The History of Woman Suffrage Volume I Part 75

Foote squealed out his angry opposition, in the old stupid slang (of Shakespeare perverted from "Macbeth"), about uns.e.xing woman with the right of suffrage, and endeavored to contrast it with property-claims; as if the revolutionary maxim concerning taxation and representation going together is not a property rule. I suspect, too, that personal rights, secured by the right preservative of all rights, are more important than mere property rights. But they need not be distinguished in that respect. The proceeding is (even if without any present beneficial result) a triumph; because it proves to Judge Foote and others that the Woman's Rights pet.i.tions (or rather demands) must receive suitable consideration and, at least, a respectful report.

Next winter we may hope to be more successful--if not then, success is merely postponed. It has become a question of time only, and perhaps of place--probably Nebraska!

THE SEVENTH NATIONAL WOMAN'S EIGHTS CONTENTION.

Pursuant to a call issued by the Central Committee, the Seventh National Woman's Rights Convention was held in New York, at the Broadway Tabernacle, November 25 and 26, 1856.

The Convention was called to order by Martha C. Wright, President of the last Convention.

The officers were duly appointed.[145]

LUCY STONE, on taking the chair, said: I am sure that all present will agree with me that this is a day of congratulation. It is our Seventh Annual National Woman's Rights Convention. Our first effort was made in a small room in Boston, where a few women were gathered, who had learned woman's rights by woman's wrongs. There had been only one meeting in Ohio, and two in New York. The laws were yet against us, custom was against us, prejudice was against us, and more than all, women were against us. We were strong only "in the might of our right"--and, now, when this seventh year has brought us together again, we can say as did a laborer in the Republican party, though all is not gained, "we are without a wound in our faith, without a wound in our hope, and stronger than when we began." Never before has any reformatory movement gained so much in so short a time. When we began, the statute books were covered with laws against women, which an eminent jurist (Judge Walker) said would be a disgrace to the statute books of any heathen nation.

Now almost every Northern State has more or less modified its laws. The Legislature of Maine, after having granted nearly all other property rights to wives, found a bill before it asking that a wife should be ent.i.tled to what she earns, but a certain member grew fearful that wives would bring in bills for their daily service, and, by an eloquent appeal to pockets, the measure was lost for the time, but that which has secured other rights will secure this. In Ma.s.sachusetts, by the old laws, a wife owned nothing but the fee simple in her real estate. And even for that, she could not make a will without the written endors.e.m.e.nt of her husband, permitting her to do so. Two years ago the law was so changed that she now holds the absolute right to her entire property, earnings included. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island have also very much amended their statutes. New York, the proud Empire State, has, by the direct effort of this movement, secured to wives every property right except earnings. During two years a bill has been before the Legislature, which provides that if a husband be a drunkard, a profligate, or has abandoned his wife, she may have a right to her own earnings. It has not pa.s.sed. Two hundred years hence that bill will be quoted as a proof of the barbarism of the times; now it is a proof of progress.

Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana have also very materially modified their laws. And Wisconsin--G.o.d bless these young States--has granted almost all that has been asked except the right of suffrage. And even this, Senator Sholes,[146] in an able minority report on the subject, said, "is only a question of time, and as sure to triumph as G.o.d is just." It proposed that the Convention which meets in two years to amend the Const.i.tution of the State should consider the subject. In Michigan, too, it has been moved that women should have a right to their own babies, which none of you, ladies, have here in New York. The motion caused much discussion in the Legislature, and it would probably have been carried had not a disciple of Brigham Young's, a Mormon member, defeated the bill. In Nebraska everything is bright for our cause. Mrs. Bloomer is there, and she has circulated pet.i.tions, claiming for women the right to vote. A bill to that effect pa.s.sed the House of Representatives, and was lost in the Senate, only because of the too early closing of the session. That act of justice to woman would be gained in Nebraska first, and scores of women would go there that they might be made citizens, and be no longer subjects.

In addition to these great legal changes, achieved so directly by this reform, we find also that women have entered upon many new and more remunerative industrial pursuits; thus being enabled to save themselves from the bitterness of dependent positions, or from lives of infamy. Our demand that Harvard and Yale Colleges should admit women, though not yielded, only waits for a little more time. And while they wait, numerous petty "female colleges"

have sprung into being, indicative of the justice of our claim that a college education should be granted to women. Not one of these female colleges (which are all second or third rate, and their whole course of study only about equal to what completes the soph.o.m.ore year in our best colleges) meets the demand of the age, and so will eventually perish. Oberlin and Antioch Colleges in Ohio, and Lima College in New York, admit women on terms nearly equal with men.

In England, too, the claims of women are making progress. The most influential papers in London have urged the propriety of women physicians. Also a pet.i.tion was sent to Parliament last year, signed by the Brownings, the Howitts, Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Gaskell, and Mrs. Jameson, asking for just such rights as we claim here. It was presented by Lord Brougham, and was respectfully received by Parliament. The ballot has not yet been yielded; but it can not be far off when, as in the last Presidential contest,[147] women were urged to attend political meetings, and a woman's name was made one of the rallying cries of the party of progress. The enthusiasm which everywhere greeted the name of Jessie[148] was so far a recognition of woman's right to partic.i.p.ate in politics. Encouraged by the success of these seven years of effort, let us continue with unfailing fidelity to labor for the practical recognition of the great truth, that all human rights inhere in each human being. We welcome to this platform man and women irrespective of creed, country, or color; those who dissent from us as freely as those who agree with us.

ERNESTINE L. ROSE, from the Business Committee, reported a series of resolutions.[149]

The President stated that several letters had been received, one from Francis Jackson, of Boston, one of the n.o.blest of the n.o.ble men of the age, inclosing $50, which, he says, he gives "to help this righteous cause along." Also a letter from the Rev. Samuel Johnson, of Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, which would be read by Mr. Higginson.

Rev. T. W. HIGGINSON said he was much more willing to be called upon to read the words of others at this time, than to utter poor words of his own. There were many who came into a Woman's Rights Convention and started to find men on the platform. He could only say, that in these times, and with the present light, there was no place where a man could redeem his manhood better than on the Woman's Rights Platform. Gentlemen in distant seats were perhaps trembling to think that they had actually got that far into this dangerous place. They might think themselves well off--no, badly off--if the maelstrom did not draw them nearer and nearer and nearer in, as it did him. He began, like them, hesitating and smiling on the back seats; they saw what he had got to now, and he hoped they, too, might get into such n.o.ble company before long. He was prouder to train in this band than to be at the head of the play-soldiers who were marching through the streets to-day, and immortalizing themselves by not failing, so utterly as some of their companions, to hit some easy target. Those were play-soldiers; these were soldiers in earnest.

Men talk a great deal of nonsense about the woman's rights movement. He never knew a husband who was demolished in an argument by his wife, or a young gentleman who found his resources of reason entirely used up by a young lady, who did not fall back at last when there was no retreat, and say: "It's no use; you can't reason with a woman." Well, so it would seem in their case. Others shelter themselves behind the general statement, that they don't wish to marry a woman's rights woman.

I have no doubt the woman's rights women reciprocate the wish.

These appear to have some anxiety about dinner--that seems to be the trouble. Jean Paul, the German, wanted to have a wife who could cook him something good; and Mrs. Frederica Bremer, the novelist, remarked, that a wife can always conciliate her husband by having something to stop his mouth. In a conversation in Philadelphia the other day, a young lawyer, when told that Mrs.

Emma R. Coe was studying law with the intention of practicing, remarked, that he should never see her in Court, but she would remind him of mince pies; to which the gentleman he was in conversation with, observed that he had better not get her as his antagonist in trying a suit, or she would remind him of minced meat. Having given two or three examples of the nonsense of men upon this subject, he would now read them some sense. The letter was from one of the most eloquent and learned of the younger clergy of New England; a man possessed of powers of genius and practical wisdom which would yet make him heard in a larger sphere than that which he now occupied. It was not the old English Sam. Johnson who said that "there never was a lawsuit or a quarrel where a woman was not at the bottom of it." This was Sam. Johnson Americanized, and of course he was a woman's rights man.

LETTER FROM REV. SAMUEL JOHNSON.

SALEM, _October 4, 1856_.

DEAR FRIEND:--In complying with your desire that I should send a few words to the Woman's Rights Convention, I am quite aware that in this matter infinitely more depends upon what women do than upon what men say; nevertheless, if my confession of faith will be of the least service, it shall not be wanting.

I regard this movement as no less than the sum and crown of all our moral enterprises; as a proclamation of entire social freedom, never practicable until now. I welcome it, not merely because it aims at delivering half the human race from constraints that degrade and demoralize the whole, but also because it is opening a new spiritual hemisphere, destined to put a new heart into our semi-barbarian theology, politics, manners, literature, and law. And especially do I rejoice, that having defrauded the feminine element of its due share in practical affairs for so many ages, and found ourselves, as a natural consequence, drifting toward barbarism with all our wealth and wisdom, we are compelled at last to learn that justice to woman is simply mercy to ourselves.

Doubtless the main obstacles to this work come from her own s.e.x.

Strange if it were not so; if the meagre hope doled out to women hitherto should have unfitted them to believe that such a function awaits them. Strange if they did not fear a thousand perils in the untried way of freedom. But the unwise distrust will have to be abandoned; and so will the conventional flippancy and contempt. I think the grand duty of every honorable man toward this effort at emanc.i.p.ation is simply _not to stand in its way_. For how much is really covered by that duty? It means that he must wash his hands of every law or prejudice that dooms woman to an inferior position, and makes her the victim of miserable wages and fatal compet.i.tions with herself. It means that he must clear himself of this senseless twaddle about "woman's sphere," a matter surely no more for his legislation, than his "sphere" is for hers; and one upon which, at this stage of their experience, it is unbecoming in either to dogmatize; and it means that as a simple act of justice, he must resign to her the control of her own earnings, secure her fair and full culture, and welcome her to the pulpit, the bar, the medical profession, and to whatever other posts of public usefulness she may prepare herself to fill.

As long as he fails of doing this, he is unjustly interfering with her sacred rights; and _after_ he has done this, he may safely leave the rest to her.

It is humiliating indeed that numbers of well-disposed persons should not recognize so plain a duty. I have no patience to argue it. The moral logic of this movement is as patent as the simplest rule in arithmetic. Every argument brought against it resolves itself into a sneer at woman's capacity, or an anxiety lest the distinction G.o.d has established between the s.e.xes will not bear testing; or, what is more common still, though covered up in a thousand ways, the brutish a.s.sertion that "might makes right."

There is but one answer to these impertinences, and that is the success of individual women in the work they set about. The current ridicule at "doing justice to women" will pa.s.s for the sheer vulgarity it is, when so many women shall do justice to themselves, that they can not be taken as exceptions to prove the rule. And this success depends on their own wills. The n.o.ble use of G.o.d's gifts shall make its mark in this world. As sure as G.o.d lives, it shall compel a becoming respect. For more and more of these lessons in true honor do we pray; for the very name of manhood must make us blush, so long as it is identified with these airs of patronage and control, these insulting obeisances, these flatterers of what is childish in women, these sarcasms upon what is n.o.blest; worse than all, this willingness to derive gain from the degradation and suffering of the s.e.x it professes to adore. And words are poor to express the grat.i.tude that shall be forever due to those women whose moral energy shall rebuke this littleness, and stir true manliness in man.

With sincere respect, I am truly your friend, SAMUEL JOHNSON.

ERNESTINE L. ROSE remarked, that in the letter read by Mr.

Higginson there was one sentence that struck her with great force, viz: that it is of far greater importance what woman does than what man thinks; and, she would add, what woman thinks. The influence of what she had done was felt not only in this country, but throughout the entire continent of Europe.

The author of that letter had expressed another sentiment to which she wished briefly to advert. He said that where ten men could be convinced of the truth of Woman's Rights, hardly one woman could be gained. At first sight it might so appear. But it should be borne in mind, that men were more accustomed to think and reflect and argue upon everything connected with the legal and political rights of men, at least, and, therefore, they were more easily convinced. Nevertheless, the subject, whenever presented to the mind of woman in its proper light, would not fail to find an echo in her heart. Whenever the subject was broached to a woman hitherto unacquainted with it, it first caused a smile, and, perchance, a sneer; but, put to her a few common-sense questions, and the smile disappeared, and her countenance a.s.sumed a serious expression. Ask her if she is not ent.i.tled to self-government, to the full development of her mental powers, to the free choice of her industrial avocations, to proper remuneration for her labor, to equal control of her offspring with that of her husband, to the possession and control of her own property, and to a voice in making the laws that impose taxes upon property that she may hold--ask her a few simple, straight-forward questions like these, and see if an immediate, hearty, and warm a.s.sent is not elicited.

In spite of a violent storm a large number a.s.sembled in the evening.

The speakers announced were Mrs. Elizabeth Jones and Wendell Phillips.

Mrs. Jones' address was a clear and logical statement of the whole claim of woman. By her own request, it was not published.

WENDELL PHILLIPS:--Ladies and gentlemen. I am told that the _Times_ of to-day warns the women of this Convention that if they proceed in their crusade they will forfeit the protection of the men. Perhaps, before it is offered, the question had better be asked whether it is needed. I do not think that I should run the risk of much difference of opinion if I claimed, that nine men out of ten would not be able to defend their right to vote as logically as the lady who has just addressed us has defended her right to vote. I question whether one-quarter of what we call the men educated by the colleges, and in active life--the better education of the two--would be able, arrogating to themselves as they do a far greater political and civil capacity, to state the grounds of civil rights and responsibilities, to mark out the limits, to vindicate the advantages, and to a.n.a.lyze the bases on which these rest, as we have just had it done. If partic.i.p.ation in civil rights is based on mind--as in this country we claim it to be--then certainly to-night we have no right to deny that the cause is gained, for the friend who has preceded me has left very little for any one to say; she has covered the whole ground.

In fact this question is a question of civilization, nothing less. The position of woman anywhere is the test of civilization.

You need not ask for the statistics of education, of national wealth, or of crime; tell me the position of woman, and you answer the question of the nation's progress. Utah is barbarism; we need no evidence; we read it in the single custom that lowers the female s.e.x. Wherever you go in history this is true. Step by step as woman ascends, civilization ripens. I warn the anxious and terrified that their first efforts should be to conquer their fears, for the triumph of this crusade is written as certain on the next leaf that turns in the great history of the race, as that the twentieth century will open.

The time was when a Greek dared not let his wife go out of doors, and in the old comic play of Athens, one of the characters says, "Where is your wife?" "She has gone out." "Death and furies! what does she do out?" Doubtless, if any "fanatic" had claimed the right of woman to walk out of doors, he would have been deemed crazy in Athens; had he claimed the right of a modest married woman to be seen out of doors it would have been considered fanaticism, and I do not know but that the _Herald_ of that day would have branded him as an infidel. But spite of the anch.o.r.ed conservatism of others, women got out of doors and the country grew, and the world turned round, and so modern Europe has progressed. Now the pendulum swung one way, and now another, but woman has gained right after right until with us, to the astonishment of the Greek, could he see it--of the Turk, when he hears it--she stands almost side by side with man in her civil rights. The Saxon race has led the van. I trample underfoot contemptuously the Jewish--yes, the Jewish--ridicule which laughs at such a Convention as this; for we are the Saxon blood, and the first line of record that is left to the Saxon race is that line of Tacitus, "On all grave questions they consult their women."

When the cycle of Saxondom is complete, when the Saxon element culminates in modern civilization, another Tacitus will record in the valley of the Mississippi, as he did in the valley of the Rhine, "On all grave questions they consult their women." The fact is, there is no use of blinking the issue. It is Paul against the Saxon blood; it is a religious prejudice against the blood of the race. The blood of the race accords to woman equality; it is a religious superst.i.tion which stands in the way and balks the effort.

Europe has known three phases. The first was the dominion of force; the second the dominion of money; the third is beginning--the dominion of brains. When it comes, woman will step out on the platform side by side with her brother. The old Hindoo dreamed that he saw the human race led out to its varied fortune, and first he saw a man bitted and curbed, and the reins went back to an iron hand. Then he saw a man led on and on, under various changes, until, at last, he saw the man led by threads that came from the brain and went back to an invisible hand. The first was the type of despotism--the reign of force, the upper cla.s.ses keeping down the under. The last is ours--the dominion of brains.

We live in a government where _The New York Herald_ and _New York Tribune_, thank G.o.d, are more really the government than Franklin Pierce and Caleb Cushing. Ideas reign. I know some men do not appreciate this fact; they are overawed by the iron arm, by the marble capitol, by the walls of granite--palpable power, felt, seen. I have seen the palace of the Caesars, built of ma.s.ses that seemed as if giants alone could have laid them together, to last for eternity, as if nothing that did not part the solid globe could move them. But the tiny roots of the weeds of Italian summers had inserted themselves between them, and the palace of the Caesars lies a shapeless ruin. So it is with your government.

It may be iron, it may be marble, but the pulses of right and wrong push it aside; only give them time. I hail the government of ideas.

There is another thing I claim. You laugh at Woman's Rights Conventions; you ridicule socialism (I do not accept that); you dislike the anti-slavery movement. The only discussion of the grave social questions of the age, the questions of right and wrong that lie at the basis of society--the only voices that have stirred them and kept those questions alive have been those of these three reforms. Smothered with gold--smothered with material prosperity, the vast ma.s.ses of our countrymen were living the lives of mere getters of money; but the ideas of this half of the nineteenth century have been bruited by despised reformers, kept alive by three radical movements, and whoever in the next generation shall seek for the sources of mental and intellectual change will find it here; and in a progressive people like ours that claim is a most vital and significant one....

I contend that woman, broadly considered, makes half the money that is made. Go the world over, take either Europe or America, the first source of money is intelligence and thrift; it is not speculation.... Out of the twenty millions of American people that make money, woman does more than half of the work that insures the reward. I claim for that half of the race whose qualities garner up wealth, the right to dispose of it, and to control it by law.

Again, take thought. I know our sister has modestly told us how utterly they are deprived of what are called the inst.i.tutions of education; but we know very well that book learning is a miserably poor thing, and that the best education in the world is what we clutch in the streets; and of that education, by hook or by crook, woman has so far gained enough, that, Europe and America through, where is the man presumptuous enough to doubt that the hand of woman is not felt as much on the helm of public opinion as that of man? To be sure, she does not have an outside ambitious distinction; but at home, in the molding hours, in youth, in the soft moments when the very balance-wheel of character is touched, we all know that woman, though she may not consciously enunciate ideas, does as much to form public opinion as man. The time has been--and every man who has ever a.n.a.lyzed history knows it--when in France, the mother to Europe of all social ideas; France that has lifted up Germany from mysticism, and told England what she means and what she wants: France that has construed England to herself, and interpreted to her what she was blindly reaching out for; when in that very France, at the fountain-head of that eighteenth century of civil progress, it was in the saloons of woman that man did his thinking, and it was under the brilliant inspiration of her society that that mighty revolution in the knowledge and science of civil affairs was wrought. In this country, too, at this hour, woman does as much to give the impulse to public opinion as man does.

Wherever I find silent power I want recognition of the responsibility. I am not in favor of a power behind the throne. I do not want half the race concealed behind the curtain and controlling without being responsible. Drag them to the light, hold them up as you do men to the utmost study of public questions, and to a personal responsibility for their public settlement. Corruption--it often takes the very form of the pa.s.sions of woman. In Paris, to-day, we are told, when the government approaches a man, the way is, not to give him wealth for his own enjoyment, but to dower his daughter. It is the pride of woman through which they reach him. Drag that woman forward on the platform of public life; give to her manifest ability a fair field, let her win wealth by her own exertions, not by the surrender of principle in the person of her husband; and although my friend doubts it, I believe, when you put the two s.e.xes harmoniously in civil life, you will secure a higher state of civilization--not because woman is better, not because she is more merciful, or more just, or more pure than man, as man naturally, but because G.o.d meant that a perfect human being should be made up of man and woman allied, and it is only when the two march side by side on the pathway of civilization that the harmonious development of the race begins.

Then, again, you can not educate woman, in the sense that we use education. She has no motive. As my friend said, when she marries, education ceases. At that age the education of man commences: he has wealth, ambition, social position, as his stimulus: he knows that by keeping his mind on the alert he earns them all. You furnish a woman with books--you give her no motive to open them. You open to her the door of science: why should she enter? She can gain nothing except in individual and exceptional cases; public opinion drives her back, places a stigma upon her of blue-stocking, and the consequence is, the very motive for education is taken away. Now, I believe, a privileged cla.s.s, an aristocracy, a set of slaveholders, does just as much harm to itself as it does to the victimized cla.s.s. When man undertakes to place woman behind him, to a.s.sume the reins of government and to govern for her, he is an aristocrat; and all aristocracies are not only unjust, but they are harmful to the progress of society.

I welcome this movement, because it shows that we have got a great amount of civilization. Every other movement to redress a wrong in the past generations of the world has been yielded to only from fear. Bentham says truly, the governing race never yielded a right unless they were bullied out of it. That is true historically; but we have come to a time--and this movement shows it--when civilization has rendered man capable of yielding to something different from fear. This movement has only been eight years on foot, and during that time, we who have watched the statute-book are aware to admiration of the rapid changes that have taken place in public opinion, and in legislation, all over the States. Within the last four years, in different localities, woman has been allowed the right to protect her earnings, and to make a will--two of the great points of property. Aye, and one little star of light begins to twinkle in the darkness of the political atmosphere: Kentucky allows her to vote. Yes, from the land where on one question they are so obstinate, the white race have remembered justice to their white co-equals. In her n.o.bly-planned school system, Kentucky divides her State into districts; the trustees are annually chosen for the State funds; and it is expressly provided, that besides the usual voters in the election of trustees for the school fund, which is coveted by millions, there shall be allowed to vote, every widow who has a child betwixt six and eighteen years old, and she shall go to the ballot-box in person or by proxy. Kentucky repudiates the doctrine that to go to the ballot-box forfeits the delicacy of the s.e.x; for she provides, in express terms, that she shall go to the ballot-box in person, or by proxy, as she pleases. It is the first drop of the coming storm--it is the first ray of light in the rising sun.

Civilization can not defend itself, on American principles, against this claim. My friend of Brooklyn claims the right to make political speeches, as well as sermons, because he is a citizen. Well, woman is a citizen too: and if a minister can preach politics because he is a citizen, woman can meddle in politics and vote, because she is a citizen too. When Mr. Beecher based his right, not on the intellect which flashes from Maine to Georgia, not on the strength of that nervous right arm, but solely on his citizenship, he dragged to the platform twelve millions of American women to stand at his side. But the difficulty is, no man can defend his own right to vote, without granting it to woman. The only reason why the demand sounds strange, is because man never a.n.a.lyzed his own right. The moment he begins to a.n.a.lyze it, he can not defend it without admitting her. Our fathers proclaimed, sixty years ago, that government was co-equal with the right to take money and to punish for crime.

Now, all that I wish to say to the American people on this question is, let woman go free from the penal statute--let her property be exempt from taxation, until you admit her to the ballot-box--or seal up the history of the Revolution, make Bancroft and Hildreth prohibited books, banish the argument of '76, and let Mr. Simms have his own way with the history of all the States, as well as South Carolina. Yes, the fact is, women make opinion for us; and the only thing we shut them out from is the ballot-box.

I would have it constantly kept before the public, that we do not seek to prop up woman; we only ask for her s.p.a.ce to let her grow.

Governments are not made; they grow. They are not buildings like this, with dome and pillars; they are oaks, with roots and branches, and they grow, by G.o.d's blessing, in the soil He gives to them. Now man has been allowed to grow, and when Pharaoh tied him down with bars of iron, when Europe tied him down with privilege and superst.i.tion, he burst the bonds and grew strong.

We ask the same for woman. Goethe said that if you plant an oak in a flower-pot, one of two things was sure to happen: either the oak will be dwarfed, or the flower-pot will break. So we have planted woman in a flower-pot, hemmed her in by restrictions, and when we move to enlarge her sphere, society cries out, "Oh!

you'll break the flower-pot!" Well, I say, let it break. Man made it, and the sooner it goes to pieces the better. Let us see how broadly the branches will throw themselves, and how beautiful will be the shape, and how glorious against the moonlit sky, or glowing sunset, the foliage shall appear.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARTHA C. WRIGHT (with autograph).]

I say the very first claim, the middle and last claim of all our Conventions should be the ballot. Everywhere, in each State, we should claim it; not for any intrinsic value in the ballot, but because it throws upon woman herself the responsibility of her position. Man never grew to his stature until he was provoked to it by the pressure and weight of responsibility; and I take it woman will grow up the same way.

The first three resolutions on the Presidential election were brought up for discussion and adopted. Those persons in the audience who desired to speak were urged to do so.