The History of the Women's Suffrage: The Flame Ignites. Susan B. Anthony

arguments for the calm consideration of their friends in this body? I ask simply for the opportunity to be afforded the representatives of the political rights of women to be heard in making respectful argument to the law-making power of the nation.

      Byron M. Cutcheon (Mich.) also spoke in favor of the committee, saying:

      Ever since the organization of this House I have received petitions from my constituents in regard to this matter of the political rights of women, but there seems to be no committee to which they could properly be referred. A few years since, when this question of woman suffrage was submitted to the people in my State, more than 40,000 electors were in favor of it. It seems to me, without committing ourselves on the question of the political rights of women, it is but respectful to a very large number of people in all our States that there should be a committee to receive and consider and report upon these petitions which come to us from time to time.

      The House refused to allow a vote.

The Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage granted a hearing March 7, 1884, at 10:30 a. m., in the Senate reception room, to the speakers and delegates in attendance at the convention, the entire committee being present.22 In introducing the speakers Miss Anthony said: "This is the sixteenth year that we have come before Congress in person, and the nineteenth by petitions, asking national protection for the citizen's right to vote, when the citizen happens to be a woman."

      Mrs. Harriet R. Shattuck (Mass.): We canvassed four localities in the city of Boston, two in smaller cities, two in country districts and made one record also of school teachers in nine schools of one town. The teachers were unanimously in favor of woman suffrage, and in the nine localities we found that the proportion of women in favor was very much larger than of those opposed. The total of women canvassed was 814. Those in favor were 405, those opposed, 44; indifferent, 166; refused to sign, 160; not seen, 39. These canvasses were made by respectable, responsible women, and they swore before a Justice of the Peace as to the truth of their statements. Thus we have in Massachusetts this reliable canvass of women showing those in favor are to those opposed as nine to one....

      Mrs. May Wright Sewall (Ind.): ... My friend has said that men have always kept us just a little below them where they could shower upon us favors and they have done that generously. So they have, but, gentlemen, has your sex been more generous to women than they have been generous toward you in their favors? Neither can dispense with the service of the other, neither can dispense with the reverence of the other or with the aid of the other in social life. The men of this nation are rapidly finding that they can not dispense with the service of woman in business life. I know that they are also feeling the need of the moral support of woman in their political life.

      You, gentlemen, by lifting the women of the nation into political equality would simply place us where we could lift you where you never yet have stood—upon a moral equality with us. I do not speak to you as individuals but as the representatives of your sex, as I stand here the representative of mine, and never until we are your equals politically will the moral standard for men be what it now is for women, and it is none too high. Let woman's standard be still more elevated, and let yours come up to match it.

      We do not appeal to you as Republicans or as Democrats. We were reared with our brothers under the political belief and faith of our fathers, and probably as much influenced by that rearing as they were. We shall go to strengthen both the parties, neither the one nor the other the more, probably. So this is not a partisan measure; it is a just measure, which is our due, because of what we are, men and women both, by virtue of our heritage and our one Father, our one Mother eternal.

      Mrs. Helen M. Gougar (Ind.): I maintain there is no political question paramount to that of woman suffrage before the people of America to-day. Political parties would have us believe that tariff is the great question of the hour. It is an insult to the intelligence of the present to say that when one-half of the citizens of this republic are denied a direct voice in making the laws under which they shall live, that the tariff, the civil rights of the negro, or any other question which can be brought up, is equal to the one of giving political freedom to women.

      I ask you to let me have a voice in the laws under which I shall live because the older empires of the earth are sending to the United States a population drawn very largely from their asylums, penitentiaries, jails and poor-houses. They are emptying those men upon our shores, and within a few months they are intrusted with the ballot, the law-making power in this republic, and they and their representatives are seated in official and legislative positions. I, as an American-born woman, enter my protest at being compelled to live under laws made by this class of men while I am denied the protection that can only come from the ballot. While I would not have you take this right from those men whom we invite to our shores, I do ask you, in the face of this immense foreign immigration, to enfranchise the tax-paying, intelligent, moral, native-born women of America.

      ....We have in our State the signatures of over 5,000 of the school teachers asking for woman's ballot. I ask you if the Government does not need the voice of those 5,000 educated teachers as much as it needs the voice of the 240 criminals who are, on an average, sent out of the penitentiary of Indiana each year, to go to the ballot-box upon every question, and make laws under which those teachers must live, and under which the mothers of our State must keep their homes and rear their children?

      On behalf of the mothers of this country I demand that their hands shall be loosened before the ballot-box, and that they shall have the privilege of throwing the mother heart into the laws which shall follow their sons not only to the age of majority, but even after their hair has turned gray and they have seats in the United States Congress; yes, to the very confines of eternity. This can be done in no indirect way; it can not be done by silent influence; it can not be done by prayer. While I do not underestimate the power of prayer, I say give me my ballot with which to send statesmen instead of modern politicians into our legislative halls. I would rather have that ballot on election day than the prayers of all the disfranchised women in the universe!

      ....Our forefathers did not object to taxation, but they did object to taxation without representation, and we object to it. We are willing to contribute our share to the support of this Government, as we always have done; but we demand our little yes and no in the form of the ballot so that we shall have a direct influence in distributing the taxes.

      I am amenable to the gallows and the penitentiary, and it is no more than right that I shall have a voice in framing the laws under which I shall be rewarded or punished. It is written in the law of every State in this Union that a person tried in the courts shall have a jury of his peers; yet so long as the word "male" stands as it does in the Constitution of the United States and the States, no woman can have a jury of her peers. I protest in the name of justice against going into the court-room and being compelled to run the gauntlet of the gutter and saloon—yes, even of the police court and of the jail—as is done in selecting a male jury to try the interests of woman, whether relating to life, property or reputation....

      The political party that presumes to fight the moral battles of the future must have the women in its ranks. We are non-partisan. We come as Democrats, Republicans, Prohibitionists and Green-backers, and if there were half a dozen other political parties some of us would affiliate with them. We ask this beneficent action upon your part, because we believe the intelligence and justice of the hour demand it. We ask you in the name of equity and humanity alone, and not in that of any party....

      You ask us if we are impatient. Yes; we are impatient. Some of us may die, and I want our grand old standard-bearer, Susan B. Anthony, whose name will go down to history beside those of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Phillips—I want that woman to go to Heaven a free angel from this republic. The power lies in your hands to make all women free.

      Mrs. Caroline Gilkey Rogers (N. Y.): It is often said to us that when all the women ask for the ballot it will be granted. Did all the married women petition the Legislatures of their States to secure to them the right to hold in their own name the property which 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