The History of Woman Suffrage Volume V Part 14

The Executive Committee recommended in its Plan of Work that the States work for a uniform resolution in favor of a Sixteenth Amendment; that they endeavor to secure Initiative and Referendum laws; that in each Legislature measures be introduced for full suffrage or for some form of suffrage; that efforts be continued to obtain equalization of property and intestate laws, also co-guardians.h.i.+p of children; that the working forces of the a.s.sociation be concentrated where there are State campaigns for suffrage; that each club organize one new one and each individual member secure one more; that all present lines of work be continued and extended; that there be a more systematic and liberal distribution of literature; that hearings be obtained before all kinds of organizations. It was voted that "the Board of Officers consider the propriety of recommending all the States to make a concerted effort to secure Presidential suffrage for women in the election of 1908." But one work conference was held, that on Press, Miss Hauser presiding.

One of the most important conferences of the week was that of State presidents, at which each told of the most effective work within the year, and the discussion which followed gave much practical and helpful information.

At the second afternoon session Dr. Shaw read a number of letters from Governors of the equal suffrage and other States answering favorably an appeal from the California Suffrage a.s.sociation that they would appoint one or more women to the national commission soon to meet to consider uniform marriage and divorce laws. She had emphasized this necessity in her president's address. The report of Mrs. Florence Kelley, chairman of the Committee on Industrial Problems Affecting Women and Children, was heard with deep interest and feeling. As executive secretary of the National Consumers' League for many years and a close student of labor conditions, she spoke with accurate knowledge when she told of the employment of children. A Baltimore woman in her welcome to the convention had said that Maryland women were satisfied with what they could secure by pet.i.tion without the ballot, and Mrs. Kelley, referring with fine sarcasm to the "sadly modest results of their pet.i.tions," said:

Last night while we slept after our evening meeting there were in Maryland many hundred boys, only nominally fourteen years old, working all night in the gla.s.s-works; and here in Baltimore the smallest messenger boys I have ever seen in any city were perfectly free to work all night. No law was broken in either case, for the women of Maryland have not yet by their right of pet.i.tion brought to the children of the State protection from working all night. Here in this city children must go to school until they are nominally twelve years old but outside of Baltimore and three other counties there is no limit whatever to the work of any child. Moreover, here in Baltimore where the law nominally applies children are free to work at any age if they have a dependent relative or if they are liable to become dependent themselves!

It is five years since the first delegation of women went to Atlanta to ask for legislation on behalf of the working children of Georgia, carrying pet.i.tions with them, and they have gone in vain every year since. Each year the number of women joining in the protest has been greater and, alas, the number of little girls under ten years old, who work in Georgia cotton mills all night, has also been greater. The number of working children grows faster than the number of pet.i.tioning women.... In New York, where women can vote on school questions in the country only, not in the city, children five, six, seven and eight years old, who ought to be in the kindergarten and public schools, are working in cellars and garrets, under the sweating system, sewing on b.u.t.tons and making artificial flowers. So many such children are not in the schools that no city administration in the last ten years has dared to make a school census; and we are striving in vain, (all the philanthropic bodies), to induce the present Tammany administration just to count the children of school age but they dare not reveal the extent to which they are failing to provide for them....

We Americans do not rank among the enlightened nations when we are graded according to our care of our children. We have, according to the last census, 580,000 who cannot read or write, between the ages of ten and fourteen years, not immigrant but native-born children, and 570,000 of them are in States where the women do not even use their right of pet.i.tion. We do not rank with England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Holland or the Scandinavian countries when we are measured by our care of our children, we rank with Russia. The same thing is true of our children at work. We have two millions of them earning their living under the age of sixteen years. Legislation of the States south of Maryland for the children is like the legislation of England in 1844.... Surely it behooves us to do something at once or what sort of citizens shall we have?

Miss Gertrude Barnum, secretary of the Women's National Trade Union League, followed with an earnest address on Women as Wage Earners. She began by saying that although this would be called a representative audience, wage-earning women were not present. "A speaker should have been chosen from their ranks," she said. "We have been preaching to them, teaching them,'rescuing' them, doing almost everything for them except knowing them and working with them for the good of our common country. These women of the trade unions, who have already learned to think and vote in them, would be a great addition, a great strength to this movement. The working women have much more need of the ballot than we of the so-called leisure cla.s.s. We suffer from the insult of its refusal; we are denied the privilege of performing our obligations and we have as results things which we smart under. The working women have not only these insults and privations but they have also the knowledge that they are being destroyed, literally destroyed, body and soul, by conditions which they cannot touch by law...." Miss Barnum discussed "strikes," the "closed shop," conditions under which factory women work, the domestic problem, the trade unions, and said: "I hope that this body, which represents women from all over the country, will take this matter back to their respective States and cities and try to make the acquaintance of this great half of our population, the working people. You must bring them to your conferences and conventions and let them speak on your platform. They will speak much better for themselves than you can get any one to speak for them...."

An animated discussion took place, many of the delegates asking sympathetic questions. Mrs. Ella S. Stewart (Ill.) followed with a delightfully caustic address on Some Fallacies; Our Privileges. The reporters were so carried away by her "sweetness and beauty" that they almost forgot to make notes of her speech, of which one of them said: "She picked up Grover Cleveland, Lyman Abbott and other anti-suffragists from the time of Samuel Johnson and figuratively spun them around her finger, to the joy of the audience." In paying her tribute to chivalry she said: "Of what benefit was the chivalry of the knights toward their ladies of high degree to the thousands of peasant women and wives of serfs. .h.i.tched up with animals and working in the fields? Of no more value now is the protection given to the wives and daughters of the rich by men who are grinding down and taking advantage of those of the poor. In Chicago women have no vote except once in four years for a trustee of the State university, yet every day if we try to take a street car we are overrun and trampled down by men who get on the cars before they stop, and when we finally limp in we see them comfortably seated reading the papers while we dangle from the straps. We are crowded in stores and smoked in restaurants; in fact the only place of late where I was not crowded was at the polls when I went to cast my vote!"

Mrs. Mary E. Craigie (N. Y.) closed the session with a serious, impressive address on Our Real Opposition; Ignorance and Vice, the Silent Foe. She pointed out the "indirect alliance between the anti-suffragists and the vicious elements, opponents of all reform, fearful that if women vote good will prevail over evil." "The chief foes of woman suffrage," she said, "are the saloon keepers, sc.u.m of society, barred from fraternal organizations, social clubs and even from some of the insurance societies."

The Biography of Miss Anthony contains this paragraph.[45]

When Miss Anthony had visited President M. Carey Thomas, of Bryn Mawr College, and Miss Mary E. Garrett the last November she had talked of the approaching convention, expressed some anxiety as to its reception in so conservative a city and urged them to do what they could to make it creditable to the National a.s.sociation and to Baltimore. They showed much interest, asked in what way they could be of most a.s.sistance and talked over various plans.

Both belonged to old and prominent families in that city, Miss Garrett had the prestige of great wealth also, and Dr. Thomas of her position as president of one of the most eminent of Women's Colleges. Miss Anthony was desirous of having the program in some way ill.u.s.trate distinctly the new type of womanhood--the College Woman--and eventually Dr. Thomas took entire charge of one evening devoted to this purpose, which will ever be memorable in the history of these conventions. A day or two after Miss Anthony's visit she received a letter from Miss Garrett saying: "I have decided--really I did so while we were talking about the convention at luncheon yesterday--that I must open my house in Baltimore for that week in order to have the great pleasure of entertaining you and Miss Shaw under my own roof and to do whatever I can to help you make the meeting a success."

At a good-bye reception given for Miss Anthony in Rochester the evening before she left home for Baltimore she took cold and immediately after reaching Miss Garrett's she became very ill and was under the care of physicians and trained nurses. On the second night, however, the College Evening for which elaborate preparations had been made, she summoned the will power for which she had always been noted, rose from her bed, put on a beautiful gown and went to the convention hall. Quoting again from the Biography: "When she appeared on the stage and the great audience realized that she actually was with them their enthusiasm was unbounded. She was so white and frail as to seem almost spiritual but on her sweet face was an expression of ineffable happiness; and it was indeed one of the happiest moments of her life for it typified the intellectual triumph of her cause."

The Baltimore _American_ thus began its account: "With the great pioneer suffrage worker, Susan B. Anthony, on the platform, surrounded by women noted in the college world for their brilliant attainments, as well as those famed for social work and in other professions, and with a large audience, the session of the woman suffrage convention opened last evening in the Lyric Theater. If the veteran suffragist thought of more than the pleasure of the event it must have been the contrast of this occasion with the times past, when, unhonored and unsung, she fought what must have often seemed a losing fight for principles for which the presence of these women proclaimed victory.... It had been announced as 'Colloge evening' but it might just as well have been called 'Susan B. Anthony evening,' for, while the addresses dealt with various phases of the woman question, all evolved into one strong tribute to Miss Anthony."

The following remarkable program was carried out:

COLLEGE EVENING

February 8, 1906

_Presiding Officer_ Ira Remsen, Ph.D., LL.D., _President of Johns Hopkins University_.

_Ushers_ Students of the Woman's College of Baltimore in Academic Dress.

_Addresses_ Mary E. Woolley, A.M., Litt.D., L.H.D., _President of Mount Holyoke College_.

Lucy M. Salmon, A.M., _Professor of History_, _Va.s.sar College_.

Mary A. Jordan, A.M., _Professor of English_, _Smith College_.

Mary W. Calkins, A.M., _Professor of Philosophy and Psychology_, _Wellesley College_.

Eva Perry Moore, A.B., _Trustee Va.s.sar College_; _President of the a.s.sociation of Collegiate Alumnae_ (_over three thousand college women_).

Maud Wood Park, A.B. (_Radcliffe College_), _President of the Boston Branch of the Equal Suffrage League in Women's Colleges and Founder of the League_.

M. Carey Thomas, Ph.D., LL.D., _President of Bryn Mawr College_.

A tribute of grat.i.tude from representatives of Women's Colleges.

What has been accomplished for the higher education of women by Susan B. Anthony and other woman suffragists.

The statement is sometimes questioned that all of the advantages which women enjoy today had their inception in the efforts of the pioneers suffragists. The addresses made on this occasion by some of the most distinguished women educators of the country certainly should sustain this claim so far as the higher education is concerned. It seems a sacrilege to use only brief quotations from these important contributions to the literature of the movement for woman suffrage.

PRESIDENT WOOLLEY: It will not be possible in the limited time given to the representatives of colleges for women to do more than suggest what has been accomplished for the higher education of women by Miss Anthony and other suffragists, but it is a pleasure to have this opportunity to add our tribute of appreciation....

At a meeting called in 1851 at Seneca Falls, N. Y., to consider founding a People's College, Miss Anthony, Lucy Stone and Mrs.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton were determined that the const.i.tution and by-laws should be framed so as to admit women on the same terms as men and finally carried their point. The college, however, before it was fairly started was merged in Cornell University.

Five years later Miss Anthony's lecture on "Co-education" brought that subject most forcibly to the attention of the public.... It was no part of Miss Anthony's plan to have work given to women for which they were not fitted but rather that they should be prepared to do well whatever they attempted. There were not to be two standards of efficiency, one for the man and another for the woman. "Think your best thoughts, speak your best words, do your best work, looking to your own conscience for approval," was her charge to women forty years ago.... The higher education of women should be added to the list of causes for which she and other women struggled. She has lived to see the work of her hands established in the gaining of educational and social rights for women which might well be called revolutionary, so momentous have been the changes....

It seems almost inexplicable that changes surely as radical as giving to women the opportunity to vote should be accepted today as perfectly natural while the political right is still viewed somewhat askance.... The time will come when some of us will look back upon the arguments against the granting of the suffrage to women with as much incredulity as that with which we now read those against their education. Then shall it be said of the woman, who with gentleness and strength, courage and patience, has been unswerving in her allegiance to the aim which she had set before her, "Give her of the fruit of her hands and let her own works praise her in the gates."

PROFESSOR SALMON: The personal experience will perhaps be pardoned if it is considered representative of the possibly changing att.i.tude of other college women toward the subject. The natural stages in the development seem to have been, opposition, due to ignorance; rejection, due to conscientious disapproval; indifference, due to preoccupation in other lines of work; acceptance, due to appreciation of what the work for equal suffrage has accomplished. It has been a work positive rather than negative, active rather than destructive, and thus it is coming to appeal to the judgment and reason of college women.

They are coming to realize that they have been taught by these pioneers, both by precept and example, to look at the essential things of life and to ignore the unessential and for this they are grateful....

The college woman is beginning to wonder whether it is worth while to reckon the mint, anise and c.u.mmin while the weightier matters of the law are forgotten. For a larger outlook on life we are all indebted to Miss Anthony, to Mrs. Howe and to their colleagues. We are indebted to them in large measure for the educational opportunities of today. We are indebted to them for the theory, and in some places for the reality, of equal pay for men and women when the work performed is the same. We are indebted to them for making it possible for us to spend our lives in fruitful work rather than in idle tears. We are indebted to these pioneer women for the subst.i.tution of a positive creed for inertia and indifference. From them we also inherit the weighty responsibility of pa.s.sing on to others, in degree if not in kind, all that we have received from them.

Professor Jordan, after considering the woman's college, said: "The suffragists lent us Maria Mitch.e.l.l and they felt severely the loss they sustained in her increasing absorption in the cla.s.s room and in the requirements of modern scientific work. When we had taken Maria Mitch.e.l.l they turned to us in friends.h.i.+p, Mrs. Livermore, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Miss Anthony, Miss Elizabeth Peabody, Mrs. Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Mrs. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Lois Anna Green, Mary Dame--and never failed to stir our minds with their urgent appeals for our thoughtful consideration of the causes they presented and the interest they took for granted. The last was their strong point. They simply implicated us in whatever was good and true. Their enthusiasm was infectious and we 'caught' it--to our own lasting spiritual benefit.... I do not believe that I was over-fanciful when I used to feel that Lucy Stone and you, Miss Anthony, looked at us as if you would say, 'Make the best of your freedom for we have bought it with a great price.'"

PROFESSOR CALKINS: I wish to indicate this evening the definite form in which I think the grat.i.tude of all college women might be expressed to Miss Anthony and to the other leaders of the equal suffrage movement for their service to the cause of women's education. In other words, I wish to ask what have these veteran equal suffrage leaders a right to expect from university and college students, and in particular from the students and graduates of our women's colleges?... Equal suffragists, if I may serve as interpreter, demand just this, that women trained to scientific method shall make equal suffrage an object of scientific a.n.a.lysis and logic and ask of college women that they cease being ignorant or indifferent on the question; that they adopt, if not an att.i.tude of active leaders.h.i.+p or of loyal support, at least a position of reasoned opposition or of intelligent hesitation between opposing arguments. To ask less than this really is an insult to a thinking person, man or woman.... The student trained to reach decisions in the light of logic and of history will be disposed to recognize that, in a democratic country governed as this is by the suffrage of its citizens and given over as this is to the principle and practice of educating women, a distinction based on difference of s.e.x is artificial and illogical, and thus suspicious.... For myself, I believe that the probabilities favor woman suffrage.

MRS. MOORE: The women of today may well feel that it is Miss Anthony who has made life possible to them; she has trodden the rough paths and by unwearied devotion has opened to them the professions and higher applied industries. Through her life's work they enjoy a hundred privileges denied them fifty years ago; from her devotion has grown a new order; her hand has helped to open every line of business to women. She has spoken at times to thousands of girls on the public duties of women.... Her life story must epitomize the victorious struggle of women for larger intellectual freedom in the last century.... The world does move.

Those who are aware of the great and beneficent changes made in the laws relating to the rights of property, in the civil and industrial laws pertaining to women and children, may estimate the good accomplished by these pioneers.

MRS. PARK: I suppose it is true that all through history individual women have been able, sometimes by cajolery, sometimes by personal charm, sometimes by force of character, to get for themselves privileges far greater than any that the most radical advocates of woman's rights have yet demanded. But in the case of Miss Anthony and the other early suffragists all that force of character was turned not to individual ends, not to getting large things for themselves, but to getting little gains, step by step, for the great ma.s.s of other women; not for the service of themselves but for the service of the s.e.x and so of the whole human race.... The object of the College Women's League is to bring the question of equal suffrage to college women, to help them realize their debt to the women who have worked so hard for them and to make them understand that one of the ways to pay that debt is to fight the battle in the quarter of the field in which it is still unwon; in short, to make them feel the obligation of opportunity.

PRESIDENT THOMAS: In the year 1903 there were in the United States 6,474 women studying in women's colleges and 24,863 women studying in co-educational colleges. If the annual rate of increase has continued the same, as it undoubtedly has, during the past three years, there are in college at the present time 38,268 women students. Although there are in the United States nearly 1,800,000 less women than men, women already const.i.tute considerably over one-third of the entire student body and are steadily gaining on men. This means that in another generation or two one-half of all the people who have been to college in the United States will be women; and, just as surely as the seasons of the year succeed one another or the law of gravitation works, just so surely will this great body of educated women wish to use their trained intelligence in making the towns, cities and States of their country better places for themselves and their children to live in; just so surely will the men with whom they have worked side by side in college cla.s.ses claim and receive their aid in political as well as home life. The logic of events does not lie. It is unthinkable that women who have learned to act for themselves in college and have become awakened there to civic duties should not care for the ballot to enforce their wishes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PIONEERS OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. Born, 1815.

LUCY STONE. Born, 1818.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY. Born, 1820.

LUCRETIA MOTT. Born, 1793.

MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT Born, 1846.]

The same is true of every woman's club and every individual woman who tries to obtain laws to save little children from working cruel hours in cotton mills or to open summer gardens for homeless little waifs on the streets of a great city. These women, too, are being irresistibly driven to desire equal suffrage for the sake of the wrongs they try to right.... It seems to me in the highest degree ungenerous for women like these in this audience, who are cared for and protected in every way, not to desire equal suffrage for the sake of other less fortunate women, and it is not only ungenerous but short-sighted of such women not to desire it for their own sakes. There is nothing dearer to women than the respect and reverence of their children and of the men they love. Yet every son who has grown up reverencing his mother's opinion must realize, when he reaches the age of twenty-one, with a shock from which he can never wholly recover, that in the most important civic and national affairs her opinion is not considered equal to his own....

I confidently believe that equal suffrage is coming far more swiftly than most of us suspect. Educated, public-spirited women will soon refuse to be subjected to such humiliating conditions.

Educated men will recoil in their turn from the sheer unreason of the position that the opinions and wishes of their wives and mothers are to be consulted upon every other question except the laws and government under which they and their husbands and children must live and die. Equal suffrage thus seems to me to be an inevitable and logical consequence of the higher education of women. And the higher education of women is, if possible, a still more inevitable result of the agitation of the early woman suffragists....

We who are guiding this educational movement today owe the profoundest debt of grat.i.tude to those early pioneers--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and, above and beyond all, to Susan B. Anthony. Other women reformers, like other men reformers, have given part of their time and energy. She has given to the cause of women every year, every month, every day, every hour and every moment of her whole life and every dollar she could beg or earn, and she has earned thousands and begged thousands more.

Turning to the honored guest of the evening Dr. Thomas said:

To most women it is given to have returned to them in double measure the love of the children they have nurtured. To you, Miss Anthony, belongs by right, as to no other woman in the world's history, the love and grat.i.tude of all women in every country of the globe. We, your daughters in the spirit, rise up today and call you blessed.

In those far-off days when our mothers' mothers sat contented in the darkness, you, our champion, sprang forth to battle for us, equipped and s.h.i.+ning, inspired by a prophetic vision of the future like that of the apostles and martyrs, and the heat of your battle has lasted more than fifty years. Two generations of men lie between the time when, in the early fifties, you and Mrs.

Stanton sat together in New York State, writing over the cradles of her babies those trumpet calls to freedom that began and carried forward the emanc.i.p.ation of women--and the day eighteen months ago when that great audience in Berlin rose to do you honor, thousands of women from every country in the civilized world, silent, with full eyes and lumps in their throats, because of what they owed to you. Of such as you were the lines of the poet Yeats written: