CHAPTER XXIII.
FIRST TRIP TO THE PACIFIC COAST.
1871.
At the close of the New York convention Miss Anthony, Rev. Olympia Brown and Josephine S. Griffing went with Mrs. Hooker to Hartford for a short visit, which it may be imagined was one protracted "business session." Then Miss Anthony hastened to her own home to prepare for a long journey, as she and Mrs. Stanton had decided to make a lecture tour through California. She left Rochester the last day of May, and met Mrs. Stanton in Chicago where a reception was given them by the suffrage club, in its elegant new headquarters. They spoke in a number of cities en route and attended numerous handsome receptions held in their honor. At Denver they were entertained by Governor and Mrs. McCook. Their audiences were large and enthusiastic, the press respectful and often cordial and appreciative.[58] At Laramie City they were accompanied to the station by a hundred women whom Mrs. Stanton addressed from the platform. A letter written by Miss Anthony during the journey contains these beautiful paragraphs:
We have a drawing-room all to ourselves, and here we are just as cozy and happy as lovers. We look at the prairie schooners slowly moving along with ox-teams, or notice the one lone cabin-light on the endless plains, and Mrs. Stanton will say: "In all that there is real bliss, if only the two are perfect equals, two loving people, neither assuming to control the other." Yes, after all, life is about one and the same thing, whether in the prairie schooner and sod cabin, or the Fifth Avenue palace. Love for and faith in each other alone can make either a heaven, and without these any home is a hell. It is not the outside things which make life, but the inner, the spirit of love which casteth out all devils and bringeth in all angels.
Ever since 4 o'clock this morning we have been moving over the soil that is really the land of the free and the home of the brave—Wyoming, the Territory in which women are the recognized political equals of men. Women here can say: "What a magnificent country is ours, where every class and caste, color and sex, may find equal freedom, and every woman sit under her own vine and fig tree." What a blessed attainment at last; and that it should be here among these everlasting mountains, midway between the Atlantic and Pacific, seems significant of the true growth of the individual—the center pure, the heart-beats free and equal.
At Salt Lake City they were the guests of Mr. and Mrs. W.S. Godbe, and were presented to their audience by Mayor Wells, who afterward took them to call on his five wives. The second evening they were introduced by Bishop Orson Pratt. From here Miss Anthony writes to The Revolution:
If I were a believer in special providences, I should say that our being in Salt Lake City at the dedication of the New Liberal Institute was one. On Sunday morning, July 2, this beautiful hall of the Liberal party—Apostate party, the Saints call it—was well filled. The services consisted of invocations, hymns and brief addresses. Messrs. Godbe, Harrison, Lyman and Lawrence seem to be the advance-guard—the high priests of the new order—and as they sang their songs of freedom, poured out their rejoicings over their emancipation from the Theocracy of Brigham, and told of the beatitudes of soul-to-soul communion with the All-Father, my heart was steeped in deepest sympathy with the women around me and, rising at an opportune pause, I asked if a woman and a stranger might be permitted to say a word. At once the entire circle of men on the platform arose and beckoned me forward; and, with a Quaker inspiration not to be repeated, much less put on paper, I asked those men, bubbling over with the divine spirit of freedom for themselves, if they had thought whether the women of their households were today rejoicing in like manner? I can not tell what I said—only this I know, that young and beautiful, old and wrinkled women alike wept, and men said, "I wanted to get out of doors where I could shout."
The transition of this people into the new life is complicated—is heartrending. Remember that when these men began their rebellion against Brigham, it was simply a protest against his tyranny—his exorbitant tithing system—a mere refusal to render tribute unto him; not at all a disavowal of the Morman religion or of polygamy. But as bond after bond has burst, this last, strongest and tightest one of plurality of wives is beginning to snap asunder. To illustrate: One man, a noble, loving, beautiful spirit—nothing of the tyrant, nothing of the sensualist—with four lovely wives, three of whom I have seen, and in the homes of two of whom I have broken bread, with thirteen loved and loving children—wakes up to the new idea. Four women's hearts breaking, three sets of children who must leave their father that the one-wife system may be realized! I can assure you my heart aches for the man, the women and the children, and cries, "God help them, one and all."
Where the man is a brutal tyrant, the problem is comparatively easy. What we have tried to do is to show them that the principle of the subjection of woman to man is the point of attack; and that woman's work in monogamy and polygamy is one and the same—that of planting her feet on the ground of self-support. The saddest feature here is that there really is nothing by which these women can earn an independent livelihood for themselves and their children, no manufacturing establishments, no free schools to teach. Women here, as everywhere, must be able to live honestly and honorably without the aid of men, before it can be possible to save the masses of them from entering into polygamy or prostitution, legal or illegal. Whichever way I turn, whatever phase of social life presents itself, the same conclusion comes: "Independent bread alone can redeem woman from her curse of subjection to man."
I attended the Liberals' Fourth of July celebration. Their beautiful hall was packed; their souls were on fire with their new freedom. Never since the first reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, were its great truths responded to with such real and deep feeling as on this occasion. I did not intrude myself on them again—but my soul, too, was on fire for freedom for my sex, as was that of every wife and daughter in that assembly. But these men have yet to learn to loose the bonds of power over the women by their side, precisely as have the men in the States and the world over.
Here is missionary work—not for any "thus saith the Lord" canting priests or echoing priestesses by divine right, but for great, Godlike, humanitarian men and women, who "feel for those in bonds as bound with them." No Phariseeism, no shudders of Puritanic horror, no standing afar off; but a simple, loving, fraternal clasp of hands with these struggling women, and an earnest work with them—not to ameliorate but to abolish the whole system of woman's subjection to man in both polygamy and monogamy.