A memorial embodying this claim was presented to the legislature, and on, January 18, the committee went to Albany and were heard by the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly, to whom their paper had been referred. Hon. Robert H. Strahan of New York presided. On February 8, the memorialists[229] had another meeting before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, in the Senate chamber, Hon. Bradford L. Prince presiding. The audience was overflowing, and the corridors so crowded that the meeting adjourned to the Assembly chamber by order of the chairman. Soon after, Hon. George H. West of Saratoga presented a bill giving the women of the State the right to vote for president. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee and reported adversely, notwithstanding it was twice called up and debated by its friends, Messrs. Strahan, Husted, Ogden, Hogeboom and West. No vote was reached on the measure, but this much of consideration was a gain over previous years, when nothing had been done beyond the presentation of a bill and its reference to a committee.
In 1876 Governor Samuel J. Tilden appointed Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell as commissioner of the State Board of Charities, the first official position a woman ever held in this State.
During the winter of 1877 a memorial was sent to the legislature, asking that women be allowed to serve as school officers. The Hon. William N. Emerson, senator from Monroe, presented the following bill:
An Act to Authorize the Election of Women to School Offices.
The People of the State of New York, represented in Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows:
Section 1. Any woman of the age of twenty-one years and upwards, and possessing the qualifications prescribed for men, shall be eligible to any office under the general or special school laws of this State, subject to the same conditions and requirements as prescribed to men.
Sec. 2. This act shall take effect immediately.
Petitions and memorials from all parts of the State were poured into the legislature, praying for the passage of the bill. Mr. Emerson made an eloquent speech in its favor, and labored earnestly for the measure. It passed the Senate by a vote of 19 to 9; the Assembly by a vote of 84 to 19. This success was hailed with great rejoicing by the women of the State who understood the progress of events. But their delight was turned into indignation and disappointment when the governor, Lucius Robinson, returned the bill to the Senate with the following veto:
State of New York, Executive Chamber, }
Albany, May 8, 1877. }To the Senate:
I return without approval Senate bill No. 61, entitled "An act to authorize the election of women to school offices."
This bill goes too far or not far enough. It provides that women may hold any or all of the offices connected with the department of education, that is to say, a woman may be elected superintendent of public instruction, women may be appointed school commissioners, members of boards of education and trustees of school districts. In some of these positions it will become their duty to make contracts, purchase materials, build and repair school-houses, and to supervise and effect all the transactions of school business, involving an annual expenditure of over twelve million dollars in this State. There can be no greater reason that women should occupy these positions than the less responsible ones of supervisors, town clerks, justices of the peace, commissioners of highways, overseers of the poor, and numerous others. If women are physically and mentally fitted for one class of these stations, they are equally so for the others.
But at this period in the history of the world such enactments as the present hardly comport with the wisdom and dignity of legislation. The God of nature has appointed different fields of labor, duty and usefulness for the sexes. His decrees cannot be changed by human legislation. In the education of our children the mother stands far above all superintendents, commissioners, trustees and school teachers. Her influence in the family, in social intercourse and enterprises, outweighs all the mere machinery of benevolence and education. To lower her from the high and holy place given her by nature, is to degrade her power and to injure rather than benefit the cause of education itself. In all enlightened and Christian nations the experience and observations of ages have illustrated and defined the relative duties of the sexes in promoting the best interests of society. Few, if any, of the intelligent and right-minded among women desire or would be willing to accept the change which such a law would inaugurate.
The bill is moreover a clear infraction of the spirit if not the letter of the constitution. Under that instrument women have no right to vote, and it cannot be supposed that it is the intention of the constitution that persons not entitled to the right of suffrage should be eligible to some of the most important offices in the State.
L. Robinson.
On May 24, 25, 1877, the National and State conventions were again held in New York, at Steinway Hall. Both conventions passed resolutions denouncing Governor Robinson's action in his veto. The following address was issued by the State association:
To the Voters and Legislators of New York:
The women of the State of New York, in convention assembled, do most earnestly protest against the injustice with which they are treated by the State, where in point of numbers they are in excess of the men:
First—They are denied the right of choosing their own rulers, but are compelled to submit to the choice of a minority consisting of its male residents, fully one-third of whom are of foreign birth. Second—They are held amenable to laws they have had no share in making and in which they are forbidden a voice—laws which touch all their most vital interests of education, industry, children, property, life and liberty. Third—While compelled to bear the burdens and suffer the penalties of government, they are debarred the honors and emoluments of civil service, and the control of offices in the righteous discharge of whose duties their interest is equal to that of men. Fourth—They are taxed without their consent to sustain men in office who enact laws directly opposing their interests, and inasmuch as the State of New York pays one-sixth the taxes of the United States, its women feel the arm of oppression—like Briareus with his hundred hands—touching and crushing them with its burdens. Fifth—They are under the power of an autocrat whose salary they must pay, but who, in opposition to the will of the people—as recently shown in the passage of the School bill by the legislature—has by his veto denied them all official authority in the control of the public schools, and this despite the fact of there being 3,670 more girls of school age than boys, and 14,819 more women than men teaching in the State. Sixth—Under pretence of regulating public morals, women of the femme de pave class, many of whom have been driven to this mode of life as a livelihood, are subjected to more oppressive laws than their partners in vice. Seventh—The laws treat married women as criminals by taking from them all legal control of their children, while those born outside of marriage belong absolutely to the mothers. Eighth—They forbid the mother's inheritance of property from her children in case the father is living, thus making her of no consideration in the eyes of those to whom she has given birth. Ninth—They give the husband control of the common property—allow him to spend the whole personal estate in riotous living, or even to sell the home over his wife's head, subject only to her third life-interest in case she survives him. Tenth—They allow the husband to imprison her at his pleasure within his own house, the court sustaining him in this coërcion until the wife "submits herself to her husband's will." Eleventh—They allow the husband while the common property is in his possession, "without even the formality of a legal complaint, the taking of an oath or the filing of a bond for the good faith of his action," to advertise his wife through the public press as a deserter and to forbid her credit. Twelfth—They deny the widow the right of inheritance in the common property that they give the widower, allow her but forty days' residence in the family mansion before paying rent to her husband's heirs, thus treating her as if she were an alien to her own children—set off to her a few paltry articles of household use, close the estate through a process of law, and make the days of her bereavement doubly days of sorrow.
The above laws of marriage, placing irresponsible authority in the hands of the husband, have given him a power of moral coërcion over the wife, making her virtually his slave. Without entering into fuller details of the injustice and oppression of the laws upon all women, married and single, we will sum the whole subject up in the language of the French Woman's Rights League, which characterizes woman's position thus:
(1) Woman is held politically to have no existence; (2) civilly, she is a minor; (3) in marriage she is a serf; (4) in labor she is made inferior and robbed of her earnings; (5) in public instruction she is sacrificed to man; (6) out of marriage, answers to the faults committed by both; (7) as a mother is deprived of her right to her children; (8) she is only deemed equally responsible, intelligent and answerable in taxes and crimes.
By order of the New York State Woman Suffrage Society.
Matilda Joslyn Gage, Secretary.
May, 1877.
First—They are denied the right of choosing their own rulers, but are compelled to submit to the choice of a minority consisting of its male residents, fully one-third of whom are of foreign birth. Second—They are held amenable to laws they have had no share in making and in which they are forbidden a voice—laws which touch all their most vital interests of education, industry, children, property, life and liberty. Third—While compelled to bear the burdens and suffer the penalties of government, they are debarred the honors and emoluments of civil service, and the control of offices in the righteous discharge of whose duties their interest is equal to that of men. Fourth—They are taxed without their consent to sustain men in office who enact laws directly opposing their interests, and inasmuch as the State of New York pays one-sixth the taxes of the United States, its women feel the arm of oppression—like Briareus with his hundred hands—touching and crushing them with its burdens. Fifth—They are under the power of an autocrat whose salary they must pay, but who, in opposition to the will of the people—as recently shown in the passage of the School bill by the legislature—has by his veto denied them all official authority in the control of the public schools, and this despite the fact of there being 3,670 more girls of school age than boys, and 14,819 more women than men teaching in the State. Sixth—Under pretence of regulating public morals, women of the femme de pave class, many of whom have been driven to this mode of life as a livelihood, are subjected to more oppressive laws than their partners in vice. Seventh—The laws treat married women as criminals by taking from them all legal control of their children, while those born outside of marriage belong absolutely to the mothers. Eighth—They forbid the mother's inheritance of property from her children in case the father is living, thus making her of no consideration in the eyes of those to whom she has given birth. Ninth—They give the husband control of the common property—allow him to spend the whole personal estate in riotous living, or even to sell the home over his wife's head, subject only to her third life-interest in case she survives him. Tenth—They allow the husband to imprison her at his pleasure within his own house, the court sustaining him in this coërcion until the wife "submits herself to her husband's will." Eleventh—They allow the husband while the common property is in his possession, "without even the formality of a legal complaint, the taking of an oath or the filing of a bond for the good faith of his action," to advertise his wife through the public press as a deserter and to forbid her credit. Twelfth—They deny the widow the right of inheritance in the common property that they give the widower, allow her but forty days' residence in the family mansion before paying rent to her husband's heirs, thus treating her as if she were an alien to her own children—set off to her a few paltry articles of household use, close the estate through a process of law, and make the days of her bereavement doubly days of sorrow.
(1) Woman is held politically to have no existence; (2) civilly, she is a minor; (3) in marriage she is a serf; (4) in labor she is made inferior and robbed of her earnings; (5) in public instruction she is sacrificed to man; (6) out of marriage, answers to the faults committed by both; (7) as a mother is deprived of her right to her children; (8) she is only deemed equally responsible, intelligent and answerable in taxes and crimes.