The History of Woman Suffrage Volume III Part 61

In 1876 a presidential election was again approaching, and to meet the exigencies of the campaign a woman suffrage committee was formed to ask the legislature to grant presidential suffrage to women, as it was strictly within their power to do without a const.i.tutional amendment. To this end Mrs. Gage prepared an appeal which was widely circulated throughout the State:

Within a year the election of President and Vice-President of the United States, will again take place. The right to vote for these functionaries is a National and not a State right; the United States has unquestioned control of this branch of suffrage, and in its const.i.tution has declared to whom it has delegated this power. Article 2 of the Const.i.tution of the United States, is devoted to the president; the manner of choosing him, his power, his duties, etc. In regard to the method of choosing the president, Par. 2, Sec. 1, Art. 2, reads thus: "Each State shall appoint in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the State may be ent.i.tled in the congress." There is no other authority for the appointment of presidential electors, either in the Const.i.tution of the United States, or in the const.i.tution of any State. The const.i.tution of the State of New York is entirely silent upon the appointment of presidential electors, for the reason that the const.i.tution of the United States declares that they _shall_ be appointed in such manner as the legislature may direct. With the exception of South Carolina, every State in the Union has adopted the plan of choosing presidential electors by ballot, and it is in the power of the legislature of each State to prescribe the qualifications of those who shall be permitted to vote for such electors.

The authority to prescribe the qualifications of those persons in the State of New York who shall be permitted to vote for electors of President and Vice-President of the United States, therefore lies alone in the legislature of this State. That body has power in this respect superior to the State const.i.tution; it rises above the const.i.tution; it is invested with its powers by the Const.i.tution of the United States; it is under national authority, and need in no way be governed by any representative clause which may exist in the State const.i.tution. In prescribing the qualifications of those persons who shall vote for electors, the legislature has power to exclude all persons who cannot read and write. It has power to say that no person unless possessing a freehold estate of the value of two hundred and fifty dollars, shall vote for such electors. It has power to declare that only tax-payers shall vote for such electors, it is even vested with authority to say that no one but church members shall be ent.i.tled to vote for electors of President and Vice-President of the United States. The legislature of this State at its next session has even power to cut off the right of all white men to vote for electors at the presidential election next fall. It matters not what qualifications the State itself may have prescribed for electors of State officers, the question who shall vote for president and vice-president is on an entirely different basis, and prescribing the qualifications for such electors lies in entirely different hands. It is a question of national import with which the State (in its const.i.tution) has nothing to do, and over which even congress has no power. The legislature which is to a.s.semble in Albany, the first Tuesday in January next, will have power, by the pa.s.sage of a simple bill, to secure to the women of this State the right to vote for electors at the presidential election in the fall of 1876, and thus to inaugurate the centennial year by an act of equity and justice that will be in accordance with that part of the Declaration of Independence which declares that "governments derive their _just_ powers from the consent of the governed." Shall it not be done?

MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE, LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE, CLEMENCE S. LOZIER, M. D., _N. Y. State Woman Suffrage Com._

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lillie Devereux Blake]

A memorial embodying this claim was presented to the legislature, and on, January 18, the committee went to Albany and were heard by the Judiciary Committee of the a.s.sembly, to whom their paper had been referred. Hon. Robert H. Strahan of New York presided. On February 8, the memorialists[229] had another meeting before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, in the Senate chamber, Hon.

Bradford L. Prince presiding. The audience was overflowing, and the corridors so crowded that the meeting adjourned to the a.s.sembly chamber by order of the chairman. Soon after, Hon. George H. West of Saratoga presented a bill giving the women of the State the right to vote for president. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee and reported adversely, notwithstanding it was twice called up and debated by its friends, Messrs. Strahan, Husted, Ogden, Hogeboom and West. No vote was reached on the measure, but this much of consideration was a gain over previous years, when nothing had been done beyond the presentation of a bill and its reference to a committee.

In 1876 Governor Samuel J. Tilden appointed Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell as commissioner of the State Board of Charities, the first official position a woman ever held in this State.

During the winter of 1877 a memorial was sent to the legislature, asking that women be allowed to serve as school officers. The Hon.

William N. Emerson, senator from Monroe, presented the following bill:

AN ACT _to Authorize the Election of Women to School Offices._

The People of the State of New York, represented in Senate and a.s.sembly, do enact as follows:

SECTION 1. Any woman of the age of twenty-one years and upwards, and possessing the qualifications prescribed for men, shall be eligible to any office under the general or special school laws of this State, subject to the same conditions and requirements as prescribed to men.

SEC. 2. This act shall take effect immediately.

Pet.i.tions and memorials from all parts of the State were poured into the legislature, praying for the pa.s.sage of the bill. Mr.

Emerson made an eloquent speech in its favor, and labored earnestly for the measure. It pa.s.sed the Senate by a vote of 19 to 9; the a.s.sembly by a vote of 84 to 19. This success was hailed with great rejoicing by the women of the State who understood the progress of events. But their delight was turned into indignation and disappointment when the governor, Lucius Robinson, returned the bill to the Senate with the following veto:

STATE OF NEW YORK, EXECUTIVE CHAMBER, } ALBANY, May 8, 1877. }

_To the Senate:_

I return without approval Senate bill No. 61, ent.i.tled "An act to authorize the election of women to school offices."

This bill goes too far or not far enough. It provides that women may hold any or all of the offices connected with the department of education, that is to say, a woman may be elected superintendent of public instruction, women may be appointed school commissioners, members of boards of education and trustees of school districts. In some of these positions it will become their duty to make contracts, purchase materials, build and repair school-houses, and to supervise and effect all the transactions of school business, involving an annual expenditure of over twelve million dollars in this State. There can be no greater reason that women should occupy these positions than the less responsible ones of supervisors, town clerks, justices of the peace, commissioners of highways, overseers of the poor, and numerous others. If women are physically and mentally fitted for one cla.s.s of these stations, they are equally so for the others.

But at this period in the history of the world such enactments as the present hardly comport with the wisdom and dignity of legislation. The G.o.d of nature has appointed different fields of labor, duty and usefulness for the s.e.xes. His decrees cannot be changed by human legislation. In the education of our children the mother stands far above all superintendents, commissioners, trustees and school teachers. Her influence in the family, in social intercourse and enterprises, outweighs all the mere machinery of benevolence and education. To lower her from the high and holy place given her by nature, is to degrade her power and to injure rather than benefit the cause of education itself.

In all enlightened and Christian nations the experience and observations of ages have ill.u.s.trated and defined the relative duties of the s.e.xes in promoting the best interests of society.

Few, if any, of the intelligent and right-minded among women desire or would be willing to accept the change which such a law would inaugurate.

The bill is moreover a clear infraction of the spirit if not the letter of the const.i.tution. Under that instrument women have no right to vote, and it cannot be supposed that it is the intention of the const.i.tution that persons not ent.i.tled to the right of suffrage should be eligible to some of the most important offices in the State.

L. ROBINSON.

On May 24, 25, 1877, the National and State conventions were again held in New York, at Steinway Hall. Both conventions pa.s.sed resolutions denouncing Governor Robinson's action in his veto. The following address was issued by the State a.s.sociation:

_To the Voters and Legislators of New York:_

The women of the State of New York, in convention a.s.sembled, do most earnestly protest against the injustice with which they are treated by the State, where in point of numbers they are in excess of the men:

_First_--They are denied the right of choosing their own rulers, but are compelled to submit to the choice of a minority consisting of its male residents, fully one-third of whom are of foreign birth. _Second_--They are held amenable to laws they have had no share in making and in which they are forbidden a voice--laws which touch all their most vital interests of education, industry, children, property, life and liberty. _Third_--While compelled to bear the burdens and suffer the penalties of government, they are debarred the honors and emoluments of civil service, and the control of offices in the righteous discharge of whose duties their interest is equal to that of men.

_Fourth_--They are taxed without their consent to sustain men in office who enact laws directly opposing their interests, and inasmuch as the State of New York pays one-sixth the taxes of the United States, its women feel the arm of oppression--like Briareus with his hundred hands--touching and crus.h.i.+ng them with its burdens.

_Fifth_--They are under the power of an autocrat whose salary they must pay, but who, in opposition to the will of the people--as recently shown in the pa.s.sage of the School bill by the legislature--has by his veto denied them all official authority in the control of the public schools, and this despite the fact of there being 3,670 more girls of school age than boys, and 14,819 more women than men teaching in the State. _Sixth_--Under pretence of regulating public morals, women of the _femme de pave_ cla.s.s, many of whom have been driven to this mode of life as a livelihood, are subjected to more oppressive laws than their partners in vice. _Seventh_--The laws treat married women as criminals by taking from them all legal control of their children, while those born outside of marriage belong absolutely to the mothers. _Eighth_--They forbid the mother's inheritance of property from her children in case the father is living, thus making her of no consideration in the eyes of those to whom she has given birth. _Ninth_--They give the husband control of the common property--allow him to spend the whole personal estate in riotous living, or even to sell the home over his wife's head, subject only to her third life-interest in case she survives him. _Tenth_--They allow the husband to imprison her at his pleasure within his own house, the court sustaining him in this coercion until the wife "submits herself to her husband's will."

_Eleventh_--They allow the husband while the common property is in his possession, "without even the formality of a legal complaint, the taking of an oath or the filing of a bond for the good faith of his action," to advertise his wife through the public press as a deserter and to forbid her credit.

_Twelfth_--They deny the widow the right of inheritance in the common property that they give the widower, allow her but forty days' residence in the family mansion before paying rent to her husband's heirs, thus treating her as if she were an alien to her own children--set off to her a few paltry articles of household use, close the estate through a process of law, and make the days of her bereavement doubly days of sorrow.

The above laws of marriage, placing irresponsible authority in the hands of the husband, have given him a power of moral coercion over the wife, making her virtually his slave. Without entering into fuller details of the injustice and oppression of the laws upon all women, married and single, we will sum the whole subject up in the language of the French Woman's Rights League, which characterizes woman's position thus:

(1) Woman is held _politically_ to have no existence; (2) _civilly_, she is a minor; (3) in marriage she is a serf; (4) in labor she is made inferior and robbed of her earnings; (5) in public instruction she is sacrificed to man; (6) out of marriage, answers to the faults committed by both; (7) as a mother is deprived of her right to her children; (8) she is only deemed equally responsible, intelligent and answerable in taxes and crimes.

By order of the New York State Woman Suffrage Society.

May, 1877. MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE, _Secretary_.

In the summer of 1877 another effort was made by women of wealth to be relieved from taxation. Several memorials to that effect were sent to the legislature, one headed by Susan A. King[230] of New York, a self-made woman who had acc.u.mulated a large fortune and owned much real estate. Her memorial, signed by a few others, represented $9,000,000. The committee bearing these waited on many members of the legislature to secure their influence when such a bill should be presented, which was done March 11, by Col. Alfred Wagstaff, with warm recommendations. He was followed by Senator McCarthy of Onondaga, who also introduced a bill for an amendment to the const.i.tution to secure to women the right of suffrage. Both these bills called out the determined opposition of Thomas C.

Ecclesine, senator from the eleventh district, and the ridicule of others. The delegation of ladies, sitting there as representatives of half the people of the State, felt insulted to have their demands thus sneered at; it was for them a moment of bitter humiliation. In the evening, however, their time for retaliation came, as they had a hearing in the Senate chamber, before the Judiciary Committee, where an immense crowd a.s.sembled at an early hour. The chairman of the committee Hon. William H. Robertson, presided. Each of the ladies, in the course of her speech, referred to the insulting remarks of Mr. Hughes of Was.h.i.+ngton county. That gentleman, being present, looked as if he regretted his unfortunate jokes, and winced under the sarcasm of the ladies.

Soon after this, great excitement was created by the close of Stewart's Home for Working Women. This fine building, on the corner of Thirty-second street and Fourth avenue, had been erected by the merchant prince for the use of working women, who could there find a home at a moderate expense. The millionaire dead, his large fortune pa.s.sed into other hands. The building was completed and furnished in a style of elegance far beyond what was appropriated to that purpose. On April 2, with a great flourish, the immense building was thrown open for public inspection. A large number of women applied at once for admission, but encountered a set of rules that drove most of them away. This gave Judge Hilton an excuse for violating his obligation to carry out the plan of his dead benefactor, and in a few weeks he closed the house to working women and opened it as the Park Hotel, for which it was so admirably furnished and fitted that it was the general opinion that it was intended for this from the beginning. Great indignation was felt in the community, the women calling a meeting to express their disappointment and dissatisfaction. This was held in Cooper Inst.i.tute, under the auspices of the Woman Suffrage a.s.sociation.[231] Had Mr. Stewart provided a permanent home for working women it would have been but a meager return for the underpaid toil of the thousands who had labored for half a century to build up his princely fortune. But even the idea of such an act of justice died with him.

In 1879 that eminent philanthropist Dr. Hervey Backus Wilbur, superintendent of the State Idiot Asylum at Syracuse, urged the pa.s.sage of a law requiring the employment of competent women as physicians in the female wards of the State insane asylums.

Pet.i.tions prepared by him were circulated by the officers of the Women's Medical College, of the New York Infirmary, by Mrs.

Josephine Shaw Lowell of the State Board of Charities, and by Drs.

Willard Parker, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and other eminent physicians of New York. The bill prepared by Dr. Wilbur was introduced in the a.s.sembly by Hon. Erastus Brooks, and required the trustees of each of the four State asylums for the insane, "to employ one or more competent, well-educated female physicians to have the charge of the female patients of said asylum, under the direction of the medical superintendents of the several asylums, as in the case of the other or male a.s.sistant physicians, and to take the place of such male a.s.sistant physician or physicians in the wards of the female patients." Although Dr. Wilbur stood at the head of his profession, his authority upon everything connected with the feeble-minded being not only recognized in this country but in Europe also as absolute, yet this bill, which did not contemplate placing a woman in charge of such an inst.i.tution, and which was so purely moral in its character, met with ridicule and opposition from the press of the State, to which Dr. Wilbur made an exhaustive reply, showing the need of women as physicians in all inst.i.tutions in which unfortunate women are incarcerated.

When the fall elections of 1879 approached, a circular letter was sent to every candidate for office in the city, asking his views on the question of woman suffrage, and delegations waited on the nominees for mayor. Mr. Edward Cooper, the Republican candidate, declared he had no sympathy with the movement, while Hon. Augustus Sch.e.l.l, the Democratic candidate, received the ladies with great courtesy, and avowed himself friendly at least to the demand for equal wages and better opportunities for education, and in the trades and professions. From the answers received, a list of candidates was prepared. On the evening of October 30, a crowded ma.s.s-meeting was held in Steinway Hall to advocate the election of those men who were favorable to the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of woman. Mr.

Sch.e.l.l was chosen Mayor. The re-nomination in 1879, of Lucius Robinson for governor by the Democratic convention, aroused the opposition of the women who understood the politics of the State.

He had declared that "the G.o.d of Nature did not intend women for public life"; they resolved that the same power should retire Mr.

Robinson from public life, and held ma.s.s-meetings to that end.[232]

These meetings were all alike crowded and enthusiastic, and the speakers[233] felt richly paid for their efforts. A thorough canva.s.s of the State was also made, and a protest[234] extensively circulated, condemning the governor for his veto of the school-bill.

Mr. F. B. Thurber, and Miss Susan A. King contributed liberally to this campaign. Handbills containing the protest and a call for a series of ma.s.s-meetings, were distributed by the thousands all over the State. The last meeting was held at the seventh ward Republican wigwam, an immense structure, in Brooklyn: its use was given by the unanimous vote of the club.[235] At every one of these meetings resolutions were pa.s.sed condemning Mr. Robinson, and electors were urged to cast their votes against him. No doubt the enthusiasm the women aroused for his opponent helped in a measure to defeat him.

In the meantime, women in the eleventh senatorial district were concentrating their efforts for the defeat of Thomas H. Eccelsine.

His Republican opponent, Hon. Chas. E. Foster, was a p.r.o.nounced advocate of woman suffrage. Miss King,[236] who resided in this district, exerted all her influence for his election, giving time, money and thought to the canva.s.s. On the morning of November 5, the day after election, the papers announced that Mr. Cornell was chosen governor, and that Mr. Ecclesine, who two years before had been elected by 7,000 majority, was defeated by 600, and Mr. Foster chosen senator in his stead.

This campaign attracted much attention. The journals throughout the country commented upon the action of the women. It was conceded that their efforts had counted for something in influencing the election, and from this moment the leaders of the woman suffrage movement in New York regarded themselves as possessing some political influence.

In January, 1880, Governor Alonzo B. Cornell, in his first message to the legislature, among other recommendations, embodied the following:

The policy of making women eligible as school officers has been adopted in several States with beneficial results, and the question is exciting much discussion in this State. Women are equally competent with men for this duty, and it cannot be doubted that their admission to representation would largely increase the efficacy of our school management. The favorable attention of the legislature is earnestly directed to this subject.

With such words from the chief executive it was an easy matter to find friends for a measure making women eligible as school officers. Early in the session the following bill was introduced by Hon. Lorraine B. Sessions of Cattaraugus:

No person shall be deemed ineligible to serve as any school officer, or to vote at any school meeting, by reason of s.e.x, who has the voter's qualifications required by law.

Senator Edwin G. Halbert of Broome rendered efficient aid and the bill pa.s.sed at once in the Senate by a nearly unanimous vote. Hon.