Volume I Part 82 (1/2)

We are not doing anything new. There is no fanaticism about it.

We are merely extending the area of liberty--nothing else. We have made great progress. The law pa.s.sed at the last session of the New York Legislature grants, in fact, the whole question. The moment you grant us anything, we have gained the whole. You can not stop with an inconsistent statute-book. A man is uneasy who is inconsistent. As Thomas Fuller says, ”You can not make one side of the face laugh, and the other cry!” You can not have one-half your statute-book Jewish, and the other Christian; one-half of the statute-book Oriental, the other Saxon. You have granted that woman may be hung, therefore you must grant that woman may vote. You have granted that she may be taxed, therefore, on republican principles, you must grant that she ought to have a voice in fixing the laws of taxation--and this is, in fact, all that we claim--the whole of it.

Now, I want to consider some of the objections that are made to this claim. Men say, ”Woman is not fit to vote; she does not know enough; she has not sense enough to vote.” I take this idea of the ballot as the Gibraltar of our claim, for this reason, because I am speaking in a democracy; I am speaking under republican inst.i.tutions. The rule of despotism is that one cla.s.s is made to protect the other; that the rich, the n.o.ble, the educated are a sort of probate court, to take care of the poor, the ignorant, and the common cla.s.ses. Our fathers got rid of all that. They knocked it on the head by the simple principle, that no cla.s.s is safe, unless government is so arranged that each cla.s.s has in its own hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics. The Briton says to the poor man, ”Be content; I am worth five millions, and I will protect you.” And America says, ”Thank you, sir; I had rather take care of myself!”--and that is the essence of democracy. (Applause). It is the corner-stone of progress, also; because, the moment you have admitted that poor ignorant heart as an element of the government, able to mold your inst.i.tutions, those five millions of dollars, feeling that their cradle is not safe and their life is in peril, unless that heart is bulwarked with education and informed with morality, selfishness dictates that wealth and education should do its utmost to educate poverty and hold up weakness--and that is the philosophy of democratic inst.i.tutions.

(Applause). I am speaking in a republic which admits the principle that the poor are not to be protected by the rich, but to have the means of protecting themselves. So, too, the ignorant; so, too, races. The Irish are not to trust to the sense of justice in the Saxon; the German is not to trust to the native-born citizen; the Catholic is not to trust to the Protestant; but all sects, all cla.s.ses, are to hold in their own hands the scepter--the American scepter--of the ballot, which protects each cla.s.s. We claim it, therefore, for woman. The reply is, that woman has not got sense enough. If she has not, so much the more shame for your public-schools--educate her! For you will not say that woman naturally has not mind enough. If G.o.d did not give her mind enough, then you are brutes, for you say to her: ”Madam, you have sense enough to earn your own living--don't come to us!” You make her earn her own bread, and, if she has sense enough to do that, she has enough to say whether Fernando Wood or Governor Morgan shall take one cent out of every hundred to pay for fireworks. When you hold her up in both hands, and say, ”Let me work for you! Don't move one of your dainty fingers! We will pour wealth into your lap, and be ye clothed in satin and velvet, every daughter of Eve!”--then you will be consistent in saying that woman has not sense enough to vote. But if she has sense enough to work, to depend for her bread on her work, she has sense enough to vote....

But men say it would be very indelicate for woman to go to the ballot-box or sit in the Legislature. Well, what would she see there? Why, she would see men. (Laughter). She sees men now. In ”Cranford Village,” that sweet little sketch by Mrs. Gaskill, one of the characters says, ”I know these men--my father was a man.”

(Laughter). I think every woman can say the same. She meets men now; she could meet nothing but men at the ballot-box, or, if she meets brutes, they ought not to be there. (Applause). Indelicate for her to go to the ballot-box!--but you may walk up and down Broadway any time from nine o'clock in the morning until nine at night, and you will find about equal numbers of men and women crowding that thoroughfare, which is never still. You may get into an omnibus--women are there, crowding us out, sometimes.

(Laughter). You can not go into a theater without being crowded to death by two women to one man. If you go to the lyceum, woman is there. I have stood on this very platform, and seen as many women as men before me, and one time, at least, when they could not have met any worse men at the ballot-box than they met in this hall. (Laughter and applause). You may go to church, and you will find her facing men of all cla.s.ses--ignorant and wise, saints and sinners. I do not know anywhere that woman is not. It is too late now to say that she can not go to the ballot-box. Go back to Turkey, and shut her up in a harem; go back to Greece, and shut her up in the private apartments of women; go back to the old Oriental phases of civilization, that never allowed woman's eyes to light a man's pathway, unless he owned her, and you are consistent; but you see, we have broken down the bulwark, centuries ago. You know they used to let a man be hung in public, and said that it was for the sake of the example. They got ashamed of it, and banished the gallows to the jail-yard, and allowed only twelve men to witness an execution. It is too late to say that you hang men for the example, because the example you are ashamed to have public can not be a wholesome example. So it is with this question of woman. You have granted so much, that you have left yourselves no ground to stand on. My dear, delicate friend, you are out of your sphere; you ought to be in Turkey. My dear, religiously, scrupulously fas.h.i.+onable, exquisitely anxious hearer, fearful lest your wife, or daughter, or sister shall be sullied by looking into your neighbors' faces at the ballot-box, you do not belong to the century that has ballot-boxes. You belong to the century of Tamerlane and Timour the Tartar; you belong to China, where the women have no feet, because it is not meant that they shall walk. You belong anywhere but in America; and if you want an answer, walk down Broadway, and meet a hundred thousand petticoats, and they are a hundred thousand answers; for if woman can walk the streets, she can go to the ballot-box, and any reason of indelicacy that forbids the one covers the other.

Men say, ”Why do you come here? What good are you going to do?

You do nothing but talk.” Oh, yes, we have done a great deal besides talk! But suppose we had done nothing but talk? I saw a poor man the other day, and said he (speaking of a certain period in his life), ”I felt very friendless and alone--I had only G.o.d with me”; and he seemed to think that was not much. And so thirty millions of thinking, reading people are constantly throwing it in the teeth of reformers that they rely upon talk! What is talk?

Why, it is the representative of brains. And what is the characteristic glory of the nineteenth century? That it is ruled by brains, and not by muscle; that rifles are gone by, and ideas have come in; and, of course, in such an era, talk is the fountain-head of all things. But we have done a great deal. In the first place, you will meet dozens of men who say, ”Oh, woman's right to property, the right of the wife to her own earnings, we grant that; we always thought that; we have had that idea for a dozen years.” I met a man the other day in the cars, and we read the statute of your New York Legislature. ”Why,” said he, ”that is nothing; I have a.s.sented to that for these fifteen years.” All I could say to that was this: ”This agitation has either given you the idea, or it has given you the courage to utter it, for n.o.body ever heard it from you until to-day.” ...

What do we toil for? Why, my friends, I do not care much whether a woman actually goes to the ballot-box and votes--that is a slight matter; and I shall not wait, either, to know whether every woman in this audience wants to vote. Some of you were saying to-day, in these very seats, coming here out of mere curiosity, to see what certain fanatics could find to say, ”Why, I don't want any more rights; I have got rights enough.” Many a lady, whose husband is what he ought to be, whose father is what fathers ought to be, feeling no want unsupplied, is ready to say, ”I have all the rights I want.” So the daughter of Louis Sixteenth, in the troublous time of 1791, when somebody told her that the people were starving in the streets of Paris, exclaimed, ”What fools! I would eat bread first!” Thus wealth, comfort, and ease say, ”I have rights enough.” n.o.body doubted it, madam! But the question is not of you; the question is of some houseless wife of a drunkard; the question is of some ground-down daughter of toil, whose earnings are filched from her by the rum debts of a selfishness which the law makes to have a right over her, in the person of a husband. The question is not of you, it is of some friendless woman of twenty, standing at the door of the world, educated, capable, desirous of serving her time and her race, and saying, ”Where shall I use these talents? How shall I earn bread?” And orthodox society, cabined and cribbed in St.

Paul, cries out, ”Go sew, jade! We have no other channel for you.

Go to the needle, or wear yourself to death as a school-mistress.” We come here to endeavor to convince you, and so to shape our inst.i.tutions that public opinion, following in the wake, shall be willing to open channels for the agreeable and profitable occupation of women as much as for men. People blame the s.h.i.+rt-makers and tailors because they pay two cents where they ought to pay fifty. It is not their fault. They are nothing but the weatherc.o.c.ks, and society is the wind. Trade does not grow out of the Sermon on the Mount; merchants never have any hearts, they have only ledgers; two per cent. a month is their Sermon on the Mount, and a balance on the wrong side of the ledger is their demonstration. (Laughter). n.o.body finds fault with them for it. Everything according to the law of its life. A man pays as much for making s.h.i.+rts or coats as it is necessary to pay, and he would be a fool and a bankrupt if he paid any more.

He needs only a hundred workwomen; there are a thousand women standing at his door saying, ”Give us work; and if it is worth ten cents to do it, we will do it for two”; and a hundred get the work, and nine hundred are turned into the street, to drag down this city into the pit that it deserves. (Loud applause).

Now, what is the remedy? To take that tailor by the throat, and gibbet him in _The New York Tribune_? Not at all; it does the women no good, and he does not deserve it. I will tell you what is to be done. Behind the door at which those women stand asking for work, on one side stands an orthodox disciple of St. Paul, and on the other a dainty exquisite; and the one says, it is not religious, and the other says, it is not fas.h.i.+onable, for woman to be anything but a drudge. Now, strangle the one in his own creed, and smother the other in his own perfumes, and give to those thousand women freedom to toil. Let public opinion only grant that, like their thousand brothers, those thousand women may go out, and wherever they find work to do, do it, without a stigma being set upon them. Let the educated girl of twenty have the same liberty to use the pen, to practice law, to write books, to attend the telegraph, to go into the artist's studio, to serve in a library, to tend in a gallery of art, to do anything that her brother can do. St. Paul is dead and rotten, and ought to be forgotten--(Applause, laughter, and a few hisses)--so far as this doctrine goes, mark you! for his is the n.o.blest figure in all history, except that of Christ, the broadest and most masterly intellect of any age; but he was a Jew and not a Christian; he lived under Jewish civilization and not ours, and was speaking by his own light, and not by inspiration of G.o.d.

This is all we claim; and we claim the ballot for this reason; the moment you give woman power, that moment men will see to it that she has the way cleared for her. There are two sources of power: one is civil, the ballot; the other is physical, the rifle. I do not believe that the upper cla.s.ses--education, wealth, aristocracy, conservatism--the men that are in--ever yielded, except to fear. I think the history of the race shows that the upper cla.s.ses never granted a privilege to the lower out of love. As Jeremy Bentham says, ”The upper cla.s.ses never yielded a privilege without being bullied out of it.” When man rises in revolution, with the sword in his right hand, trembling wealth and conservatism say, ”What do you want? Take it; but grant me my life.” The Duke of Tuscany, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has told us, swore to a dozen const.i.tutions when the Tuscans stood armed in the streets of Florence, and he forgot them when the Austrians came in and took the rifles out of the Tuscans' hands. You must force the upper cla.s.ses to do justice by physical or some other power. The age of physical power is gone, and we want to put ballots into the hands of women....

Political economy puts in every man's hand, by the labor of half a day, money enough to be drunk a week. There is one temptation, dragging down the possibility of self-government into the pit of imbruted humanity; and on the other side, is that hideous problem of modern civilized life--prost.i.tution--born of orthodox scruples and aristocratic fastidiousness--born of that fastidious denial of the right of woman to choose her own work, and, like her brother, to satiate her ambition, her love of luxury, her love of material gratifications, by fair wages for fair work. As long as you deny it, as long as the pulpit covers with its fastidious orthodoxy this question from the consideration of the public, it is but a concealed brothel, although it calls itself an orthodox pulpit. (Applause and hisses). I know what I say; your hisses can not change it. Go, clean out the Gehenna of New York! (Applause).

Go, sweep the Augean stable that makes New York the lazar-house of corruption! You know that on one side or the other of these temptations lies very much of the evil of modern civilized life.

You know that before them, statesmans.h.i.+p folds its hands in despair. Here is a method by which to take care of at least one.

Give men fair wages, and ninety-nine out of a hundred will disdain to steal. The way to prevent dishonesty is to let every man have a field for his work, and honest wages; the way to prevent licentiousness is to give to woman's capacity free play.

Give to the higher powers activity, and they will choke down the animal. The man who loves thinking, disdains to be the victim of appet.i.te. It is a law of our nature. Give a hundred women honest wages for capacity and toil, and ninety-nine out of the hundred will disdain to win it by vice. _That_ is a cure for licentiousness. (Applause).

I wish to put into our civil life the element of woman's right to shape the laws, for all our social life copies largely from the statute-book. Let woman dictate at the capital, let her say to Wall Street, ”My votes on finance are to make stocks rise and fall,” and Wall Street will say to Columbia College, ”Open your cla.s.ses to woman; it needs be that she should learn.” The moment you give her the ballot, you take bonds of wealth and fas.h.i.+on and conservatism, that they will educate this power, which is holding their interest in its right hand. I want to spike the gun of selfishness; or rather, I want to double-shot the cannon of selfishness. Let Wall Street say, ”Look you! whether the New York Central stock shall have a toll placed upon it, whether my million shares shall be worth sixty cents in the market or eighty, depends upon whether certain women up there at Albany know the laws of trade and the secrets of political economy”--and Wall Street will say, ”Get out of the way, Dr. Adams!--absent yourself, Dr. Spring!--we don't care for Jewish prejudices; these women must have education!” (Loud applause). Show me the necessity in civil life, and I will find you forty thousand pulpits that will say St. Paul meant just that. (Renewed applause). Now, I am orthodox; I believe in the Bible; I reverence St. Paul; I believe his was the most masterly intellect that G.o.d ever gave to the race; I believe he was the connecting link, the bridge, by which the Asiatic and European mind were joined; I believe that Plato ministers at his feet; but, after all, he was a man, and not G.o.d. (Applause). He was limited, and made mistakes. You can not anchor this western continent to the Jewish footstool of St. Paul; and, after all, that is the difficulty--religious prejudice. It is not fas.h.i.+on--we shall beat it; it is not the fastidiousness of the exquisite--we shall smother it; it is the religious prejudice, borrowed from a mistaken interpretation of the New Testament. That is the real Gibraltar with which we are to grapple, and my argument with that is simply this: You left it when you founded a republic; you left it when you inaugurated Western civilization; we must grow out of one root.

Let me, in closing, show you, by one single anecdote, how mean a thing a man can be. You have heard of Mrs. Norton, ”the woman Byron,” as critics call her--the granddaughter of Sheridan, and the one on whose shoulders his mantle has rested--a genius by right of inheritance and by G.o.d's own gift. Perhaps you may remember that when the Tories wanted to break down the reform administration of Lord Melbourne, they brought her husband to feign to believe his wife unfaithful, and to sue her before a jury. He did so, brought an action, and an English jury said she was innocent; and his own counsel has since admitted, in writing, under his own signature, that during the time he prosecuted that trial, the Honorable Mr. Norton (for so he is in the Herald's Book) confessed all the time that he did not believe a word against his wife, and knew she was innocent. She is a writer. The profits of her books, by the law of England, belong to her husband. She has not lived with him--of course not, for she is a woman!--since that trial; but the brute goes every six months to John Murray, and eats the profits of the brain of the wife whom he tried to disgrace. (Loud cries of ”shame,” ”shame”). And the law of England says it is right; the orthodox pulpit says, ”If you change it, it will be the pulling down of the stars and St.

Paul.” I do not believe that the Honorable Mr. Norton is half as near to the mind of St. Paul as the Honorable Mrs. Norton. I go, therefore, for woman having her right to her brain, to her hands, to her toil, to her ballot. ”The tools to him that can use them”--and let G.o.d settle the rest. If He made it just that we should have democratic inst.i.tutions, then He made it just that everybody who is to suffer under the law should have a voice in making it; and if it is indelicate for woman to vote, then let Him stop making women (applause and laughter), because republicanism and such women are not consistent. I say it reverently; and I only say it to show you the absurdity. Why, my dear man and woman, we are not to help G.o.d govern the world by telling lies! He can take care of it Himself. If He made it just, you may be certain that He saw to it that it should be delicate; and you need not insert your little tiny roots of fastidious delicacy into the great giant rifts of G.o.d's world--they are only in the way. (Applause).

The first evening session was called to order at 7-1/2 o'clock. The President in the chair. The audience was very large, the hall being uncomfortably full, and the attention unremitting and profound. The most excellent order was preserved; the meeting, in this respect, furnis.h.i.+ng a marked and gratifying contrast with the evening sessions of the last two years at Mozart Hall.

Mrs. Rose, from the Business Committee, presented a series of resolutions[167], which were read by Miss Anthony. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first speaker of the evening. By particular request she gave the same address recently delivered before the Legislature at Albany, and was followed by Ernestine L. Rose with one of her logical and convincing arguments.

Susan B. Anthony then read the following letters:

LETTER FROM HON. GERRIT SMITH.

PETERBORO, _May 3, 1860_.

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON:

MY VERY DEAR COUSIN:--It is proper that one of the first letters which I write in my new life, should be to the cousin whose views are most in harmony with my own. I call it my new life, because I have come up into it from the gates of death. May it prove a new life also, in being a far better and n.o.bler one than that which I had hitherto lived!

I wake up with joy to see my old fellow-laborers still in their work of honoring G.o.d, in benefiting and blessing man. Your own zeal for truth is unabated. I see that you are still laboring to free the slave from his chains, and woman from her social, civil, and political disabilities; and to preserve both man and woman from defiling and debasing themselves with intoxicating liquors and tobacco. Precious reforms are these which have enlisted your powers! It is true that they do not cover the whole ground of religious duty. But it is also true that the religion, which, like the current one, opposes or ignores them all, is spurious; and so, too, that the religion which opposes or ignores any one of them is always sadly defective, if not always spurious.