The president of the Howard Mission School, New York, said, "Miss Anthony, it is a marvel to me that, with so much brain and common sense, you should always devote yourself to mere abstractions. Why is it that you never set yourself about some practical work?"
"Like the Howard Mission?" said I. "How many less children have you now than ten years ago?"
"Oh, no less, but many, many more."
"Would it not be a practical work, then, to make it possible for every mother to support her own children? That is my aim and my work; while yours is simply to pick up the poor children, leaving every girl-child to the mother's heritage of helpless poverty and vice. My aim is to change the condition of women to self-help; yours, simply to ameliorate the ills that must inevitably grow out of dependence. My work is to lessen the numbers of the poor; yours, merely to lessen the sufferings of their tenfold increase."
If the divine law visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, equally so does it transmit to them their virtues. Therefore, if it is through woman's ignorant subjection to the tyranny of man's appetites and passions that the life-current of the race is corrupted, then must it be through her intelligent emancipation that the race shall be redeemed from the curse, and her children and children's children rise up to call her blessed. When the mother of Christ shall be made the true model of womanhood and motherhood, when the office of maternity shall be held sacred and the mother shall consecrate herself, as did Mary, to the one idea of bringing forth the Christ-child, then, and not till then, will this earth see a new order of men and women, prone to good rather than evil.
I am a full and firm believer in the revelation that it is through woman that the race is to be redeemed. And it is because of this faith that I ask for her immediate and unconditional emancipation from all political, industrial, social and religious subjection.
"What is most needed to ensure the future greatness of the empire?" inquired Madame Campan of the great Napoleon. "Mothers!" was the terse and suggestive reply. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Men are what their mothers made them." But I say, to hold mothers responsible for the character of their sons while you deny them any control over the surroundings of their lives, is worse than mockery, it is cruelty! Responsibilities grow out of rights and powers. Therefore, before mothers can be held responsible for the vices and crimes, the wholesale demoralization of men, they must possess all possible rights and powers to control the conditions and circumstances of their own and their children's lives.
A minister of Chicago sums up the infamies of that great metropolis of the West as follows: 3,000 licensed dram-shops and myriad patrons; 300 gambling houses and countless frequenters, many of them young men from the best families of the city; 79 obscene theatres, with their thousands of degraded men and boys nightly in attendance; 500 brothels, with their thousands of poor girls, bodies and souls sacrificed to the 20,000 or 30,000 depraved men—young and old, married and single—who visit them. While all the participants in all these forms of iniquity, victims and victimizers alike—the women excepted—may go to the polls on every election day and vote for the mayor and members of the common council, who will either continue to license these places, or fail to enforce the laws which would practically close them—not a single woman in that city may record her vote against those wretched blots on civilization. The profane, tobacco-chewing, whiskey-drinking, gambling libertines may vote, but not their virtuous, intelligent, sober, law-abiding wives and mothers!
You remember the petition of 18,000 of the best women of Chicago, a year ago, asking the common council not to repeal the Sunday Liquor Law? Why were they treated with ridicule and contempt? Why was their prayer unheeded? Was it because the honorable gentlemen had no respect for those women or their demand? No; on the contrary, many of them, doubtless, were men possessed of high regard for women, who would have been glad to aid them in their noble efforts; but the power that placed those men in office, the representatives of the saloons, brothels and obscene shows, crowded the council chamber and its corridors, threatening political death to the man who should dare give his voice or his vote for the maintenance of that law. Could those 18,000 women, with the tens of thousands whom they represented, have gone to the ballot-box at the next election and voted to re-elect the men who championed their petition, and defeat those who opposed it, does any one doubt that it would have been heeded by the common council?
As the fountain can rise no higher than the spring that feeds it, so a legislative body will enact or enforce no law above the average sentiment of the people who created it. Any and every reform work is sure to lead women to the ballot-box. It is idle for them to hope to battle successfully against the monster evils of society until they shall be armed with weapons equal to those of the enemy—votes and money. Archimedes said, "Give to me a fulcrum on which to plant my lever, and I will move the world." And I say, give to woman the ballot, the political fulcrum, on which to plant her moral lever, and she will lift the world into a nobler and purer atmosphere.