The History of the Women's Suffrage: The Flame Ignites. Susan B. Anthony
the M. E. Metropolitan Church of Washington, Jan. 25, 1887, continuing in session three days. On no evening was the building large enough to accommodate the audience. The Rev. John P. Newman, pastor of the church, prayed earnestly for the blessing of God "on these women, who, through good and evil report, have been striving for the right."62 Miss Susan B. Anthony came directly from the Capitol and opened the convention by reading a letter from Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was in England. She then referred to the fact that while this convention was in session the United States Senate was discussing the question of woman suffrage. There would be taken the first direct vote in that body on a Sixteenth Amendment to enfranchise women. The attention of the advocates of woman suffrage was directed to Congress for the first time when the Fourteenth Amendment was under discussion in 1865. That article in the beginning was broad enough to include women but political expediency inserted the word "male," so that if any State should disfranchise any of its male citizens they should be counted out of the basis of representation. She continued:
This taught us that we might look to Congress. We presented our first petition in 1865. In December, 1866, came the discussion in the Senate on the proposition to strike the word "male" from the District of Columbia Suffrage Bill and nine voted in favor. From that day we have gone forward pressing our claims on Congress. Denied in the construction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments we have been trying for a Sixteenth Amendment. We have gained so much as a special committee, who hear our arguments and have four times reported in our favor; Senator Hoar, chairman in 1879, Senator Lapham in 1882, Senator Palmer in 1884, and Senator Blair in 1886. This is the bill which is pending now. We are not asking Congress to enfranchise us, because it does not possess that power. We are asking it to submit a proposition to be voted on by the Legislatures.
Mrs. Stanton's letter said in part:
For half a century we have tried appeals, petitions, arguments, with thrilling quotations from our greatest jurists and statesmen, and lo! in the year of our Lord, 1887, the best answer we can wring from Senators Brown and Cockrell, in the shape of a minority report, is a "chimney corner letter" written by a woman ignorant of the first principles of republican government, which, they say, gives a better statement of the whole question than they are capable of producing. Verily this is a new departure in congressional proceedings! Though a woman has not sufficient capacity to vote, yet she has superior capacity to her representatives in drawing up a minority report....
But if Senators Cockrell and Brown hope to dispose of the question by remanding us to "the chimney corner" we trust their constituents will send them to keep us company, that they may enliven our retirement and make us satisfied 'in the sphere where the Creator intended we should be' by daily intoning for us their inspired minority report.
The one pleasant feature in this original document is the harmony between the views of these gentlemen and their Creator. The only drawback to our faith in their knowledge of what exists in the Divine mind, is in the fact that they can not tell us when, where and how they interviewed Jehovah. I have always found that when men have exhausted their own resources, they fall back on "the intentions of the Creator." But their platitudes have ceased to have any influence with those women who believe they have the same facilities for communication with the Divine mind as men have.
The right and liability to be called on to fight, if we vote, as continually emphasized by our opponents, is one of the greatest barriers in our way. If all the heroic deeds of women recorded in history and our daily journals, and the active virtues so forcibly illustrated in domestic life, have not yet convinced our opponents that women are possessed of superior fighting qualities, the sex may feel called upon in the near future to give some further illustrations of their prowess. Of one thing they may be assured, that the next generation will not argue the question of woman's rights with the infinite patience we have had for half a century, and to so little purpose. To emancipate woman from the fourfold bondage she has so long suffered in the State, the church, the home and the world of work, harder battles than we have yet fought are still before us.
Mrs. Caroline Hallowell Miller (Md.) paid a beautiful tribute to Miss Anthony, "the Sir Galahad in search of the Holy Grail," and closed with an eloquent prophecy of future success. Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.) gave a clever satire on The Rights of Men, which was very imperfectly reported.
....Surely it is time that some one on this platform should say something for this half of humanity, which we really must confess after all is an important half. Ought we not admit that men have wrongs to complain of? Are they not constantly declaring themselves our slaves? Is it not a well known fact, conceded even here, that women shine in all the tints of the rainbow while men must wear only costumes of dull brown and somber black? Nor is this because men do not like bright colors, for never a belle in all the sheen of satin and glimmer of pearls looks half so happily proud as does a man when he has on a uniform, or struts in a political procession with a white hat on his head, a red ribbon in his buttonhole and a little cane in his hand.
Then, too, have not men, poor fellows, had to do all the talking since the world began? Have we not heretofore been the silent sex? Even to-day a thousand men speak from pulpit and platform where one woman uplifts her voice.
But let us pass to other and more important rights which have been denied to man in the past. The first right that any man ought to be allowed—a right paramount to all others—is the right to a wife. But look how even in this matter he has been hardly dealt with. Has he had just standards set before him as to what a wife should be? No, but he has been led to believe that the weak woman, the dependent woman, is the one to be desired....
Look again at the unhappy mess into which man all by himself has brought politics and public affairs. Is it not too bad to leave him longer alone in his misery? Like the naughty boy who has broken and destroyed his toys, who needs mamma to help him mend them, and perhaps also to administer to him such wholesome discipline as Solomon himself has advised—so does man need woman to come to his rescue. Look what politics is now. Who to-day can tell the difference between a Democrat and a Republican? Even a Mugwump is becoming a doubtful being....
Do not these wrongs which men suffer appeal to our tenderest sympathies? Is it not evident that the poor fellows can't go on alone much longer, that it is high time we should take the boys in hand and show them what a correct government really is?
There is another question which deserves our gravest consideration. Man sinks or rises with woman; if she is degraded he is tempted to vice; if she is oppressed he is brutalized. What is the industrial condition of women to-day?...
In behalf of the sons, the brothers and the husbands of these wage-earning women we ask for that political power which alone will insure equality of pay without regard to sex. For the sake of man's redemption and morality we demand that this injustice shall cease, for it is not possible for woman to be half-starved and man not dwarfed; for many women to be degraded and all men's lives pure; for women to be fallen and no man lost.
We all know that man himself has been most willing to grant to women every right, every opportunity. If he has hesitated it has been rather from love and admiration of woman than from any tyrannical desire of oppression. He has said that women must not vote because they can not perform military duty. Can they not serve the nation as well as those men, who during the last war sent substitutes and to-day hold the highest places in the Government? But we ask one question: Which every year does most for the State, the soldier or the mother who risks her life not to destroy other life but to create it? Of the two it would be better to disfranchise the soldiers and enfranchise the mothers. For much as the nation owes to the soldiers, she owes far more to the mothers who in endless martyrdom make the nation a possibility....
Man deserves that we should consider his present unhappy condition. In all ages he has proved his reverence for woman by embodying every virtue in female form, and has left none for himself. Truth and chastity, mercy and peace, charity and justice, all are represented as feminine, and lately, as a proof of his devotion, he has erected at the entrance to the harbor of our greatest metropolis a statue of liberty and this too is represented as a woman.... And so we hail the men, liberty enlightening a world where woman and man shall alike be free.
One interesting address