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

reunion of the friends.

      In each county there should be a county woman suffrage society auxiliary to the State; in each town or village a local society auxiliary to the county. Friends desirous of forming a society should meet, even though few in number, and organize.

      CHAPTER V.

       The National Suffrage Convention of 1886.

       Table of Contents

      The Eighteenth national convention met in the Church of Our Father, Washington, D. C., Feb. 17-19, 1886, presided over by Miss Susan B. Anthony, vice-president-at-large, with twenty-three States represented. In her opening address Miss Anthony paid an eloquent tribute to her old friend and co-laborer, their absent president, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton; sketched the history of the movement for the past thirty-six years, and described the first suffrage meeting ever held in Washington. This had been conducted by Ernestine L. Rose and herself in 1854, and the audience consisted of twenty or thirty persons gathered in an upper room of a private house. To-night she faced a thousand interested listeners.

      The first address was given by Mrs. Sarah M. Perkins (O.), Are Women Citizens? "While suffrage will not revolutionize the world," she said, "the door of the millennium will have a little child's hand on the latch when the mothers of the nation have equal power with its fathers."

      In the evening Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby addressed the audience on The Relation of the Woman Suffrage Movement to the Labor Question. She began by saying, "All revolutions of thought must be allied to practical ends." After sketching those already attained by women, she continued:

      The danger threatens that, having accomplished all these so thoroughly and successfully that they no longer need our help and already scarcely own their origin, we will be left without the connecting line between the abstract right on which we stand and the common heart and sympathy which must be enlisted for our cause ere it can succeed. Why is it that, having accomplished so much, the woman suffrage movement does not force itself as a vital issue into the thoughts of the masses? Is it not because the ends which it most prominently seeks do not enlist the self-interest of mankind, and those palpable wrongs which it had in early days to combat have now almost entirely disappeared?...

      We need to vitalize our movement by allying it with great non-partisan questions, and many of these are involved in the interests of the wage-earning classes.... We need to labor to secure a change of the conditions under which workingwomen live. We need to help them to educative and protective measures, to better pay, to better knowledge how to make the most of their resources, to better training, to protection against frauds, to shelter when health and heart fail. We must help them to see the connection between the ballot and better hours, exclusion of children from factories, compulsory education, free kindergartens; between the ballot and laws relating to liability of employers, savings banks, adulteration of food and a thousand things which it may secure when in the hands of enlightened and virtuous people.

      Miss Ada C. Sweet, who for a number of years occupied the unique position of pension agent in Chicago, supplemented Mrs. Colby's remarks by urging all women to work for the ballot in order to come to the rescue of their fellow-women in the hospitals, asylums and other institutions. She emphasized her remarks by recounting instances of personal knowledge.

      The Rev. Rush R. Shippen, pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church of Washington, a consistent advocate of equal suffrage, spoke on woman's advance in every department of the world's work, on the evolution of that work itself and the necessity for a continued progress in conditions.

      Mrs. May Wright Sewall presented a comprehensive report of the year's work of the executive committee. The Edmunds Bill had been a special point of attack because of its arbitrary disfranchisement of Utah women, and Mrs. Zerelda G. Wallace (Ind.) had written a personal plea against it to every member of the House. At the close of this report a vote on woman suffrage was called for. The audience voted unanimously in favor, except one man whose "no" called forth much laughter. Miss Anthony said she sympathized with him, as she had been laughed at all her life.

      Mrs. Sallie Clay Bennett (Ky.), whose specialty was the Bible argument for woman's equality, said in the course of her remarks: "I am filled with shame and sorrow that from listening to men, instead of studying the Bible for myself, I did once think that the God who said He came into the world to preach glad tidings to the poor, to break every yoke and to set the prisoners free, had really come to rivet the chains with which sin had bound the women, and to forge a gag for them more cruel and silencing than that put into their mouths by heathen men; for in many heathen nations women were once selected to preside at their most sacred altars."

      Miss Mary F. Eastman (Mass), in an impressive address, said:

      I asked a friend what phase of the subject I should talk about to-night. She answered, "The despair of it.".. Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that "we, the people," should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?...

      Men tell us that they speak for us. There is no companionship of women as equals permitted in the State. A man can not represent a woman's opinion. It was in inspiration that magnificent Declaration of Independence was framed. Men builded better than they knew; they were at the highest perception of principles; but after declaring this magnificent principle they went back on it....

      Although I hold the attitude of a petitioner, I come not with the sense that men have any right to give. Our forefathers erected barriers which exclude women. I want to press it into the consciousness of the legislator and of the individual citizen that he is personally responsible for the continuance of this injustice. We ask that men take down the barriers. We do not come to pledge that we will be a unit on temperance or virtue or high living, but we want the right to speak for ourselves, as men speak for themselves.

      Mrs. Caroline Hallowell Miller (Md.) spoke strongly on A Case in Point. Mrs. Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, of St. Louis, devoted her remarks chiefly to a caustic criticism of Senator George G. Vest, who had recently declared himself uncompromisingly opposed to woman suffrage. He was made the target of a number of spicy remarks, and some of the newspaper correspondents insisted that the presence of the suffrage convention in the city was responsible for the Senator's severe illness, which followed immediately afterwards. Mrs. Meriwether's son, Lee, paid a handsome tribute to "strong-minded mothers".

      Mrs. Harriette R. Shattuck (Mass.) addressed the convention on The Basis of Our Claim, the right of every individual to make his personality felt in the Government. Madame Clara Neymann (N. Y.) gave a scholarly paper on German and American Independence Contrasted, in which she said:

      The difference between the German and the American is simply this: Germans believe in monarchism, in the rule of the Emperor and Prince Bismarck, while Americans believe in the government by all the people, high or low, rich or poor. You have conferred the blessings of free citizenship upon the negro; you invite the humblest, the lowest men to cast their vote; you make them feel that they are sovereign human beings; you place those men above the most virtuous, intelligent women; you set them above your own daughters. Yes, your own child, if born a girl on this free soil, is not free, for she stands without the pale of the Constitution. She, and only she, is deprived of her rightful heritage.

      Oh, shame upon the short-sightedness, the delinquency of American statesmen, who will quietly look on and suffer such an injustice to exist! Nowhere in the world is woman so highly respected as in free America, and nowhere does she feel so keenly and deeply her degradation. The vote—you know it full well—is the insignia of power, of influence, of position. And from this position the American woman is debarred.

      Do you wonder at the low estimate of American politics? The exclusion of women means the exclusion of your best men. Not before the husband can take his wife, the brother his sister, the father his daughter to the primary meeting, to the political assembly and to the polls, will he himself become interested and fulfil his duty as a voter and a citizen....

      "Look