The History of Woman Suffrage Volume IV Part 45

The advocates of woman's enfranchis.e.m.e.nt never were brighter, happier or more hopeful and courageous. All of the States but four were represented by the 173 delegates in attendance. Some of them were white-haired and wrinkled and had been coming to Washington for the whole thirty-two years. Others were in the prime and vigor of life and had entered the movement after the heaviest blows had been struck and the hardest battles had been won, but now they had enlisted until the end of the war. And now there were a large number of beautiful and highly-educated young women, graduates of the best colleges, filled with the zeal of new converts, bringing to the work well-trained and thoroughly-equipped minds and giving to the old members the comforting a.s.surance that the vital cause would still be carried forward when their own labors were ended.

The _Woman's Journal_ in recounting the gains for suffrage concluded: "In this year, 1900, the woman suffragists, after a half-century of unbroken national organization, can go before Congress and claim the support of members from four States who were elected in part by the votes of women. They can enforce their pleas before presidential nominating conventions with the concrete fact that thirteen members of the electoral college have a const.i.tuency of women voters."

Miss Anthony presided at three public sessions daily and at all the executive and business meetings, went to Baltimore and held a one-day's conference and made a big speech, addressed a parlor meeting, attended several dinners and receptions, partic.i.p.ated in her own great birthday festivities, afternoon and evening, and remained for nearly a week of Executive Committee meetings after the convention had closed.

As she rose to open the convention, clad as usual in soft black satin, with d.u.c.h.esse lace in the neck and sleeves and the lovely red crepe shawl falling gracefully from her shoulders, there were many a moist eye and tightened throat at the thought that this was the last time.

Her fine voice with its rich alto vibrations was as strong and resonant as fifty years ago, and her practical, matter-of-fact speech, followed by the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw's lively stories, soon dispelled the sadness and put the audience in a cheerful mood. Miss Anthony commenced by saying:

I have been attending conventions in Washington for over thirty years. It is good for us to come to this Mecca, the heart of our nation. Here the members of Congress from all parts of the country meet together to deliberate for the best interests of the whole government and of their respective States. So our delegates a.s.semble here to plan for the best interests of our cause in the nation and in their respective States. We come here to study how we may do more and more for the spread of the doctrine of equality, but chiefly to study how to get the States to concentrate their efforts on Congress. Our final aim is an amendment to the Federal Const.i.tution providing that no citizen over whom the Stars and Stripes wave shall be debarred from suffrage except for cause. I am always glad when we come to Washington, and in our little peregrinations over the country I have been more and more impressed with the conviction that, while we should do all the good work we can in our own States, we ought to hold our annual meeting in the national capital.

In beginning her vice-president's address, which as usual defied reporting, Miss Shaw said:

Before giving my report I want to tell a story against Miss Anthony. We suffragists have been called everything under the sun, and when there was nothing else quite bad enough for us we have been called infidels, which includes everything. Once we went to hold a convention in a particularly orthodox city in New York, and Miss Anthony, wishing to impress upon the audience that we were not atheists, introduced me as "a regularly-ordained orthodox minister, the Rev. Anna H. Shaw, _my right bower_!" That orthodox audience all seemed to know what a "right bower" is, for they laughed even louder than you do. After the meeting Miss Anthony said to me, "Anna, what did I say to make the people laugh so?" I answered, "You called me your right bower." She said, "Well, you are my right-hand man. That is what right bower means, isn't it?" And this orthodox minister had to explain to her Quaker friend what a right bower is.

The chief event of last summer was the quinquennial meeting of the International Council of Women in London. The Woman's National Council of the United States is made up of about twenty societies with an aggregate membership of over a million women.

It was only allowed two delegates besides its president, and it is not a suffrage a.s.sociation, yet it honored two women who have been known for some years as suffragists, Miss Anthony and myself, by making us its delegates to London. They said they did this because they wanted women who did not represent anything too radical!

That Congress was the greatest a.s.semblage of women from all parts of the world that ever had taken place, and therefore the biggest suffrage convention ever held. Suffrage seemed to take possession of the whole meeting, as it does at every great gathering of women. From this point of view it was a decided and emphatic success. The largest meeting of all was the one held by the Suffrage a.s.sociation and every suffrage heart would have swollen so large it could hardly have been kept within the bounds of the body if it had heard the applause with which Miss Anthony was greeted. She could not speak for ten minutes....

In England I entered upon a role I had never filled before, or had any ambition for--I "entered society," and for ten days I was in it from before breakfast till after midnight; and I prayed the prayer of the Pharisee--I thanked the Lord that I was not as other women are who have to go into society all the time. I had thought that traveling up and down the country with gripsack in hand was hard enough; but it is child's play to hand-shaking and hob-n.o.bbing with d.u.c.h.esses and countesses. However, the experience was good for us, and it was especially good for those American women who had thought that they knew more than other women till they met them and found that they didn't.

I came home, spent three days there, and then took my grip in hand and started out again lecturing--mostly for the Redpath bureau, and for people who did not want to hear about suffrage; so I spoke on "The Fate of Republics," "The American Home," "The New Man," etc. Under these t.i.tles I gave them stronger doses of suffrage than I ever do to you here, and they received it with great enthusiasm, because it was not called suffrage. I spoke the other day in Cincinnati to about 3,000 people and they were delighted, and did not suspect that I was talking suffrage. They don't know what woman suffrage is. They think it only means to berate the men. In this way I have perhaps done the best suffrage work I possibly could.

Later in the session Miss Anthony made her report as delegate from the National Council of Women of the United States to this International Congress in London, in which she said:

During the last seventeen years there has been a perfect revolution in England. When Mrs. Stanton and I went there for the first time, in 1883, just a few families were not afraid of us--the Brights, Peter Taylor's household, and some of the old abolitionists who knew all about us. When it was proposed to get up a testimonial meeting for us, even the officers of the suffrage societies did not dare to sign the invitation. They thought we Americans were too radical....

This time when we reached London we were the recipients of testimonials not only from the real, radical suffrage people, but also from the conservatives. At that magnificent Queen's Hall meeting of the Suffrage a.s.sociation, with Mrs. Fawcett presiding, three or four thousand people packed the hall. It was a representative gathering. Australia and New Zealand were there to speak for themselves, and they had me to speak for the United States. I tried to have them call on Miss Shaw instead, but they would not do it....

Every young woman who is to-day enjoying the advantages of free schools and opportunities to earn a living and the other enlarged rights for women, is a child of the woman suffrage movement. This larger freedom has broadened and strengthened women wonderfully.

At the end of the Council, Lady Aberdeen, who had been its president for six years, in a published interview summing up the work of the women who had been present, said there was no denying that the English-speaking women stood head and shoulders above all the others in their knowledge of Parliamentary law, and that at the very top were those of the United States and Canada--the two freest parts of the world. I said: "If the women of the United States, with their free schools and all their enlarged liberties, are not superior to women brought up under monarchical forms of government, then there is no good in liberty." It is because of this freedom that Europeans are always struck with the greater self-poise, self-control and independence of American women. These characteristics will be still more marked when we have mingled more with men in their various meetings. It is only by the friction of intellect with intellect that these desirable qualities can be gained.

The public sessions of the Council were all that heart could wish. I was present at only a few of them because the business meetings came at the same hour, and were held miles away. But every day people would say to me, "Miss Anthony, you yourself could not have made a stronger suffrage speech than So-and-So made to-day in such-and-such a section"--industrial, professional, etc. In the educational section, one of the best speeches was made by Miss Brownell, dean of Sage College, Cornell University, on co-education.

It was a great occasion. Here were the advocates of this movement for absolutely equal rights received and entertained by the n.o.bility of England--American women at the head. Among many others a reception was given by the Lord Bishop of London at his home, Fulham Palace. In talking with Lady Battersea, daughter of a Rothschild, I caught myself repeatedly addressing her as "Mrs.

Battersea," and I said, "I suppose I shock you very much by forgetting your t.i.tle." She answered emphatically: "Not at all. I like an American to be an American. It is much pleasanter than when they come cringing and crawling and trying to conform to our customs." When all sorts of notables were giving us receptions, I said to Lady Aberdeen: "If this great Council of Women of ten nations were meeting in Washington, we would be invited to the White House. Can't you contrive an interview with the Queen?"

Miss Anthony then described the reception of the Congress by the Queen at Windsor Castle, the serving of tea in the great Hall of St. George, and all the incidents of that interesting occasion, and concluded: "What I want most to impress upon you is this: If we had represented nothing but ourselves we should have been nowhere. Wendell Phillips said: 'When I speak as an individual, I represent only myself, but when I speak for the American Anti-Slavery Society, I represent every one in the country who believes in liberty.' It was because Miss Shaw and I represented you and all which makes for liberty that we were so well received; and I want you to feel that all the honors paid to us were paid to you."

A paper to be remembered was that of Mrs. Isabel C. Barrows (Ma.s.s.) on Woman's Work in Philanthropy. After tracing the various lines of philanthropic effort in which women had been distinguished, she said in conclusion that no woman who ever had lived had done more in the line of philanthropy than Susan B. Anthony.

Miss Harriet May Mills (N. Y.) gave a fine address on The Winning of Educational Freedom, saying in part:

Abigail Adams said of the conditions in the early part of the nineteenth century: "Female education in the best families went no farther than reading, writing and arithmetic and, in some rare instances, music and dancing." A lady living in the first quarter of the century relates that she returned from a school in Charleston, where she had been sent to be "finished off," with little besides a knowledge of sixty different lace st.i.tches....

The majority of women were content, they asked no change; they took no part in the movement for higher education except to ridicule it. This, like every other battle for freedom which the world has seen, was led by the few brave, strong souls who saw the truth and dared proclaim it. In 1820 the world looked aghast upon "bluestockings." Because a young woman was publicly examined in geometry at one of Mrs. Emma Willard's school exhibitions, a storm of ridicule broke forth at so scandalous a proceeding. It was ten years after Holyoke was founded before Mary Lyon dared to have Latin appear in the regular course, because the views of the community would not allow it. Boston had a high school for girls in 1825, which was maintained but eighteen months, Mayor Quincy declaring that "no funds of any city could stand the expense."

The difficulty was that "too many girls attended." ...

In 1877 President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard protested against the opening of the Boston Latin School to girls, saying: "I resist the proposition for the sake of the boys, the girls, the schools and the general interest of education." Nearly twenty years later, he said to the Radcliffe graduates: "It is a quarter of a century since the college doors were open to women. From that time, where boys and girls have been educated together, it has become a historical fact that women have taken a greater number of honors, in proportion to their numbers, than men." It is to be hoped that the next twenty years may work further conversion in the mind of this learned president, and lead him to see that equality in citizenship is as desirable as equality in education.

One learned man prophesied that all educated women would become somnambulists. Another declared that the perilous track to higher education would be strewn with wrecks. There are now over thirty thousand of these college-educated wrecks, the majority of them engaged in the active work of the world. It was found in 1874, when Dr. E. H. Clarke's evil prophecies as to higher education were attracting attention, that at Antioch, opened to women in 1853, thirteen and one-half per cent. of the men graduates had died, nine and three-fourths per cent. of the women. This did not include war mortality or accidental death. Three of the men then living were confirmed invalids; not one of the women was in such a condition. The a.s.sociation of Collegiate Alumnae has compiled later and fuller statistics. The results show an increase during the college course of from three to six per cent. in good health, and the health after graduation to be twenty-two per cent. higher among graduates than among women who have not been in college....

Elizabeth Blackwell applied to twelve colleges before she gained admittance to the Geneva (N. Y.) Medical School in 1846, and secured the first M. D. ever given to a woman in this country.

To-day 1,583 women are studying medicine. Not so full a measure of freedom has been won in law or theology. In 1897, 131 women were in the law schools, 193 in the theological schools, but women are still handicapped in these professions....

Unfortunately, educational freedom has not been followed by industrial freedom. Of the leading colleges for women but four have women presidents; but one offers a free field to women on its professional staff. In the majority of co-educational colleges which give women any place as teachers, they appear in small numbers as a.s.sistant professors and, more often, as instructors....

With educational freedom partially won has come general interest among collegiate and non-collegiate women in furthering the movement. Large gifts have been bestowed for scholarships and for colleges, both co-educational and separate. Within the last year thirty-four women have given $4,446,400 to the cause of education. Mrs. Stanford's munificent benefactions, and other lesser ones, swell the amount to more than fifty millions from women alone. As a result of the struggle for educational freedom, we have 35,782 women in the colleges of the country.[120]

Educational freedom without political freedom is but partial.

Minerva sprang fully armed from the head of Jove; not only had she wisdom, but she had the spear and the helmet in her hands--every weapon of offense and defense to equip her for the world's conquest. Standing on the threshold of the new century, we behold the woman of the future thus armed; we see the fully educated woman possessed of a truer knowledge of the fundamental principles of government; we see her conscious of her responsibilities as a citizen, and doing her part in the making of laws and in the fulfilment of the ideal of democracy.

Educational freedom must lead to political freedom.

Mrs. Mary C. C. Bradford, a leader among Colorado women, spoke eloquently on The Social Transformation, following the stages in evolution expressed in the words, "I dare, I will, I am." Describing the effects of woman suffrage, she said:

I wish I could make you all understand that the home is not touched. Equal suffrage does not mean destruction or disintegration but the radiation of the home--carrying it out into the wider life of the community. The ideal of the family must pervade society; and that is what equal suffrage is gradually bringing about. I know you hear all sorts of things about woman suffrage in Colorado. Not very long ago certain Eastern papers gave great prominence to an interview with a "distinguished citizen of Colorado," who gave a highly unfavorable account of the workings of woman suffrage there. The "distinguished citizen" in question was a prize-fighter who had killed three men--a gambler driven out by woman suffrage; and he naturally said that woman suffrage was a failure.... The great Woman's Club of Denver is a power for good in the city; it is carrying on schools in "the bottoms," night schools, kitchen gardens, traveling libraries; it secured the establishment of the State Home for Dependent Children, the removal of the emblems from the Australian ballot, and other good things....

I would that you could all go out to Colorado and see how subtly, yes, and how swiftly, the social transformation is going on. It is the home transforming the State, not the State destroying the home. A Denver paper lately said the men had found out that in determining all questions of morality, sanitation, etc., if the women were consulted, better results were obtained.

We have more intelligent homes because of equal suffrage. Where children see their father and mother go to the polls together, and hear them talk over public questions, and occasionally express different views, they learn tolerance. A party slave will not come out from such a home. The children will grow up seeing that it is un-American to say that everybody in the opposite party is either a fool or a knave. The two best features of equal suffrage are the improvement of the individual woman and the prospective abolition of the political "boss."

Introducing Henry B. Blackwell (Ma.s.s.) to report on Presidential Suffrage, Miss Anthony said: "Here is a man who has the virtue of having stood by the woman's cause for nearly fifty years. I can remember him when his hair was not white, and when he was following up our conventions a.s.siduously because a bright, little, red-cheeked woman attracted him. She attracted him so strongly that he still works for woman suffrage, and will do so as long as he lives, not only because of her who was always so true and faithful to the cause--Lucy Stone--but also because he has a daughter, a worthy representative of the twain who were made one."

On Friday evening Mrs. Ida Husted Harper gave a portion of her paper, The Training of the Woman Journalist, which she had presented at the International Congress in London. Miss Anna Barrows (Ma.s.s.), literary editor of _The American Kitchen Magazine_, spoke on New Professions for Women Centering in the Home:

The main objection made by conservative people to definite occupations or professions for women has been that such callings would inevitably tend to destroy the home. Once let women prove that they can follow a trade or profession and yet make a home for themselves and others, and such objectors have no ground left.... The fear is sometimes expressed that the club movement is drawing women away from home interests; but the general attention now given to household economics by all the women's clubs proves that women are realizing that knowledge of history, art and science is needed to give the broad culture necessary for the proper conduct of the home life. Although as yet few women's colleges offer adequate courses in home economics, nevertheless after marriage the college women begin to study household problems with all the energy brought out by the college training.

A very general comment on woman's desire for a share in munic.i.p.al and national government is that the servant question is yet unsolved; that, since she has not succeeded in governing her own domain, she has no rights outside of it. By going outside of her home as an employee herself she is learning to deal with this problem. It has been necessary for women to have thorough business training in other directions before they could discover how unbusinesslike were the methods pursued in the average household. The more women have gone out of their homes into new occupations, the more they have realized that the home is dependent upon the same principles as the business world. The business woman understands human nature, and therefore can deal successfully with the butcher, the baker and other tradespeople.

She has a power of adapting herself to new conditions which is impossible to her sister accustomed only to the narrow treadmill of housework.

Specialization is the tendency of the age, and by wise attention to this in the household, as elsewhere, enough time should be saved to each community for the world's work to be done in fewer hours, and for men and women to have time besides to be homemakers and good citizens. Little by little one art and craft after another has been evolved into the dignity of a profession, while housework as a whole has been left to untrained workers.

Needle work, cookery and cleaning are dependent on the fundamental principles of all the natural sciences.... There is need also of trained women to lead public sentiment to recognize the dignity of manual labor.

The statesmanlike paper of Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) on the Duty of Woman Citizens of the United States in the Present Political Crisis, was read by Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.), who enforced its sentiments by earnest and stirring remarks of her own. Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, A. M. of Oberlin College, president of the National a.s.sociation of Colored Women and a member of the Washington School Board, considered the Justice of Woman Suffrage:

....To a.s.sign reasons in this day and time why it is unjust to deprive one-half of the human race of rights and privileges freely accorded to the other, which is neither more deserving nor more capable of exercising them, seems like a reflection upon the intelligence of the audience. As a nation we professed long ago to have abandoned the principle that might makes right. Before the world we pose to-day as a government whose citizens have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, in spite of these lofty professions and n.o.ble sentiments, the present policy of this government is to hold one-half of its citizens in legal subjection to the other, without being able to a.s.sign good and sufficient reasons for such a flagrant violation of the very principles upon which it was founded.

When one observes how all the most honorable and lucrative positions in Church and State have been reserved for men, according to laws which they themselves have made so as to debar women; how, until recently, a married woman's property was under the exclusive control of her husband; how, in all transactions where husband and wife are considered one, the law makes the husband that one--man's boasted chivalry to the disfranchised s.e.x is punctured beyond repair.

These unjust discriminations will ever remain, until the source from which they spring--the political disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of woman--shall be removed. The injustice involved in denying woman the suffrage is not confined to the disfranchised s.e.x alone, but extends to the nation as well, in that it is deprived of the excellent service which woman might render....

The argument that it is unnatural for woman to vote is as old as the rock-ribbed and ancient hills. Whatever is unusual is called unnatural, the world over. Whenever humanity takes a step forward in progress, some old custom falls dead at our feet. Nothing could be more unnatural than that a good woman should shirk her duty to the State.

If you marvel that so few women work vigorously for political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, let me remind you that woman's success in almost everything depends upon what men think of her. Why the majority of men oppose woman suffrage is clear even to the dullest understanding. In all great reforms it is only the few brave souls who have the courage of their convictions and who are willing to fight until victory is wrested from the very jaws of fate.

In treating of Women in the Ministry, the Rev. Ida C. Hultin (Ma.s.s.) considered what is known as "the woman movement" from a broad and philosophical standpoint, which carried conviction and disarmed opposition.

At the opening of the Sat.u.r.day evening meeting a telegram was read from the Executive Committee of the National Anti-Trust Conference, in session at Chicago: "Hearty congratulations to the distinguished president of the Woman Suffrage a.s.sociation, and hopes that Miss Anthony may enjoy many years of added happiness and honor. This cordial salutation includes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and all of the n.o.ble souls who have wrought so great a work in the liberation and advancement of the women of this country." A letter was read also from Frank Morrison, secretary of the American Federation of Labor, with the following resolution, which was pa.s.sed by the convention held in Detroit, Mich., the previous December:

WHEREAS, Disfranchised labor, like that of the enslaved, degrades all free and enfranchised labor; therefore,