I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist in bearing its burdens, by no means excluding women.—[Abraham Lincoln.
I believe that the vices in our large cities will never be conquered until the ballot is put into the hands of women.—[Bishop Simpson.
I do not think our politics will be what it ought to be till women are legislators and voters.—[Rev. James Freeman Clarke.
Women have quite as much interest in good government as men, and I have never heard or read of any satisfactory reason for excluding them from the ballot-box; I have no more doubt of their ameliorating influence upon politics than I have of the influence they exert everywhere else.—[George William Curtis.
In view of the terrible corruption of our politics, people ask, can we maintain universal suffrage? I say no, not without women. The only bear-gardens in our community are the town-meeting and the caucus. Why is this? Because these are the only places at which women are not present.—[Bishop Gilbert Haven.
I repeat my conviction of the right of woman suffrage. Because suffrage is a right and not a grace, it should be extended to women who bear their share of the public cost, and who have the same interest that I have in the selection of officials and the making of laws which affect their lives, their property, and their happiness.—[Governor Long of Massachusetts.
However much the giving of political power to woman may disagree with our notions of propriety, we conclude that, being required by that first prerequisite to greater happiness, the law of equal freedom, such a concession is unquestionably right and good.—[Herbert Spencer.
In the administration of a State neither a woman as a woman, nor a man as a man has any special functions, but the gifts are equally diffused in both sexes. The same opportunity for self-development which makes man a good guardian will make woman a good guardian, for their original nature is the same.—[Plato.
June 5, 1882, Mr. George, from the Committee on Woman Suffrage, submitted the following views of the minority:
The undersigned are unable to concur in the report of the majority recommending the adoption of the joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, for reasons which they will now proceed to state.
We do not base our dissent upon any ground having relation to the expediency or inexpediency of vesting in women the right to vote. Hence we shall not discuss the very grave and important social and political questions which have arisen from the agitation to admit to equal political rights the women of our country, and to impose on them the burden of discharging, equally with men, political and public duties. Whether so radical a change in our political and social system would advance the happiness and welfare of the American people, considered as a whole, without distinction of sex, is a question on which there is a marked disagreement among the most enlightened and thoughtful of both sexes. Its solution involves considerations so intimately pertaining to all the relations of social and private life—the family circle—the status of women as wives, mothers, daughters, and companions, to the functions in private and public life which they ought to perform, and their ability and willingness to perform them—the harmony and stability of marriage, and the division of the labors and cares of that union—that we are convinced that the proper and safe discussion and weighing of them would be best secured by deliberations in the separate communities which have so deep an interest in the rightful solution of this grave question. Great organic changes in government, especially when they involve, as this proposed change does, a revolution in the modes of life, long-standing habits, and the most sacred domestic relations of the people, should result only upon the demand of the people, who are to be affected by them. Such changes should originate with, and be molded and guided in their operation and extent by, the people themselves. They should neither precede their demand for them, nor be delayed in opposition to their clearly expressed wishes. Their happiness, their welfare, their advancement, are the sole objects of the institution of government; of these they are not only the best, but they are the exclusive judges. They have commissioned us to exercise for their good the great powers which they have intrusted to us by their letter of attorney, the constitution; not to assume to ourselves a superior wisdom, or usurp a guardianship over them, dictating reforms not demanded by them, and attempting to grasp power not granted.
The organization of our political institutions is such that the great mass of the powers of government, the proper exercise of which so deeply concerns the welfare of the people, is left to the States. In that depository the will of the people is most certainly ascertained, and the exercise of power is more directly under their guidance. Our free institutions have had their great development and owe their stability more to causes connected with the direct exercise of the power of the people in local self-government than to all other causes combined. Recent events, though tending strongly to centralization, have not destroyed in the public mind the inestimable value of local self-government. Among the powers which have hitherto been esteemed as most essential to the public welfare is the power of the States to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way; and among those institutions none has been preserved by the States with greater jealousy than their absolute control over marriage and the relation between the sexes.
Another power of the States, deemed by the people when they assented to the Constitution of the United States most essential to the public welfare, was the right of each State to determine the qualifications of electors. Wherever the federal constitution speaks of elections for a federal office, it adopts the qualifications for electors prescribed by the State in which the election is to be held.
Nor has this fundamental rule been departed from in the fifteenth amendment. That impairs it only to the extent that race, color, or previous condition of servitude shall not be made a ground of exclusion from the right of suffrage. In all else that pertains to the qualifications of electors the absolute will of the State prevails. This amendment was inserted from considerations which pertain to no other part of the question of suffrage. The negro race had been recently emancipated; it was supposed that the antagonism between them and their old masters and the prejudice of race would be such as to obstruct the equal enjoyment of the rights of freedom conferred by the national forces, and would prevent the white race of the South from admitting the negro race, however deserving it might be, to equal political privileges. And, moreover, it was deemed by the North a point of honor that, having conferred freedom on the negro, he should be provided with the right of suffrage.
None of these considerations applies in the present case. It is not pretended that any such antagonism or prejudice exists between the sexes. It is not pretended that women have been redeemed from an intolerable slavery by the power of the government. It is not pretended that the sex in whose hands is the political power of the States is unwilling, from any cause, to do full justice to the other; for it is conceded that if the proposed amendment should be adopted, its incorporation into the constitution must result from the voluntary action of that sex in which is vested this political power. No good reason has been given why the congress of the United States should force or even hasten the States into such action, and no such reason can be given without a reversal of the theories on which our free institutions are based.
The history given by the majority, of the legislation of the several States in relation to the rights of persons and property of married women showing as it does a steady advance in the abolition of their common-law disabilities, conclusively demonstrates that this question may be safely left for solution where it now is and has always hitherto belonged. The public mind is now being agitated in many of the States as to the rights of women, not only as to suffrage, but as to their engaging in the various employments from which they have hitherto been excluded. This exclusion from certain employments has not been the result of municipal but of social laws—the strongest of all human regulations. As these social laws have been modified, so the sphere of woman's activities and usefulness has been enlarged. These social laws are in the main the groundwork of the exclusion of women from the right of suffrage. In the establishment of these laws, as in their modification, women themselves have even a greater influence than men. Their disability to vote is, therefore, self-imposed; when they shall will otherwise, it is not too much to say that the disability will no longer exist. If in the future it shall be found that these laws deny a right to women the enjoyment of which they desire, and for the exercise of which they are qualified, it cannot be doubted that they will give way. If, on the contrary, neither of these shall be discovered, it will happen that the exclusion of suffrage will not be considered as a denial of a right, but as an exemption granted to women from cares and burdens which a tender and affectionate regard for womanhood refuses to cast on them.
We are convinced, therefore, that the best mode of disposing of the question is to leave its solution to that power most amenable to the influences and usages of society in which women have so large and so potential a share, confident that at no distant day a right result will be reached in each State which will be satisfactory to both sexes and perfectly consistent with the welfare and happiness of the people. Certainly this must be so if the people themselves, the source and foundation of all power, are capable of self-government.
At two of its meetings the committee listened with great pleasure to several eminent ladies who appeared before it as advocates of the proposed amendment. At none of the meetings of the committee, including that at which the members voted on the proposed amendment, was there any discussion of this important subject; none was asked for or desired by any member of the committee, and the vote was taken. The reports of the majority and of the minority of the committee are therefore to be construed only as the individual opinions of the members who respectively concur in them. They are in no sense to be treated as the judgment of a deliberative body charged with the examination of this important subject.
The foregoing leads us to but one recommendation: that the committee should be discharged from the further consideration of the subject, that the resolution raising it be rescinded, and that the proposed amendment be rejected.
J. Z. George,
Howell E. Jackson,
James G. Fair.
In a letter from Miss Caroline Biggs to the president of the National Association the following congratulations came from the friends of suffrage in England:
Central Committee of the National Society for }
Woman Suffrage, 64 Berners Street, London, W. }At a meeting of the Executive Committee, on May 18, 1882, the following resolution was proposed by Mrs. Lucas, seconded by Miss Jane Cobden, and passed unanimously:
Resolved, That the Executive Committee of the National Society for Woman Suffrage have heard with hearty satisfaction that a select committee of the United States Senate in Washington has passed by a majority of votes the recommendation to adopt a constitutional amendment in favor of women's suffrage. They feel that the cause of woman is one in all countries, and they offer their most cordial congratulations to the women of America on the important step which has just been gained, and their warmest good-wishes for a speedy success in obtaining a measure which will guarantee justice and equal rights to half the population of a sister country.
Resolved, That the Executive Committee of the National Society for Woman Suffrage have heard with hearty satisfaction that a select committee of the United States Senate in Washington has passed by a majority of votes the recommendation to adopt a constitutional amendment in favor of women's suffrage. They feel that the cause of woman is one in all countries, and they offer their most cordial congratulations to the women of America on the important step which has just been gained, and their warmest good-wishes for a speedy success in obtaining a measure which will guarantee justice and equal rights to half the population of a sister country.
Nebraska now became the center of interest, as a constitutional amendment to secure the right of suffrage to woman was submitted to be voted upon in the November election. As the submission of such a proposition makes an important crisis in the history of a State, as well as in the suffrage movement, the notes of preparation were as varied as multitudinous throughout the nation, rousing all to renewed earnestness in the work. Both the American and National associations decided to hold their annual conventions in Omaha, the chief city of the State, and to support as many speakers[90] as possible through the campaign, that meetings might be held and tracts distributed in every county of the State, an Herculean undertaking, as Nebraska comprises 230,000 inhabitants scattered over an area of 76,000 square miles, divided into sixty-six counties; and yet this is what the friends of the measure proposed to do. The American Association[91] held its convention September 12, 13, 14. The National[92] continued three days, September 27, 28, 29.
The Opera House, in which the National Association held its meeting, was completely filled during all the sessions. The address of welcome was given by Hon. A. J. Poppleton, one of the most distinguished lawyers in that State. He said:
I deem it no light compliment that, in the face of an explicit declaration that I am not in favor of woman suffrage, I have been asked to make, on behalf of the people of Omaha and the State, an address of welcome to the many distinguished men and women whom this occasion has brought together. Doubtless the consideration shown me is a recognition of the fact that I have been a life-long advocate of the advancement of women through the agencies of equality in education, equality in employment, equality in wages, equality in property-rights and personal liberty, in short, a fair, open, equal field in the struggle for life. That I cannot go beyond this and embrace equal suffrage, is due rather to long adherence to the political philosophy of Edmund Burke than any lack of conviction of the absolute equality of men and women in natural rights.
In the winter of 1852-3, when a student at Poughkeepsie, N. Y., while the spot on which we now stand was Indian country as yet untouched by the formative power of national legislation, I listened to Miss Susan B. Anthony, Miss Antoinette Brown and others in the advocacy of the rights of women. It seems a strange fortune that brings now, nearly thirty years after, one of those speakers, crowned with a national reputation, into a State carved out of that Indian country and containing 60,000 people, in advocacy of equal suffrage for her sex. This single fact proclaims in thunder tones the bravery, the fidelity, the devotion of these pioneers of reform, and challenges for them the sympathy, respect, esteem and admiration of every good man and woman in America.
The thirty years commencing about 1850 have been prolific of momentous changes. It is the era of the sewing machine, of the domestication of steam and electricity, the overthrow of the great rebellion, the destruction of slavery, the consolidation of the German empire, the fall of the second Napoleon, the birth of the French republic, the incorporation of India into the British empire, and the revolution of commerce by the Pacific railways and the Suez canal. Great changes have likewise taken place in the structure of our own State and national legislation, the most conspicuous and pronounced result being the centralization of power in the federal government. It has been preëminently a period of amelioration, a long stride in the direction of tolerance of opinion, belief, speech and creed. Hospitals, asylums, schools, colleges and the manifold agencies of an advanced Christian civilization for alleviating the average lot of humanity, have grown and multiplied beyond the experience of former times, and men like Matthew Vassar, George Peabody and John Hopkins have hastened to consecrate the abundant fruits of honorable lives to the exaltation and advancement of the race.
But in no direction have greater changes occurred in this country than in the condition of woman in respect to employment, wages, personal and property rights. In all heathen countries at this hour the mass of women are slaves or worse, wholly deprived of civil rights. In most Christian countries their legal status is one of absolute subordination in person and property to men. In this republic alone have we attained an altitude where some small measure of justice is meted out to women by the laws. In 1850 a fair measure of her rights was the grim edict of the common law holding her in guardianship prior to marriage, and upon marriage making her and all her possessions practically the property of her husband, while a cruel, unreasonable and vicious public opinion excluded her from all except menial and ill-paid service. One by one and year by year these barriers have given way, until in many States her property and personal rights enjoy the complete shelter of the law. Now more than half the occupations and employments of this age of industrial activity and progress are thronged with the faithful, efficient and contented labor of women.
The law has broken forever the thraldom of an odious and hopeless marriage by reasonable laws for divorce for just cause, given her the custody of her children, vested her with the absolute power of disposition and control over her property, inherited or acquired, freed it from the claims of her husband's creditors, and clothed her with ample legal remedies even against her husband. Perhaps Nebraska alone of all the States, by its court of last resort, has upheld the power of the wife to make contracts with her husband and enforce them against him in her own name by the appropriate legal remedies. This surely is progress. Beyond this there lies but one field to win or fortress to reduce. Then surely the worn soldier in the long campaign crowned with the garlands of victory may rest from the battle.
Not many years ago, coming from Wisconsin, I think, a girl presented herself in the Illinois courts for admission to the bar, and after a rigid and unsparing examination she was admitted with public compliment. She took an office in the great city of Chicago and in the short remnant of an uncertain life so wrought in her profession as to attain an average professional income, and win the undivided respect and esteem of her professional associates. And when from a far country, whither she had gone in hope to escape a fell disease, her lifeless corpse was brought back for sepulture, many of the foremost lawyers of Chicago gathered about her bier and bore emphatic testimony to her virtues as a woman and her attainments as a lawyer. To me no greater work has been done by any American woman. When Alta Hulett unobtrusively, silently but indomitably pressed her way to the front of the legal profession, and established herself there, she vindicated the right of her sex to contend for the highest prizes of life, and left her countrywomen a legacy which will ultimately blazon her name imperishably in the history of the advancement of women; and every American woman who, like her, goes to the front of any honorable occupation, employment or profession, and stays there, becomes her coädjutor in work and a sharer in her reward.
Laden with the trophies of thirty years of conflict, of progress, of measurable success, the vice-president of the National Woman Suffrage Association and her associates present themselves to Nebraska and ask a hearing upon the final issue, "Shall this work be crowned by granting to women in this State the highest privilege of the citizen—suffrage?" On behalf of the people of a State whose legislature has granted everything else to women—whose devotion to free speech, untrammeled discussion and an independent press has been conspicuous in its constitutional and legislative history—I welcome them to this city and State, and bespeak for them a patient, candid, respectful, appreciative hearing.
Miss Anthony replied briefly to Mr. Poppleton's eloquent address and returned the thanks of the convention for the courtesy with which its members had been received by the citizens of Omaha.[93] She then read a letter from the president of the convention: