The Complete History of the Women's Suffrage Movement in U.S.. Jane Addams
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woman. There is not a man here who does not, in his own highest moments, reverence in woman the same qualities he admires in himself, if he thinks he claims them. Power of clear thought and of heroic action—every man admires these in woman in the best moments of his life. It is when he lowers himself to the level of the public meeting, or of the fashionable drawing-room, that he is changed into a flatterer, and he who flatters always despises the object of his flattery.
Another source of opposition to this movement among women is founded in Fear. It does not require much courage for a man to stand on a Woman's Rights platform. I do not say that it does not require more than a good many men have, for it would be difficult to find a thing so easy as not to do that. He, of course, has to run the gauntlet of the old nonsense of "strong-minded women and weak-minded men." Well, I am willing to be accounted weak-minded in the presence of strength of mind and heart, with which it has been my privilege to be associated in this movement. That is a small thing, and it is the experience of every man who has entered into this reform, that if he had a fiber of manhood in him heretofore, that fiber had been doubled, trebled, and quadrupled before he had been in it a year. Instead of requiring courage for a man to enter into this movement, it rather requires courage to keep out of it, if he is a logical, clear-headed man. But with a woman it is different. She needs much courage. A woman who, for instance, has been engaged in some literary avocation, and obtained some position, does not wish to risk her reputation by connecting herself with those who advocate the right of woman, not merely to write and to speak, but to vote also; hence, while admitting, secretly admitting, the justice of the claim, she will shrink back from avowing it for fear of "losing her position." How can any brave man honor such a recreant woman as that, who, having gained all she wants to herself, under cover of the bolder efforts of these nobler spirits, then settles back upon the ease and comfort of that position, and turns her small artillery on her own sisters? I feel a sense of shame for American literature, when I think how our literary women shrink, and cringe, and apologize, and dodge to avoid being taken for "strong-minded women." Oh, there's no danger. I don't wonder that their literary efforts are stricken with the palsy of weakness from the beginning. I don't wonder that our magazines are filled with diluted stories, in which sentimental heroines sigh, cry, and die through whole pages of weary flatness, and not a single noble thought relieves that Sahara of emptiness and barrenness. It is a retribution on them. A man or woman can not put in a book more than they have in themselves, and if woman is not noble enough to appreciate a great thought, she is not noble enough to write one. I don't wonder that their fame does not keep the promise of its dawn, when that dawn is so dastardly.
The time will come, let me tell you, ladies, when the first question asked about any woman in this age who is worth remembering will be, "Did that woman comprehend her whole sphere? Did she stand beside her sisters who were laboring for the right? If she did not this, it is no matter what she did." It is thus we already begin to judge the American women of the past. The time will come, when of all Mrs. Adams' letters, the passage best remembered will be that, where she points out to her great husband, that while emancipating the world, he still believes in giving men the absolute control over women. So the time will come when Harriet Beecher Stowe will be less honored, even as the authoress of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," than as the woman who in The New York Independent, that repository of religious thought, dared to place it among her religious thoughts, that Antoinette Brown had a right to stand in the pulpit. I wish Mrs. Stowe were yet more consistent; I wish she were not satisfied with merely wishing that others would attend Woman's Rights Conventions, and support Woman's Rights Lectures, but would join and take part in these things herself, as I believe she will when her brave spirit has gone a little further. Her heroic brother, Henry Ward Beecher, is with us already in the public advocacy of the right of suffrage for women.
The third obstacle that sets woman against this movement is prejudice. It is the honest feeling of multitudes of women that their "natural sphere," their domestic duties, will be interfered with by any other career. Let me tell you that so judging, you have only learned half the story we have to tell. We encourage these domestic duties most fully and amply. There is not a woman here who is not proud to claim them. Of all the women who have stood or spoken on this platform since this Convention began, there is only one who is not a married woman; there are very few who are not mothers; and among them all there is not one who does not give, by the nobleness of her domestic life, a proof of the consistency of that with the rest of the claims she makes for her sex. Some there are who doubt this; some there are who do not see how the elective franchise is any way connected with home duties and cares. I tell you there is the closest connection. If any one thing caps the sum of the argument for the rights of woman, it is the fact of those domestic duties which some idly array against it. What has a man at stake in society? What has he to risk by his ballot? Ask him at the ballot-box, and you will hear his statement. You will hear it in a thousand ways, and in a thousand voices. His own personal interest. A man invests himself in society; woman invests infinitely more, for she throws in her child. The man can run away to California with his interests, and from his duties; the woman is anchored to her home. It is important to him, you say, whether the community provides, by its statutes, schools or dram-shops. Then how vast, how unspeakable the importance to her! Deprive every man in the nation of the ballot, if you will, but demand, oh, demand its protection for the wife and the mother!
See the unjust workings of the present system. I knew in a town in Massachusetts a widow woman, who paid the highest tax bill in the town; nay, for every dollar that any man paid in the town, she paid two, and yet that woman had not the right to the ballot, which belonged to the most ignorant Irishman in her employ. She hadn't the right to protect her child from the misappropriation of his property; and if she had owned the whole town, and there had not been any other person to pay a property tax except that solitary woman, the case would have been the same, and not the slightest power of protection would have been in her hands, against the most outrageous misappropriation.
In another town of Massachusetts there is a story told of a man, a member of the Society of Friends. He was once sending his wife on a long journey. As she was about to set forth in the stage, "My dear," said she, "thee has forgotten to give me any money for my journey." "Why," said the Quaker, "thee knows very well that I paid thy fare in the stage." "But thee knows," said she, "that I am going to be away for some weeks, and perhaps it may be well for me to have some little money, in case I should have any expenses." "Rachel," said the astonished husband, "where is that ninepence I gave thee day before yesterday?" That man had gained all the money he had in the world through that wife. He obtained her property by marriage; he invested that property in real estate, and had grown richer and richer, until he grew rich enough to spare a ninepence for Rachel the day before yesterday. It is such marriages as that, that we wish to avert, by placing woman in an honorable position, by substituting an equal union in marriage; such a union as is shown in the lives of those who stand behind me now.
The movement which these women urge is sweeping on with resistless power. Within the last seven years, every legislature, every school, every industrial avocation has been reached by it. This is preliminary work. The final Malakoff, the right of suffrage, is yet to be gained. Already it has been partially conceded, in communities differing in all else, in Canada and in Kentucky. We have only to press on. Strange to say, the reform is reversing the ordinary weapons of the sexes, for the women have all the logic, and the men only gossip and slander. But it finds its answering echo in the very hostility it creates. It has a million hearts. Silence every woman on this platform, and the movement still goes on. Elevate woman at any point, and you lead directly to this. The thousand schools of New York are educating a Woman's Rights advocate in every house.
During the latter part of Mr. Higginson's remarks, a frequent disturbance was made by some of the occupants of the galleries, who were evidently curious to hear the female speakers.
The President then introduced Ernestine L. Rose, who said she wished to say to all self-respecting men, that this is the last place in which they should create a disturbance, especially in a matter which concerns their sisters, their wives, and their mothers.
Mrs. Rose: This morning a young man made some remarks in opposition to our claims. We were glad to hear him, because he gave evidence of an earnest, sincere spirit of inquiry, which is always welcome in every true reform movement. And as we believe our cause to be based on truth, we know it