The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V

by Unknown

It may be news to some of you that we have had 12 reports on the woman suffrage amendment from committees of Congress. In 1869 the first hearing was given on woman suffrage and from that time to the present every Congress has had one....

Never were there such splendid women in the records of time as those who have stood for the rights of their sex and the rights of humanity.... All those women passed on without being allowed to enter the promised land and for every one of them one hundred sprang up for whom the doors of opportunity and education had been opened by the efforts of those pioneer women. Now these also are coming to gray hairs and weariness, but for every one of these hundreds there are a thousand of the 20th century insisting that this question shall be settled now and not be passed on to the children of tomorrow to hamper and limit them, to exhaust and consume their energy and ability.

I was present at the last hearing where Mrs. Stanton spoke before a Judiciary Committee, and she said: "I have stood before this committee for thirty years, may I be allowed to sit now?" ... Miss Anthony before a committee in 1884 said: "This method of settling the matter by the Legislatures is just as much in the line of State's rights as is that of the popular vote. The one question before you is: Will you insist that a majority of the individual men of every State must be converted before its women shall have the power to vote, or will you allow the matter to be settled by the representative men in the Legislatures of the several States? We are not appealing from the States to the nation. We are appealing to the States, but to the picked men of those States instead of to the masses." She used to say when John Morrissey, champion of the prize ring, was in the New York Legislature, that it was bad enough to go and ask him to give her her birthright but it was infinitely worse to go down into the slums and ask his constituents....

Mrs. Colby closed with an extract from one of Mrs. Stanton's eloquent speeches before the Judiciary Committee and submitted a valuable summary of Congressional hearings and reports on woman suffrage from 1869 to 1914.

Mrs. Glendower Evans of Boston presided over the hearing for the Congressional Union and introduced as the first speaker Mrs. Crystal Eastman Benedict (N. Y.) who said in part:

When we go to the voters of a campaign State to ask them to vote "yes" on a woman suffrage amendment, we go as petitioners with smiles and arguments and unwearied patience. We tell them over and over again the same well established truths; that it is the essence of democracy that all classes of people should have the power of protection in their own hands; that women are people and that they have special interests which need representation in politics; that where women have the right to vote they vote in the same proportion as men; that on the whole their influence in government has been decidedly good and absolutely no evils can be traced to that influence. In short, we reason and plead with them, try to touch their sense of honor, their sense of justice, their reason, whatever noble human quality they possess.

That is one way of getting woman suffrage in the United States, a long, laborious and very costly way. We have now achieved it in nine States and are a political power, and the time has come for us to compel this great reform by the simple, direct, American method of amending the Federal Constitution. Our argument is not one of justice or democracy or fair play—it is one of political expediency. Our plea is simply that you look at the little suffrage map. That triumphant, threatening army of white States crowding rapidly eastward toward the center of population is the sum and substance of our argument. It represents 4,000,000 women voters. Do you want to put yourselves in the very delicate position of going to those women next fall for endorsement and re-election after having refused even to report a woman suffrage amendment out of committee for discussion on the floor of the House?

You might say, "Why do you select this Democratic administration for your demand? This is the first time in eighteen years that this party has been in control of the Government. We are doing our best to give the people what they want; we are trying to live up to our platform pledges; we think we are doing pretty well. Why persist in embarrassing us with this very troublesome question?" ... I answer that if this Congress adjourns without taking action on the woman suffrage amendment it will be because the party deliberately dodged the issue. Every woman voter will know this and we have faith that the woman voter will stand by us. You will go to her and say: "We have lowered the tariff; we have made new banking laws; we have avoided war with Mexico," and she will say: "It is true you have done these things, but you have done a great injustice to my sister in this nearby State. She asked for a fundamental democratic right, a right which I possess and which you are asking me to exercise in your favor. It was in your power to extend this right to her and you refused, and after this you come to me and ask me for my vote, but I shall show you that we stand together on this question, my sister and I."

Several of the committee made caustic remarks about trying to hold the Democrats responsible after the Republicans had ignored them during all the past years. Mrs. Evans then introduced Mary (Mrs. Charles R.) Beard, wife of the well-known professor in Columbia University. Her address in the stenographic report of the hearing filled seven closely printed pages, an able review of the Democratic party's record in regard to Federal legislation. It was the most complete exposé of the fallacy of the Democratic contention that this party stood for State's rights as opposed to Federal rights ever made at a hearing in behalf of woman suffrage and is most inadequately represented by quotations. In the course of it she said:

Did Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, founders of the Democratic party, rend the air with cries of State's rights against Federal usurpation when the Federalists chartered the first United States bank in 1791, and when the Federalist Court, under the leadership of John Marshall, rendered one ringing nationalist decision after another upholding the rights of the nation against the claims of the States? Jefferson, as President, acquired the Louisiana Territory in what he admitted was an open violation of the Federal Constitution; and the same James Madison who opposed the Federalist bank in 1790 as a violation of the Constitution and State rights, cheerfully signed the bill rechartering that bank when it became useful to the fiscal interests of the Democratic party. Jefferson was ready to nullify the alien and sedition laws and the Constitution of the United States in the Kentucky resolutions of 1798. The very Federalists who fought him in that day and denounced him as a traitor and nullifier lived to proclaim and practice doctrines of nullification in behalf of State's rights during the War of 1812.