Divines may preach thanksgiving sermons on the poetry of the arm-chair and the cradle; but when they lay down their newspapers, or leave their beds a cold night to attend to the wants of either, I shall begin to look for the golden age of chivalry once more. If a short dress is to make the men less gallant than they now are, I beg the women at our next convention to add at least two yards more to every skirt they wear. And you mock us with dependence, too. Do not the majority of women in every town support themselves, and very many their husbands, too? What father of a family, at the loss of his wife, has ever been able to meet his responsibilities as woman has done? When the mother dies the house is made desolate, the children are forsaken—scattered to the four winds of heaven—to the care of any one who chooses to take them. Go to those aged widows who have reared large families of children, unaided and alone, who have kept them all together under one roof, watched and nursed them in health and sickness through all their infant years, clothed and educated them, and made them all respectable men and women, ask them on whom they depended. They will tell you on their own hands, and on that never-dying, never-failing love, that a mother's heart alone can know. It is into hands like these—to these who have calmly met the terrible emergencies of life—who, without the inspiration of glory, or fame, or applause, through long years have faithfully and bravely performed their work, self-sustained and cheered, that we commit our cause. We need not wait for one more generation to pass away, to find a race of women worthy to assert the humanity of women, and that is all we claim to do.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Affectionately yours,
Frances D. Gage's Reply to Gerrit Smith.
[From Frederick Douglass' paper].
Frederick Douglass.—Dear Sir:—In your issue of Dec. 1st, I find a letter from Hon. Gerrit Smith to Elizabeth C. Stanton, in reference to the Woman's Rights Movement, showing cause, through labored columns, why it has proved a failure.
This article, though addressed to Mrs. Stanton, is an attack upon every one engaged in the cause. For he boldly asserts that the movement "is not in proper hands, and that the proper hands are not yet to be found." I will not deny the assertion, but must still claim the privilege of working in a movement that involves not only my own interest, but the interests of my sex, and through us the interests of a whole humanity. And though I may be but a John the Baptist, unworthy to unloose the latchet of the shoes of those who are to come in short skirts to redeem the world, I still prefer that humble position to being Peter to deny my Master, or a Gerrit Smith to assert that truth can fail.
I do not propose to enter into a full criticism of Mr. Smith's long letter. He has made the whole battle-ground of the Woman's Rights Movement her dress. Nothing brighter, nothing nobler than a few inches of calico or brocade added to or taken from her skirts, is to decide this great and glorious question—to give her freedom or to continue her a slave. This argument, had it come from one of less influence than Gerrit Smith, would have been simply ridiculous. But coming from him, the almost oracle of a large portion of our reformers, it becomes worthy of an answer from every earnest woman in our cause. I will not say one word in defense of our present mode of dress. Not I; but bad as it is, and cumbersome and annoying, I still feel that we can wear it, and yet be lovers of liberty, speaking out our deep feeling, portraying our accumulated wrongs, saving ourselves for a time yet from that antagonism which we must inevitably meet when we don the semi-male attire. We must own ourselves under the law first, own our bodies, our earnings, our genius, and our consciences; then we will turn to the lesser matter of what shall be the garniture of the body. Was the old Roman less a man in his cumbrous toga, than Washington in his tights? Was Christ less a Christ in His vesture, woven without a seam, than He would have been in the suit of a Broadway dandy?
"Moreover, to concede to her rights of property, would be to benefit her comparatively little, unless she shall resolve to break out of her clothes-prison, and to undertake right earnestly, as earnestly as a man, to get property." So says Gerrit Smith. And he imputes the want of earnestness to her clothes. It in a new doctrine that high and holy purposes go from without inward, that the garments of men or women govern and control their aspirations. But do not women now work right earnestly? Do not the German women and our market women labor right earnestly? Do not the wives of our farmers and mechanics toil? Is not the work of the mothers in our land as important as that of the father? "Labor is the foundation of wealth." The reason that our women are "paupers," is not that they do not labor "right earnestly," but that the law gives their earnings into the hands of manhood. Mr. Smith says, "That women are helpless, is no wonder, so long as they are paupers"; he might add, no wonder that the slaves of the cotton plantation are helpless, so long as they are paupers. What reduces both the woman and the slave to this condition? The law which gives the husband and the master entire control of the person and earnings of each; the law that robs each of the rights and liberties that every "free white male citizen" takes to himself as God-given. Truth falling from the lips of a Lucretia Mott in long skirts is none the less truth, than if uttered by a Lucy Stone in short dress, or a Helen Maria Weber in pants and swallow-tail coat. And I can not yet think so meanly of manly justice, as to believe it will yield simply to a change of garments. Let us assert our right to be free. Let us get out of our prison-house of law. Let us own ourselves, our earnings, our genius; let us have power to control as well as to earn and to own; then will each woman adjust her dress to her relations in life.
Mr. Smith speaks of reforms as failures; what can he mean? "The Temperance Reform still drags." I have been in New York thirty-seven days; have given thirty-three lectures; have been at taverns, hotels, private houses, and depots; rode in stages, country wagons, omnibuses, carriages, and railroad cars; met the masses of people daily, and yet have not seen one drunken man, scarce an evidence that there was such a thing as intemperance in the Empire State. If the whole body has been diseased from childhood and a cure be attempted, shall we cry out against the physician that his effort is a failure, because the malady does not wholly disappear at once? Oh, no! let us rather cheer than discourage, while we see symptoms of amendment, hoping and trusting that each day will give renewed strength for the morrow, till the cure shall be made perfect. The accumulated ills of centuries can not be removed in a day or a year. Shall we talk of the Anti-Slavery Cause as a "failure," while our whole great nation is shaking as if an Etna were boiling below? When did the North ever stand, as now, defiant of slavery? Anti-slavery may be said to be written upon the "chariots and the bells of the horses." Our National Congress is nothing more or less than a great Anti-slavery Convention. Not a bill, no matter how small or how great its importance, but hinges upon the question of slavery. The Anti-Slavery Cause is no failure; right can not fail.