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

and so it will be with the franchise. Woman's right to self-government does not depend upon the numbers that demand it, but upon precisely the same principles on which man claims it for himself. Where did man get the authority which he now exercises 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 it made her his mother—his equal when it fitted her to hold the sacred position of wife. Did women meet in council and voluntarily give up all their right to be their own law-makers? The power of the strong over the weak makes man the master. Thus, and thus 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 it is settled by the States it will be left to the men, not to the women, to decide. Or if suffrage comes to women through a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Constitution, it will be decided by Legislatures elected by men only. In neither case will women have an opportunity of passing 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 the barriers which now prevent our exercising the right of suffrage....

      Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.): 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 very reason she should have the ballot and every help which 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 councils are apt to become coarse and brutal. God gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a better land, and by our love and our intellect to help make our country pure and noble, and if you would have statesmen you must have stateswomen to bear them....

      Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.): 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. In the enormous immigration which pours upon our shores every year, numbering nearly half a million, there come twice as many men as women. What does this mean? 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 foreign men as compared to the native born men. To those who fear that our American institutions are threatened by this gigantic inroad of foreigners, I commend the reflection that the best safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign influence is to put the ballot in the hands of the American born woman, and of all other women also, so that if the foreign born man overbalances us in numbers we shall be always in a majority on the side of the liberty which is secured by our institutions....

      Mrs. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert: From the great State of Illinois I come, representing 200,000 men and women of that State who have recorded their written petitions for woman's ballot, 90,000 of these being citizens under the law, male voters; those 90,000 have signed petitions for the right of woman to vote on the temperance question; 90,000 women also signed those petitions; 50,000 men and women signed the petitions for the school vote, and 60,000 more have signed petitions that the full right of suffrage might be accorded to woman.

      This growth of public sentiment has been occasioned by the needs of the children and the working women of that great State. I come here to ask you to make a niche in the statesmanship and legislation of the nation for the domestic interests of the people. You recognize that the masculine thought is more often turned to material and political interests. I claim that the mother-thought, the woman-element needed, is to supplement the statesmanship of American men on political and industrial affairs with domestic legislation.

      In her closing address Miss Anthony took up the question of obtaining suffrage for women through the States instead of Congress and said:

      My answer is that I do not wish to see the women of the thirty-eight States of this Union compelled to leave their homes to canvass each one of these, school district by school district. It is asking too much of a moneyless class. The joint earnings of the marriage co-partnership in all the States belong legally to the husband. It is only that wife who goes outside the home to work whom the law permits to own and control the money she earns. Therefore, to ask of women, the vast majority of whom are without an independent dollar of their own, to make a thorough canvass of their several States, is asking an impossibility.

      We have already made the experiment of canvassing four States—Kansas in 1867, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, Nebraska in 1882—and in each, with the best campaign possible for us to make, we obtained a vote of only one-third. One man out of every three voted for the enfranchisement of the women of his household, while two out of every three voted against it....

      We beg, therefore, that instead of insisting that a majority of the individual voters must be converted before women shall have the franchise, you will give us the more hopeful task of appealing to the representative men in the Legislatures of the several States. You need not fear that we shall get suffrage too quickly if Congress submits the proposition, for even then we shall have a long siege in going from Legislature to Legislature to secure the vote of three-fourths of the States necessary to ratify the amendment. It may require twenty years after Congress has taken the initiative step, to obtain action by the requisite number, but once submitted by Congress it always will stand until ratified by the States.

      Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's paper on Self-Government the Best Means of Self-Development was read to the committee. A few extracts will serve to show its broad scope:

      The basic idea of a republic is the right of self-government, the right of every citizen to choose his own representatives and to have a voice in the laws under which he lives. As this right can be secured only by the exercise of the suffrage, the ballot in the hand of every qualified citizen constitutes the true political status of the people in a republic.

      The right of suffrage is simply the right to govern one's self. Every human being is born into the world with this right, and the desire to exercise it comes naturally with the feeling of life's responsibilities. Those only who are capable of appreciating this dignity, can measure the extent to which women are defrauded, and they only can measure the loss to the councils of the nation of the wisdom of representative women. They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience.

      It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts. If woman naturally has no will, no self-assertion, no opinions of her own, what means the terrible persecution of the sex under all forms of religious fanaticism, culminating in witchcraft in which scarce one wizard to a thousand witches was sacrificed? So powerful and merciless has been the struggle to dominate the feminine element in humanity, that we may well wonder at the steady, determined resistance maintained by woman through the centuries. To every step of progress which she has made from slavery to the partial freedom she now enjoys, the Church and the State alike have made the most cruel opposition, and yet, under all circumstances she has shown her love of individual freedom, her desire for self-government, while her achievements in practical affairs and her courage in the great emergencies of life have vindicated her capacity to exercise this right....

      The right of suffrage in a republic means self-government, and self-government means education, development, self-reliance, independence, courage in the hour of danger. That women may attain these virtues we demand the exercise of this right. Not that we suppose we should at once be transformed into a higher order of beings with all the elements of sovereignty, wisdom, goodness and power full-fledged, but because the exercise of the suffrage is the primary school in which the citizen learns how to use the ballot as a weapon of defense; it is the open sesame to the land of freedom and equality. The ballot is the scepter of power in the hand of every citizen. Woman can never have an equal chance with man in the struggle of life until she too wields this power. So long as women have no voice in the Government under which they live they will be an ostracised class, and invidious distinctions will be made against them in the world of work. Thrown on their own resources they have all the hardships that men have to encounter in earning their daily bread, with the added disabilities which grow out of disfranchisement. Men of the republic, why make life harder