[55] The demands for woman everywhere today are for a wider range of employment, higher wages, thorough mental and physical education, and an equal right before the law in all those relations which grow out of the marriage state. While we yield to none in the earnestness of our advocacy of these claims, we make a broader demand for the enfranchisement of woman, as the only way in which all her just rights can be permanently secured. By discussing, as we shall incidentally, leading questions of political and social importance, we hope to educate women for an intelligent judgment upon public affairs, and for a faithful expression of that judgment at the polls.
As masculine ideas have ruled the race for six thousand years, we especially desire that The Revolution shall be the mouth piece of women, to give the world the feminine thought in politics, religion and social life; so that ultimately in the union of both we may find the truth in all things. On the idea taught by the creeds, codes and customs of the world, that woman was made for man, we declare war to the death, and proclaim the higher truth that, like man, she was created by God for individual moral responsibility and progress here and forever.
Our principal contributors this year are: Anna Dickinson, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alice and Phoebe Cary, Olive Logan, Mary Clemmer, Mrs. Theodore Tilton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Phoebe Couzins, Elizabeth Boynton and others; and foreign, Rebecca Moore, Lydia E. Becker and Madame Marie Goeg.
The Revolution is an independent journal, bound to no party or sect, and those who write for our columns are responsible only for what appears under their own names. Hence, if old Abolitionists and Slaveholders, Republicans and Democrats, Presbyterians and Universalists, Catholics and Protestants find themselves side by side in writing on the question, of woman suffrage, they must pardon each other's differences on all other points, trusting that by giving their own views strongly and grandly, they will overshadow the errors by their side.
[56] Frances Wright, from Scotland, in 1828 was the first woman to speak on a public platform in this country. Ernestine L. Rose, from Poland, gave political lectures in 1836; Mary S. Gove, of New York, lectured oil woman's rights in 1837; Sarah and Angelina Grimké, from South Carolina, commenced their anti-slavery speeches in 1837, and Abby Kelly, of Massachusetts, in 1839; Eliza W. Farnham, of New York, lectured in 1843; between 1840 and 1845 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Paulina Wright (afterwards Davis) and Ernestine L. Rose circulated petitions for a bill to secure property rights for married women, and several times addressed committees of the New York Legislature; Margaret Fuller gave lectures in Massachusetts, in 1845; Lucy Stone spoke for the rights of women in 1847. The first woman's rights convention was called by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright and Mary Ann McClintock, at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848; Susan B. Anthony made her first speech on temperance in 1849. From 1850 the number of women speakers rapidly increased.