The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V

by Unknown

Australia does lead the world in democratic government, a government by the whole people, women as well as men, but we realize the great debt that we owe to your brave pioneer women. We are reaping the harvest which they planted. To us the names of Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are household words. It seems strange to me to be asked to come here to tell you anything about suffrage, for with us the American woman has been supposed to know and have everything.

Australia is as large as the United States and women have national and municipal suffrage and in four of our six States they have State suffrage—South and West Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania. In Victoria and Queensland they do not yet possess it. When the six States became federated it was provided that federal suffrage throughout Australia should be on the same basis as State suffrage where it was the most liberal. South and West Australia had it in full, so the women obtained it throughout Australia in national elections. There was so little opposition or discussion, it was regarded so completely as an accepted fact and foregone conclusion, that most women did not even know the measure had passed. It was not an experiment, as our men had seen its working in South and West Australia for years and also in New Zealand, which is the most democratic and best governed country in the world.

In Australia women are eligible to all offices, even that of Prime Minister. At the last elections five stood for Parliament. Miss Vida Goldstein was a candidate in Victoria. Although both our large newspapers ignored her meetings she got 51,000 votes, while the man highest got about 100,000. Not one of the five women came out at the bottom of the poll....

After we had worked for years with members of Parliament for various reforms without avail because we had no votes, you can not imagine the difference the vote makes. When we held meetings to advocate public measures that women wanted, we used to have to go out into the highways and hedges and compel the members of Parliament to come in; now the difficulty is to keep them out. I have seen seven Senators at one small meeting. A prominent man who, by an oversight, was not invited to the one held to welcome Miss Goldstein on her return from the United States was decidedly offended. Chivalry has not been destroyed but increased. On the platform at one of our meetings the secretary happened to drop her pencil and I saw the Premier and several members of Parliament scrambling to pick it up. A woman is never allowed to stand in a street car in Australia....

A good deal of light was shed on the inside history of the organized anti-suffrage movement, which if turned on in other countries would disclose a similar situation. "Our Anti-Suffrage Association," she said, "died three months after it was born. It was formed by two of our leading manufacturers, who hid behind their daughters. They had plenty of money, took a large office on a main street, employed several paid secretaries and spent more in three months than we had done in all our years of work. They paid little boys and girls to circulate their petition and got many signatures under false pretences.... Much was made of their petition though it was not half as large as ours. The daughters of these manufacturers drove up in their carriages to their fathers' factories at the lunch hour and made the working girls sign their petition."

A scholarly review of Morley's Life of Gladstone was given by Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch (Eng.). Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman turned A New Light on the Woman Question, saying:

My subject is a scientific theory as to the origin and relation of the eternal duo. It was started by our greatest living sociologist, Lester Ward—the explanation of the order in which the sexes were developed. What is it that this suffrage movement has had to meet, as it has plowed along up hill for fifty years, with its tremendous battery of arguments which it discharges into thin air? What it has to overcome is not an argument but a feeling, which rests at bottom on the idea expressed in the "rib story." As a parable this fairly represents the old belief that man was created first, that he was the race, was "it," and that woman was created, as modern jokers put it, for "Adams Express Company." The poet expressed the same idea when he called woman "God's last, best gift to man." ... Ward gives the biological facts. In the evolution of species the earliest periods were the longest. During ages of the world's history, while animal life was slowly evolving, the female was the larger, stronger and more representative creature; the male was small, often a parasite, told off for the sole purpose of reproduction. By natural selection, the female choosing always the best male, the male was gradually developed until he became bigger and stronger than the female. For a time natural selection continued to work, the males competing for the favor of the female. Then the male reduced the female to subjection. It occurred to him that it was easier to fight one little female once and subjugate her than to fight a lot of big males over and over.

The feminine ideal with many is the bee-hive—lots of honey, lots of young ones and nothing else. It was necessary that the male should become dominant for a time if the race was to progress. Now women are ceasing to be subjugated and we are approaching a state of equal rights. It was through a free motherhood and the female's constant selection of the best mate that she brought into the world power and brain enough to enable man to do what he has done. That free motherhood, reinstated, choosing always the best and refusing anything less, will bring us a higher humanity than we have yet known.

The usual Work Conferences were held and the Executive Committee presented the Plan of Work which was adopted. In addition to the usual recommendations it urged that a Memorial Organization Fund be established to perpetuate the memory of pioneers and that a legal adviser for the association be appointed from its women lawyer members. The morning meetings as always were given up to business and reports of officers, chairmen of committees and field workers and the afternoons to State reports. The latter, made for the most part by the presidents, showed faithful work going on in every State and progress in many. Miss Helen Kimber reported that the Legislature of Kansas had added to the School franchise, which the women had possessed ever since the State came into the Union, the right to vote on all public expenditure of money for issuing of bonds, waterworks, sewerage, libraries, etc. Miss Elizabeth J. Hauser, office secretary, told of the removal of the national headquarters from New York, where they had first been established, to Warren, O., where they occupied two large rooms on the lower floor of an old vine-covered family residence in the heart of town. From here 35,000 pieces of literature had been sent out and here had been printed 2,000 each of Lucy Stone and Mrs. Stanton birthday souvenirs, a booklet to be used on Miss Anthony's birthday; 10,000 suffrage stamps, Christmas blotters, etc., and 10,000 letters written. The subscription list of Progress had been increased from 950 to 4,000 and a weekly headquarters' letter had been sent to the Woman's Journal. Resolutions for woman suffrage had been obtained in international, national and a large number of State conventions.

Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, the treasurer, reported the receipts, $21,117, the largest in the history of the association. It contributed $3,255 to the New Hampshire campaign. Neither Mrs. Upton nor any of the national officers received a salary (except the secretary, who had a nominal one), and in referring to the immense amount of unpaid work done by them and by women in the different States, she said: "People outside of the association often ask why it is that women can be found who are willing to give their time to a work without recompense. We can not answer such inquiries and yet we ourselves know that, through this devotion to a just and holy cause, we rise to a higher plane, we see with larger eyes, we feel the presence of the real self of our fellow-worker. We can no more explain why this is so than we can analyze 'mother love,' or the love of a daughter for a father but we know it. It is for this reason your treasurer rejoices over the day she was so placed, either by design or chance, and so blessed with perfect health that she was able to serve in the cause of woman's political freedom." Mrs. Upton referred to Mrs. Cornelia C. Hussey's bequest of $10,000 and that of Mrs. Henrietta M. Banker, from which the association realized $3,000.