The truth is, the American woman has been so pleasantly soothed by the sweet opiate of that high-sounding theory of her "sovereignty," that until very recently she could not be aroused to examine the facts. Forty years ago the voices of a few crying in the wilderness began to prepare the way for the present awakening....
The deliverance of woman must have as its corner-stone self-support. The first step in this direction must be to explode the fallacy that marriage is a state of being supported. As men are most largely the gatherers of money, it is mistakenly assumed that they are most largely the creators of wealth. The man goes abroad and gives his daily labor toward earning his board and clothes; but what he actually receives for his work can neither be eaten nor worn. It does nothing whatever until he puts it into his wife's hands, and upon her intelligence, energy and ability depend how much can be done through the using of it. Not until her labor in transforming raw material, in cooking, sewing, and rendering a house habitable, is joined to his, can a man be said to have really received anything worth having. He begins, she completes, the making of their joint wealth. Their dependence is mutual; the position of the one who turns the money into usable material by her labor being equally important, equally valuable, with that of him who turned his labor into money; and this must be fully recognized if woman is ever to come into her true relation to man. She supports him exactly as he supports her, and this is equally the case with the wife who herself produces directly, or the one who gives her time and intelligence to direct the production of others....
Closely allied to the fallacy that man supports woman is the fallacy that man protects woman, and has a right to control her by virtue of this protection. There was a period in the world's transition from savagery to civilization when mankind had so little conception of the mutuality of human interests that war was a perpetual condition of society. Originally women also were fighters; just as the lioness or tigress is as capable as her mate of self-defense and protection of her young, so the savage woman, when necessity required, was equally capable of conducting warfare in the same cause. But long before men had given up killing each other for the better business of trading with and helping each other woman had ceased to be a fighter. She was the first to see the advantages of peace, both because she was the earliest manufacturer and trader and because it cost her more in the production of every soldier than it cost man. Instinct directed her toward peace long before reason made it possible for her to explain why she hated war, and she hated it as an occupation for herself long before it occurred to her to despise it as an occupation for man. To-day the love of peace and hatred for war which she is rapidly spreading through the world is the real protector of woman; she is a self-protector by virtue of this proclivity, and, as war is equally the enemy of man, here again woman gives to man as much as she receives. Whatever force the argument based on the right of soldiers to rule may once have had is rapidly passing away. The era of the destroyer is dying, the epoch of the Creator is coming in....
The subjugation of woman doubtless arose from an honest desire of man to protect her. His mistake lay in assuming that his mind and will could do private and public duty for both. Woman's mistake lay in assuming that she might with safety permit man's mind and will to discharge the duties nature meant to be fulfilled by her own. Unhappily nature has a way of allowing the human race to learn by its own experience, even though the lesson consume ages of time; and she has also a rule that unused faculties and functions fall into a state of atrophy. It was by such a substitution of masculine for feminine will that woman fell so far behind him whom she originally led in the race, industrial and intellectual. If they are ever to march side by side as true comrades and free partners, it must be by a voluntary resumption of independence in feminine mind and will. In this man can assist by stimulating her spirit of independence, or he can discourage it by a contrary course, but the final result lies with woman herself. She alone can free herself from the habits of thought and action engendered by thousands of years of slavery.
The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made by millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.
In the address of Mrs. Ruth C. D. Havens (D. C.) on The Girl of the Future, which was greatly enjoyed, she said:
The training and education of the girl of the present have seldom been discussed except from one standpoint—her suitable preparation for becoming an economical housekeeper, an inexpensive wife, a willing and self-forgetful mother, a cheap, unexacting, patient, unquestioning, unexpectant, ministering machine. The girl's usefulness to herself, to her sex and race, her preferences, tastes, happiness, social, intellectual or financial prosperity, hardly have entered into the thought upon this question....
If woman would be a student, a scientist, a lecturer, a physician; if she would be a pioneer in a wilderness of scoffers to make fair roads up which her sex might easily travel to equal educational and legal rights, equal privileges and pay in fields of labor, equal suffrage—she must divide her eager energies and give the larger half to superior homekeeping, wifehood and motherhood, in order that her new gospel shall be received with any respect or acceptance. And probably no class of women have been such sticklers for the cultivation of all woman's modest, unassuming home duties as have been the great, ambitious teachers on this suffrage platform....
But this will not be the training of the girl of the future. It is not the sort of preparation to which the boy of the present is urged. "Jack of all trades, good at none" is the old epithet bestowed upon a man who thus diffuses his energies. You do not expect a distinguished lawyer to clean his own clothes, a doctor to groom his horse, a teacher to take care of the schoolhouse furnace, a preacher to half-sole his shoes. This would be illogical, and men are nothing if not logical. Yet a woman who enters upon any line of achievement is invariably hampered, for at least the early years, with the inbred desire to add to the labor of her profession all the so-called feminine duties, which, fulfilled to-day, are yet to be done to-morrow, which bring to her neither comfort, gain nor reputation, and which by their perpetual demand diminish her powers for a higher quality of work....
Everywhere there is too much housekeeping. It is not economy of time or money for every little family of moderate means to undertake alone the expensive and wearing routine. The married woman of the future will be set free by co-operative methods, half the families on a square, perhaps, enjoying one luxurious, well-appointed dining-room with expenses divided pro rata. In many other ways housekeeping will be simplified. Homes have no longer room for people—they are consecrated to things. Parlors and bedrooms are full of the cheap and incongruous or expensive and harmonious belongings of a junk shop. Plush gods hold the fort. All the average house needs to make it a museum is the sign, "Hands off." ...
The girl of the future will select her own avocation and take her own training for it. If she be a houseworker, and many will prefer to be, she will be so valuable in that line as to command much respect and good wages. If she be an architect, a jeweler, an electrical engineer, she will not rob a cook by mutilating a dinner, or a dressmaker by amateur cutting and sewing, or a milliner by creating her own bonnet. The house helper will not be incompetent, because the development and training of woman for her best and truest work will have extended to her also, and she will do housework because she loves it and is better adapted to it than to any other employment. She will preside in the kitchen with skill and science.
The service girl of the future will be paid perhaps double or treble her present wages, with wholesome food, a cheerful room, an opportunity to see an occasional cousin and some leisure for recreation. At present this would be ruinous, and why? Because too frequently the family has but one producer. The wife, herself a consumer, produces more consumers. Daughters grow up around a man like lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin. Every member of every family in the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother, for a child can hardly be born with cheerful views of living whose mother's life has been, for its sake, a double burden. From this root spring melancholy, insanity, suicide. The production of human souls is the highest production of all, the one which requires most preparation, truest worth, gravest care and holiest consecration. If the girl of the future recognizes this truth, she will have made an advance indeed. But apart from the mother every member of the family should be a material producer; and then there will be means sufficient for the producer in the kitchen to get such remuneration for her skill as will eliminate the incompetent, shirking, migratory creature of today....
I hardly need say to this audience that the girl of the future will vote. She will not plead for the privilege—she will be urged to exercise the right, and no one will admit that he ever opposed it, or remember that there was a time when woman's ballot was despised and rejected of men. She will not be told that she needs the suffrage for her own protection, but she will be urged to exercise it for the good of her country and of humanity. It will not be known that the Declaration of Independence was once a dead letter. No one will believe that it ever was declared that the Constitution did not protect this right. It will be incredible that women were once neither people nor citizens, and yet were the mothers, and in so much the creators, of the men who governed them.
Mrs. Mary S. Lockwood (D. C.), member-at-large of the World's Fair Board of Lady Managers, read a carefully prepared statement of the methods and aims of that body, which began: "The Board of Lady Managers owe their existence to Susan B. Anthony and her co-workers. It was these women who went before Congress and not only asked but demanded that women should have a place in the management of this Columbian Exposition—and they got it"![92] She closed as follows:
I have been greatly impressed as I have come into this hall from day to day, and have looked upon the sweet representative face in marble of Lucretia Mott and the benign, glorified face of Mrs. Stanton, with Susan B. Anthony as the central figure of the trio, and have thought of the years they have lifted up their voices praying they might see the glory of the coming of the Lord; and I have felt if only I could bring before them the sheaves which we are gathering from the women of the earth for this great exposition; if only I could show them how their work has put the women of this nation in touch with the women of every other country, awakening them to new aspirations, new hopes, new efforts, to whom the dawn of a brighter day is visible—these pioneers would say, "Our eyes are indeed opened; a handful of corn planted on the top of the mountain has been made to shake all Lebanon."
Miss Mary H. Williams (Neb.) reported that, as chairman of a committee for this purpose, she had sent letters to forty-nine Governors of States and Territories; twenty-one replies had been received—nine in favor of full suffrage for women, two of school suffrage only, three were totally opposed and the others made evasive replies. The nine in favor were Governors Barber of Wyoming, Routt of Colorado, Mellette of South Dakota, Winans of Michigan, Thomas of Utah, Burke of North Dakota, Humphrey of Kansas, Colcord of Nevada, Knapp of Alaska. All of these were Western men and all Republicans but Winans. Tillman of South Carolina and Willey of Idaho favored school suffrage alone. Stone of Mississippi and Fleming of West Virginia answered "no". Gov. James E. Boyd of Nebraska was opposed, although he would allow women to vote on school questions. Governor Boyd's election had been contested on the ground that his father had not been properly naturalized.
Gov. Thomas M. Holt of North Carolina replied: "I am utterly opposed to woman suffrage in any shape or form. I have a wife and three daughters, all married, who are as much opposed to women going into politics as I am, and they reflex the sentiment of our Southern women generally."
Gov. Francis P. Fleming of Florida gave nine reasons why he was opposed, but concluded: "The above objections would not as a rule apply to church or school elections, and as women are usually much more pious than men and take more interest in church matters, I am inclined to think it would be well for them to vote at church elections, and am not aware of any particular objection to their voting at school elections."
The address of Mrs. Orra Langhorne (Va.) was read by her niece, Miss Henderson Dangerfield. It gave a charming picture of the oldtime Southern woman, her responsible social position, her care for her great household in her own small world; described how she was handicapped by tradition and lack of intellectual training; depicted the changed conditions since the war and her gradual awakening to the demands of modern life and the need of larger rights.
Lucy Stone was not able to be present and a letter from her was read by her husband, Mr. Blackwell: