Mohammedanism and heathenism. Their amus.e.m.e.nts vary from cannibalism to c.o.c.k-fighting. Their social status ranges from barbarous promiscuity to Moslem polygamy and thence to Hindoo monogamy. But everywhere exist masculine domination and feminine subjection, under varied forms of political despotism, tempered with Protestant liberalism in the case of Hawaii. To establish over all these diverse social conditions the rigid principles of the English common law, which prevail largely in our jurisprudence, will perpetuate and intensify the tyranny of husband over wife, of father over offspring.

We see the consequences already in the British West Indies, where negro women generally prefer to live outside of legal marriage because as wives they find themselves subjected to practical serfdom. In Jamaica 75 per cent. of the births are illegitimate for this reason. When I visited Haiti, I was told to my great surprise that the homes and small farms were usually owned by the women. Expressing my admiration of this chivalrous recognition of women's right to the homestead, I was informed that there was no such sentiment. It was solely because the men were so lazy and unreliable that the perpetuity of the race was endangered. The fathers of the children were here to-day and away to-morrow. They spent their time in loafing, drinking, gambling and plotting "revolutions." The women, anch.o.r.ed by the love for their children, lived in the little huts on their small plantations, raising yams and bananas, and if the men became too drunken and abusive the women ordered them to leave. Among those people, in a tropical climate, with land to squat upon, most of the work is done by the women. Let no one imagine that the so-called "matriarchate" of early ages was an ideal condition of society.

It was based primarily upon the industrial and moral irresponsibility of men.

In our new possessions, side by side with these primitive conditions, we have great bodies of Chinese and Hindoo coolies, who represent ancient and fossilized types of civilized society, patient, economical, industrious, monogamous and exclusive in their family relations. The trouble is that where Western civilization interferes with Oriental abuses it does not go far enough. When in India the British government prohibited the custom of burning widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands, widows became the slaves of their husband's relatives, and were actually believed to be responsible for his death and were ill treated accordingly. When infanticide was forbidden and peace maintained, population multiplied until famine became chronic. The only salvation for the women of our new possessions lies in a legal recognition of their personal, industrial, social and political equality. If, as seems too probable, their rights shall be simply ignored in the reconstruction, women will suffer all the disabilities of the law, without the practical alleviations afforded by an enlightened public opinion. Such women, even more than those of our own States, will need the ballot as a means of self-protection....

MISS ANTHONY: I have been overflowing with wrath ever since the proposal was made to engraft our half-barbaric form of government on Hawaii and our other new possessions. I have been studying how to save, not them, but ourselves from the disgrace. This is the first time the United States has ever tried to foist upon a new people the exclusively masculine form of government. Our business should be to give this people the highest form which has been attained by us. When our State governments were originally formed, there was no example of woman suffrage anywhere, but now we have a great deal of it, and everywhere it has done good. The principle is constantly spreading....

We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of justice--that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessions upon the same terms as to the men--because we shall not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get it; our business is to make the demand. Suppose during these fifty years we had asked only for what we thought we could secure, where should we be now? Ask for the whole loaf and take what you can get.

Mrs. Mary L. Doe (Mich.), brought greetings from the American Federation of Labor. "Woman suffrage would find its most hopeful and fertile field among the labor organizations," she said; "the workingmen stood for weak and defenseless women even before they did for their own rights." From Samuel Gompers, president of the Federation, she read the following letter:

The American Federation of Labor, at every convention where the subject has been brought up and discussed, has unfalteringly declared for equal legal, political and economic rights for women. At the convention held in Detroit, some thirteen years ago, a resolution to that effect was unanimously adopted. A pet.i.tion to Congress for the submission of a const.i.tutional amendment enfranchising women was circulated among our various unions, and within two months it received nearly 300,000 signatures and indors.e.m.e.nts.

At the Kansas City convention last December, the question of woman's work was discussed, and the following declaration was unanimously adopted: "In view of the awful conditions under which woman is compelled to toil, this, the eighteenth annual convention of the American Federation of Labor, strongly urges the more general formation of trade unions of wage-working women, to the end that they may scientifically and permanently abolish the terrible evils accompanying their weakened, because unorganized state; and we emphatically reiterate the trade-union demand that women receive equal compensation for equal service performed."

You will see that there ought to be no question as to the att.i.tude of the organized labor movement on this subject, notwithstanding the designing misrepresentations of enemies of our cause, who seek to place our movement in a false light. Let me say, too, that the declaration just quoted is not for compliment merely, for members of many of our organizations have been involved in long and sacrificing contests in order to secure to women equal pay for equal work. Please convey fraternal greetings to our friends who will meet at Grand Rapids.

When Mrs. Loraine Immen came forward with a greeting from the Michigan Elocutionists' a.s.sociation, Miss Anthony spoke of the great change which had taken place in women's voices in the last twenty-five years.

At an early Woman's Rights Convention, when she insisted that they should speak louder, one of them answered, "We are not here to screech; we are here to be ladies."

Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.) spoke entertainingly on The Hope of the Future:

The lessons of the past year have brought home to many of us more forcibly than any other recent events the injustice and cruelty of denying to women their proper share in deciding questions for the public good. We have seen the republic plunged into war in which women have borne a heavy share of the burdens. It should be the rule of all nations that no contest of arms should be entered into without the consent of the women....

Another significant object lesson grew out of the war. When the time of election approached, the governmental authorities became much exercised over the means of providing for the voting of the soldiers. It is astonishing how much men think of their own right to vote. Extra sessions of the Legislatures were called to provide means of meeting this emergency. In this dilemma I ventured to write to the Governor of my State and suggest that he recommend the pa.s.sing of a law empowering each soldier and sailor to send to some woman at home a proxy permitting her to vote for him. You can see how simple a plan this would be. Every man would have a beloved mother, a dear sister or some adored damsel whom he would be proud to have represent him at the polls, and the amount of money which this scheme would have saved to the State is enormous. The counting of the soldiers' votes when at last they were sent to New York cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In one instance, in a certain county where the board of supervisors had to be called together in two special sessions and the county officials summoned as if at a regular election, to count six votes, the amount reached $100 per vote!

Miss Frances A. Griffin (Ala.), a new speaker on the national platform, captured the audience with her rich voice and southern intonation as she discussed The Effects of Our Teaching:

The thanksgiving of the old Jew, "Lord, I thank Thee that Thou didst not make me a woman," doubtless came from a careful review of the situation. Like all of us, he had fort.i.tude enough to bear his neighbors' afflictions....