Thus it seems evident to me that the Woman-Suffrage movement no more grew logically out of the great discussions on human bondage which began with Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, and John Jay, and ended with Sumner, Seward, and Lincoln, than the communes of this country grew out of the utterances of the Fathers based on the declaration that "All men are created equal, and are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
It was among those whose mistaken zeal and wild conduct were most mischievous, that the Suffrage sentiment gathered head. Their lack of judgment in defying the opinions of their own sex, as well as of the other, their wrapt forgetfulness of proprieties, which incited mobs and proved a fine tool for the frenzy of so-called social reformers, brought contempt upon womanhood as well as upon the cause they advocated. Women, in the churches and out, were the strength of the Anti-slavery movement; but not these women. As to the notable meeting in London, had the delegates been the highest and largest minded and most cultured of their sex, and had their cause been the noblest, they and it would have been dishonored by the method of its presentation. American women of to-day would no more applaud such conduct than did those of fifty years ago. Women have won lasting public favor and place, while Suffrage has won an uneasy footing by unenviable methods.
This survey enables us to understand what otherwise would seem most strange, how the women of the Suffrage movement, in claiming the right of suffrage, ignored the duties and powers based upon and connected with it— those that formed the defence which made possible any such nation as ours. Added to the extreme Quaker doctrine of peace-at-any-price, was the fanatical notion of the sinfulness of all war, all use of physical force, and a cool assumption that opinion was law. Mrs. Maria Chapman read, at one of the early Woman's-Rights conventions, a string of verses that reveals the absurdity of the situation. It was in reply to "A Clerical Appeal," issued by the Rev. Nehemiah Adams, whose "South-Side View of Slavery" received more Anti-slavery attention than it deserved, for it expressed only his own fantastic ideas. In the "Appeal" he maintains that women should paint in water colors only, not in oil. Mrs. Chapman says:
"Our patriot fathers, of eloquent fame,
Waged war against tangible forms;
Aye, their foes were men—and if ours were the same,
We might speedily quiet their storms;
But, ah! their descendants enjoy not such bliss,
The assumptions of Britain were nothing to this.
"Could we but array all our force in the field,
We'd teach these usurpers of power
That their bodily safety demands they should yield,
And in presence of womanhood cower;
But alas! for our tethered and impotent state,
Chained by notions of knighthood—we can but debate."
* * * * *
"Oh! shade of the prophet Mahomet, arise!
Place woman again in her 'sphere,'
And teach that her soul was not born for the skies,
But to flutter a brief moment here.
This doctrine of Jesus, as preached up by Paul,
If embraced in its spirit will ruin us all."
Mention of Mrs. Chapman recalls her attitude toward Frederick Douglass and the further fact that he became an advocate of Suffrage. In his "Life and Times" he says: "I could not meet her [Mrs. Stanton's] arguments except with the shallow plea of 'custom,' 'natural division of duties,' 'indelicacy of woman's taking part in politics,' 'the common talk of woman's sphere,' and the like, all of which that able woman brushed away by those arguments which no man has yet successfully refuted." Mr. Douglass might have called to mind the fact, to the recognition of which he had been so thoroughly converted, and which he set forth on page 460 of his book, when he wrote: "I insisted that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box." He forgot that Mrs. Stanton, in defiance of those social laws that had weight with him, was asking to use the first, to use partially the second, and to ignore the third, on which both of the others depend for continuance.
The "History" is dedicated to Harriet Martineau (among other women) as one who influenced the starting of the Suffrage movement. Turning to Miss Martineau's "Society in America," published in 1837, I find the following in her account of the Anti-slavery movement in the United States: "The progress of the Abolition question within three years throughout the whole of the rural districts of the North, is a far stronger testimony to the virtue of the nation than the noisy clamor of a portion of the slaveholders of the South, and the merchant aristocracy of the North, and the silence of the clergy, against it. The nation must not be judged of by that portion whose worldly interests are involved in the maintenance of the anomaly; nor yet by the eight hundred flourishing Abolition societies of the North, with all the supporters they have in unassociated individuals. If it be found that the five Abolitionists who first met in a little chamber five years ago, to measure their moral strength against this national enormity, have become a host beneath whose assaults the vicious institution is rocking to its foundations, it is time that slavery was ceasing to be a national reproach."
An observer who could be made to believe that these five Abolitionists had really accomplished more toward the overthrow of slavery than eight hundred flourishing Abolition societies and their outside supporters, and that the great body of clergymen were silent, because they did not adopt the methods of the five who set themselves against church and state, shows a credulity that leads one to question the information and the conclusions on which her judgment of the relation of American women to the Republic were based.