Part 17 (1/2)

It seems to be a sort of charity to let a woman teach school. You say here that if a woman has a father, mother, or brother, or anybody to support her, she can not have a place in the Departments. In the city of Rochester they cannot let a married woman teach school because she has got a husband, and it is supposed he ought to support her. The women are working in the Departments, as everywhere else, for half price, and the only pretext, you tell us, for keeping women there is because the Government can economize by employing women for less money. The other day when I saw a newspaper item stating that the Government proposed to compensate Miss Josephine Meeker for all her bravery, heroism, and terrible sufferings by giving her a place in the Interior Department, it made my blood boil to the ends of my fingers and toes. To give that girl a chance to work in the Department; to do just as much work as a man, and pay her half as much, was a charity. That was a beneficence on the part of this grand Government to her. We want the ballot for bread. When we do equal work we want equal wages.

MRS. SAXON. California, in her recent convention, prohibits the Legislature hereafter from enacting any law for woman's suffrage, does it not?

MISS ANTHONY. I do not know. I have not seen the new const.i.tution.

MRS. SAXON. It does. The convention inserted a provision in the const.i.tution that the Legislature could not act upon the subject at all.

MISS ANTHONY. Everywhere that we have gone, Senators, to ask our right at the hands of any legislative or political body, we have been the subjects of ridicule. For instance, I went before the great national Democratic convention in New York, in 1868, as a delegate from the New York Woman Suffrage a.s.sociation, to ask that great party, now that it wanted to come to the front again, to put a genuine Jeffersonian plank in its platform, pledging the ballot to all citizens, women as well as men, should it come into power.

You may remember how Mr. Seymour ordered my pet.i.tion to be read, after looking at it in the most scrutinizing manner, when it was referred to the committee on resolutions, where it has slept the sleep of death from that day to this. But before the close of the convention a body of ignorant workingmen sent in a pet.i.tion clamoring for greenbacks, and you remember that the Democratic party bought those men by putting a solid greenback plank in the platform.

Everybody supposed they would nominate Pendleton, or some other man of p.r.o.nounced views, but instead of doing that they nominated Horatio Seymour, who stood on the fence, politically speaking. My friends, Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and women who have brains and education, women who are tax-payers, went there and pet.i.tioned for the practical application of the fundamental principles of our Government to one-half of the people. Those most ignorant workingmen, the vast ma.s.s of them foreigners, went there, and pet.i.tioned that that great political party should favor greenbacks. Why did they treat those workingmen with respect, and put a greenback plank in their platform, and only table us, and ignore us? Simply because the workingmen represented the power of the ballot. They could make or unmake the great Democratic party at that election. The women were powerless. We could be ridiculed and ignored with impunity, and so we were laughed at, and put on the table.

Then the Republicans went to Chicago, and they did just the same thing. They said the Government bonds must be paid in precisely the currency specified by the Congressional enactment, and Talleyrand himself could not have devised how not to say anything better than the Republicans did at Chicago on that question. Then they nominated a man who had not any financial opinions whatever, and who was not known, except for his military record, and they went into the campaign. Both those parties had this pet.i.tion from us.

I met a woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., a short time ago. She came to me one morning and told me about the obscene shows licensed in that city, and said that she thought of memorializing the Legislature. I said, ”Do; you can not do anything else; you are helpless, but you can pet.i.tion. Of course they will laugh at you.”

Notwithstanding, I drew up a pet.i.tion and she circulated it.

Twelve hundred of the best citizens signed that pet.i.tion, and the lady carried it to the Legislature, just as Mrs. Wallace took her pet.i.tion in the Indiana Legislature. They read it, laughed at it, and laid it on the table; and at the close of the session, by a unanimous vote, they retired in a solid body to witness the obscene show themselves. After witnessing it, they not only allowed the license to continue for that year, but they have licensed it every year from that day to this, against all the protests of the pet.i.tioners. [Laughter.]

SENATOR EDMUNDS. Do not think we are wanting in respect to you and the ladies here because you say something that makes us laugh.

MISS ANTHONY. You are not laughing at me; you are treating me respectfully, because you are hearing my argument; you are not asleep, not one of you, and I am delighted.

Now, I am going to tell you one other fact. Seven thousand of the best citizens of Illinois pet.i.tioned the Legislature of 1877 to give them the poor privilege of voting on the license question. A gentleman presented their pet.i.tion; the ladies were in the lobbies around the room. A gentleman made a motion that the president of the State a.s.sociation of the Christian Temperance Union be allowed to address the Legislature regarding the pet.i.tion of the memorialists, when a gentleman sprang to his feet, and said it was well enough for the honorable gentleman to present the pet.i.tion, and have it received and laid on the table, but ”for a gentleman to rise in his seat and propose that the valuable time of the honorable gentlemen of the Illinois Legislature should be consumed in discussing the nonsense of those women is going a little too far. I move that the sergeant-at-arms be ordered to clear the hall of the house of representatives of the mob;” referring to those Christian women. Now, they had had the lobbyists of the whisky ring in that Legislature for years and years, not only around it at respectful distances, but inside the bar, and n.o.body ever made a motion to clear the halls of the whisky mob there. It only takes Christian women to make a mob.

MRS. SAXON. We were treated extremely respectfully in Louisiana.

It showed plainly the temper of the convention when the present governor admitted that woman suffrage was a fact bound to come.

They gave us the privilege of having women on the school boards, but then the officers are appointed by men who are politicians.

MISS ANTHONY. I want to read a few words that come from good authority, for black men at least. I find here a little extract that I copied years ago from the Anti-Slavery Standard of 1870. As you know, Wendell Phillips was the editor of that paper at that time:

”A man with the ballot in his hand is the master of the situation.

He defines all his other rights; what is not already given him he takes.”

That is exactly what we want, Senators. The rights you have not already given us; we want to get in such a position that we can take them.

”The ballot makes every cla.s.s sovereign over its own fate.

Corruption may steal from a man his independence; capital may starve, and intrigue fetter him, at times; but against all these, his vote, intelligently and honestly cast, is, in the long run, his full protection. If, in the struggle, his fort surrenders, it is only because it is betrayed from within. No power ever permanently wronged a voting cla.s.s without its own consent.”

Senators, I want to ask of you that you will, by the law and parliamentary rules of your committee, allow us to agitate this question by publis.h.i.+ng this report and the report which you shall make upon our pet.i.tions, as I hope you will make a report. If your committee is so pressed with business that it can not possibly consider and report upon this question, I wish some of you would make a motion on the floor of the Senate that a special committee be appointed to take the whole question of the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women into consideration, and that that committee shall have nothing else to do. This off-year of politics, when there is nothing to do but to try how not to do it (politically, I mean, I am not speaking personally), is the best time you can have to consider the question of woman suffrage, and I ask you to use your influence with the Senate to have it specially attended to this year. Do not make us come here thirty years longer. It is twelve years since the first time I came before a Senate committee. I said then to Charles Sumner, if I could make the honorable Senator from Ma.s.sachusetts believe that I feel the degradation and the humiliation of disfranchis.e.m.e.nt precisely as he would if his fellows had adjudged him incompetent from any cause whatever from having his opinion counted at the ballot-box we should have our right to vote in the twinkling of an eye.

REMARKS BY MRS. SARA A. SPENCER, OF WAs.h.i.+NGTON.

Mrs. SPENCER. Congress printed 10,000 copies of its proceedings concerning the memorial services of a dead man, Professor Henry.

It cost me three months of hard work to have 3,000 copies of our arguments last year before the Committee on Privileges and Elections printed for 10,000,000 living women. I ask that the committee will have printed 10,000 copies of this report.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee have no power to order the printing.