Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States Part 12

REMARKS BY MRS. CAROLINE GILKEY ROGERS.

Miss ANTHONY. I now call upon Mrs. Caroline Gilkey Rogers, of Lansingburg, N.Y., to address the committee.

Mrs. ROGERS. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, in our efforts to secure the right of citizens.h.i.+p we appeal only to your sense of justice and love of fair dealing.

We ask for the ballot because it is the symbol of equality. There is no other recognized symbol of equality in this country. We ask for the ballot that we may be equal to man before the law. We urge a twofold right--our right to the Republic, the Republic's right to us. We believe the interests of the country are identical with the interests of all its citizens, including women, and that the Government can no longer afford to shut women out from the affairs of the State and nation, and wise men are beginning to know that they are needed in the Government; that they are needed where our laws are made as well as where they are violated.

Many admit the justice of our claim, but will say, Is it safe? Is it expedient? It is always safe to do right; is always expedient to be just. Justice can never bring evil in its train.

The question is asked how and what would the women do in the State and nation? We do not pledge ourselves to anything. I claim that we can not have a better government than that of the people. The present Government is of only a part of the people. We have not yet entered upon the system of higher arbitration, because the Government is of man only. If we had been marching along with you all this time I trust we should have reached a higher plane of civilization.

We believe that all the virtue of the world can take care of all the evil, and all the intelligence can take care of all the ignorance. Let us have all the virtue confront all the vice.

There is no need to do battle in this matter. In all kindness and gentleness we urge our claims. There is no need to declare war upon men, for the best of men in this country are with us heart and soul.

It is a common remark that unless some new element is infused into our political life our nation is doomed to destruction. What more fitting element than the n.o.ble type of American womanhood, who have taught our Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen the rudiments of all they know.

Think of all the foreigners and all our own native-born ignorant men who can not write their own names or read the Declaration of Independence making laws for such women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Think of jurors drawn from these ranks to watch and try young girls for crimes often committed against them when the male criminal goes free. Think of a single one of these votes on election day outweighing all the women in the country. Is it not humiliating for me to sit, a political cipher, and see the colored man in my employ, to whom I have taught the alphabet, go out on election day and say by his vote what shall be done with my tax money. How would you like it?

When we think of the wives trampled on by husbands whom the law has taught them to regard as inferior beings, and of the mothers whose children are torn from their arms by the direct behest of the law at the bidding of a dead or living father, when we think of these things, our hearts ache with pity and indignation.

If mothers could only realize how the laws which they have no voice in making and no power to change affect them at every point, how they enter every door, whether palace or hovel, touch, limit, and bind, every article and inmate from the smallest child up, no woman, however shrinking and delicate, can escape it, they would get beyond the meaningless cry, "I have all the rights I want."

Do these women know that in most States in the Union the shameful fact that no woman has any legal rights to her own child, except it is born out of wedlock! In these States there is not a line of positive law to protect the mother; the father is the legal protector and guardian of the children.

Under the laws of most of the States to-day a husband may by his last will bequeath his child away from its mother, so that she might, if the guardian chose, never see it again.

The husband may have been a very bad man, and in a moment of anger made the will. The guardian he has appointed may turn out a malicious man, and take pleasure in tormenting the mother, or he may bring up the children in a way that the mother thinks ruinous to them, and she has no redress in law. Why do not all the fortunate mothers in the land cry out against such a law? Why do not all women say, "Inasmuch as the law has done this wrong unto the least of these my sisters it has done it unto me." It is true that men are almost always better than their laws, but while a bad law remains on the statute-books it gives to an unscrupulous man a right to be as bad as the law.

It is often said to us when all the women ask for the ballot it will be granted. Did all the married women pet.i.tion the Legislatures of their States to secure to them the right to hold in their own name the property that belonged to them? To secure to the poor forsaken wife the right to her earnings?

All the women did not ask for these rights, but all accepted them with joy and gladness when they were obtained, and so it will be with the franchise. But woman's right to self-government does not depend upon the numbers that demand it, but upon precisely the same principles that man claims it for himself.

Where did man get the authority that he now claims to govern one-half of humanity, from what power the right to place woman, his helpmeet in life, in an inferior position? Came it from nature? Nature made woman his superior when she made her his mother--his equal when she fitted her to hold the sacred position of wife. Did women meet in council and voluntarily give up all their claim to be their own law-makers?

The power of the strong over the weak makes man the master. Yes, then, and then only, does he gain the authority.

It is all very well to say "convert the women." While we most heartily wish they could all feel as we do, yet when it comes to the decision of this great question they are mere ciphers, for if this question is settled by the States it will be left to the voters, not to the women to decide. Or if suffrage comes to women through a sixteenth amendment of the national Const.i.tution, it will be decided by Legislatures elected by men. In neither case will women have an opportunity of pa.s.sing; upon the question. So reason tells us we must devote our best efforts to converting those to whom we must look for the removal of our disabilities, which now prevent our exercising the right of suffrage.

The arguments in favor of the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women are truths strong and unanswerable, and as old as the free inst.i.tutions of our Government. The principle of "taxation without representation is tyranny" applies to women as well as men, and is as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago.

Our demand for the ballot is the great onward step of the century, and not, as some claim, the idiosyncracies of a few unbalanced minds.

Every argument that has been urged against this question of woman's suffrage has been urged against every reform. Yet the reforms have fought their way onward and become a part of the glorious history of humanity.

So it will be with suffrage. "You can stop the crowing of the c.o.c.k, but you can not stop the dawn of the morning." And now, gentlemen, you are responsible, not for the laws you find on the statute books, but for those you leave there.

REMARKS BY MRS. MARY SEYMOUR HOWELL.

Miss ANTHONY. I now introduce to the committee Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell, the president of the Albany, N.Y., State society.

Mrs. HOWELL. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: Miss Anthony gives me five minutes. I shall have to talk very rapidly.

I ask you for the ballot because of the very first principle that is often repeated to you, that "taxation without representation is tyranny." I come from the city of Albany, where many of my sisters are taxed for millions of dollars. There are three or four women in the city of Albany who are worth their millions, and yet they have no voice in the laws that govern and control them. One of our great State senators has said that you can not argue five minutes against woman suffrage without repudiating every principle that this great Republic is founded upon.

I ask you also for the ballot for the large cla.s.s of women who are not taxed. They need it more than the women who are taxed, I have found in every work that I have conducted that because I am a woman I am not paid for that work as a man is paid for similar work.

You have heard, and perhaps some of you are thinking--I hope not--that women should be at home. I wish to say to you that there are millions of women in the United States who have no homes.

There are millions of women who are trying to earn their bread and hold their purity sacred. For that cla.s.s of women I appeal to you.

In the city of Albany there are hundreds of women in our factories making the s.h.i.+rts that you can buy for $1.50 and $2, and all those women are paid for making the s.h.i.+rts is 4 cents apiece. There are in the State of New York 18,000 teachers. When I was a teacher and taught with gentlemen in our academies, I received about one-fourth of the pay because I happened to be a woman. I consider it an insult that forever burns in my soul, that I am to be handed a mere pittance in comparison with what man receives for same quality of work. When I was sent out by our superintendent of public instruction to hold conventions of teachers, as I have often done in our State of New York, and when I did one-third more work than the men teachers so sent out, but because I was a woman and had not the ballot, I was only paid about half as much as the man; and saying that once to our superintendent of public instruction in Albany, he said, "Mrs. Howell, just as soon as you get the ballot and have a political influence in the work you will have the same pay as a man."

We ask for the ballot for that great army of fallen women who walk our streets and who break up our homes and ruin our husbands and our dear boys. We ask it for those women. The ballot will lift them up. Hundreds and thousands of women give up their purity for the sake of starving children and families. There is many a woman who goes to a life of degradation and pollution shedding burning tears over her 4-cent s.h.i.+rts.

We ask for the ballot for the good of the race, Huxley says, "admitting for the sake of argument that woman is the weaker, mentally and physically, for that reason she should have the ballot and should have every help that the world can give her."

When you debar from your councils and legislative halls the purity, the spirituality, and the love of woman then those legislative halls and those councils are apt to become coa.r.s.e and brutal, G.o.d gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a better land, and by our love and our intellect to help to make our country pure and n.o.ble, and if you would have statesmen you must have states we men to bear them.

I ask you also for the ballot that I may decide what I am. I stand before you, but I do not know to-day whether I am legally a "person" according to the law. It has been decided in some States that we are not "persons." In the State of New York, in one village, it was decided that women are not inhabitants. So I should like to know whether I am a person, whether I am an inhabitant, and above all I ask you for the ballot that I may become a citizen of this great Republic.

Gentlemen, you see before you this great convention of women from the Atlantic slopes to the Pacific Ocean, from the North to the South. We are in dead earnest. A reform never goes backward. This is a question that is before the American nation. Will you do your duty and give us our liberty, or will you leave it for braver hearts to do what must be done? For, like our forefathers, we will ask until we have gained it.

Ever the world goes round and round; Ever the truth comes uppermost; and ever is justice done.

REMARKS BY MRS. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.

Miss ANTHONY. I now have the pleasure of introducing to the committee Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake, of New York. New York is a great State, and therefore it has three representatives here to-day.

Mrs. BLAKE. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: A recent writer in an English magazine, in speaking of the great advantage which to-day flows to the laboring cla.s.ses of that nation from having received the right of suffrage, made the statement that disfranchised cla.s.ses are oppressed, not because there is any desire whatever to do injustice to them, but because they are forgotten. We have year after year and session after session of our legislatures and of our Congresses proved the correctness of this statement. While we have nothing to complain of in the courtesy which we receive in private life, still when we see ma.s.ses of men a.s.sembled together for political action, whether it be of the nation or of the State, we find that the women are totally forgotten.

In the limited time that is mine I cannot go into any lengthy exposition upon this point. I will simply call your attention to the total forgetfulness of the Congress of the United States to the debt owed to the women of this nation during the war. You have pa.s.sed a pension bill upon which there has been much comment throughout the nation, and yet, when an old army nurse applies for a pension, a woman who is broken down by her devotion to the nation in hospitals and upon the battle-field, she is met at the door of the Pension Bureau by this statement, "the Government has made no appropriation for the services of women in the war." One of these women is an old nurse whom some of you may remember, Mother Bickerd.y.k.e, who went out onto many a battle-field when she was in the prime of life, twenty years ago, and at the risk of her life lifted men, who were wounded, in her arms, and carried them to a place of safety. She is an old woman now, and where is she?

What reward the nation bestowed to her faithful services? The nation has a pension for every man who has served this nation, even down to the boy recruit who was out but three months; but Mother Bickerd.y.k.e, though her health has never been good since her service then, is earning her living at the wash-tub, a monument to the ingrat.i.tude of a Republic as great as was that when Belisarius begged in the streets of Rome.

I bring up this ill.u.s.tration alone out of innumerable others that are possible, to try to impress upon your minds that we are forgotten. It is not from any unkindness on your part. Who would think for one moment, looking upon the kindly faces of this committee, that any man on it would do an injustice to women, especially if she were old and feeble? But because we have no right to vote, as I said, our interests are overlooked and forgotten.

It is often said that we have too many voters; that the aggregate of vice and ignorance among us should not be increased by giving women the right of suffrage. I wish to remind you of the fact that in the enormous immigration that pours to our sh.o.r.es every year, numbering somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million, there come, twice as many men as women. The figures for the last year were two hundred and twenty-three thousand men, and one hundred and thirteen thousand women.

What does this mean? It means a steady influx of this foreign element; it means a constant preponderance of the masculine over the feminine; and it means also, of course, a preponderance of the voting power of the foreigner as compared to the native born. To those who fear that our American inst.i.tutions are threatened by this gigantic inroad of foreigners I commend the reflection that the best safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign nations or of foreign influence is to put the ballot in the hands of the American-born women, And of all other women also, so that if the foreign-born man overbalances us in numbers we shall be always in a preponderance on the side of the liberty which is secured by our inst.i.tutions.

It is because, as many of my predecessors have said, of the different elements represented by the two s.e.xes, that we are asking for this liberty. When I was recently in the capitol of my own State of New York, I was reminded there of the difference of temperament between the s.e.xes by seeing how children act when coming to the doors of the capitol, which have been constructed so that they are very hard to open. Whether that is because they want to keep us women out or not I am not able to say; but for some reason the doors are so constructed that it is nearly impossible to open them. I saw a number of little girls coming in through those doors--every child held the door for those who were to follow. A number of little boys followed just after, and every boy rushed through and let the door shut in the face of the one who was coming behind him. That is a good ill.u.s.tration of the different qualities of the s.e.xes. Those boys were not unkind, they simply represented that onward push which is one of the grandest characteristics of your s.e.x; and the little girls, on the other hand, represented that gentleness and thoughtfulness of others which is eminently a characteristic of women.

This woman element is needed in every branch of the Government.

Look at the wholesale destruction of the forests throughout our nation, which has gone on until it brings direct destruction to the land on the lines of the great rivers of the West, and threatens us even in New York with destroying at once the beauty and usefulness of our far-famed Hudson. If women were in the Government do you not think they would protect the economic interests of the nation? They are the born and trained economists of the world, and when you call them to your a.s.sistance you will find an element that has not heretofore been felt with the weight which it deserves.

As we walk through the Capitol we are struck with the significance of the symbolism on every side; we view the adornments in the beautiful room, and we find here everywhere emblematically woman's figure. Here is woman representing even war, and there are women representing grace and loveliness and the fullness of the harvest; and, above all, they are extending their protecting arms over the little children. Gentlemen, I leave you under this symbolism, hoping that you will see in it the type of a coming day when we shall have women and men united together in the national councils in this great building.