Part 15 (1/2)
There were many women and a few n.o.ble men who were deeply stirred over the fate of our memorial. I wrote to Miss Belle Kearney just after this hearing: ”You are needed right here, this very day, to speak what the women want said for them now that the other speakers are gone away. I am so dead tired and heart-sore that I almost wish I were lying quiet in my grave waiting for the resurrection! G.o.d help all women, young and old!
They are a man-neglected, G.o.d-forgotten lot, here in Louisiana, when they ask simply for a reasonable recognition, and justice under the Const.i.tution now being constructed, and under which they must be governed and pay taxes. We pray in vain, work always in vain. How that grand old martyr, Susan Anthony, can still hold out is a marvel. The Convention has apparently forgotten the women. They discuss the needs of every man and his qualification for the ballot. Yet, good women brought such men into the world to keep other women in subjection and minority forever!--still, they love that sinner, man, better than their own souls--and I know they will continue that way to the end. But it is hard lines to be kept waiting. The dead can wait, but we cannot! Oh, Lord, how long!”
Once again, however, it was proven that nothing is ever quite so bad as it seems, for the convention did give the right to vote to all taxpaying women--a mere crumb--but a prophetic-crumb. This much being gained led, in 1899, to the organization, through the initiative of the Era Club, of the ”Woman's League for Sewerage and Drainage.” That variable and imponderable quant.i.ty, ”influence,” now had added to its much invoked ”womanly sweetness”--_power_--a power which could not only be felt but which would have to be counted.
Mrs. Ordway tells in a little review of the movement, that several months previous to the election many of those who voted would have scouted the idea that they should do so unwomanly a deed;--voting belonged to men.
Many did not even know that they had a right to vote. The question proposed to them was one affecting the health and prosperity of New Orleans--whether or not they were willing to be additionally taxed in order to secure pure water and an effective system of drainage. There were about 10,000 taxpaying women in the city, many of them small householders, owning the little homes in which they dwelt. Owing to New Orleans being peculiarly situated below the level of the Mississippi river, and to the fact that there is no underground drainage, many parts of the city are inundated during heavy rains. There was much at stake. No wonder the women were interested, and that parlor and ma.s.s meetings were held, in which women were not only invited but urged--even by the mayor and other prominent men--to come forward with their votes. When election day arrived, women found that they did want the franchise, one-third of the votes cast being contributed by them. After months of hard work and a house-to-house canva.s.s for signatures of taxpaying women, who would vote personally or by proxy, the battle was won, as was universally conceded, by the energy of the woman's ballot.
Very many men and women soon realized the need of full suffrage for women, in a quickly succeeding campaign for the election of munic.i.p.al officers who would properly carry out the people's intent for sewerage and drainage. Though they could not vote every courtesy and respect was accorded the women, and their influence was appealed to by the respective sides. The day has dawned for woman's full enfranchis.e.m.e.nt in Louisiana.
In her farewell address after the victory the president of the Woman's League, Miss Kate M. Gordon,--president of the Era Club,--who had led the women's forces with an intelligent courage and dignity that won universal admiration, stated as follows: ”At one time the success of this great work was seriously threatened by an element of conservatism raising the cry, 'It is simply suffrage movement!' While it is hard to disa.s.sociate suffrage from any work which depends on a vote for success, and while the word, defined by Worcester, means 'a vote, the act of voting,' yet it seems a poor commentary on the intelligence, patriotism and even sagacity of that conservatism to raise the question when the life of a city was trembling in the balance, and that city their home.
”In justice to women holding suffrage views, I ask are they to be treated as a cla.s.s apart because they believe intelligence and not s.e.x should be the determining power in government? Is there any wrong in believing that power added to influence would be a factor in creating and enforcing laws for a higher moral standard? Where is the woman, who, holding the power, would not use it to enforce the laws for the protection of minors, and to give to character at least the same protection given to property? Where is the woman who would withhold her power from creating and enforcing a law to read; 'Equal pay for equal work'? Is it unwomanly to believe the wife's wages should belong to the wife who earned them? Is it unnatural to resent being cla.s.sed with idiots, insane, criminal and minors--and so on, _ad infinitum_?
”The Woman's League contributed with no sacrifice of womanliness, but with a sacrifice of personal comfort, to an education against apathy and indifference, to the G.o.dlike charity of helping men to help themselves--the keynote of physical as well as moral regeneration. As women throw the power of your influence against the dangers of proxies.
The proxy vote is not a personal expression; it is giving manifold power into the hands of one individual, and therefore un-American.”
This wide-awake Era Club has now a pet.i.tion before the trustees of Tulane University praying that this progressive inst.i.tution will no longer refuse to open its Medical School to women. It also memorialized its last legislature for the right to be accorded to women to witness a legal doc.u.ment; for, incredible as it may seem, there still remains among Louisiana statutes, as a survival of the French habit of thought, toward females, the disability of a woman to sign a paper as a witness.
Soon after the New Orleans Exposition, Miss Susan B. Anthony wrote me, while I was president of the Louisiana Woman's Christian Temperance Union: ”I long to see the grand hosts of the Temperance women of this nation standing as a unit demanding the one and only weapon that can smite to the heart the liquor-traffic. The Kansas women's first vote has sent worse terror to the soul of the whisky alliance of the nation than it ever knew before.” The temperance hosts through bitter defeats long ago learned that they cannot carry their cause without the ballot, and ”as a unit” they may be said to desire it and to work for it. They know Miss Anthony spoke words of soberness and experience. The first day there was a great debate, in the Const.i.tutional Convention of our neighbor State, on methods of suffrage, about the middle of the day some one met a pale, haggard prince of liquor dealers rus.h.i.+ng excitedly from the gates of the Capital. ”My G.o.d!” he exclaimed, ”if they let the women in our business is dead! We must do something!”--and he hurried to convene his partners in iniquity.
What they did is not proclaimed; but immediately nearly every newspaper in the State began to pour in gatling-gun volleys against enfranchising women.
About the time Miss Anthony wrote me respecting Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton coming to lecture. ”I do not want her,” she said, ”to be translated before all of your splendid New Orleans women have seen and heard her.” And so I feel about Miss Anthony, I do not want her ”to be translated” until she has seen the Louisiana woman vote as unrestrictedly as the Louisiana man.
But I should like to ask this question of those men and women--and there are many such--who are convinced of the righteousness of the women's ballot, but who do not come forward and strengthen the struggling vanguard of a great movement,--
”Why is it that you choose to blow Your bugle in the rear?
The helper is the man divine Who tells us something new;-- The man who tells us something new And points the road ahead; Whose tent is with the forward few-- And not among the dead.
You spy not what the future holds, A-bugling in the rear.
You're harking back to times outworn, A-bugling in the rear.”
CHAPTER XX.
”THE BEST IS YET TO BE.”
Why should women regret the golden period of youth? There are things finer and more precious than inexperience and a fair face. When a friend of Petrarch bemoaned the age revealed in his white temples, he replied: ”Nay, be sorry rather that ever I was young, to be a fool.” Joyous and lovely as youth is--and it always seems a pity to be old in the springtime when everything else is young--how many of us would be willing to be again in the bonds of crudities, the embarra.s.sments, the unreasoning agonies, and to the false values youth ever sets upon life? Youth longs for and cries out after happiness; it would wrest it from the world as its divine birthright; it does not understand itself or anybody else; and the pity of it all is that youth is gone before it has grasped the fact that its chief concern is not to be loved but to be lovely.
Age is content with comfort. ”Content,” did I say? Nay, old folks are always wanting more and more comfort, until they seem out of harmony with surrounding objects and circ.u.mstances. I think it is Ruskin who says that there are ”much sadder days than the early ones; not sadder in a n.o.ble, deep way, but in a dim, wearied way--the way of _ennui_ and jaded intellect. The Romans had their life interwoven with white and purple; the life of the aged is one seamless stuff of brown.” And this is true, so far as beauty of existence is expressed by variety.
Perhaps there are few periods of keener suffering to any one than when he first realizes that he is growing old. This experience is none the less sharp for being universal; but it comes with peculiar poignancy to a woman, because of the fict.i.tious estimate that has always been placed upon her good looks. They are her highest stock in the market, not through her own valuation but by man's. If she has never had beauty, still less can she afford to lose any charm which youth alone confers. This pain of loss with the majority of women is not an expression of mere vanity, but--as with a man--it arises from a fear of waning power, the dread of inability any longer to be a factor in the world's value; from the horror of having no longer an aptness to attract, of being no more desired, of filling no true place in life--any or all of which is enough to make a soul cry out for death.
That there is something wrong with our social structure is not more surely indicated than by the present demand in all fields of labor for only the young man or woman. The span of life is perceptibly lengthening for most civilized peoples; yet, with increase of days, old age is set forward instead of being proportionally postponed. Thirty years ago it was considered that a man must make his success by fifty years of age, if he made it at all; now it is said that unless a man has made his mark at thirty he is already written down ”a back number.” No profession to-day, perhaps, chronicles so many tragedies as that of the teacher; for school and college give the preference to the young applicant who has yet to prove if he have the making of a teacher in him, while rejected experience dies of a broken heart. Not long since, it was stated in _The Outlook_, in reference to the ministry, that a man over forty years old was not wanted to fill important charges. Last year I heard a conversation between a young missionary from China and a woman of superior attainments, a wide knowledge of life, high spiritual culture, and who was not yet old; who, moreover, was one of the sort who never grow old. They talked of the advisability of older women entering the foreign mission field. The missionary advised that the other make application to the Board, but frankly stated that the missionaries abroad did not wish anybody of her age because she would have established opinions which might conflict with the younger members' control of the mission. The church no doubt can well account for its preference for young people; but it has seemed to me rather hard on the heathen that they must be the subjects of untested enthusiasm, however ”consecrated” and zealous it may be.
The tendency to fasten old age prematurely on our people by the rejection of practical knowledge for the brawn of youth, seems to find an explanation mainly in the all-prevailing commercialism of the day. The herding of productive industries in syndicates and trusts has destroyed the individual in the industrial world: it is not the man who is employed, but ”the hand”--so many hands in the office, so many at the machine; and these are ”put on or knocked off” according to the sum totals of the ledger. Manhood is the football of the dividend, and grows less and less as the latter grows more and more. Everywhere it is the same; the young with few ties and responsibilities are most plastic to the interests of the business; p.a.w.ns have widest range of movement, and whoever can cover the most ground for the least money is the person in demand.