....Surely it is time that some one on this platform should say something for this half of humanity, which we really must confess after all is an important half. Ought we not admit that men have wrongs to complain of? Are they not constantly declaring themselves our slaves? Is it not a well known fact, conceded even here, that women shine in all the tints of the rainbow while men must wear only costumes of dull brown and somber black? Nor is this because men do not like bright colors, for never a belle in all the sheen of satin and glimmer of pearls looks half so happily proud as does a man when he has on a uniform, or struts in a political procession with a white hat on his head, a red ribbon in his buttonhole and a little cane in his hand.
Then, too, have not men, poor fellows, had to do all the talking since the world began? Have we not heretofore been the silent sex? Even to-day a thousand men speak from pulpit and platform where one woman uplifts her voice.
But let us pass to other and more important rights which have been denied to man in the past. The first right that any man ought to be allowed—a right paramount to all others—is the right to a wife. But look how even in this matter he has been hardly dealt with. Has he had just standards set before him as to what a wife should be? No, but he has been led to believe that the weak woman, the dependent woman, is the one to be desired....
Look again at the unhappy mess into which man all by himself has brought politics and public affairs. Is it not too bad to leave him longer alone in his misery? Like the naughty boy who has broken and destroyed his toys, who needs mamma to help him mend them, and perhaps also to administer to him such wholesome discipline as Solomon himself has advised—so does man need woman to come to his rescue. Look what politics is now. Who to-day can tell the difference between a Democrat and a Republican? Even a Mugwump is becoming a doubtful being....
Do not these wrongs which men suffer appeal to our tenderest sympathies? Is it not evident that the poor fellows can't go on alone much longer, that it is high time we should take the boys in hand and show them what a correct government really is?
There is another question which deserves our gravest consideration. Man sinks or rises with woman; if she is degraded he is tempted to vice; if she is oppressed he is brutalized. What is the industrial condition of women to-day?...
In behalf of the sons, the brothers and the husbands of these wage-earning women we ask for that political power which alone will insure equality of pay without regard to sex. For the sake of man's redemption and morality we demand that this injustice shall cease, for it is not possible for woman to be half-starved and man not dwarfed; for many women to be degraded and all men's lives pure; for women to be fallen and no man lost.
We all know that man himself has been most willing to grant to women every right, every opportunity. If he has hesitated it has been rather from love and admiration of woman than from any tyrannical desire of oppression. He has said that women must not vote because they can not perform military duty. Can they not serve the nation as well as those men, who during the last war sent substitutes and to-day hold the highest places in the Government? But we ask one question: Which every year does most for the State, the soldier or the mother who risks her life not to destroy other life but to create it? Of the two it would be better to disfranchise the soldiers and enfranchise the mothers. For much as the nation owes to the soldiers, she owes far more to the mothers who in endless martyrdom make the nation a possibility....
Man deserves that we should consider his present unhappy condition. In all ages he has proved his reverence for woman by embodying every virtue in female form, and has left none for himself. Truth and chastity, mercy and peace, charity and justice, all are represented as feminine, and lately, as a proof of his devotion, he has erected at the entrance to the harbor of our greatest metropolis a statue of liberty and this too is represented as a woman.... And so we hail the men, liberty enlightening a world where woman and man shall alike be free.
One interesting address followed another throughout the convention, presenting the question of suffrage for women with appeal, humor, logic, statistics and every variety of argument.
Mrs. Harriette Robinson Shattuck (Mass.) presented in striking contrast The Women Who Ask and the Women Who Object. Mrs. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert in a fine address told of Our Motherless Government. Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) gave for the first time her masterly speech, The Constitutional Rights of the Women of the United States, which has been so widely circulated in pamphlet form, and which closed with this peroration:
There are those who say we have too many voters already. No, we have not too many. On the contrary, to take away the ballot even from the ignorant and perverse is to invite discontent, social disturbance, and crime. The restraints and benedictions of this little white symbol are so silent and so gentle, so atmospheric, so like the snow-flakes that come down to guard the slumbering forces of the earth and prepare them for springing into bud, blossom, and fruit in due season, that few recognize the divine alchemy, and many impatient souls are saying we are on the wrong path—the Old World was right—the government of the few is safe; the wise, the rich, should rule; the ignorant, the poor, should serve. But God, sitting between the eternities, has said otherwise, and we of this land are foreordained to prove His word just and true. And we will prove it by inviting every newcomer to our shore to share our liberties so dearly bought and our responsibilities now grown so heavy that the shoulders which bear them are staggering under their weight; that by the joys of freedom and the burdens of responsibility they, with us, may grow into the stature of perfect men, and our country realize at last the dreams of the great souls who, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions," did "ordain and establish the Constitution for the United States of America"—the grandest charter of human rights that the world has yet conceived.
In an impassioned address Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.) contrasted The Present and the Past, saying:
The destiny of the world to-day lies in the hearts and brains of her women. The world can not travel upward faster than the feet of her women are climbing the paths of progress. Put us back if you can; veil us in harems; make us beasts of burden; take from us all knowledge; teach us we are only material; and humanity will go back to the dark ages. The nineteenth century is closing over a world arising from bondage. It is the grandest, sublimest spectacle ever beheld. The world has seen and is still looking at the luminous writing in the heavens—"The truth shall make you free"—and for the first time is gathering to itself the true significance of liberty. All the progress of these years has not come easily or from conservatism, but from the persistent efforts of enthusiastic radicals, men and women with ideas in their heads and courage in their hearts to make them practical.
Ever since woman took her life in her own hands, ever since she began to think for herself, the dawning of a great light has flooded the world. We are the mothers of men. Show me the mothers of a country and I will tell you of the sons. If men would ever rise above their sensuality and materialism, they must have mothers whose pure souls, brave hearts and clear intellects have touched them deeply before their birth and equipped them for the journey of life....
It is the evening of the nineteenth century, but the starlight is clearer than the morning of its existence. I look back and see in each year improvement and advancement. I see woman gathering up her soul and personality and claiming them as her own against all odds and the world. I see her asking that this personality may be impressed upon her nation. I see her speaking her soul from platforms, preaching in pulpits of a life of which this is the shadow. I see her pleading before courts, using her brains to solve the knotty questions of the law. Woman's sphere is the wide world, her sceptre the mind that God has given her, her kingdom the largest place that she has the brains to fill and the will to hold. So is woman influencing the world, and as her sphere widens the world grows better. With the freedom she now has, see how she is arousing the public conscience on all questions of right....
What is conservatism? It is the dying faith of a closing century. What is fanaticism? It is the dawning light of a new era. Yes, a new era will dawn with the twentieth century. I look to that time and see woman the redeeming power of the world.
Mrs. Pearson of Nottingham gave a glowing account of the progress of suffrage in England and the work of the Primrose League; Madame Clara Neymann (N. Y.) made a scholarly address entitled Skeptics and Skepticism; Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (Neb.), the Rev. Rush R. Shippen of Washington City and Miss Phoebe W. Couzins (Mo.) were among the speakers. Delegate Joseph M. Carey (Wy.) said in the course of his address:
Eighteen years ago the right of suffrage was given to the women of Wyoming. Women have voted as universally and as conscientiously as men. I have had the honor of voting for women and of being voted for by them. There are not three per cent. of women old enough who do not vote in every part of the Territory. In intelligence, beauty, grace, in perfection of home and social duties, the women of Wyoming will compare favorably with those of any other State. I have been asked if they neglect home affairs on account of politics. I have never known an instance of this. I have never known a controversy to arise from the wives voting differently from their husbands, which they often do. If women could vote in the States to-day they would vote as wisely as men....
I will say to woman's credit she has not sought office, she is not a natural office-seeker, but she desires to vote, has preferences and exercises her rights. The superintendents in nearly all the counties are women. They have taken a deep interest in school matters and as a rule they control school meetings. Three-fourths of the voters present at these are women. In Cheyenne they alone seem to have the time to attend. Give woman this right to vote and she will make out of the boys men more capable of exercising it. I have seen the results and am satisfied that every woman should have the suffrage.
Mrs. Carey sat on the platform with Miss Anthony, Mrs. Hooker and other prominent members of the convention. The eloquent address of Mrs. May Wright Sewall (Ind.) on The Conditions of Liberty attracted special attention. Mrs. Caroline Gilkey Rogers (N. Y.) proved in an original manner that There is Nothing New under the Sun. In a statesmanlike paper Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage (N. Y.) set forth the authority of Congress to secure to woman her right to the ballot:
To protect all citizens in the use of the ballot by national authority is not to deprive the States of the right of local self-government. When Andrew Jackson, who had been elected as a State's Rights man, asserted the supremacy of the National Government, that assertion, carried out as it was, did not deprive States of their power of self-government. Neither did the Reconstruction Acts nor the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Yet in many ways it is proved that States are not sovereign. Besides their inability to coin money, to declare peace and war, they are proved by their own acts not even to be self-protective. If women as individuals, as one-half of the people, call upon the nation for protection, they are doing no more nor less than so-called sovereign States themselves do. National aid has been frequently asked to preserve peace, or to insure that protection found impossible under mere local or State authority....
In ratifying an amendment States become factors in the nation, the same as by the acts of their representatives and senators in Congress. A law created by themselves in this way can be no interference with their local rights of self-government; because in helping enact these laws, either through congressional action, or by legislative ratification of amendments, each State has arisen above and beyond itself into a higher national realm.
The one right above all others which is not local is the right of self-government. That right being the corner stone on which the nation was founded, is a strictly national right. It is not local, it is not State....
It does not matter by what instrumentality—whether by State constitution or by statute law—woman has been deprived of her national right of self-government, it is none the less the duty of Congress to protect her in regaining it. Surely her right to govern herself is of as much value as the protection of property, the quelling of riots, the destruction or establishment of banks, the guarding of the polls, the securing of a free ballot for the colored race or the taking of it from a Mormon voter.