The Complete History of the Women's Suffrage Movement in U.S.. Jane Addams
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women of Corinth centuries ago. We have learned too well the lessons of liberty taught in our revolution to accept now the position of slaves.
Mrs. Tracy Cutler: It would appear, after all, that we women are placed pretty much in the condition of the veriest slave. We must prove our own humanity by exhibiting our skill in work. We must bring forth our own samples; put them, as it were, on the auction-block, and thus make our claim to equality of rights a matter of dollars and cents. Is it here only that woman can touch man's sympathy? She then described the degraded condition of women in Europe, and particularly in London, where poverty and the tyranny of man have driven women to despair, until they were forced to prostitute their own bodies to procure bread. This vice, horribly revolting as it is, seems to go hand in hand with intemperance. She did not wish women to go into the field to be yoked with mules, or to turn scavenger, to pick up rags and crusts in the streets to carry home in their aprons. Men bring the elements to their aid, and we wish women to do the same. She then adverted to the difference in the labor of the kitchen and other pursuits open to women. Let the printer advertise for two girls to set type, and a hundred applications will be made, while women for the kitchen are very scarce. The reason for this is, that all other kinds of work are better paid. When woman's labor is justly remunerated and equally respected in all departments of industry, there will be no such difference in the supply of help for the factory, shop, and kitchen.
Frances D. Gage said: The reason why the work of the kitchen is looked upon as degrading, is because the girl is never taken by the hand. Where are your philanthropic ladies who assist her? Where is she to go when her work is done? Does she sit in the same room with you? Does she eat at the same table? No, to your shame, she is confined to the basement and the garret. It is not so much because the pay for kitchen labor is not so good, as it is chiefly because of the public opinion that they are employed to serve. It is true that there are many who will take a quarter off the wages of a girl to put a new bow on their own bonnets. The men are not to be blamed for this; they have enough sins to answer for.
Mrs. Coe said: It would afford women great pleasure to be able to pay their own expenses on pleasure excursions and to the concert-room, instead of being always compelled to allow the gentlemen to foot the bills for them. Women must have equal pay for equal work. Among the Quakers the sexes stand on an equality, and everything moves on smoothly and happily.
Susan B. Anthony, after relating several instances of the injustice of the laws that made the wife subject to the husband, said: And all these wrongs are to be redressed by appeals to the State Legislatures. In New York and Ohio the women had already commenced with every prospect of success. Thousands of petitions had been sent into both Legislatures asking for suffrage and equal property rights, and their Committees had granted hearings to our representatives—Caroline M. Severance, in Ohio; Ernestine L. Rose, Rev. William Henry Channing, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Rev. Antoinette L. Brown, and herself, in New York. And closed with an earnest appeal to the women of every State to petition, petition, remembering that "what is worth having is worth asking for," and that "who would be free must themselves strike the blow."
Frances D. Gage moved that the next National Convention be held at Cincinnati, Ohio. A gentlemen suggested Washington, to which Mr. Garrison replied, "We shall go there by and by."72 After discussion by Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Rose, and others, the motion was unanimously adopted. Mrs. Gage then spoke of the Press of the city; its faithful reports of the proceedings of the Convention, and moved a vote of thanks. Edward M. Davis begged Mrs. Gage to accept as a substitute the following resolutions:
Resolved, That the thanks of this Convention are due, and are hereby conveyed, to Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, of New York, for the courtesy, impartiality, and dignity with which she has presided over its proceedings.
Resolved, That in the crowded and intelligent audiences which have attended the sessions of this Convention; in the earnest attention given to its proceedings from the commencement to its close; in the fair reports of the Press of the city, and in the spirit of harmony and fraternity which has prevailed amongst its members, we see evidence of the rapid progress of our cause, and find incitement to renewed and more earnest efforts in its behalf.
Thus closed another most successful Convention. Notwithstanding an admission fee of ten cents during the day and twenty-five at night, the audiences grew larger every session, until the last evening the spacious hall, aisles, stairs, and all available standing-room, was densely packed, and hundreds went away unable to get in.
Let us remember that behind the chief actors in these Conventions, there stands in each State, a group of women of stern moral principle, large experience, refinement and cultivation, filling with honor the more private walks of life, who, by their sympathy, hospitality, and generous contributions, are the great sources of support and inspiration to those on the platform, who represent the ideas they hold sacred, whose tongues and pens proclaim their thoughts. Among such in Pennsylvania, let us ever remember Sarah Pugh, Mary Ann McClintock, Elizabeth Phillips, Anna and Adeline Thomson, Abby and Gertrude Kimber, Margaretta Forten, Harriet Forten Purvis, Hannah M. Darlington, Dinah Mendenhall, Sarah Pierce, Elizabeth and Sarah Miller, and Ruth Dugdale. When success shall at last crown our efforts, in according due praise to those who have achieved the victory, such names as these must not be forgotten.
Alice Bradley Neal, of Philadelphia, ridiculed this Woman's Rights Convention in her husband's73 paper, and Jane Grey Swisshelm indignantly replied in her Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor as follows:
Mrs. Neal can not be ignorant that the principal object of the Convention, and all the agitation about woman's rights, is to secure to the toiling millions of her own sex a just reward for their labor; to save them from the alternative of prostitution, starvation, or incessant life-destroying toil; and yet the whole subject furnishes her with material for scorn and merriment! Tell it not in Gath! Publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the sons of the Phillistines rejoice that one of the daughters of Eve, beautiful and gentle, throws down her knitting-pins, and tries her strength to wield the hammer of old Vulcan to aid them in forging fetters for the wrists of her unfortunate sisters. We would that it had been some one else than the gentle Alice Neal who had volunteered to soil her white hands and sweat her fair face, laboring in such a blacksmith-shop.
While ever and anon during the last forty years Mrs. Swisshelm has seized some of these dilettante literary women with her metaphysical tweezers, and held them up to scorn for their ridicule of the woman suffrage conventions, yet in her own recently published work in her mature years, she vouchsafes no words of approval for those who have inaugurated the greatest movement of the centuries. She complains that in some of the woman suffrage conventions she attended, there was not a strict observance of parliamentary rules, and that the resolutions and speeches were unworthy the occasion. Yet the only time Mrs. Swisshelm ever honored our platform at a National Convention, her speech was far below the level of most of the others, and the resolutions she offered were so verbose and irrelevant, that the Committee declined to present them to the Convention.
It is quite evident from her last pronunciamento that she has no just appreciation of the importance and dignity of our demand for justice and equality. A soldier without a leg is a fact so much more readily understood, than all women without ballots, and his loss so much more readily comprehended and supplied, that we can hardly blame any one for doing the work of the hour, rather than struggling a life-time for an idea. Hence it is not a matter of surprise that most women are more readily enlisted in the suppression of evils in the concrete, than in advocating the principles that underlie them in the abstract, and thus ultimately doing the broader and more lasting work. On this ground we can excuse the author of "Half a Century" for giving the reader one hundred and twenty-five pages of her own work in hospitals and three to the Woman Suffrage movement, but considering the tone of the three pages, the advocates of the measure should be thankful she gave no more.
Mrs. Swisshelm's contempt is only surpassed by Mrs. Hale's "Jeremiad" over the infidelity of the noble leader of our movement. For a woman so thoroughly politic and time-serving, who, unlike the great master she professed to follow, never identified herself with one of the