The History of Woman Suffrage Volume V Part 18

FOOTNOTES:

[48] Part of Call: The friends of equal rights will come together on this occasion with an outlook even more than usually bright. During the last year full suffrage has been granted to the women of Finland, the greatest victory since full national suffrage was given to the women of Federated Australia in 1902. Within the past year the Munic.i.p.al franchise has been given to women in Natal, South Africa; national a.s.sociations have been organized in Hungary, Italy and Russia and the reports at the recent meeting of the International Alliance at Copenhagen showed a remarkable increase in the agitation for woman suffrage all over Europe. In England, out of the 670 members of the present House of Commons, 420 are pledged to its support.

In the United States widely circulated newspapers and magazines representing the most opposite political views have lately declared for woman suffrage; the National Grange and the American Federation of Labor have unanimously endorsed it. In Chicago 87 organizations with an aggregate membership of 10,000 women have pet.i.tioned for a Munic.i.p.al suffrage clause in the new charter and the men and women most prominent in the city's good works are supporting the plea.

Men and women are natural complements of one another. American political life today is marked by executive force and business ability, qualities in which men are strong, but it is often lacking in conscience and humanity. These a larger infusion of the mother element would supply. We believe that men and women in co-operation can accomplish better work than either s.e.x alone....

ANNA HOWARD SHAW, President.

FLORENCE KELLEY, Vice-President-at-Large.

KATE M. GORDON, Corresponding Secretary.

ALICE STONE BLACKWELL, Recording Secretary.

HARRIET TAYLOR UPTON, Treasurer.

LAURA CLAY, } ANNICE JEFFREYS MYERS, } Auditors.

[49] The proposition was defeated during the suffrage convention by a tie, with the chairman, Milton J. Foreman, giving the deciding vote against it. [See Illinois, Volume VI.]

[50] Miss Anthony helped arrange for the first National Woman Suffrage Convention and it was held in Washington in January, 1869. From that time to 1906 she missed but two of these annual meetings, when she was speaking in the far West under the auspices of a lecture bureau, and each time she sent the proceeds of a week's lectures as her contribution.

[51] Through lack of initiative and effort the money for the bust was never raised. For Mrs. Gannett's report and other matter about the Memorial Building see the Appendix to this chapter. See also page 442, Volume VI. Reports on the Memorial Fund were made to the convention year after year. The intention at first was to create a fund and use only the interest but immediate demands were so urgent that the money subscribed was appropriated as needed and an audited account given by the national treasurer at each annual convention.

[52] In the Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony Chapter LXXIV begins: "The death of no woman ever called forth so wide an editorial comment as that of Miss Anthony, except possibly that of Queen Victoria, whose years in public life numbered about the same. On the desk where this is written are almost one thousand editorials, representing all the papers of consequence in the United States and many in other countries, and they form what may be accepted without reserve as the consensus of thought in the early years of the twentieth century in regard to Miss Anthony and the work she accomplished."

Over eighty pages of extracts from these editorials are given and several memorial poems. A large number of magazines in this and other countries contained sketches and articles from which quotations are made. Tributes of her biographer were published in the April numbers of the _Review of Reviews_ and the North American _Review_, and on the week following her death in _Collier's_ and the New York _Independent_.

In Chapter LXXI and following in the Biography are full accounts of Miss Anthony's death and funeral services.

[53] By vote of the convention these volumes were to be presented to the club or individual member under whose auspices a new club of not less than twenty paid up members had been formed and remained in active existence for not less than a year and was properly certified.

The following year the Executive Committee voted to place 300 sets in public libraries.

[54] This work was continued year after year until the list became far too large to publish. Not one organization, save a few connected with the liquor business, ever adopted a resolution against woman suffrage except the anti-suffrage societies themselves.

[55] One of the striking features of the recent national suffrage convention in Chicago was the large number of very close votes on woman suffrage bills that were announced from different States, all taking place at about the same time. While the convention was in session, the Chicago charter convention defeated woman suffrage by a tie vote. The Nebraska delegates got word that it had been lost in their Lower House by a vote of 47 to 46, with a tie in the Senate. In the Oklahoma const.i.tutional convention, where the gambling and liquor forces as usual lined up against woman suffrage, it came so near pa.s.sing that a change of seven votes would have carried it. In the West Virginia Legislature, where the last time it was smothered in committee, the House vote this time stood 38 yeas to 24 nays. In South Dakota the measure pa.s.sed the Senate and came so near pa.s.sing the House that a change of seven votes would have carried it. In the Minnesota House the vote showed a small majority for suffrage but not the const.i.tutional one required. All these close legislative votes followed hard upon the remarkable vote in Vermont, where the suffrage bill pa.s.sed the House 130 to 25 and came so near pa.s.sing the Senate that a change of three votes would have carried it.--_Woman's Journal._

CHAPTER VIII.

NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1908.

The Fortieth annual convention, Oct. 15-21, 1908, celebrated a notable event, as it was the 60th anniversary of the first Woman's Rights Convention, that famous gathering of July 19-20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, N. Y., the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The celebration was appropriately held in Buffalo, the largest city in the western part of the State, and was one of the most interesting and successful of the organization's many conventions.[56] The evening before it opened the president and directors of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy gave a large reception to the officers, delegates, members and friends of the a.s.sociation.

The convention met in the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation building but this proved to be entirely too small for the evening sessions, which were held in the large Central Presbyterian Church. The excellent program was the work of Miss Kate Gordon, national corresponding secretary, and the admirable arrangements were due to Mrs. Richard Williams, president for the past eight years of the Political Equality Club, with a corps of local helpers, but an accident on the first day prevented her from welcoming the convention or taking part in its proceedings. With the national president, Dr.

Anna Howard Shaw, in the chair, it was opened with prayer by the Rev.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell.[57] Mrs. Helen Z. M. Rodgers, a lawyer of Buffalo, extended a welcome from women in the professions, who, she said, "had only penetrated the ante-rooms and the annexes--the teachers never able to reach the salaries paid to men; the doctors shut out from the advantage of hospital positions; the lawyers allowed to help interpret the laws but not to help make them." "To get much further," she said, "we must be invested with full citizenship."

Mrs. John Miller Horton gave a cordial welcome for the City Federation of Women's Clubs, of which she was president, and for the Buffalo Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Niagara Frontier Chapter of the Daughters of 1812 and the Nellie Custis Branch of the Children of the Revolution, as regent of each of them. She presented to Dr. Shaw a large cl.u.s.ter of American Beauty roses tied with the blue and gold of the federation and the blue and white of the D. A. R., which was accepted in the name of Susan B. Anthony and reverently laid over her portrait that stood on an easel. Dr. Ida C.

Bender, president of the Women Teachers' a.s.sociation, spoke earnestly in behalf of "the army of teachers who are training the future citizens of the republic," and Dr. Shaw commented: "Political nonent.i.ties can hardly be expected to inspire a political ent.i.ty with enthusiasm."

The Western Federation of Women's Clubs gave its welcome through its president, Mrs. Nettie Rogers Shuler, of whom the _Woman's Journal_ said: "She spoke with an accent of unaffected sincerity and self-forgetfulness that recalled the spirit of the pioneers." She referred with pride to the fact that this organization, with nearly 100 clubs and about 32,000 members, was the first Federation of Women's Clubs to admit suffrage societies. Mrs. Lucretia L.

Blankenburg, president of the Pennsylvania Suffrage a.s.sociation and officer of the General Federation, brought its greeting, the first it had ever sent to a national suffrage convention. Mrs. Frances W.

Graham, president of the New York State Woman's Christian Temperance Union, gave its greeting and spoke of the close cooperation which had always existed between the workers for temperance and suffrage. Dr.

Shaw asked that she would convey the cordial greetings and best wishes of the a.s.sociation to the National W. C. T. U., to whose convention in Denver she was en route. Mrs. Ella Hawley Crossett, for the sixth term president of the New York State Suffrage a.s.sociation, united with Dr.

Shaw in responding to the welcoming addresses and spoke with deep feeling of the courage and persistence of the pioneers and of the pride with which the State where the movement for woman suffrage had its birth welcomed the convention to celebrate the event.

Miss Emily Howland of Sherwood, N. Y., reformer, educator and philanthropist, a co-worker and friend of the early suffragists, gave a delightful address on The Spirit of 1848, "herself a living embodiment of that spirit," in which she said:

"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends!" These are the words that come to me as I essay to speak of the Spirit of '48! Was it not something of this love which inspired that immortal Declaration made at the Woman's Rights Convention on July 19-20, 1848? "This," says Mrs. Stanton in her autobiography, "was the initial step in the most momentous reform that has yet been launched upon the world--the first organized protest against the injustice which had brooded for ages over the character and destiny of one-half of the race. No words could express our astonishment on finding a few days afterward that what seemed to us so timely, so rational and so sacred should be a subject for sarcasm and ridicule in the entire press of the nation. The anti-slavery papers alone stood by us manfully."

The Declaration had been signed by many, the audiences being large, but when pulpit and press ridiculed and reproved do we marvel that one by one the women withdrew their names and "joined the persecutors?" Much I fear that our own organization would shrivel to pitiful proportions if today submitted to the ordeal from which they recoiled. Indeed even Mrs. Stanton confessed that if she had had the slightest premonition of all that would follow this convention, she feared her courage would not have been equal to it. Fortunate ignorance, if she did not underrate her bravery, for she and a goodly number of the other signers were steadfast. They chose to side with truth and take the consequences.

Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery (Penn.), corresponding secretary of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, presented a long and valuable report of its recent congress in Amsterdam. [See chapter on Alliance.]

The convention then adjourned for the reception given by Mrs. Horton, whose handsome home on Delaware Avenue was decorated with American Beauty roses, the dining room with yellow chrysanthemums. She was a.s.sisted in receiving by Dr. Shaw, Mrs. Crossett and Mrs. Allison S.

Capwell, president of the Erie County Suffrage a.s.sociation.

At the evening session Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller (N. Y.), presided, daughter of Gerrit Smith, who was a staunch advocate of woman suffrage from the time the movement for it began. Hundreds were turned away for lack of room. The convention was officially welcomed to the city by Mayor J. N. Adams and the welcome on the part of the State was expressed by Senator Henry W. Hill, a consistent supporter of the legislative work for suffrage. The princ.i.p.al feature of the evening was the president's address of Dr. Shaw, of whom the report in the Buffalo _Express_ said: "The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw has set a new standard for womanhood. She is one of the most wonderful women of her time, alert, watchful, magnetic, earnest, with a mind as quick for a joke as for the truth. She points her arguments with epigrams and tips the arrows of her persuasion with a jest.... Even the unbelievers are carried away with her brilliancy, eloquence and mental grasp." There was no adequate report of her address but she began by saying:

We are scarcely able today to understand what those brave pioneers endured to secure the things which we accept as a matter of course. They started the greatest revolution the world has ever witnessed. During these last sixty years more changes have been wrought for the benefit of women, more opportunities for education have been secured and more all-round enlightenment than in the 6,000 years preceding. There are women who accept these advantages and the positions that have been obtained because of this early movement who have no conception of what it has meant to open the highways of progress for them. Some of those who oppose the suffrage say: "These things would have come; men would have given woman these opportunities as civilization advanced."

Why did they not come sooner if men were so willing? Why should they have grown more in the last sixty years than in all the years before?... But the women in all this long time of struggle have not stood entirely alone. There have always been some men to stand by their side and they owed it to do so, for ever since the world began women have stood by men in their efforts to achieve the right. Never was there a great leader who had not some woman by his side. Woman was first at the cradle, last at the cross and first at the tomb. Women have stood shoulder to shoulder with men always in their efforts.... Some tell us that we have not made great progress. It is impossible to change the att.i.tude of all the conflicting elements of humanity in three-score years. If Christianity in 1900 years, with the teaching of such a Leader, has not yet made Peace Congresses unnecessary, what can be expected of other reforms?

The secretary's report of Miss Gordon contributed this bit of history:

At this junction of the work a question arising upon the advisability of securing a pet.i.tion of a million signatures to present to President Roosevelt in order to influence a recommendation of suffrage for women in his annual message, a request was made that he receive at Oyster Bay a committee from our a.s.sociation. The President reasonably declined to have his vacation interrupted with committees but offered to receive our request in writing. Your secretary accordingly wrote him to the effect that we wished to know--before going to the labor and expense involved in securing such a pet.i.tion--whether its influence would have any weight in leading him to recommend woman suffrage in his message. Courteously but emphatically came the reply that it would not, but at the same time extending an invitation for the National a.s.sociation to appoint a committee to see him on his return to Washington. The committee appointed was composed of your national treasurer, Mrs. Upton, Mrs. Henry d.i.c.kson Bruns of New Orleans, Mrs. Katharine Reed Balentine of Maine and your corresponding secretary, and at the appointed time it was received by the President, who again reiterated his opinion on the absolute valuelessness of such a pet.i.tion. In so doing he ignored what for the women of this republic is their only right--the right of pet.i.tion. The interview was fruitful of no suggestion beyond the time-honored recommendation to "get another State." Women who worship as a fetish the power of this right to pet.i.tion may well catalogue this fallacy with those other American fallacies that "taxation without representation is tyranny"; that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," and that the Government guarantees "equal rights for all and special privileges for none."

Miss Gordon told how the last convention had changed the plan for forty years of holding the national convention in Washington during the first session of a new Congress and therefore the corresponding secretary had been obliged to arrange for representative women to go there and have a hearing before the committees of Senate and House.

Mrs. Balentine, who was staying in Washington, and Miss Emma Gillett, a lawyer of that city, took charge and hearings were granted March 3.

They lacked the inspiration of the presence of delegates from all parts of the country and the convention lost the pleasure and benefit.

The Work Conferences were continued under the name of Round Table Conferences. The subjects considered were: Increase of membership; press work; 16th Amendment as a line of policy; finance; State legislative methods. An organizers' symposium discussed "A comparison of conditions today with those of ten years ago; the building of a State a.s.sociation; the personal touch; preliminary arrangements for meetings."

The usual comprehensive report was made by the headquarters secretary, Miss Elizabeth J. Hauser, who told of the vast amount of work done, which included the sending out of 13,000 letters and 207,410 pieces of literature, exclusive of matter for the press. _Progress_ had been issued monthly, the Political Equality Leaflets and twenty other kinds had been published and a card catalogue of 5,696 names completed; the convention reports edited and distributed, the sales of the Life of Miss Anthony and the History of Woman Suffrage looked after and an endless amount of other work done. Miss Hauser told also of the extensive effort with organizations. Ten great national a.s.sociations during 1907, twenty-four State a.s.sociations and ninety-three labor unions had pa.s.sed resolutions for woman suffrage, and thus far in 1908 nine national and thirty-six important State a.s.sociations had done so.

She gave an equally encouraging report of the work with the press, which was done through committee chairmen in thirty-two States, who had furnished thousands of articles to hundreds of newspapers. Part of this material was local but the national headquarters had supplied 69,244 pages. Suitable matter had been sent to religious, educational and other specialized papers and over a thousand letters to editors. A long list was given of the leading magazines which had published articles on woman suffrage by prominent writers during the year. The reason was that things were happening in all parts of the world directly related to this question.

Miss Hauser's report was accepted by a rising vote. She presided at the Press Conference on how to secure the publication of woman suffrage in country and in city papers; character of material; what is the greatest need in press work; should "anti" articles be answered, etc. Interesting addresses were made on Woman's Share in Productive Industry by Mrs. Anna Cadogan Etz (N. Y.); A Square Deal, by Mrs.

Grace H. Ballantyne (Ia.); and one by Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, president of the Michigan State a.s.sociation, reviewing the extensive work that had been done in its recent const.i.tutional convention to secure a woman suffrage clause. Henry B. Blackwell (Ma.s.s.) began his report on Presidential Suffrage by saying: "It was the maxim of Napoleon Bonaparte to concentrate his military forces upon the point in his enemy's lines of the greatest importance and least resistance and by so doing he conquered Europe. This point in the woman suffrage battle is, under our form of government, the Presidential Suffrage, the vote for presidential electors."

The great evening of the week was the one devoted to the Commemorative Program in Honor of the 1848 Convention. This convention was called by Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock and Martha C.

Wright--the last three Friends, or Quakers--to consider a Declaration of Sentiments and set of Resolutions which they had prepared and it adopted both.[58] Those resolutions of sixty years ago were now discussed by women who represented the two succeeding generations, still in the midst of the contest which the women who began it expected to see ended during their lifetime. The session was opened with prayer by the Rev. Olympia Brown, a veteran suffragist, and the presiding officer was Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborne (N. Y.), daughter of Martha C. Wright and niece of Lucretia Mott. Each resolution was presented and commented on in a brief, pungent speech, the speakers including Mr. Blackwell, husband of Lucy Stone, both pioneers, and another pioneer, the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first ordained woman minister; Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Mrs.

Stanton; Mrs. f.a.n.n.y Garrison Villard, daughter of William Lloyd Garrison, a pioneer; the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer, an early leader in Rhode Island, and Miss Laura Clay, at the head of the movement in Kentucky almost from its beginning. Among the later generation were the Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane (Mich.), Miss Julie R. Jenney (N.

Y.), Mrs. Ella S. Stewart (Ill.), Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (N.

Y.) and Mrs. Judith Hyams Douglas (La.).

Of most of these addresses there is no printed record. Mrs. Gilman commented on the resolution that "the laws which place woman in a position inferior to that of man are contrary to the great precept of nature," saying in part: "Woman has the same right to happiness and justice as an individual that man has and as the mother of the race she has more.... Women have a right to citizenship and to all that citizenship implies, not only for their own sake but especially because the world needs them. We have the masculine and the feminine but above them both is the human, which has nothing to do with s.e.x.

The argument for equal freedom and equal opportunities for women rests not on the law of the worthy Mr. Blackstone but on the law of nature, which is the law of G.o.d...."

Mrs. Blackwell said in response to the resolution that "as man accords to woman moral superiority it is his pre-eminent duty to encourage her to speak and teach in religious a.s.semblies": "You cannot realize how serious a thing it was to be a minister in early days when St. Paul was taken literally. I know from personal experience that nearly all the religious world in those days believed it to be a sin for a woman to try to preach. My own mother urged me to become a foreign missionary instead; she was willing to send her daughter away to other lands rather than have her become a minister at home. At 18 I was considered as well-fitted for college as the half dozen young men among my schoolmates who were going to take a college course. At that time Oberlin, O., was the only college that admitted women. When I arrived there Lucy Stone had pretty well stirred up the whole inst.i.tution. I was warned against her in advance but we soon became warm friends. One beautiful evening we walked out together and as we stood in that glorious sunset I told her that I meant to be a minister. She said: 'You can't do it; they will never let a woman be a public teacher in the church.' ... One other woman and I graduated from the theological school. For three years the authorities of the school put our names into the catalogue with a star and then they dropped us out and it took forty years to get us reinstated."

Mrs. Spencer said of the resolution that "the same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on man and woman." "Of all the notable p.r.o.nunciamentos at Seneca Falls no resolutions shows a finer spiritual audacity than this. A delicious flavor of transcendentalism from beginning to end marks the phraseology. Like the Brook Farm experiment the Seneca Falls Convention was the outcome of a great wave of idealism sweeping over the world. It was seen in England and in Europe. Germany was stirring things up and Italy was seething with revolution. This new world was eager to put its idealism into immediate practical living.... Women were looking after their woman's share of it. They felt that it must be founded on spiritual ideas and this was a spiritual Declaration of Independence. We honor these pioneers because women who had been trained to follow and not to lead, and taught that wives and mothers should buy their security at the cost of a discarded fragment of their s.e.x, dared to summon men to an equal bar and to declare that in purity, as in justice, there is no s.e.x."