Chapter XXXIII: Part II (2)

Charlotte Bronté’s portion in life was pain and toil and sorrow. Her experience was a long struggle with every unkindness of fate, and she lacked every advantage supposed necessary to literary work. Her force of character and undismayed persistence triumphed over all hindrances. She put heart and conscience into books that held the literary world in fascination. In them she rent the shams of society by her keen analyses. She depicted life as she had known it, shorn of every illusion, and then beautified it by unflinching loyalty to duty, and unwavering fidelity to conscience. The publication of “Jane Eyre” marked an era in the literary world not soon to be forgotten.

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BELVA ANN LOCKWOOD.

FIRST WOMAN LAWYER BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES.

FOR heroic perseverance, strength of intellect, dignity and power of mind, logic and eloquence,――and withal true womanliness of character, the sisterhood of the world perhaps could present no counterpart in any single woman, of any age, to Belva A. Lockwood. Had she devoted her life to literature the profoundness of her writings must have impressed the world. The fragments of her speeches which remain are worthy to live. She has had one idea in life――to enfranchise woman――and while earning her living in a profession, for recognition in which she had to fight and conquer the United States, she has, from every advanced step, held back the helping hand to her more timid sisters. If her ideal is ever realized, she will live in future history as one of the emancipators and greatest benefactors of her sex.

Belva Ann Bennett was born in Niagara County, New York, October 24, 1830, on her father’s farm. Her early education was received at a district school and in the academy of her native town. At fourteen years of age she began to teach in summer, attending school in winter. At eighteen she married a young farmer, Uriah H. McNall, who died in 1853, leaving one daughter. The young widow entered Genesee College in Lima, New York, the same year, from which she graduated with the degree of A. B. four years later. She was immediately elected to a position in the Lockport Academy, where she manifested her progressive principles by introducing declamation and gymnastics for young ladies, conducting the classes herself. This was in addition to her duties as professor of higher mathematics, logic, rhetoric, and botany. Four years later she became proprietor of McNall Seminary in Oswego, New York, which she conducted until the close of the Civil War, at which time she removed to Washington, D. C., and in March, 1868, married Rev. Ezekiel Lockwood, a Baptist minister and chaplain during the war. Dr. Lockwood died in 1877. At this late date Mrs. Lockwood resumed her studies, entering the Syracuse University at New York, from which she graduated with the degree of A. M. She had previous to this studied law in Washington, graduating from the National University Law School with the degree of D. C. L. in May, 1873. In the same year she was admitted to practice in the highest court of the District, and in 1875 applied for admission to the Court of Claims, which was refused; first, on the ground that she was a woman, and afterwards that she was a married woman. In 1876 she applied for admission to the Supreme Court of the United States. This was denied her because there was no English precedent. It was in vain that she pleaded that Queens Eleanor and Elizabeth had both been supreme chancellors of the realm, that Countess Ann had sat with the judges on the bench at the Assizes of Appleby. Finally she drafted a bill and secured its introduction into both houses of Congress, which was passed in 1879, admitting women to the Court, by which means she accomplished her purpose, and since that time she has enjoyed an active and lucrative practice, being privileged to appear before any Court in the United States. Nine other women have since been admitted to practice in the Supreme Court under the above Act.

Among the services which Mrs. Lockwood has rendered her sex may be mentioned the bill passed by Congress in 1870, giving to the women employees of the government, of whom there are many thousands, the same pay as men receive for similar work. She also secured the passage of a bill appropriating $50,000 for the aid of sailors and mariners. She has frequently appeared before congressional committees in the cause of women, her arguments always looking to the final enfranchisement of woman. An extract from one of these addresses succeeds this article. Mrs. Lockwood is also an intense advocate of temperance and labor reform.

When President Garfield died in 1881, he was considering her application for appointment as minister to Brazil. In 1884 and again in 1888, she was nominated for President of the United States by the Equal Rights Party of San Francisco, California, and though knowing that her candidacy would only subject her to the ridicule of the masses, it afforded an opportunity for the preaching of her theory of woman suffrage, and she accepted the nomination, and made a canvass that awakened the people of the United States to no small consideration of the subject. The popularity given her by these several movements has called her largely to the lecture platform and into newspaper correspondence during the last fifteen years. She was a delegate to the International Congress of Peace in Paris, and made one of the opening speeches, and presented a paper in the French language on “International Arbitration,” which was well received. In 1890 she was again a delegate to the same convention in London, and her paper there on “Disarmament” was widely commented upon. Even at this late date her thirst for knowledge again evinced itself, for she remained in London to take a course of University Extension lectures at Oxford. In 1891 she was again a delegate to the Peace Congress at Rome, where her influence was equally as conspicuous as before.

Of late years Mrs. Lockwood, in addition to her law practice, has acted as assistant editor of the “Peacemaker,” a Philadelphia magazine, all the time pursuing her studies and contributing no small modicum of encouragement, both by her pen and lectures, to the furtherance of the University Extension idea. It may be said, however, that her interest and labor in all forward movements are mainly due to her confidence in the aid they will contribute toward the final enfranchisement of woman.

* * * * *

ADDRESS BEFORE THE COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF DELEGATES WASHINGTON,
IN SUPPORT OF WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE.

GENTLEMEN of the Committee: We come before you to-day, not with any studied eloquence, far-fetched erudition, or new theories for the metamorphosis of our government, or the overthrow of our social economy and relations, but we come, asking for our whole commonwealth, for the fathers who begat us, and the brothers at our side――for the mothers who bore us, and the sisters who go hand in hand with us; for the orphan and the widow unprotected; for the wretched inebriate and the outcast Magdalene; for the beggars who throng our streets and the inmates of our jails and asylums――for these we ask you that we too may have a hand and a voice, a share in this matter which so nearly concerns not only our temporal but even our eternal salvation. We ask you that we may have an interest that shall awaken from its apathy fully one-half of the moral and intellectual resources of the country, fully one-half of its productive interest――an interest which contains in the germ the physical power and vital force of the whole nation. Weakness cannot beget power, ignorance cannot beget wisdom, disease cannot produce health. Look at our women of to-day, with their enfeebled bodies, dwarfed intellects, laxness of moral force, without enough of healthy stimulus to incite to action, and compare them with our grandmothers of the Revolution and the Martha Washington school. Here you find a woman who dared to control her own affairs; who superintended a farm of six hundred acres; giving personal instructions to the workmen, writing her own bills and receipts, and setting an example of industry and frugality to the neighboring women who called to see her.

I need not, gentlemen, enumerate to you to prove what I wish to prove to-day, the countless numbers of women who have participated creditably in government from the days of our Saviour until the present time. You know that Victoria rules in England; and the adoration of the English heart to-day for its Queen, found expression but a few weeks since in one of our popular lecture halls, when the audience, composed partly of Englishmen, were asked to sing “God Save the Queen.” The wisdom of the reign of Elizabeth, “good Queen Bess,” as she has been called, gave to England her prestige――the proud pre-eminence which she holds to-day among the nations of the earth. Isabella I. of Spain, the patron saint of America, without whose generosity our country to-day might have been a wilderness, was never nobler than when after Ferdinand’s refusal, after the refusal of the crowned authority of England, the disapproval of the wise men of her own kingdom, she rose in her queenly majesty, and said, “I undertake it for my own crown of Castile, and will pledge my jewels to raise the necessary funds.” Maria Theresa, of Austria, who assumed the reins of government with her kingdom divided and disturbed, found herself equal to the emergency, brought order out of chaos, and prosperity to her kingdom. Christine, of Sweden, brought that kingdom to the zenith of its power. Eugenie, Empress of the French, in the late disastrous revolution, assumed the regency of the Empire in defiance of her ministry, and, when forced to flee, covered her flight with a shrewdness that would have done credit to Napoleon himself. Florence Nightingale brought order and efficiency into the hospitals of the Crimea, and Clara Barton, with her clear head and generous heart, has lifted up the starving women of Strassburg, and made it possible for them to be self-sustaining. I need not cite to you Catharine, of Russia, Cleopatra, or the Queen of Sheba, who came to admire the wisdom of Solomon; or the Roman matrons, Zenobia, Lucretia, Tullia; or revert to the earliest forms of government when the family and the church were lawgivers; remind you of Lydia, the seller of purple and fine linen, who ruled her own household, called to the church; of Aquilla and Priscilla, whom Paul took with him and left to control the church at Ephesus, after they had been banished from Rome by the decree of Claudius; or of Phebe, the deaconess. It is a well-known fact that women have been sent as ministers and ambassadors, the latter a power fuller than our country grants, to treat on important State matters between the crowned heads of Europe. In many cases they have represented the person of the monarch or emperor himself. France, since the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV., through the period of the ascendency of Napoleon I. down to the reign of Napoleon III., has employed women in diplomacy. Instances may be found recorded in a work entitled “Napoleon and His Court,” by Madame Junot, and also in our own consular works. The late Empress of France has been said to be especially gifted in this respect. It has been the custom of Russia for the past century, and still continues to be, to send women on diplomatic errands. In this empire, also, where the voting is done by households, a woman is often sent to represent the family.

Women are now writing a large proportion of the books and newspapers of the country, are editing newspapers and commanding ships. They are admitted to law schools, medical schools, and the higher order of colleges, and are knocking at Amherst and Yale. Yea, more, they are admitted to the practice of law, as in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Wyoming and Utah; admitted to the practice of medicine everywhere, and more recently to consultation. One hundred women preachers are already ordained and are preaching throughout the land. Women are elected as engrossing and enrolling clerks in Legislatures, as in Wisconsin, Missouri and Indiana; appointed as justices of the peace, as in Maine, Wyoming and Connecticut; as bankers and brokers, as in New York and St. Louis. They are filling as school teachers three-fourths of the schools of the land.

This is more than true of our own city. Shall we not then have women school trustees and superintendents? Already they are appointed in the East and in the West, and women are permitted to vote at the school elections. Who has a deeper interest in the schools than the mothers.

Look at the hundreds of women clerks in the government departments. They are all eligible, since the passage of the Arnell bill, to the highest clerkships. Look at the postmistresses throughout the land. Each one a bonded officer of the government, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the highest executive power in the land. “The power of the President to appoint, and of the Senate to confirm, has never been questioned by our highest courts. Being bonded officers, they must necessarily qualify before a judicial officer.”

And now, gentlemen of the Committee on Laws and Judiciary, whatever may be your report on these bills for justice and equality to women, committed to your trust, I hope you will bear in mind that you have mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, who will be affected by your decision. They may be amply provided for to-day, and be beggared to-morrow. Remember that “life is short and time is fleeting,” but principles never die. You hold in your hands a power and an opportunity to-day to render yourselves immortal――an opportunity that comes but once in a lifetime. Shakespeare says, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Gentlemen, the flood-tide is with you! Shall this appeal be in vain? I hold in my hands the names of hundreds of men and women of our city pledged to this work, and they will not relax their efforts until it is accomplished.

“Truth crushed to earth will rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;
But ♦Error, wounded, writhes in pain
And dies amid her worshippers.”

♦ ‘Errror’ replaced with ‘Error’

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SUSAN B. ANTHONY.

FOUNDER OF THE FIRST WOMEN’S TEMPERANCE ORGANIZATION.

AMONG the famous names of our time, history will, no doubt, record that of Susan B. Anthony with the greatest of reformers and progressive thinkers. Once held in derision, she now enjoys the reward of being esteemed and loved by her fellow men, while she is looked up to, by those of her own sex who believe in woman suffrage as one of the pioneers whose herculean efforts will eventually place the ballot in the hands of the women of the United States.

Miss Anthony was born in South Adams, Mass., February 15, 1820. She was brought up in New York under the most religious influence of a Baptist mother and a Quaker father. From her childhood her character has been strongly marked by individuality and native strength.

Mr. Anthony was a manufacturer and a wealthy man. He fitted his daughters and sons for teachers, and at the age of fifteen Susan began to teach in a Quaker family, her salary being one dollar per week and board. In 1837, a financial crash caused the failure of her father, who was, after this, aided in his efforts to retrieve his fortune by his children. Susan was particularly successful and progressive in her work, and identified herself actively with the New York Teachers’ Association, rendering herself conspicuous by pleading in the conventions for higher wages and equal rights for women in all the honors and responsibilities of the association. The women teachers throughout America owe her a debt of gratitude for their improved position and compensation to-day.

The subject of temperance also claimed Miss Anthony’s attention from the time of her childhood. In 1852, she organized the New York State Women’s Temperance Association, which was the first open temperance organization of women, and the foundation for the modern society known as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was president, and Miss Anthony for several years secretary, of this first organization. It was in this work that Miss Anthony discovered the impotency of women to advance the cause of temperance without the ballot, and she at once became an ardent woman suffragist. She was also a pronounced and active abolitionist; and, during the war, with her friend and co-worker, Mrs. Stanton, and others, she presented a petition to Congress for the abolition of slavery, bearing nearly 400,000 signatures from all parts of the country. These petitions were so powerful in arousing the people, and also Congress, that Charles Sumner urged Miss Anthony to continue in the work. “Send on the petitions,” he wrote, “they furnish the only background for my demands.”

The most dramatic event of Miss Anthony’s life was her arrest and trial for voting at the presidential election of 1872. When asked by the judge, “You voted as a woman, did you not?” she replied, “No, sir, I voted as a citizen of the United States.” Before the date set for the trial Miss Anthony thoroughly canvassed her county and instructed the people in citizen’s rights, intending in this way to have the jurors, whoever they might be, well instructed in advance. To her chagrin change of venue was ordered to another county, setting the date three weeks ahead. Miss Anthony was equal to the emergency; in twenty-four hours dates were set and appointments made for a series of meetings in that county, and the country was thoroughly aroused in Miss Anthony’s behalf. The jury would no doubt have acquitted her, but the judge took the case out of their hands saying it was a question of law and not of fact, and pronounced Miss Anthony guilty and fined her $100.00 and costs. “I shall never pay a penny of this unjust claim,” she said. “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” She intended to take the case to the Supreme Court, and further to help her cause did not desire to give bond, preferring to be imprisoned, but her counsel gave bond and thus frustrated her purpose of carrying it to the Supreme Court. The inspectors who received the ballot from her and her friends were fined and imprisoned, but were pardoned by President Grant. Miss Anthony steadfastly adhered to her vow and never paid the fine.

Miss Anthony has always been in great demand on the platform and has lectured in almost every city and hamlet in the North. She has made constitutional arguments before congressional committees and spoken impromptu in all sorts of places. Wherever a good word in introducing a speaker, or a short speech to awaken a convention, or a closing appeal to set people to work was needed she always knew how to say the right thing, and never wearied her audience. There was no hurry, no superfluity in her discourse, and it was equally devoid of sentiment or poetry. She was remarkably self-forgetful and devoted to the noblest principles. A fine sense of humor, however, pervaded her logical arguments. She had the happy faculty of disarming and winning her opponents. She possessed a most wonderful memory, carrying in her mind the legislative history of each state, the formation and progress of political parties, and the public history of prominent men in our national life, and in fact whatever has been done the world over to ameliorate the condition of women. She is said to be a most congenial and instructive companion, and her unfailing sympathy makes her as good a listener as talker.

It must be consolingly comforting and pleasant for this ardent worker, who has stemmed a violent tide of opposition throughout a long life, to have the tide of popular esteem turn so favorably toward her last years. Once it was the fashion of the press to ridicule and jeer, but at last the best reporters were sent to interview her and to put her sentiments before the world with the most respectful and laudatory personal comment. Society, too, threw open its doors, and into many distinguished gatherings she carried a refreshing breath of sincerity and earnestness. Her seventieth birthday was celebrated by the National Woman Suffrage Association with an outburst of gratitude which is perhaps unparalleled in the history of any living woman. In 1892 she was elected president of this association, at which time, though seventy-two years of age, she was still of undiminished vigor and activity. Standing at the head of this organization, of which she was forty years before among the founders, Susan B. Anthony is one of the most heroic figures in American history.

* * * * *

WOMAN’S RIGHT TO SUFFRAGE.

After its delivery, this address was printed and distributed
in Monroe and Ontario counties prior to her trial, in June,
1873, the charge against her being that she had violated the
law by voting in the presidential election in November, 1872.
This address is necessarily argumentative; but it contains
occasional passages which exhibit the power of her oratory.

_Copied from an account of the trial published in Rochester,
New York, 1874._

FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS: I stand before you to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my _citizen’s right_, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.

* * * * *

The preamble of the federal constitution says:

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure _domestic_ tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.”

It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people――women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government――the ballot.

The early journals of Congress show that when the committee reported to that body the original articles of confederation, the very first article which became the subject of discussion was that respecting equality of suffrage. Article IV. said:

“The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse between the people of the different States of the Union, the free inhabitants of each of the States, (paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted,) shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the free citizens of the several States.”

Thus, at the very beginning, did the fathers see the necessity of the universal application of the great principle of equal rights to all――in order to produce the desired result――a harmonious union and a homogeneous people.

* * * * *

B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three days’ discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan’s motion to strike male from the District of Columbia suffrage bill, said:

“Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I stand for universal suffrage; and as a matter of fundamental principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any ground of race or sex.”

* * * * *

Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, insisted that, so soon as by the thirteenth amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United States Constitution guaranteed to them equal rights――the right to vote and to be voted for.

* * * * *

Article 1 of the New York State Constitution says:

“No member of this State shall be disfranchised or deprived of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers.”

And so carefully guarded is the citizen’s right to vote that the Constitution makes special mention of all who may be excluded. It says:

“Laws may be passed excluding from the right of suffrage all persons who have been or may be convicted of bribery, larceny or any infamous crime.”

* * * * *

“The law of the land” is the United States Constitution, and there is no provision in that document that can be fairly construed into a permission to the States to deprive any class of their citizens of their right to vote. Hence, New York can get no power from that source to disfranchise one entire half of her members. Nor has “the judgment of their peers” been pronounced against women exercising their right to vote; no disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror, and none but disfranchised persons can be women’s peers; nor has the Legislature passed laws excluding them on account of idiocy or lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers whatever stand to-day between women and the exercise of their right to vote save those of precedent and prejudice.

* * * * *

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an _ex post facto_ law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects; carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

* * * * *

Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person, in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.

Prior to the adoption of the thirteenth amendment, by which slavery was forever abolished, and black men transformed from _property_ to _persons_, the judicial opinions of the country had always been in harmony with these definitions. To be a _person_ was to be a _citizen_, and to be a _citizen_ was to be a _voter_.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens, and no State has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their ♦privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is to-day null and void, precisely as is every one against negroes.

♦ ‘priviliges’ replaced with ‘privileges’

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ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.

FOUNDER OF THE WOMAN-SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT.

AMONG the few women who have shown themselves the polemic equals of the most trained and brilliant men of their times, the subject of this sketch stands prominently with the first. Mrs. Stanton was always a vigorous woman of commanding size with the mental force of a giant. In public debates and private arguments, she has shown herself to be an orator, forceful, logical, witty, sarcastic and eloquent. Like all great orators, she is imbued with one great idea which presses to the front in all she says or does and has been the moving force of her life. She believes that social and national safety lies alone in the purity of individuals and in the full and free bestowal upon every individual, regardless of sex, of all the rights and privileges of citizenship. In other words, whatever other excellencies or merits she may possess, she is primarily a Woman Suffragist.

Elizabeth Cady was the daughter of Judge Daniel Cady and was born in Johnstown, N. Y., November 12, 1815. She was a child of marked intelligence and was thoroughly educated by her parents and graduated in Troy, N. Y., in 1832. She was learned in Latin and Greek, was a great lover of sports and, it is said that in early life she frequently complained that she had been born a girl instead of a boy. She used to discuss law in her father’s office and always insisted that no law was just which denied to women an equal right with men. She was anxious to complete her education in Union College where her brother had been educated, and her indignation was unbounded when she was refused entrance because girls were not admitted to that institution. Thus it will be seen how she became a Woman’s Rights believer, and with her strong and cultured mind it was only natural that she should become one of its chief advocates. At the age of twenty-five, in 1840, she married Henry B. Stanton, an Anti-slavery orator, journalist and author. Thus she became an Abolitionist and entered, with her usual force and zeal, into that movement. She was a delegate to the World’s Anti-slavery Convention, which met the next year in London. With Lucretia Mott, she signed the first call for a Woman’s Rights Convention, which met in Seneca Falls, N. Y., on the 19th of July, 1848. Mrs. Stanton received and cared for the visitors, wrote the resolutions, declarations and aims of the organization, and had the satisfaction of being ridiculed throughout the United States. Even her father, Judge Cady, imagined that she had gone crazy and journeyed all the way to Seneca Falls in order to endeavor to reason her out of her position; but she remained unshaken. Since that convention, Mrs. Stanton has been one of the leaders of the movement in the United States.

In 1854, Mrs. Stanton addressed the New York Legislature, endeavoring to bring about such a change in the constitution as would enfranchise women, an extract from which, we insert in this volume. She delivered another address to the same body in 1860 and again in 1867. In Kansas and in Michigan in ’67 and ’74, when those states were submitting the question of “Woman’s Suffrage” to the people, she did heroic work by canvassing and speaking throughout both of these Commonwealths. Until the year of 1890, she was President of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. In 1868, she ventured to run as candidate for Congress and, in her speech to the electors of the district, she announced her creed to be “Free speech, free press, free men and free trade.”

The “New York Herald” ventured to support her in this effort; but of course she was defeated, as she expected, her object being only to emphasize and advertise the principle of “Woman Suffrage.”

The literary works of Mrs. Stanton consist of her contributions to “The Revolution,” a magazine published in New York City, of which she became editor in 1868, Susan B. Anthony being the publisher. She was also joint-author of the “History of Woman’s Suffrage” of which three volumes have appeared. She has, also, lectured much and contributed to the secular press.

Mrs. Stanton, with all her public works, has been a thoroughly domestic woman. She has a family of seven children, five sons and two daughters, all of whom were living up to a recent date and some of them have inherited the talents of their mother and bid fair to become famous. Mrs. Stanton possesses conversational powers of the highest order. In the light of recent developments, the retrospect of her long career must afford her unusual pleasure. She was met with bitterness, ridicule and misrepresentation at the beginning of her crusade. She has lived down all of this and has seen her cherished ambition fruited here and there, while many of the leading men of the age in all sections of the country have been brought to look upon “Woman Suffrage” as something to be desired; while in the minds of the public generally, the seed of thoughts sown by her are so fast rooting themselves and springing up, that she looks with confidence forward to the early realization of her hopes――the enfranchisement of woman.

* * * * *

A PLEA FOR EQUAL RIGHTS.

Delivered at Seneca Falls, N. Y., on the assembling of the
first Woman-Suffragist Convention, July 19, 1848. Mrs. Stanton
begins by saying:

I SHOULD feel exceedingly diffident to appear before you at this time, having never before spoken in public, were I not nerved by a sense of right and duty.

[After delivering a masterly and eloquent argument of nearly
two hours length announcing the principles and setting forth
the arguments which have since signalized the movement, Mrs.
Stanton closed in the following eloquent strain:]

Our churches are multiplying on all sides, our missionary societies, Sunday Schools, and prayer meetings and innumerable charitable and reform organizations are all in operation, but still the tide of vice is swelling, and threatens the destruction of everything, and the battlements of righteousness are weak against the raging elements of sin and death. Verily the world waits the coming of some new element, some purifying power, some spirit of mercy and love. The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided. There are deep and tender cords of sympathy and love in the hearts of the down-fallen and oppressed that woman can touch more skilfully than man. The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source. It is vain to look for silver and gold from the mines of copper and lead. It is the wise mother that has the wise son. So long as your women are slaves you may throw your colleges and churches to the winds. You can’t have scholars and saints so long as your mothers are ground to powder between the upper and nether millstone of tyranny and lust. How seldom, now, is a father’s pride gratified, his fond hopes realized, in the budding genius of his son. The wife is degraded, made the mere creature of caprice, and the foolish son is heaviness to his heart. Truly are the sins of the father visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. God, in his wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together, that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length, and here, too, is the law of restoration, as in woman all have fallen, so in her elevation shall the race be recreated. “Voices” were the visitors and advisers of Joan of Arc. Do not “voices” come to us daily from the haunts of poverty, sorrow, degradation and despair, already too long unheeded. Now is the time for the women of this country, if they would save our free institutions, to defend the right, to buckle on the armor that can best resist the keenest weapons of the enemy――contempt and ridicule. The same religious enthusiasm that nerved Joan of Arc to her work nerves us to ours. In every generation God calls some men and women for the utterance of the truth, a heroic action, and our work to-day is the fulfilling of what has long since been foretold by the prophet――Joel ii. 28, “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” We do not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers of popular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry and prejudice will be our way, and on our banners will beat the dark storm-clouds of opposition from those who have entrenched themselves behind the stormy bulwarks of custom and authority, and who have fortified their position by every means, holy and unholy. But we will steadfastly abide the result. Unmoved we will bear it aloft. Undauntedly we will unfurl it to the gale, for we know that the storm cannot rend from it a shred, that the electric flash will but more clearly show to us the glorious words inscribed upon it, “Equality of Rights.”

“Then fear not thou to wind thy horn,
Though elf and gnome thy courage scorn.
Ask for the Castle’s King and Queen,
Though rabble rout may rush between,
Beat thee senseless to the ground,
And in the dark beset thee round,
Persist to ask and it will come,
Seek not for rest in humbler home,
So shalt thou see what few have seen;
The palace home of King and Queen.”

* * * * *

MRS. STANTON’S ADDRESS TO THE LEGISLATURE OF NEW YORK.

UNDER THE SANCTION OF THE STATE WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION.
FEBRUARY 14, 1854.

_To the Legislature of the State of New York_:

THE tyrant, Custom, has been summoned before the bar of Common Sense. His majesty no longer awes the multitude――his sceptre is broken――his crown is trampled in the dust――the sentence of death is pronounced upon him. All nations, ranks and classes have, in turn, questioned and repudiated his authority; and now, that the monster is chained and caged, timid woman, on tiptoe, comes to look him in the face, and to demand of her brave sires and sons, who have struck stout blows for liberty, if, in this change of dynasty, she, too, shall find relief.

Yes, gentlemen, in republican America, in the nineteenth century, we, the daughters of the revolutionary heroes of ’76, demand at your hands the redress of our grievances――a revision of your state constitution――a new code of laws.... We demand the full recognition of all our rights as citizens of the Empire State. We are persons; native, free-born citizens; property-holders, tax-payers; yet we are denied the exercise of our right to the elective franchise. We support ourselves, and, in part, your schools, colleges, churches, your poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the navy, the whole machinery of government, and yet we have no voice in your councils. We have every qualification required by the constitution, necessary to the legal voter; but the one of sex. We are moral, virtuous and intelligent, and in all respects quite equal to the proud white man himself, and yet by your laws we are classed with idiots, lunatics and negroes;... in fact, our legal position is lower than that of either; for the negro can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of $250; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool; but we, who have guided great movements of charity, established missions, edited journals, published works on history, economy and statistics; who have governed nations, led armies, filled the professor’s chair, taught philosophy and mathematics to the savants of our age, discovered planets, piloted ships across the sea, are denied the most sacred rights of citizens, because, forsooth, we came not into this republic crowned with the dignity of manhood!... Now, gentlemen, we would fain know by what authority you have disfranchised one-half of the people of this state?... Would that the men who can sanction a constitution so opposed to the genius of this government, who can enact and execute laws so degrading to womankind, had sprung, Minerva-like, from the brains of their fathers, that the matrons of this republic need not blush to own their sons!... Again we demand in criminal cases, that most sacred of all rights, trial by a jury of our own peers. The establishment of trial by jury is of so early a date that its beginning is lost in antiquity; but the right of trial by a jury of one’s own peers is a great, progressive step of advanced civilization.... Would it not, in woman’s hour of trial at the bar, be some consolation to see that she was surrounded by the wise and virtuous of her own sex; by those who had known the depth of a mother’s love and the misery of a lover’s falsehood; to know that to these she could make her confession, and from them receive her sentence? If so, then listen to our just demands and make such a change in your laws as will secure to every woman tried in your courts, an impartial jury. At this moment among the hundreds of women who are shut up in the prisons of this state, not one has enjoyed that most sacred of all her rights――that right which you would die to defend for yourselves――trial by a jury of one’s peers.

(After referring to the law relating to woman’s inability to
make contracts; to own property and to control the property
of her children after her husband’s death (except by special
provision in his will); the inability of the wife to protect
the family property against the drunken husband; her inability
to prevent her children from being bound out for a term of
years against her express wishes,――Mrs. Stanton closes her
address in the following words:)

For all these, then, we speak. If to this long list you add all the laboring women, who are loudly demanding remuneration for their unending toil――those women who teach in our seminaries, academies and common schools for a miserable pittance, the widows, who are taxed without mercy; the unfortunate ones in our work-houses, poor-houses and prisons; who are they that we do not now represent? But a small class of fashionable butterflies, who, through the short summer days, seek the sunshine and the flowers; but the cool breezes of autumn and the hoary frosts of winter will soon chase all these away; then; they too will need and seek protection, and through other lips demand, in their turn, justice and equity at your hands.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

FRANCES E. WILLARD.

THE ORGANIZER AND HEAD OF THE W. C. T. U.

WITH the latter years of this century a new power has made itself felt in the world――the power of organized womanhood. Fifty years ago such a body as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was not only unknown, but impossible; and fifty years ago the woman who has done more than any other to bring it into being was a bright, healthy child of five years, living at Oberlin, Ohio, whither her father and mother had moved from Monroe County, New York, where she was born in September, 1839. In 1846 there was another move westward, this time to Forest Home, near Janesville, Wisconsin. Here Miss Willard spent twelve years, in which she grew from a child to a woman. She had wise parents, who gave free rein to the romping, freedom-loving girl, and let her grow up “near to nature’s heart.” She could ride a horse or fight a prairie fire “just as well as a man.”

After twelve years of life on Wisconsin prairies, the Willard family moved to Evanston, on the shore of Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago. Here Miss Willard began her work as a teacher, which she pursued in different institutions until 1870, when she was chosen president of Evanston College for Ladies. This place she filled until 1874, when she finally gave up teaching to enter upon a new and still larger work.

In 1873 occurred in Ohio the memorable “Women’s Crusade” against the rum shops. Bands of devoted women besieged the saloons for days and weeks together, entreating the saloon-keepers to cease selling liquor, praying and singing hymns incessantly in bar-rooms or on the sidewalks, until the men who kept them agreed to close them up, and in many cases emptied barrels of liquor into the gutters. This movement at once arrested Miss Willard’s attention. She saw in it the germ of a mighty power for good. She resigned her position as president of the college at Evanston, and threw all her energies into the anti-liquor movement. With her customary thoroughness she entered upon a systematic study of the subject of intemperance and the sale of liquor, and of the different measures which had been undertaken to abate this mighty evil. She sought the counsel of Neal Dow and other leaders in the temperance cause. She joined in the crusade against liquor-selling in Pittsburgh, kneeling in prayer on the sawdust-covered floors of the saloons, and leading the host in singing “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and “Rock of Ages,” in strains which awed and melted the hearts of the multitude thronging the streets. The result of her work was a determination to combine in one mighty organization the many separate bands of women temperance workers which had sprung up over the country; and this was achieved in the autumn of 1874, in the organization at Cleveland of that wonderful body, the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The resolution which was adopted at that meeting, written by Miss Willard herself, beautifully expresses the spirit in which they entered upon the work. It read as follows:――

“_Resolved_, That, recognizing that our cause is and will be
contested by mighty, determined, and relentless forces, we will,
trusting in Him who is the Prince of Peace, meet argument with
argument, misjudgment with patience, denunciation with kindness,
and all our difficulties and dangers with prayer.”

From that time Miss Willard’s life is the history of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Like the “handful of corn in the tops of the mountains,” all over this and in other lands it has taken root and grown until the fruit does indeed “shake like Lebanon.” In almost every corner of the United States is a subordinate organization of some sort, a local union, a children’s band, a young woman’s circle, or perhaps all of these. It has built the great “Temperance Temple,” one of the largest of the immense business buildings in Chicago. It has organized a large publishing business, from whose busy presses temperance literature is constantly being circulated in all parts of the country. It has by its political power made and unmade governors, senators, and representatives; and it has done much to hasten the time when women shall take an equal share in the government of church and state. In all this work the head and guiding spirit has been Frances E. Willard.

Overwork has of late somewhat impaired her health, and made travel and rest abroad necessary. But in whatever corner of the world she may dwell, there is always a warm corner kept for her in the many thousand hearts and homes that have been cheered and brightened by her work “for God and home and native land.”

Miss Willard’s friend and co-worker, Hannah Whitall Smith, says of her: “Miss Willard has been to me the embodiment of all that is lovely and good and womanly and strong and noble and tender in human nature. She has done more to enlarge our sympathies, widen our outlook, and develop our gifts, than any man or any other woman of our time.”

* * * * *

HOME PROTECTION.

(FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN PHILADELPHIA, 1876.)

LONGER ago than I shall tell, my father returned one night to the far-off Wisconsin home where I was reared, and sitting by my mother’s chair, with a child’s attentive ear I listened to their words. He told us of the news that day had brought about Neal Dow, and the great fight for Prohibition down in Maine, and then he said: “I wonder if poor, rum-cursed Wisconsin will ever get a law like that?” And mother rocked awhile in silence, in the dear old chair I love, and then she gently said: “Yes, Josiah, there’ll be such a law all over the land some day, when women vote.”

My father had never heard her say as much before. He was a great conservative; so he looked tremendously astonished, and replied, in his keen, sarcastic voice: “And pray, how will you arrange it so that women shall vote?” Mother’s chair went to and fro a little faster for a minute, and then, looking not into his face, but into the flickering flames of the grate, she slowly answered: “Well, I say to you, as the Apostle Paul said to his jailor: ‘You have put us into prison, we being Romans, and you must come and take us out.’”

That was a seed-thought in a girl’s brain and heart. Years passed on, in which nothing more was said upon this dangerous theme. My brother grew to manhood, and soon after he was twenty-one years old he went with father to vote. Standing by the window, a girl of sixteen years, a girl of simple, homely fancies, not at all strong-minded, and altogether ignorant of the world, I looked out as they drove away, my father and brother, and as I looked I felt a strange ache in my heart, and tears sprang to my eyes. Turning to my sister Mary, who stood beside me, I saw that the dear little innocent seemed wonderfully sober, too. I said, “Don’t you wish that we could go with them when we are old enough? Don’t we love our country just as well as they do?” and her little frightened voice piped out: “Yes, of course we ought. Don’t I know that; but you mustn’t tell a soul――not mother, even; we should be called strong-minded.”

In all the years since then, I have kept those things, and many others like them, and pondered them in my heart; but two years of struggle in this temperance reform have shown me, as they have ten thousand other women, so clearly and so impressively, my duty, that I have passed the Rubicon of Silence, and am ready for any battle that shall be involved in this honest declaration of the faith that is within me. “Fight behind masked batteries a little longer,” whisper good friends and true. So I have been fighting hitherto; but it is a style of warfare altogether foreign to my temperament and mode of life. Reared on the prairies, I seemed pre-determined to join the ♦cavalry force in this great spiritual war, and I must tilt a free lance henceforth on the splendid battlefield of this reform; where the earth shall soon be shaken by the onset of contending hosts, where legions of valiant soldiers are deploying; where to the grand encounter marches to-day a great army, gentle of mien and mild of utterance, but with hearts for any fate; where there are trumpets and bugles calling strong souls onward to a victory which Heaven might envy, and

“Where, behind the dim Unknown,
Standeth GOD within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own.”

♦ “calvary” replaced with “cavalry”

I thought that women ought to have the ballot as I paid the hard-earned taxes upon my mother’s cottage home――but I never said as much――somehow the motive did not command my heart. For my own sake, I had not courage, but I have for thy sake, dear native land, for thy necessity is as much greater than mine as thy transcendant hope is greater than the personal interest of thy humble child. For love of you, heart-broken wives, whose tremulous lips have blessed me; for love of you, sweet mothers, who in the cradle’s shadow kneel this night, beside your infant sons; and you, sorrowful little children, who listen at this hour, with faces strangely old, for him whose footsteps frighten you; for love of you, have I thus spoken.