Part 13 (1/2)
The _Visiter_ had a large list of subscribers in Salem, Ohio, and in the summer of '49 a letter from a lady came to me saying, that the _Visiter_ had stirred up so much interest in women's rights that a meeting had been held and a committee appointed to get up a woman's rights convention, and she, as chairman of that committee, invited me to preside. I felt on reading this as if I had had a douche bath; then, as a lawyer might have felt who had carried a case for a corporation through the lower court, and when expecting it up before the supreme bench, had learned that all his clients were coming in to address the court on the merits of the case.
By the pecks of letters I had been receiving, I had learned that there were thousands of women with grievances, and no power to state them or to discriminate between those which could be reached by law and those purely personal; and that the love of privacy with which the whole s.e.x was accredited was a mistake, since most of my correspondents literally agonized to get before the public. Publicity! publicity! was the persistent demand. To meet the demand, small papers, owned and edited by women, sprang up all over the land, and like Jonah's gourd, perished in a night. Ruskin says to be n.o.ble is to be known, and at that period there was a great demand on the part of women for their full allowance of n.o.bility; but not one in a hundred thought of merit as a means of reaching it. No use waiting to learn to put two consecutive sentences together in any connected form, or for an idea or the power of expressing it. One woman was printing her productions, and why should not all the rest do likewise? They had so long followed some leader like a flock of sheep, that now they would rush through the first gap into newspaperdom.
I declined the presidential honors tendered me, on the ground of inability to fill the place; and earnestly entreated the movers to reconsider and give up the convention, saying:
”It will open a door through which fools and fanatics will pour in, and make the cause ridiculous.”
The answer was that it was too late to recede. The convention was held, and justified my worst fears. When I criticised it, the reply was:
”If you had come and presided, as we wished you to do, the result would have been different. You started the movement and now refuse to lead it, but cannot stop it.”
The next summer a convention was held in Akron, Ohio, and I attended, hoping to modify the madness, but failed utterly, by all protests I could make, to prevent the introduction by the committee on resolutions of this:
”_Resolved_, that the difference in s.e.x is one of education.”
A man stood behind the president to prompt her, but she could not catch his meaning, and when confusion came, she rose and made a little speech, in which she stated that she knew nothing of parliamentary rules, and when consenting to preside had resolved, if there were trouble, to say to the convention as she did to her boys at home: ”Quit behaving yourselves!”
This brought down the house, but brought no order, and she sat down, smiling, a perfect picture of self-complaisance.
People thought the press unmerciful in its ridicule of that convention, but I felt in it all there was much forbearance. No words could have done justice to the occasion. It was so much more ridiculous than ridicule, so much more absurd than absurdity. The women on whom that ridicule was heaped were utterly incapable of self-defense, or unconscious of its need. The ma.s.s of n.o.bility seekers seemed content to get before the public by any means, and to wear its most stinging sarcasms as they would a new dress cap.
In those days I reserved all my hard words for men, and in my notice of the convention mildly suggested that it would have been better had Mrs.
Oliver Johnson been made president, as she had great executive ability and a good knowledge of parliamentary rules. This suggestion was received by the president as an insult never to be forgiven, and in the _Visiter_ defended herself against it. I replied, and in the discussion which followed she argued that the affairs of each family should be so arranged that the husband and wife would be breadwinner and housekeeper by turns, day or oven half day about. He should go to business in the forenoon, then in the afternoon take care of baby and permit her to go to the office, shop or warehouse from which came the family supplies.
I took the ground that baby would be apt to object, and that in our family the rule would not work, since I could not put a log on the mill-carriage, and the water would be running to waste all my day or half-day as bread-winner.
About the same time, Mrs. Stanton published a series of articles in Mrs.
Bloomer's paper, the _Lily_, in which she taught that it was right for a mother to make baby comfortable, lay him in his crib, come out, lock the door, and leave him to develop his lungs by crying or cooing, as he might decide, while mamma improved her mind and attended to her public and social duties.
Against such head winds, it was hard for my poor little craft to make progress in a.s.serting the right of women to influence great public questions.
For something over twenty years, after that Akron meeting, I did not see a woman's rights convention, and in all have seen but five. Up to 1876 there had been no material improvement in them, if those I saw were a fair specimen. Their holders have always seemed to me like a woman who should undertake at a state fair to run a sewing machine, under pretense of advertising it, while she had never spent an hour in learning its use.
However, those conventions have probably saved the republic. From the readiness with which Pennsylvania legislators responded to the pet.i.tion of three of four women, acting without concert, in the matter of property rights, it is probable that in a fit of generosity the men of the United States would have enfranchised its women _en ma.s.se;_ and the government now staggering under the ballots of ignorant, irresponsible men, must have gone down under the additional burden of the votes which would have been thrown upon it, by millions of ignorant, irresponsible women. Before that time, the unanswerable argument of Judge Hurlbut had been published, and had made a deep impression on the minds of thinking men. Had this been followed by the earnest, thrilling appeals of Susan B. Anthony, free from all alliance with cant and vanity, we should no doubt have had a voting population to-day, under which no government could exist ten years; but those conventions raised the danger signal, and men took heed to the warning.
CHAPTER x.x.x.
MANY MATTERS.
The period of the _Visiter_ was one of great mental activity--a period of hobbies--and it, having a.s.sumed the reform roll, was expected to a.s.sume all the reforms. Turkish trowsers, Fourierism, Spiritualism, Vegetarianism, Phonetics, Pneumonics, the Eight Hour Law, Criminal Caudling, Magdaleneism, and other devices for teaching pyramids to stand on their apex was pressed upon the _Visiter_, and it held by the disciples of each as ”false to all its professions,” when declining to devote itself to its advocacy. There were a thousand men and women, who knew exactly what it ought to do; but seldom two of them agreed, and none ever thought of furnis.h.i.+ng funds for the doing of it. Reformers insisted that it should advocate their plan of hurrying up the millenium, furnish the white paper and pay the printers. Pond parents came with their young geniuses to have them baptized in type from the _Visiter_ font. Male editors were far away folks, but the _Visiter_ would sympathize with family hopes.
Ah, the crop of Miltons, Shakespeares, and Drydens which was growing up in this land, full forty years ago. What has ever become of them? Here conscience gives a twinge, for that wicked _Visiter_ did advise that parents should treat young genius as scientists do wood, which they wish to convert into pure carbon, _i.e._, cover it up with neglect and discouragement, and pat these down with wholesome discipline, solid study and useful work, and so let the fire smoulder out of sight.
The policy of the _Visiter_ in regard to Woman's Rights, was to ”go easy,” except in the case of those slave-women, who had no rights. For others, gain an advance when you could. Educate girls with boys, develop their brains, and take away legal disabilities little by little, as experience should show was wise; but never dream of their doing the world's hard work, either mental or physical; and Heaven defend them from going into all the trades.
The human teeth proved that we should eat flesh, and the human form proved that men should take the ore out of the mines, subdue the inertia of matter and the ferocity of animals; that they should raise the grain, build the houses, roads and heavy machinery; and that women should do the lighter work. As this work was as important as the heavier, and as it fell princ.i.p.ally on wives and mothers, they in these relations should receive equal compensation with the husband and father. By this plan, the estate acquired by a matrimonial firm, would belong equally to both parties, and each could devise his or her share, so that a woman would know that her acc.u.mulations would go to her heirs, not to her successor.