To this Mrs. Stanton replied: "That is not the point, but which party, as a party, has the best record on our question. For four years I have chafed under the Republican maneuvering to keep us still. Let me call your attention to my speech on the Fifteenth Amendment, in which I said 'this is a new stab at womanhood, to result in deeper degradation to her than she has ever known before.'... Sometimes I exclaim in agony, 'Can nothing raise the self-respect of women?' I despise the Republican party for the political serfdom we suffer today, under the heel of every foreign lord and lackey who treads our soil. If all of you have turned to such idols, I will go alone to Jerusalem."
When the judiciary committee made its adverse report[57] which was merely that Congress had not the power to act, most of the friends were not discouraged but believed another committee would decide differently. Mrs. Hooker, however, was at the boiling point of indignation over the report and reversed her decision in regard to the Republican party, writing: "Thank God! that party is dead; every one here knows it, feels it, and is waiting to see what will take its place. A great labor and woman suffrage party is ready to spring into life, and a hundred aristocratic Democrats are pledged to the work. You can have no conception of the new conditions unless you are here in the midst of things and read the telegrams from all parts of the country. Early next winter we shall be declared voting citizens." She then quotes a number of prominent Democratic politicians whom she has interviewed and who have given her reason for having faith in that party. But many of the women were fooled then by both political parties, just as they have continued to be up to the present time.
A letter from Phoebe Couzins expressed the sentiment of numbers which were received this spring: "We made a grand mistake in giving up the National. If you and Mrs. Stanton think best, as your fingers are on the pulse of the people, let us resolve the Union Society into the National Association. So say Mr. and Mrs. Minor, but whatever is done, the two grand women who have the qualifications for leadership must be at the head; the cause will languish until you are back in your old places."
The suffrage anniversary was held in Apollo Hall, New York, May 11 and 12, 1871. Mrs. Griffing read an able report on the work at Washington the previous winter. There were strong objections by a number of ladies to sitting on the platform with Mrs. Woodhull, but Mrs. Stanton said she should be sandwiched between Lucretia Mott and herself and that surely would give her sufficient respectability. She made a fine constitutional argument, to which the most captious could not object. The excitement created by her appearance at the Washington meeting was mild compared to that in New York City where she was becoming so well-known. The great dailies headed all reports, "The Woodhull Convention." The injustice and vindictiveness of the Tribune, that paper which once had been the champion of woman's cause, were especially hard to bear. It rang the changes upon the term "free love," insisted that, because the women allowed Mrs. Woodhull to stand upon their platform and advocate suffrage, they thereby indorsed all her ideas on social questions, and by every possible means it cast odium on the convention.
There is no doubt that the advocates of "free love," in its usually accepted sense, did endeavor to insinuate themselves among the suffrage women and make this movement responsible for their social doctrines, but every great reform has to suffer from similar parasites. The lives of Miss Anthony, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Davis, and of all the old and tried leaders in this cause, form the strongest testimony of their utter repudiation of any such heresy. It was impossible, however, for the world in general to understand their broad ground that it was their business to accept valuable services without inquiring into the private life of the persons who offered them. If this were a mistake, these pioneers, who fought single-handed such a battle as the women of later days can not comprehend, had to learn the fact by experience.
The notorious Stephen Pearl Andrews prepared a set of involved and intricate resolutions which were read by Paulina Wright Davis, the chairman, without any thought of their possessing a deeper meaning than appeared on the surface, but they fell flat on the convention, and were neither discussed nor voted upon. The papers got possession of them, nevertheless, declared that they were adopted as part of the platform, read "free love" between the lines, and used them as the basis of many ponderous and prophetic editorials.
A national committee was formed of one woman from each State, with Mrs. Stanton as chairman, of which the New York Standard, edited by John Russell Young, said: "Miss Susan B. Anthony holds a modest position, but we can well believe that in any movement for the enfranchisement of women, like MacGregor, wherever she sits will be the head of the table." The New York Democrat commented: "She deals with facts, not theories, but just gets hold of one nail after another and drives it home.... Her words were to the point, as they always are, and abounded in telling hits in every direction." Even the Tribune was generous enough to say: "The ranks of the agitators with whom Captain Anthony is identified contain no one more indiscreet, more reckless or more honest. We have no sort of sympathy with the object to which the fair captain is now devoting her life; but we know no person before the country more single-minded, sincere and unselfish and, for these reasons, more honestly entitled to the regard of a public which will always appreciate upright intentions and disinterested devotion."
In the closing days of May, she wrote to her old paper, The Revolution:
Your "Stand by the Cause," this week, is the timely word to the friends of woman suffrage. The present howl is an old trick of the arch-fiend to divert public thought from the main question, viz: woman's equal freedom and equal power to make and control her own conditions in the state, in the church and, most of all, in the home.
Though the ballot is the open sesame to equal rights, there is a fundamental law which can not be violated with impunity between woman and man, any more than between man and man; a law stated a hundred years ago by Alexander Hamilton: "Give to a man a right over my subsistence, and he has power over my whole moral being." Woman's subsistence is in the hands of man, and most arbitrarily and unjustly does he exercise his consequent power, making two moral codes: one for himself, with largest latitude—swearing, chewing, smoking, drinking, gambling, libertinism, all winked at—cash and brains giving him a free pass everywhere; another quite unlike this for woman—she must be immaculate. One hair's breadth deviation, even the touch of the hem of the garment of an accused sister, dooms her to the world's scorn. Man demands that his wife shall be above suspicion. Woman must accept her husband as he is, for she is powerless so long as she eats the bread of dependence. Were man today dependent upon woman for his subsistence, I have no doubt he would very soon find himself compelled to square his life to an entirely new code, not a whit less severe than that to which he now holds her. In moral rectitude, we would not have woman less but man more.
It is to put an end to such heresies as the following, from the Rochester Democrat, that all women should most earnestly labor. That paper begs us not to forget, "that what may be pardonable in a man, speaking of evils generally, may and perhaps ought to be unpardonable in one of the presumably better sex; because there can not and must not be perfect equality between men and women when the disposition to do wrong is under discussion. Women are permitted to be as much better than men as they choose; but there ought to be no law, on or oft the statute books, recognizing their social and political right to be worse or even as bad as men; and it is shameful that intelligent women should claim such a right, or even dare to mention it at all." No human being or class of human beings would venture to talk thus to equals. It is only because women are dependent on men that such cowardly impudence can be dished out to them day after day by puny legislators and editors, themselves often reeking in social corruption which should banish them forever from the presence of womanhood. Yours for an even-handed scale in morals as well as politics, SUSAN B. ANTHONY.
[57] The committee reported January 30, 1871, John A. Bingham, of Ohio, chairman. The minority report, signed by Benjamin F. Butler, of Massachusetts, and William Loughridge, of Iowa, is perhaps the strongest and most exhaustive argument ever written on woman's right to vote under the Constitution. It is given in full in the History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 464.