“I long to hear that you have declared an independency; and in the new code of laws, which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire that you will remember the women, and be more generous and honorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
“If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice nor representation. That your sex is tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity? Superior men of all ages abhor those customs which treat us as the vassals of your sex.”
When the Constitution of the United States was framed without any recognition of the rights of women, the disappointment of Mrs. Adams almost culminated in indignation. She felt most keenly the discrimination of the law against her sex, and wrote her husband again, as follows:
“I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies, for while you are proclaiming peace and good-will to all men, emancipating all nations, you insist on retaining absolute power over wives. But you must remember that absolute power, like most other things which are very bad, is most likely to be broken.”
She was especially solicitous that there should be equal advantages of education for boys and girls. “If we mean to have heroes,” she writes, “statesmen, and philosophers, we should have learned women.” And again, “If you complain of lack of education for sons, what shall I say in regard to daughters who every day experience the want of it!”
Nor were the women of the South forgetful of their rights, and at an early day they also put in a demand for political equality. The counties of Mecklenburg and Rowan in North Carolina blazed with the fiery patriotism of their women. And in their defiant conversations with British officers, who were quartered in the houses of the wealthiest and most intelligent of these Southern matrons, as also in their debates with the men of their own community, officers, judges, and clergymen, they unhesitatingly declared their right to legal equality with men, in the new government, whenever laws should be formulated for the infant republic.
Two years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, the sister of General Richard Henry Lee, Mrs. Hannah Lee Corbin of Virginia, wrote to her brother, declaring that women should be allowed the franchise, if they paid taxes. He replied that in Virginia women already had the right to vote, and “it is on record that women in Virginia did exercise the right of voting at an early day.” On the second day of July, 1776, the right to vote was secured to the women of New Jersey, and they exercised it for over thirty years. Our country began its very existence burdened with the protests of our great fore-mothers against violation of the immortal principles which were its corner-stone. “All just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed,” was the startling announcement the Fathers thundered into the ears of the monarchs of the old world. And many of their wives and daughters contended, with invincible logic, that this axiom included women as well as men.
The long struggle of American women for education, opportunity, and political equality which has since followed, dates, therefore, from the hour of the nation’s birth. It is the legitimate outcome of American ideas, for which the nation contended for nearly a century. Absorbed in severe pioneer work, inevitable to life in the wilderness, and denied education themselves, the first care of our revolutionary mothers was for the literary and religious instruction of their children. As far back as the year 1700, a woman, one Bridget Graffort, had given the first lot of ground for a public school-house, although at that time, and for long years after, no provision whatever was made for the education of girls. There was a bitter prejudice against educated and literary women in the early days of our history. And even after five colleges had been founded for young men,—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and William and Mary, Virginia,[[162]]—a young woman was regarded as well educated who could “read, write, and cipher.”
If, however, school privileges were denied them, the education of the early American women proceeded, through the very logic of events. In laying the foundations of the new government all questions were discussed that touched human interests, not only publicly but privately—from the pulpit, and around the fireside. Women listened to them, and took part in them. The famous book of Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” was published in London in 1790, and found its way into American circles. It received the unsparing condemnation meted out to all efforts put forth in advance of the age, for the world has always stoned its prophets. It demanded for women every opportunity accorded to man, and the same rights in representation, before the law, in the courts, and in the world of work. Torrents of the vilest abuse were heaped on the author, and formed the answer vouchsafed by the public. It educated not a few women, however, who in turn preached the same gospel, and made for women the same demands.
In 1831 the first real grapple began with American slavery, through the establishment of the Liberator by William Lloyd Garrison. He flung out his banner, which he never lowered, demanding immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves of the South, and after a struggle of forty years, his demand was granted. Slavery was fastened on our coast long before the birth of the republic. In the century before 1776, three and a quarter millions of negroes had been taken by Great Britain from African shores for her various colonies in the new world. And at the close of the Revolutionary War, when the population was but three millions, six hundred thousand of these were black slaves, even then a menace to the peace of the nation. Against the protests of some of the noblest and wisest of the revolutionary patriots slavery, was introduced into the National Constitution in 1787, and was fastened on the national life.