Letters were read from Chief-Justice Greene of Washington Territory, and from Mrs. Margaret Bright Lucas of England, sister of John and Jacob Bright; also telegrams from the Minnesota W. S. A., from Major and Mrs. Pickler of South Dakota, and from others, and reports from the different State societies.
Chancellor J. A. Lippincott, of the State University, invited the association to visit that institution, and Mrs. Howe and Mrs. Stone to address the students. Mrs. Stone wrote in the Woman's Journal: "It was worth the journey to receive the warm welcome which greeted us on every hand, and still more to see the progress the cause has made in the nineteen years that have passed since the first suffrage campaign in Kansas. It would not be surprising if Municipal Suffrage should be secured in this State at the next session of the Legislature.[142] The very air was full of suffrage, even in the midst of the political contest."
1887.—The Nineteenth annual meeting was held in Association Hall, Philadelphia, October 31, November 1, 2. The platform had been beautifully decorated with tropical plants and foliage by Miss Elizabeth B. Justice and other Pennsylvania friends. The weather was fine, the audience sympathetic and the speaking excellent.
State Senator A. D. Harlan gave the address of welcome in behalf of the Pennsylvania W. S. A. President Wm. Dudley Foulke in responding paid a tribute to the Senator's good service in the Legislature in behalf of a constitutional amendment for equal suffrage. A letter of welcome was read from the venerable and beloved president of the association, Miss Mary Grew, who was kept away by illness. Col. T. W. Higginson said:
I have the sensations of a Revolutionary veteran, almost, in coming back to Philadelphia and remembering our early suffrage meetings here in that time of storm, in contrasting the audiences of to-day with the audiences of that day, and in thinking what are the difficulties that come before us now as compared with those of our youth. The audiences have changed, the atmosphere of the community has changed; nothing but the cause remains the same, and that remains because it is a part of the necessary evolution of democratic society and is an immortal thing.
I recall those early audiences; the rows of quiet faces in Quaker bonnets in the foreground; the rows of exceedingly unquiet figures of Southern medical students, with their hats on, in the background. I recall the visible purpose of those energetic young gentlemen to hear nobody but the women, and the calm determination with which their bootheels contributed to put the male speakers down. I recall also their too-assiduous attentions in the streets outside when the meeting broke up....
Woman suffrage should be urged, in my opinion, not from any predictions of what women will do with their votes after they get them, but on the ground that by all the traditions of our government, by all the precepts of its early founders, by all the axioms which lie at the foundation of our political principles, woman needs the ballot for self-respect and self-protection.
The woman of old times who did not read books of political economy or attend public meetings, could retain her self-respect; but the woman of modern times, with every step she takes in the higher education, finds it harder to retain that self-respect while she is in a republican government and yet not a member of it. She can study all the books that I saw collected this morning in the political economy alcove of the Bryn Mawr College; she can master them all; she can know more about them perhaps than any man of her acquaintance; and yet to put one thing she has learned there in practice by the simple process of dropping a piece of paper into a ballot-box—she can no more do that than she could put out her slender finger and stop the planet in its course. That is what I mean by woman's needing the suffrage for self-respect.
Then as to self-protection. We know there have been great improvements in the laws in regard to women. What brought about those improvements? The steady labor of women like these on this platform, going before Legislatures year by year and asking for something they were not willing to give, the ballot; but, as a result of it, to keep the poor creatures quiet, some law was passed removing a restriction. The old English writer Pepys, according to his diary, after spending a good deal of money for himself finds a little left and buys his wife a new gown, because, he says, "It is fit that the poor wretch should have something to content her." I have seen many laws passed for the advantage of women and they were generally passed on that principle.
I remember going before the Rhode Island Legislature once with Lucy Stone and she unrolled with her peculiar persuasive power the wrong laws which existed in that commonwealth in regard to women. After the hearing was over the chairman of that committee, a judge who had served on it for years, said to her: "Mrs. Stone, all that you have stated this morning is true, and I am ashamed to think that I, who have been chairman for years of this judiciary committee, should have known in my secret heart that it was all true and should have done nothing to set these wrongs right until I was reminded of them by a woman." Again and again I have seen that experience. Women with bleeding feet, women with exhausted voices, women with wornout lives, have lavished their strength to secure ordinary justice in the form of laws which a single woman inside the State House, armed with the position of member of the Legislature and representing a sex who had votes, could have had righted within two years. Every man knows the weakness of a disfranchised class of men. The whole race of women is disfranchised, and they suffer in the same way.
Among the other speakers were the Rev. Charles G. Ames, Henry B. Blackwell, the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Dr. Thomas, Mrs. Campbell, Mrs. Mary E. Haggart, Mrs. Frances E. W. Harper, the Rev. S. S. Hunting, Miss Cora Scott Pond, the Rev. Ada C. Bowles and Mrs. Adelaide A. Claflin.
The chairman of the executive committee, Mrs. Lucy Stone, in her annual report, reviewed the year's activities and continued:
But the chief work of the American Woman Suffrage Association during the past year has been to obtain wide access to the public through the newspapers. Early in the year correspondence was opened with most of the papers in the United States. The editors were asked whether they would publish suffrage literature if it were sent them every week without charge. More than a thousand answered that they would use what we sent, in whole or in part. Accepting this the association has, for the last eight months, furnished 1,000 weekly papers with a suffrage column. The cost of it consumes nearly the whole interest of the Eddy Fund, besides much time and strength gratuitously given. But as these papers come to us week by week containing the suffrage items and articles which through their columns reach millions of readers, we feel that no better use could be made of money or time.
The Revs. Anna H. Shaw and Ada C. Bowles were chosen national lecturers. Among the resolutions were the following:
We congratulate the Legislature of Kansas upon its honorable record in extending Municipal Suffrage last February to the women of that State, and the 26,000 women of Kansas by whose aid, last April, reformed city governments were elected in every municipality; we hail the National W. C. T. U. as an efficient ally of the woman suffrage movement; we recognize the woman suffrage resolutions of the Knights of Labor, the Land and Labor organizations, the Third Party Prohibitionists and other political parties, as evidence of a growing public sentiment in favor of the equal rights of women; we rejoice that two-thirds of the Northern Senators in the Congress of the United States voted last winter for a Sixteenth Constitutional Amendment prohibiting political distinctions on account of sex; we observe an increasing friendliness in the attitude of press and pulpit and the fact that 1,000 newspapers now publish a weekly column in the interests of woman suffrage; we are encouraged by more general discussions and more favorable votes of State Legislatures than ever before—all indicating a sure and steady progress toward the complete enfranchisement of women.
Whereas, The woman suffragists of the United States were all united until 1868 in the American Equal Rights Association; and
Whereas, The causes of the subsequent separation into the National and the American Woman Suffrage Societies have since been largely removed by the adoption of common principles and methods, therefore,
Resolved, That Mrs. Lucy Stone be appointed a committee of one from the American W. S. A. to confer with Miss Susan B. Anthony, of the National W. S. A., and if on conference it seems desirable, that she be authorized and empowered to appoint a committee of this association to meet a similar committee appointed by the National W. S. A., to consider a satisfactory basis of union, and refer it back to the executive committees of both associations for final action.