Watseka, Ill.
I send you petitions, the one circulated by me has 270 names—the other by Clara L. Peters, 139.[374] We are interested heart and soul in the movement, and our efforts here have made many friends for the cause. Have been an ardent worker since I was a child, and well remember that grand hero of moral reforms, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, N. Y., at a Woman's Temperance Convention held in Rochester in 1852, when I was eight years old.
Viola Hawks Archibald.[375]
Davis, Stephenson Co., Ill., May 28, 1877.
Editor Ballot-Box:—The question of suffrage for woman has been thoroughly discussed in our society, and last week I started out with my petition. I could work but a short time each day, but I systematically canvassed our beautiful little village, taking it by streets, and although I have been over but a small portion, I have ninety signatures. I met with but little opposition, and with kind wishes in abundance; with some amusing, some provoking, some pathetic, and some disgusting phases of human nature—with very agreeable disappointments, and very disagreeable ones. Very often some person would say to me, there is no use in calling at such a house; the man will not, and the woman dare not, sign. I went to such a place last week, was met with all the courtesy one could ask. The man looked over the petition thoughtfully, affixed his own name, and asked his wife if she did not wish to do so, and called in a beautiful sister who was out playing ball with the children, telling her as it was for the especial benefit of women, she ought to sign it too. I write these things to encourage our young girls, who will take up the work. Take every house, ask every person; "No," will not hurt or kill you. Be prepared to meet every argument that can possibly be advanced. The one which I meet oftenest, is that woman cannot fight, and therefore she shall not vote; and strange to relate, it is almost always advanced by a person who was never a soldier, through physical disability, cowardice, or over or under age.
The shortest "No," without the slightest shadow of courtesy, was shot from the lips of a man who is doing business on capital furnished by his wife, and who lives in a house purchased with his wife's money. Graceful return for her devotion, wasn't it? I suppose he prefers to keep her in her present state of serfdom, as, if she should ever find out that she was of any importance in the world, except as his housekeeper, cook, washerwoman, and waiter-in-general, she might possibly inquire into the stewardship of her lord and master. And it seemed to me if that ever came to pass, a man who could say "no" so cavalierly, without even a "thank you, ma'am," or, "you're quite welcome," both could and would manage to make surroundings rather disagreeable to the party of the second part. So far no person who has thought much, read much, or suffered much, has refused to sign, and in the few hours which I have devoted to the work, three grandmothers nearly ninety years of age, wished to have their names recorded on the right side of the question, and in two of those instances the grandmother, daughter, and grandfather affixed their signatures, one after another.[376]
Chicago, November 29, 1881.
My Dear Friend: You represent a movement of more importance to mankind than any that ever before claimed attention in the whole history of the race, viz.: the freedom of one-half of it. You have enforced this claim by half a century of heroic discussion—of persistent, unanswerable logic and appeal against the theory and practice of all nations, against all governments, codes and creeds. You proclaimed fifty years ago the novel doctrine that woman by nature is, and by law and usage should be, the absolute equal of man. A claim so self-evident should only have to be stated to be recognized by all civilized nations; and yet to this hour the highest civilization, equally with the lowest, is built on the slavery of woman. In the darkest corners of the earth and on the sunlit heights of civilization, the mothers of the race are by law, religion and custom doomed to degradation. And if the seal of their bondage is never to be broken, they themselves as well as the lords and masters they serve, are equally unconscious of the servitude. No religion, no civil government, has ever taught or recognized any other condition for woman than that of subjection. Against the accumulated precedents of all the ages, you and your noble coädjutors have rebelled in the face of derision for fifty long, weary years. Was ever such sublime womanly heroism and self-sacrifice before known? Was ever such worth of culture, such wealth of womanhood, laid on the altar of country and humanity? And all this comparatively unrecognized and unrewarded. Where is the boasted chivalry of the English-speaking nations? It is a virtue we boast of, but do not possess. It never, in fact, had any real existence based on genuine respect for woman. It is a bitter sarcasm in the mouth of an American male citizen. A few men like Theodore Parker, Joshua R. Giddings, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, Samuel J. May and Parker Pillsbury have measurably redeemed this nation, recognizing your claim for woman as self-evidently just and righteous, and coöperating with you in maintaining it. There are only a score or two of such men in a generation with sufficient chivalry or perception of justice to publicly claim for women the rights they themselves possess.
Science has demonstrated that men to be manly must be well born, must have noble mothers. How can a mother give birth to a noble soul while herself a slave? How can she impart a free spirit when her own is servile? A stream cannot rise higher than its fountain.
We have thought to bring about a high order of civilization by freeing our sons, while chaining our daughters, by sending sons to college and daughters to menial service for a mere pittance as wages, or selling them in marriage to the highest bidder—by robbing them on the very threshold of life of all noble ambition. By the degradation of our women we take from the inherited qualities of the race as much as is added by culture. We take from the metal before casting as much as we restore by polish afterwards, and thus we curse and stultify both sexes.
The law and religion of man can be no better than man himself. If religion, law, justice and social order are to improve, man must first be improved. Religion and law are effects, not causes. They are fruits, not the tree—the products of the human mind. If these are to be improved, mankind must first be improved. This will be impossible until freedom and culture shall become the inalienable rights of woman. It would be a thousand times better, if either must be a slave to the other, that man should be a slave to woman. The History of Woman Suffrage, on which you are engaged, if the second volume shall prove equal to the first, will be the richest legacy this age will bequeath to the future. It is a revelation from God, in which, if men believe, they shall be saved. Religion itself, without this great salvation, will continue to remain little else than "a wretched record of inspired crime" against woman. Woman must be free! Protection as an underling from man, savage or civilized, she in reality never had and never will have. Protection she does not want. What she needs is equal rights, when she can protect herself—rights of person, rights of labor, rights of property, rights of culture, rights of leisure, rights to participate in the making and administering of the laws. Give her equality in exchange for protection; give her her earnings in exchange for support; give her justice in exchange for charity. Let man trust woman as woman trusts man, with entire liberty of action, and she will show the world that liberty is her highest good.
In conclusion, let me confess that I read your first volume with a feeling of inexpressible shame and mortification for my sex.
A.J. Grover.
Yours faithfully,
Mrs. Boynton Harbert, to whom we are indebted for this chapter, has from girlhood been an enthusiastic advocate of the rights of women. Growing up in Crawfordsville, Indiana, under the very shadow of a collegiate institution into which girls were not permitted to enter, she early learned the humiliation of sex. After vain attempts to slip the bolts riveted with precedent and prejudice that barred the daughters of the State outside, she tried with pen and voice to rouse those whose stronger hands could open wide the doors to the justice of her appeals. Her youthful peäns to liberty in prose and verse early found their way into our Eastern journals, and later in arguments before conventions and legislative assemblies in Illinois, Iowa and other Western States. As editor for seven years of the "Woman's Kingdom" in the Chicago Inter-Ocean—one of the most popular journals in the nation—she has exerted a widespread influence over the lives of women, bringing new hope and ambition into many prairie homes. As editor-in-chief of the New Era, in which she is free to utter her deepest convictions; as wife and mother, with life's multiplied experiences, a wider outlook now opens before her, with added wisdom for the responsibilities involved in public life. In all her endeavors she has been nobly sustained by her husband, Mr. William Harbert, a successful lawyer, many years in practice in Chicago, whose clear judgment and generous sympathies have made his services invaluable in the reform movements of the day.
FOOTNOTES:
[351] Judge and Mrs. Catharine V. Waite, Mrs. Hannah M. Tracy Cutler, Amelia Bloomer, Dr. Ellen B. Ferguson, Mrs. E. O. G. Willard, the Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison of Earlville; Professor and Mrs. D. L. Brooks, Mrs. M. E. De Geer, Mrs. Frances D. Gage.
[352] Mrs. Sunderland was one of the many New England girls who in the early days went West to teach. Speaking of the large number of women elected to the office of county superintendent (one of them her own daughter), she told me that thirty years ago when she arrived at the settlement where she had been engaged as teacher, the trustees being unable to make the "examination" deputed one of their number to take her to an adjoining county, where another New England girl was teaching. The excursion was made in a lumber wagon with an ox-team. All the ordinary questions asked and promptly answered, the trustee rather hesitatingly said, "Now, while you're about it, wouldn't you just as lief write out the certificate?" This was readily done, and the man affixing his cross thereto, triumphantly carried the applicant back to his district, announcing her duly qualified to teach; and that trio of unlettered men installed the cultivated New England girl in their log school-house, probably without the thought entering the heads of trustees or teacher, that woman, when better educated, should hold the superior position.—[S. B. A.
[353] Dr. Mary Safford, Mrs. A. M. Freeman, Hon. and Mrs. Sharon Tyndale, Hon. E. Haines, Fernando Jones, Jane Graham Jones, Professor Bailey, Mr. and Mrs. Ezra Prince, Mr. and Mrs. R. M. Fell, Mrs. Belle S. Candee, General J. M. Thompson, Mrs. Professor Noyes of Evanston, Charles B. Waite, Catharine V. Waite, Susan Bronson, E. S. Williams, Kate N. Doggett, C. B. Farwell, L. Z. Leiter, J. L. Pickard, Henry M. Smith, Frank Gilbert, Ann Telford, Mrs. L. C. Levanway, Myra Bradwell, Mary E. Haven, Mrs. A. L. Taylor, Elizabeth Eggleston, P. D. Livermore, James B. Bradwell, Joseph Haven, J. H. Bayliss, D. Blakely, R. E. Hoyt, C. D. Helmer, Alfred L. Sewell, George D. Willigton, H. Allen, R. N. Foster, W. W. Smith, M. B. Smith, Amos G. Throop, Robert Collyer, L. I. Colburn, G. Percy English, Arthur Edwards, A. Reed and Sons, S. M. Booth, Sumner Ellis, George B. Marsh, Sarah Marsh, Ruth Graham, John Nutt, J. W. Butler, Mrs. J. Butler, Mrs. S. A. Richards, Mrs. S. W. Roe, F. W. Hall, Mrs. Fanny Blake, Mary S. Waite, J. F. Temple, A. W. Kellogg, W. H. Thomson, J. W. Loomis, James E. Curtis, Elizabeth Johnston, E. F. Hurlbut, E. E. Pratt, Mrs. E. M. Warren, William Doggett, Edward Beecher, James P. Weston, E. R. Allen, J. E. Forrester, Mrs. J. F. Temple, Mrs. F. W. Adams, L. Walker, Mary A. Whitaker, Elvira W. Ruggles, W. W. Corbett, H. B. Norton, W. H. Davis, I. S. Dennis, G. T. Flanders, Mrs. H. B. Manford, Edward Eggleston, Sarah G. Cleveland, G. G. Lyon, E. Manford, William D. Babbitt, Elizabeth Holt Babbitt, I. S. Page, W. O. Carpenter, Mrs. W. O. Carpenter, Mrs. H. W. Cobb, T. D. Fitch, Harriet Fitch, Mary A. Livermore, T. W. Eddy, A. G. Brackett, Andrew Shuman, John A. Jameson, John V. Farwell, B. W. Raymond, E. G. Taylor, Mems Root and lady, Rev. John McLean, Mrs. Owen Lovejoy, Mrs. Noyes Kendall.
[354] The officers were: President, Mrs. M. Livermore; Vice-Presidents, the Rev. Dr. Goodspeed, Mrs. Helen M. Beveridge, Judge Bradwell, the Rev. Edward Beecher, the Rev. D. Eggleston, Miss Eliza Bowman, the Rev. Dr. Fowler, Mrs. Elizabeth Loomis, Mrs. M. Hawley, Mrs. M. Wheeler, Mrs. Myra Bradwell; Secretaries, Mrs. Jeanne Fowler Willing, of Rockford, Mrs. Elizabeth Babbitt, and George Graham, Esq.; Committee on Finance, Judge Bradwell, General Beveridge and the Hon. S. M. Booth. The speakers were Anna Dickinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Rev. Robert Collyer, Rev. Mr. Hammond, Rev. Robert Laird Collier, Kate N. Doggett, and many of the officers of the convention.
[355] For this speech see [Vol. II., page 348].