It is customary to regard marriage as of even more importance to woman than to man, since the maternal, social and household duties involved in it consume the greater portion of the time and thought of a large majority. Love, it is commonly said, is an incident in a man's life, but makes or mars a woman's whole existence. This, however, is one of the many popular delusions crystallized into opinion by apt phraseology. To one who believes in the divinely intended equality of the sexes it is impossible to consider that any mutual relation is an incident for the one and the total of existence for the other. We may lay it down as a premise upon which to base our whole reasoning that all mutual relations of the sexes are not only divinely intended to, but actually do bring equal joys, pains, pleasures and sacrifices to both. Whatever mistake one has made has acted upon the other, and reacted equally upon the first.
The one great mistake of the ages—since woman lost her primal independence and supremacy—to which is due all the sins and sorrows growing out of the association of the sexes, has been in making woman a passive agent instead of an equal factor in arranging the laws, customs and conditions of this mutual state. Whether marriage be a purely business partnership for the care and maintenance of children, or whether it be a sacrament to which the benediction of the church gives peculiar sanctity and perpetuity and makes the parties "no more twain but one flesh," in either case it is an absurdity, which we only tolerate because of custom, for men alone to make all the regulations and stipulations concerning it.
This unnatural and strained assumption by one sex of the control of everything relating to marriage, and the equally unnatural and mischievous passivity on the part of the other, have given birth to the meek maiden waiting for her fate, to the typical disconsolate and forlorn "superfluous woman," to the two standards of morality for the sexes, to the mercenary marriage with all its attendant miseries, to the selfish, exacting, querulous wife, to the disappointed or tyrannical husband; and of late, with the wider possibilities of individual pleasure and satisfaction, to the growing aversion of young people to matrimony, and the rush of women to the divorce courts for freedom from the galling bonds; all these and a thousand variations of each, until the nature of both sexes is so perverted that it is impossible to decide what is nature.
A letter was read from Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage (N. Y.) urging women individually to petition Senators and Representatives for the removal of their political disabilities, because by this means these men were compelled to think on the question.
Mrs. Virginia L. Minor (Mo.) addressed the convention on The Law of Federal Suffrage, a legal argument on the right to vote conferred by the Constitution. Miss Anthony supplemented Mrs. Minor's argument with a history of the Fourteenth Amendment, in which she said:
When that Fourteenth Amendment was under discussion—when it was proposed to put the word "male" into the second section—it read: "If any State shall disfranchise any of its citizens on account of color, all of that class shall be counted out of the basis of representation." But there were timid souls on the floor of Congress at the close of the war, as well as at other periods of our history, and to prevent the enfranchisement of women by this amendment they moved to make it read: "If any State shall disfranchise any of its male citizens, all of that class shall be counted out of the basis of representation." Male citizens! For the first time in the history of our Government that discriminating adjective was placed in the Constitution, and yet the men on the floor of Congress, from Charles Sumner down, all declared that this amendment would not in any wise change the status of women!
We at once asserted our right to vote under this amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." Our first trial was on civil rights, when Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago, who had been for some time publishing a law journal which every lawyer in the State said he could not afford to do without, applied for admission to the bar, and these same lawyers denied it. She appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court and it confirmed the denial, because she was not only a woman but a married woman. Then she appealed her case to the Supreme Court of the United States, and a majority of this court decided that the right to be a lawyer was not especially a citizen's right and that therefore the State of Illinois could legally abridge the privileges and immunities of its women by denying them admission to the bar.
I shall never forget how our hearts sank when in 1871 that decision came, declaring the powerlessness of the Federal Constitution to protect women in their civil right of being eligible to the legal profession. When we said if these rights which it is meant to protect are not civil they must be political rights, we thought we had the Supreme Court in a corner. But when my trial for voting came on, Justice Hunt said that the right to vote was a special right belonging to men alone. We didn't believe that this decision could be confirmed, but it was, when Mrs. Minor, who attempted to vote at the same election in her State of Missouri, appealed her case to the Supreme Court of the United States. It was argued by her husband, the ablest of lawyers, and when the Judges brought in their decision it was to the effect that the Constitution of the United States has no voters. Thus it is that we have two Supreme Court decisions relative to the powers of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect women, and in both cases they have been excluded absolutely from its provisions.
I remember, Mrs. Minor (turning to that lady), how we discussed these questions in those early years. We weren't sleepy in our talk as we were being cut off inch by inch from the protection of the Constitution. I remember how Mrs. Stanton said in a public address: "If you continue to deny to women the protection of this amendment, you will finally come to the point when it will cease to protect even black men," and we have lived to see that day.
The address on The Coming Sex by Mrs. Eliza Archard Connor, a well-known journalist of New York, was declared by the press to be in its delivery "the gem of the convention." She said in part:
It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race. They have keener sympathies and quicker intuitions than men. They have a gift of language that not even their worst enemies will deny, and these are just the qualities which go to make the orator.... The time is coming when we shall need all our eloquence, all our intellectual power and all our love. The day is approaching when men will come with ballots in their hands, begging women to use them....
Wherever you go, wake women up, tell them to learn everything. Tell them to study with all their might history, civil government, political economy, social and industrial science—for the time is coming when they will need them all....
This is the work before us. This is the meaning of the desperate unrest and unhappiness of women. It is this that has drawn us here to enter our protest against the wicked, old, one-legged order of things. Our honored Miss Anthony has gone through fire and hail while she worked for her convictions. All of us have wrought as best we might for the higher education of women, for their pecuniary independence, for their civil and political rights, fighting the world, the flesh and the devil.
My own work has been in the field of journalism. For nearly twenty years I have faced here every form of disability because I am a woman, have met defeat after defeat, till the iron has entered my soul. Yet every day I have thanked God that I have been permitted to bear my share in the tremendous struggle for the development of women in the nineteenth century. Struggle means development; it can come in no other way, and this will be the grandest since creation began—the crowned, perfected woman. For this the cry of womanhood has risen out of the depths through the centuries. Up through agony and despair it has come, through sin and shame, through poverty and martyrdom, through torture which has wrung drops of blood from woman's lips, still up, up, till it has reached the great white throne itself.
The enrollment committee reported a list of about one hundred thousand names of persons asking for woman suffrage. The treasurer announced the receipts for 1888 to be $12,510. All of the expenses of the great International Council had been paid and a balance of nearly $300 remained.
The resolutions might be described as an epitomized recital of wrongs and a Bill of Rights.
Whereas, Women possessed and exercised the right of suffrage in the inauguration of this Government; and,
Whereas, They were deprived of this right by the arbitrary Acts of successive State Legislatures in violation of the original compact as seen in the early constitutions; therefore,
Resolved, That it is the duty of the several States to make prompt restitution of these ancient rights, recognized by innumerable precedents in English history, and to-day by the gradual extension of the suffrage over vast territories.
Whereas, Woman's title deed to an equal share in the inheritance left her by the fathers of the Republic has been examined and proved by able lawyers; and,
Whereas, This right is already exercised in some form in one hundred localities in different parts of the world; therefore,
Resolved, That sex is no longer considered a bar to the exercise of suffrage by civilized nations.
Resolved, That it is the duty of Congress to pass a declaratory act, compelling the several States to establish a "republican form of government" within their borders by securing to women their right to vote, thus nullifying the fraudulent Acts of Legislatures and making our Government homogeneous from Maine to Oregon.
Resolved, That the question of enfranchising one-half the people is superior to that of Indian treaties, admission of new States, tariff, international copyright or any other subject before the country, and that it is the foremost duty of the Fiftieth Congress at this, its last session, to submit an amendment to the Constitution forbidding States to disfranchise citizens on account of sex.
Resolved, That as a question of ethics the difference between putting a fraudulent ballot in the box and keeping a rightful ballot out is nothing, and that we condemn the action which prevents women from casting a ballot at any election as a shameful evidence of the corruption of dominant political parties in this country.
Whereas, The Legislature of Washington Territory has twice voted for woman suffrage—women for the most part having gladly accepted and exercised the right, Governor Squire in his report to the Secretary of the Interior in 1884 having declared that it met the approval of a large majority of the people; and,
Whereas, In 1887, after the women had voted for three and a half years, the Territorial Supreme Court pronounced the law invalid on the ground that the nature of the bill must be described in the title of the act; and,
Whereas, In January, 1888, another bill passed by the Legislature gave to this law an explicit title; and the bill, again granting suffrage to women, was signed by Governor Semple, thus triumphantly showing the approval of the people, the Legislature and the Governor; and,
Whereas, The Territorial Supreme Court, in August, 1888, again rendered a decision against the right of the women of the Territory to vote, basing their decision upon the false assumption that Congress had never delegated to the Territories the right to define the status of their own voters; and,
Whereas, This decision strikes a blow at the fundamental powers of the United States Congress, confounding laws delegated to the Territories by the Organic Act of 1852, which vests in their Legislatures the power to prescribe their qualifications for voting and holding office—with State governments which limit legislative enactments by constitutions of their own making—thus setting at naught the will of the people; therefore,
Resolved, That we earnestly and respectfully petition Congress that in passing an enabling act or acts for the admission of the other Territories there be incorporated a clause allowing women to vote for delegates to their constitutional conventions, and at the election for the adoption of the constitution, in every one where the Legislature has granted woman suffrage and such law has not been repealed by a subsequent Legislature.
Whereas, In the year 1873 our leader, Susan B. Anthony, was deprived of the right of trial by jury, by a Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, simply because she was a woman, it is the duty of all women to resent the insult thus offered to womanhood and demand of the men of this closing century of constitutional government such condemnation of this infamous decision of Judge Ward Hunt[74] as shall teach the coming generation of voters that the welfare of the republic demands that women be protected equally with men in the exercise of citizenship; and,
Whereas, In the great Centennial Celebration of 1876 women were denied all participation in the public proceedings commemorating the birth of the Declaration of Independence, though they sought earnestly and respectfully to declare their sentiments of loyalty to the great principles of liberty and responsibility there enunciated, they should now demand official recognition by Congress and the State Legislature on all the Boards of Commissioners which, at the public expense, are to initiate and carry out the august ceremonials of the coming Constitutional Celebration in New York in April, 1889, to the end that taxation without representation shall no longer be acknowledged a just and constitutional policy in this government nominally of the people, therefore,
Resolved, That a committee be appointed by the National W. S. A. to memorialize Congress on this subject, and to take such other action as shall bring before the enlightened manhood of our country their duty of chivalry no less than justice in this important matter.[75]
Whereas, The question of woman's enfranchisement is fundamental and of paramount importance; therefore,
Resolved, That, while the National Woman Suffrage Association welcomes and claims the support of persons of all parties and beliefs, it desires to strongly reassert the position which it has held of being nonpartisan.
A hearing was granted by the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage the morning of January 24. Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Minor, Mrs. Duniway, Mrs. Johns, the Rev. Olympia Brown, the Rev. Miss Shaw and Miss Alice Stone Blackwell were introduced to the committee by Miss Anthony, and each from a different standpoint presented the arguments for the submission of a Sixteenth Amendment enfranchising women.