The History of the Women's Suffrage: The Flame Ignites. Susan B. Anthony
Resolved, That the association send a deputation to Washington in behalf of its memorial to Congress to frame a statute prohibiting the disfranchisement of women in the Territories, and to co-operate with the National Woman Suffrage Association (at its January meeting) for a Sixteenth Amendment forbidding political distinctions on account of sex.
The great success of this convention was due in large measure to the excellent arrangements made by the friends in Minneapolis, especially Dr. Ripley and Mrs. Martha A. Dorsett.
The association sent two delegates, Henry B. Blackwell and the Rev. Anna H. Shaw, to Washington, to urge upon the House Committee the duty of Congress to establish equal suffrage in the Territories. They were given a respectful hearing.
1886.—The Eighteenth annual meeting was held in Topeka, Kan., October 26-28. The morning and afternoon sessions were held in Music Hall. Above the platform hung the beautiful banner of the Minnesota W. S. A., sent by Dr. Martha G. Ripley, and at its side was a package of 7,000 leaflets for distribution contributed by Mrs. Cornelia C. Hussey of New Jersey, which were gladly taken for use in different States. The evening meetings assembled in the Hall of the House of Representatives, seating 1,200 persons; the floor and both galleries were crowded with the best citizens of Topeka; all the desks were taken out, making room for more chairs, and even then hundreds of people were turned away. Both halls were given free.
All the preparations had been admirably made by Mrs. Juliet N. Martin, Miss Olive P. Bray, Mrs. S. A. Thurston and other Topeka women, who had a collation spread in Music Hall for the delegates on their arrival. The press gave full and cordial reports. Lucy Stone wrote in the Woman's Journal:
We found the editors of the four daily papers all suffragists. Among these was Major J. K. Hudson, who took his first lessons in equal rights on the Anti-Slavery Bugle in Ohio and, reared among "Friends," was ready to continue the good service he has all along rendered. Here, too, we found our old co-worker, William P. Tomlinson, who at one time published the Anti-Slavery Standard for Wendell Phillips and the American Anti-Slavery Society, and who a little later, in his young prime, devoted his time, his money and his strength to the publication of the Woman's Advocate in New York, of which he was proprietor and editor. He is now editor of the Topeka Daily Democrat. Mr. B. P. Baker, now editor and proprietor of the Commonwealth, did good service to the woman suffrage cause in 1867 in the Topeka Record. Mr. McLennan, of the Journal, is also with us.
The whole convention was interspersed with ringing reminiscences of the heroic early history of Kansas. Mrs. S. N. Wood, who in the Border Ruffian days went through the enemy's lines and at great personal peril brought into beleaguered Lawrence the ammunition which enabled it to defend itself, came to the platform to add her good word for equal suffrage. It was a great pleasure to the officers of the association to meet her and the other early Kansas workers, many of whom, like Mrs. J. H. Slocum, of Emporia, were old personal friends.
Mrs. Anna C. Wait, president of the Kansas W. S. A. and editor of the Lincoln Beacon, gave the address of welcome in behalf of the suffragists. Referring to the first campaign for a woman suffrage amendment in 1867, when Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell spoke in forty-two counties of Kansas, Mrs. Wait said: "Nineteen years ago when you came to Kansas you found no suffrage societies and even seven years ago you would have found none. To-day, in behalf of the State W. S. A. and its many flourishing auxiliaries, I welcome these dear friends who come to us from the rock-ribbed shores of the Atlantic, from the coast of the Pacific, from the lakes of the North and from the sunny South, a veritable gathering of the clans of freedom."
Major Hudson, in his address of welcome in behalf of the city, reviewed the history of woman suffrage in Kansas, paid a tribute to the work of the pioneer suffragists, and said:
We welcome you to Kansas, because it has been good battle-ground for the right.... We place the ballot in the hands of the foreigner who can not read or speak our language, and who knows nothing of our government; we enfranchised a slave race, most of whom can not read; and yet we deny to the women of America the ballot, which in their hands would be the strongest protection of this republic against the ignorance and vice of the great centers of our population. Give to woman the ballot, and you give her equal pay with men for the same work; you break down prejudice and open to her every vocation in which she is competent to engage; you do more—you give her an individuality, and equal right in life.
The president, the Hon. William Dudley Foulke, in his response to the welcome of the suffrage association said: "It gives us great pleasure to visit your beautiful city and fertile State. It gives us pleasure not because your State is fertile and your city beautiful but because it is in these Western States that there is most hope of the growth of the woman suffrage movement. The older States are what old age is in the human frame, something that is difficult to change; but where there is young blood there is hope and the progress of a new idea is more rapid."
Mrs. Howe, responding to the welcome of the citizens, said some one had spoken of woman suffrage as a hobby; she questioned whether the opposition to suffrage was not the hobby and suffrage the horse. The discussion of these great questions was doing much to make the women of the country one in feeling, and to do away with sectional prejudices. A most cordial hearing was given to the Woman's Congress lately held at Louisville, Ky., and especially to the woman suffrage symposium which occupied one evening. Mrs. Howe spoke of the wonderful, providential history of Kansas, and the way in which a new and unexpected chapter of the country's history opened out from the experience of the young Territory. She remembered when the name of Kansas was the word which set men's blood at the East tingling. She continued:
You men of Kansas, you who have been bought with a price, noble men have worked and suffered and died that you might be free. For you Charles Sumner fell in the Senate of the United States. He fell to rise again, but others fell for whom there was no rising. Having received this great gift of freedom, pray you go on to make it perfect. You may think that you have a free State, well founded and stable, and that it will stand; but remember that the State, like the Church, is not a structure to be built and set up but a living organism to grow and move. Its life is progress and freedom. Do not think that you can stay this great tide of progress by saying, "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." No such limitation is possible. That tide will oversweep every obstacle set in its way.
Why, men of Kansas, having been so nobly endowed at the beginning, have you let the younger children in the nursery of our dear mother country learn lessons that you have not learned? Are the women of Wyoming and Washington better than your women, and do the men of those Territories love their women better than you love yours? You will say "no," with indignation; but remember that love is shown in deeds far more than in words. Until you make your women free I must hold that you do not love them as well as those do who have given their mothers and sisters the gift of political enfranchisement. This place is the temple of your liberties; here, if anywhere, should be spoken the words of wisdom and be enacted just and equal laws. However grand the words may be which have been spoken here, may they become grander and better and deeper, until to all your other glories shall be added that of having set the crown of freedom upon the heads of the women of your State!
Only a few gleanings from the many speeches can be given. Professor W. H. Carruth, of the Kansas State University, said in part:
We are likely to meet some good-natured person who will say: "Why, yes, I am in favor of woman suffrage, but I don't see that there is any need of it here in Kansas. If I were in Rhode Island or Connecticut, where there are so many laws unjust to women, I would petition and work for it; but I don't see that it is worth while to make a fuss about it here." Now, what can be said to such a person? Weapons are both defensive and aggressive. The ballot has both uses. What would a herdsman say if you told him his sheepfold was all that was needed, and refused to give him a gun? What would the farmer say if you gave him a cultivator but no plough? What would Christianity be if it had only the Ten Commandments and not the Golden Rule?
He who thinks the ballot is given simply as a means of protection—protection in a limited sense, against fraud and violence—has but a limited conception of the duties of American citizenship. The old let-alone theory of government has been found a failure,