History of Woman Suffrage/Volume 4/Chapter 19

 

CHAPTER XIX.

THE NATIONAL-AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1899.

A departure was made by the suffrage association in 1899 in having its convention in the late spring instead of the winter, the Thirty-first annual meeting being held in Grand Rapids, Mich., April 27-May 3. It was thought by many that this was an unfavorable season, as the audiences were not so large as usual, but in all other respects it was one of the most delightful of these many gatherings. The meetings vere held in the handsome St. Cecilia Club House, whose auditorium seats 1,200, and the official report, usually confined to bare details, contains the following account:

The music arranged by Mrs. Rathbone Carpenter and her efficient committee was throughout of the finest character and fully justified the reputation of Grand Rapids as a musical community. Mrs. W. D. Giddings, chairman of decorations, worked daily with different members of her committee in arranging the cut flowers and decorative plants generously furnished by different florists, so that the platform was beautiful and fragrant from beginning to end of the meetings. At the evening sessions the audience was seated by the help of young lady ushers under the management of Mrs. Marie Wilson Beasley.

The Bureau of Information, under the charge of Mrs. H. Margaret Downs; the Courtesies, chairman, Mrs. Delos A. Blodgett, and the opening reception on the first evening of the convention, chairman, Mrs. William Alden Smith, were ably managed. But, with the exception of the work devolving upon Mrs. Ketcham, the most constant and trying labor fell to the chairman of entertainment, Mrs. Allen C. Adsit, who cared for the housing of all the delegates and also of the Michigan friends in attendance.

Of the efforts of Mrs. Emily B. Ketcham the entire convention bore witness; it went to Grand Rapids upon her invitation, and upon her work for many months before its opening depended its success, which was unquestioned. At one of the evening sessions she was surprised by the presentation of a handsome souvenir of the occasion containing the signatures of the officers of the association, the speakers and many of the local workers. At the close of the first evening the National officers, assisted by Mrs. Ketcham, Mrs. William Alden Smith, Mrs. Julius Burrows and several of the speakers, received in the beautiful parlor of the St. Cecilia, thus giving delegates and visitors an opportunity to meet the people of the city and to exchange social greetings with each other.

The Ladies' Literary Club, which also owns its home, kept open house several afternoons from four to six, the officers receiving the guests and serving light refreshments. This club also tendered the freedom of its house for any and all hours of the day to the delegates. Saturday afternoon the Federation of the Woman's Christian Temperance Unions of Grand Rapids received the convention at the Young Woman's Building, where a substantial supper was served. The Bissell carpet-sweeper factory, president, Mrs. M. R. Bissell, presented to the delegates one hundred and fifty specially made small carpet-sweepers, each marked in gilt, National American Woman Suffrage Association.

But to the Board of Trade belongs the honor of having outrivaled all the other kind hosts in the extent of their hospitality. They presented to the convention its programs, beautifully printed orf extra fine paper and bearing a picture of the St. Cecilia Club House. The Board also sent carriages to take the entire working convention for a drive through the city, a visit to one of the largest furniture warehouses and to the carpet-sweeper factory, where Mrs. Bissell received the delegates and all were shown through the works. A handsome souvenir containing many views of the city was given by the Board to every delegate.

The ladies of the St. Cecilia were kindness itself, and it was delightful to hold the meetings in so friendly an atmosphere, as well as in so well appointed a building. The president, Mrs. Kelsey, presented to the badge committee St. Cecilia pins having a reproduction of Carlo Dolci's head of the musical saint after whom this club is named, the only musical society of women in the United States which owns a club-house. Cordial addresses of welcome were made by Emily B. Ketcham, president of Susan B. Anthony Club; Mary Atwater Kelsey, president of St. Cecilia; Josephine Ahnafeldt Goss, president of Ladies' Literary Club; May Stocking Knaggs, president of State Equal Suffrage Association; Martha A. Keating, president of State Federation of Women's Clubs; Mrs. A. S. Benjamin, president of State Women's Christian Temperance Union; Mary A. McConnelly, department president of State Woman's Relief Corps; Lucy A. Leggett, president of State Woman's Press Association, and Frances E. Burns, Great Commander Ladies of the Maccabees.

Mrs. Ketcham expressed their pleasure in having Grand Rapids selected in preference to several larger cities which had extended invitations; referred to the long distances many of the delegates had come and assured the convention of a royal welcome, not only from the city but from the State. Brief extracts must give an idea of the scope and cordiality of these addresses:

Mrs. Goss: This has been called the woman's century. The past centuries might have been called man's, because of the great progress he has made in them; and it is now conceded that God made women to match the men. The next will be the children's century, when they will make real their parents' ideals. After humanity has been sufficiently educated, people will understand that no class has a right to special privileges, or can appropriate them without injury to the body politic. Then a woman will not demand any special privilege because she is a woman, nor be denied it because she is not a man. As a result of this movement, old lessons have been better learned and old burdens more easily carried. We advocate equal suffrage not alone because it is just to the mothers, but because it will be good for the children, good for man, good for all humanity. We are glad to be a part of this movement for a higher civilization. Grand Rapids is noted for its furniture factories, and after equal suffrage is granted it will supply plenty of material for the President's cabinet.

Mrs. Knaggs: I welcome you in behalf of the Michigan E. S. A., representing the women of this State who are especially interested in woman's enfranchisement. We have looked forward to the day when you would bring.us the inspiration of one of these great meetings; we needed it. We are told that women are indifferent. Many are so; and nothing can better arouse us than to meet those engaged in this work from so many different places.

An alderman this spring boasted that he had been elected by the votes of eight nationalities. He enumerated seven of them but for some time was unable to think of the eighth. At last he remembered; it was the American. The ballot in the hands of our present voters might be improved by the intelligence that the great body of Michigan women would bring to it. We are beginning to appreciate the solidarity of women. When one State wins suffrage, all the others are gainers by it. The good of this meeting will go abroad over the country.

Mrs. Keating: .... In the happy tone of welcome that you may hear rising from all parts of our State the club women join, with voices 9,000 strong. We have never been happier than now, even during the annual club elections, amid the joy and intelligence of the club ballot. Your fame has preceded you.

Mrs. Benjamin: The W.C. T. U. of Michigan numbers about 9,000 active members, and I bring you the greeting of your white-ribbon sisters. We welcome not only you but your principles, and your avowed determination to conquer before you die. A good mother works in the home, but she would not wish to be forbidden to cross the threshold. For the good of her child, she needs sometimes to cross it. A mother should guard her child outside the home as well as in it. Every mother worthy of the name wishes to protect her own child from vice, and her duty extends to her neighbor's child also. Equal suffrage is coming, friends, and coming soon.

Mrs. Burns: I bring you the welcome of the 45,000 Ladies of the Maccabees. Times have greatly changed in Michigan since Mrs. Goss: This has been called the woman's century. The past centuries might have been called man's, because of the great progress he has made in them; and it is now conceded that God made women to match the men. The next will be the children's century, when they will make real their parents' ideals. After humanity has been sufficiently educated, people will understand that no class has a right to special privileges, or can appropriate them without injury to the body politic. Then a woman will not demand any special privilege because she is a woman, nor be denied it because she is not a man. As a result of this movement, old lessons have been better learned and old burdens more easily carried. We advocate equal suffrage not alone because it is just to the mothers, but because it will be good for the children, good for man, good for all humanity. We are glad to be a part of this movement for a higher civilization. Grand Rapids is noted for its furniture factories, and after equal suffrage is granted it will supply plenty of material for the President's cabinet.

Mrs. Knaggs: I welcome you in behalf of the Michigan E. S. A., representing the women of this State who are especially interested in woman's enfranchisement. We have looked forward to the day when you would bring.us the inspiration of one of these great meetings; we needed it. We are told that women are indifferent. Many are so; and nothing can better arouse us than to meet those engaged in this work from so many different places.

An alderman this spring boasted that he had been elected by the votes of eight nationalities. He enumerated seven of them but for some time was unable to think of the eighth. At last he remembered; it was the American. The ballot in the hands of our present voters might be improved by the intelligence that the great body of Michigan women would bring to it. We are beginning to appreciate the solidarity of women. When one State wins suffrage, all the others are gainers by it. The good of this meeting will go abroad over the country.

Mrs. Keating: .... In the happy tone of welcome that you may hear rising from all parts of our State the club women join, with voices 9,000 strong. We have never been happier than now, even during the annual club elections, amid the joy and intelligence of the club ballot. Your fame has preceded you.

Mrs. Benjamin: The W.C. T. U. of Michigan numbers about 9,000 active members, and I bring you the greeting of your white-ribbon sisters. We welcome not only you but your principles, and your avowed determination to conquer before you die. A good mother works in the home, but she would not wish to be forbidden to cross the threshold. For the good of her child, she needs sometimes to cross it. A mother should guard her child outside the home as well as in it. Every mother worthy of the name wishes to protect her own child from vice, and her duty extends to her neighbor's child also. Equal suffrage is coming, friends, and coming soon.

Mrs. Burns: I bring you the welcome of the 45,000 Ladies of the Maccabees. Times have greatly changed in Michigan since seventy years ago, when the Indian squaws did all the manual labor, and the braves limited themselves to the noble task of hunting. There has been a corresponding change in the condition of women all along the line.

In the response of Miss Susan B. Anthony, the national president, she said:

Since our last convention the area of disfranchisement in the possessions of the United States has been greatly enlarged. Our nation has undertaken to furnish provisional governments for Hawaii and the Philippine Islands, Cuba and Porto Rico. Hitherto the settlers of new Territories have been permitted to frame their own provisional governments, which were ratified by Congress, but to-day Congress itself assumes the prerogative of making the laws for the newly-acquired Territories. When the governments for those in the West were organized there had been no practical example of universal suffrage in any one of the older States, hence it might be pardonable for their settlers to ignore the right of the women associated with them to a voice in their governments.

But to-day, after fifty years' continuous agitation of the right of women to vote, and after the demand has been conceded in one-half the States in the management of the public schools; after one State has added to that of the schools the management of its cities; and after four States have granted women the full vote—the universal reports show that the exercise of the suffrage by women has added to their influence, increased the respect of men, and elevated the moral, social and political conditions of their respective commonwealths. With those object-lessons before Congress, it would seem that no member could be so blind as not to see it the duty of that body to have the provisional governments of our new possessions founded on the principle of equal rights, privileges and immunities for all the people, women included. I hope this convention will devise some plan for securing a strong expression of public sentiment on this question, to be presented to the Fifty-sixth Congress which is to convene on the first Monday of December next. ....

During the reconstruction period and the discussion of the negro' s right to vote Senator Blaine and others opposed the counting of all the negroes in the basis of representation, instead of the old-time three-fifths, because they saw that to do so would greatly increase the power of the white men of the South on the floor of Congress. Therefore the Republican leaders insisted upon the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to secure the ballot to the negro men. Only one generation has passed and yet nearly all of the Southern States have by one device or another succeeded in excluding from the ballot-box very nearly the entire negro vote, openly and defiantly declaring their intention to secure the absolute supremacy of the white race, but there is not a suggestion on their part of allowing the citizens to whom they deny the right of suffrage to be counted out from the basis of representation. Some of the Northern newspapers have been growing indignant upon the subject, declaring that a vote in South Carolina counts more than two votes in New York, in the election of the President and the House of Representatives. It seems to me that a still greater violation of the principle of "the consent of the governed" is practiced in all the States of the Union where women, though disfranchised, are yet counted in the basis of representation, and I think the time has come when this association should make a most strenuous demand for an amendment to the Constitution of the United States forbidding any State thus to count disfranchised citizens. ....

The increased discussion of the enfranchisement of women in the newspapers throughout the country evidences the larger demand of the public for information on this line, and a vast amount of educational work is being done in this way. .... The presentation of the woman question in the New York Sunday Sun each week by Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, with the articles it has elicited from the opposition, is of incalculable value; and when we add to the number of people who read the Sun the vast numbers who read the copies of these articles made by the many newspapers between the two oceans, we see what an immense reading audience is gained by getting our question into that one of the best New York dailies. We must remember that these papers never would have copied Mrs. Harper's or any other literary woman's productions had they been first published in one of our special organs; therefore one very important branch of press work is to gain access to the metropolitan dailies. Then there is the immense work done by Mrs. Elnora M. Babcock for the State of New York, and by the chairmen of the different State press committees, as well as that done by our national organizer from the headquarters. Never has the press of the entire nation been kept so alive with discussions upon the woman suffrage question as during the past year, and my hope is that we may yet have upon every one of the great city papers a strong, educated suffrage woman, as editor of a woman's page or, better still, as writer of suffrage articles to be inserted without a special heading which would advertise to the general reader that they were about women.

Though we have' not obtained the suffrage in any of the States where we had hoped to do so during the past year, the failures have been by very small majorities. In South Dakota, where eight years ago a woman suffrage amendment was lost by a majority of over 23,000, at the election of 1898 the opposing majority was reduced to 3,000; while in Washington, where the question was submitted for the second time, it was lost by a majority less than one-half as large as that of nine years ago. In California both Houses of the Legislature passed the School Suffrage Bill, which the Governor refused to sign, repeating the action of 1894. The suffrage bills in the Territorial Legislatures of Oklahoma and Arizona were carried by very fine majorities through both lower Houses, but were lost in both upper Houses (as will be stated by our national organizer, who led our suffrage hosts in each case) through a shameful surrender to the temptation of bribery from the open and avowed enemies of woman's enfranchisement, the liquor organizations.

None of these so-called defeats ought to discourage us in the slightest degree. Our enemies, the women remonstrants, may comfort themselves with the thought that the liquor interest has joined in their efforts, but we surely can solace ourselves with the fact that the very best men voted in favor of allowing women to exercise their right to a voice in the conditions of home and State. So we have nothing to fear but everything to gain by going forward with renewed faith to agitate and educate the public, until the vast majority of men and women are thoroughly grounded in the great principle of political equality. ....

I thank you, friends, for your 'cordial words of welcome. We are glad to come here. I always feel a certain kinship to Michigan since the constitutional amendment campaign of 1874, in which I assisted. I remember that I went across one city.on a dray, the only vehicle I could secure, in order to catch a train. A newspaper said next day: "That ancient daughter of Methuselah, Susan B. Anthony, passed through our city last night, with a bonnet looking as if she had just descended from Noah's Ark." Now if Susan B. Anthony had represented votes, that young political editor would not have cared if she were the oldest or youngest daughter of Methuselah, or whether her bonnet came from the Ark or from the most fashionable man milliner's.

There are women's clubs all over the country; did you ever hear of one organized for other than an uplifting purpose? (Several voices: "Yes, the Anti-Suffrage Associations!) Well, even the "antis" wish to keep the world just as it is; they do not aim to make it worse. Some persons have tried to belittle the resolution passed by the Colorado Legislature recently, testifying to the good results of equal suffrage, by declaring that the members were afraid of the women. I never heard before of a Legislature that voted solidly in a certain way for fear of women. We have with us to-day Mrs. Welch, the president of the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association, of whom it is said that the Legislature was so afraid. [Miss Anthony led forward Mrs. Welch, a pretty little woman in a very feminine bonnet, who shrank away slightly from the compelling hand, and showed shyness in every line of her figure, as she felt the eyes of the audience concentrated upon her.] At the time of the first recognition of women in the early Granger days, when the farmers used to harness up their horses to their big wagons and take all their women folks to the meetings, I used to say that I could tell a Grange woman as far off as I could see her, because of her air of feeling herself as good as a man. Now look at this woman from Colorado!

Mrs. Welch: When I came before the Executive Committee this morning, and they said they were proud of me as a free woman, I felt almost ashamed to be a free woman. I thought of all the tears and sorrows and struggles of Miss Anthony and wondered if she ever would possess the ballot for which she had done so much, and I so little.

Miss Anthony: I am glad you have it. We are not working for ourselves alone; that is one reason why our society does not grow as fast as some others.

The paper of the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer (R. I.) was a strong, philosophical presentation of our Duty to the Women of Our New Possessions:

.... Prof. Otis T. Mason, author of that important book, "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture," tells us that "the longer one studies the subject the more he will be convinced that savage tribes can now he elevated chiefly through their women." Why is this true? For the reason that the savage is in the stage of social order through which all civilized nations have passed at some period—the stage of the mother-rule more or less modified by partial masculine domination. It is a well-known fact of human history and prehistoric record that the Matriarchate, or the mother-rule, preceded the Patriarchate, or the father-rule. "All the social fabrics of the world are built around women. The first stable society was a mother and her child." The reason why the primitive descent of name and property, and the first fixed stake of home life, was the expression of this maternal relationship is obvious. Motherhood was demonstrated by nature before fatherhood was definitely known. Inheritance of name by the female line was alone possible; and that, as well as the female holding and transmitting of property, was a family or tribal or clan relationship, women always retaining rule and wealth not so much as individuals as custodians of communal life and possessions. Not only was the mother with the child the first founder of human society, but the woman in savage life was the first inventor and originator of all life-sustaining industries. ....

When man also began to "settle down"—whether from personal choice or from social pressure—when he, too, began to learn and practice the industrial arts heretofore solely in the hands of women, he began to press his more personal and individualistic claims of recognition and of property-owning against the family wealth of which the woman was the custodian.

As man more and more assumed the burden of the world's industries outside the home (which before had been woman's care alone), and as woman became more and more absorbed in purely domestic concerns, man's individualism assumed greater and greater power within the family life, and he gradually acquired the despotic family headship which marked the ancient patriarchal order of Rome. This was not a social descent, but an immense social uplift, in the age in which it was natural. Professor Mason says, and with profound truth, "Matrimony in all ages is an effort to secure to the child the authenticity of the father." It was necessary for social growth that offspring should have two parents instead of one; that the division of labor should be more equal, and man be fastened to domestic needs by bonds he could not break, and through labors which were peaceful as well as arduous. For that process his individualism, developed through ages of free wandering and purely militant life, must be not only tamed somewhat, but harnessed to-the home life.

To accomplish that mighty social uplift by which offspring secured two-parents instead of one, woman's subjection to man was paid as the price of the higher form of family unity. Nor was her subjection to man in the ruder ages of the world wholly an evil to herself. It has been said that "woman was first the wife of any, second the wife of many, and third one of many wives." Each of these steps was an advance in her sexual relationship. All were stepping-stones to the monogamic union which is the standard of our civilization, and the realized ideal of all our best and wisest men and women. ....

Bebel says, "Woman was the first human being to taste of bondage." True, and her bondage has bten long and bitter; but the subjection of woman to man in the family bond was a vast step upward from the preceding condition. It gave woman release from the terrible labor-burdens of savage life; it gave her time and strength to develop beauty of person and refinement of taste and manners. It gave her the teaching capacity, for it put all the younger child-life into her exclusive care, with some leisure at command to devote to its mental and moral, as well as physical, well-being. It led to a closer relationship between man and woman than the world had known before, and thus gave each the advantage of the other's qualities. And always and everywhere the subjection of woman to man has had a mitigation and softening of hardships unknown to other forms of slavery, by reason of the power of human affection as it has worked through sex-attraction. As soon, however, as the slavery of woman to man was outgrown and obsolete it became (as was African slavery in a professedly democratic country like our own) "the sum of all villainies." And to-day there is no inconsistency so great, and therefore no condition so hurtful and outrageous, as the subjection of women to men in a civilization which like ours assumes to rest upon foundations of justice and equality of human rights. ....

To-day these considerations (especially the failure fully to apply the doctrine of equality of human rights to women, even in the most advanced centers of modern civilization) have an especial and most fateful significance in relation to the women of the more backward races as they are brought into contact with our modern civilization, I said the peoples with whom we are now being brought as a nation into vital relationship may be still in the matriarchate. If they are not, most of them are certainly in some transition stage from that to the father-rule. Not all peoples have had to pass through the entire subjection of women to men which marked our ancestral advance. The more persistent tribal relationship and collective family life have sometimes softened the process of social growth which was so harsh for women under the old Roman law and the later English common law. It may be that the dusky races of Africa and of the islands of the sea, as well as our Arvan cousins of India, may pass more easily through the stages, of attachment of man's responsibility to the family life than we, with our tough fiber of character, were able to do. If so, in the name of justice they should have the chance!

But if we, who have not yet "writ large" in law and political rights that respect for woman which all our education, industry, religion, art, home life and social culture express; if we, who are still inconsistent and not yet out of the transition stage from the father-rule to the equal reign of both sexes; if we lay violent hands upon these backward peoples and give them only our law and our political rights as they relate to women, we shall do horrible injustice to the savage women, and through them to the whole process of social growth for their people. When we tried to divide "in severalty" the lands of the American Indian, we did violence to all his own sense of justice and co-operative feeling when we failed to recognize the women of the tribes in the distribution. We then and there gave the Indian the worst of the white man's relationship to his wife, and failed utterly, as in the nature of the case we must have done, to give him the best of the white man's relation to his wife.

When in India, as Mrs. Garrett Fawcett has so finely shown, we introduce the technicalities of the English law of marriage to bind an unwilling wife to her husband, we give the Hindoo the slavery of the Anglo-Saxon wife, but we do not give him that spirit of Anglo-Saxon marriage and home-life which has made that slavery often scarcely felt, and never an unmixed evil. If, to-day, in the Hawaiian Islands or in Cuba we fail to recognize the native women, who still hold something of the primitive prestige of womanhood, fail to recognize them as entitled to a translation, under new laws and conditions, of the old dignity of position, we shall not only do them an injustice, but we shall forcibly give the Hawaiian and Cuban men lessons in the wrong side and not the right side of our domestic relations. Above all, if in the Philippines we abruptly and with force of arms establish the authority of the husband over the wife, by recognizing men only as property-owners, as signers of treaties, as industrial rulers and as domestic law-givers, we shall introduce every outrage and injustice of women's subjection to men, without giving these people one iota of the sense of family responsibility, of protection of and respect for woman, and of deep and self-sacrificing devotion to childhood's needs, which mark the Anglo-Saxon man.

In a word, if we introduce one particle of our belated and illogical political and legal subjection of women to men into any savage or half-civilized community, we shall spoil the domestic virtues that community already possesses, and we shall not (because we can not so abruptly and violently) inoculate them with the virtues of civilized domestic life. Nature will not be cheated. We can not escape, nor can we roughly and swiftly help others to escape, the discipline of ages of natural growth.

This all means that we need another Commission to go to all the lands in which our flag now claims a new power of oversight and control—a Commission other than that so recently sent to the Philippines—to see what may be done to bring order to that distracted group of islands. We need a Commission which shall study domestic rather than political conditions, and which shall look for the undercurrents of social growth rather than the more showy political movements. We should have on that. Commission two archzologists, a man and a woman, and I can name them—Otis T. Mason and Alice C. Fletcher. ....

An earnest discussion followed this paper, in which Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.), Mrs. Helen Philleo Jenkins (Mich), Henry B. Blackwell (Mass.), Miss Octavia W. Bates (Mich.), Miss Martha Scott Anderson (Minn.), and Miss Anthony took part:

Mrs. Jenkins: .... Whatever power in government may be given to the men of our new possessions in selecting their rulers, let the same privilege be accorded the women. It may be said that the women are ignorant, and need yet to be held in subjection—that they are unfit to have a voice in the new order of things. Let us not be deceived. Probably the women are no more ignorant and stupid than the masses of men in these newly acquired regions— excepting always the few men whom circumstances have developed. The ignorant mother can guide her child quite as safely as its ignorant father. Men and women in all nations and tribes are pretty nearly on a level as to common sense and forethought for the future good of the family. Indeed, the interests of the home, protection of the children, and the morals and behavior of the community make the standard of even unlettered women one notch higher than that of their ignorant husbands. Let us of this nation hesitate before we establish a sex supremacy that it may take long centuries to overcome. ....

Thousands of dollars are expended on a military commission; it is sent to investigate the commercial possibilities, the financial opportunities, in remote lands; but the army, the commerce, the finance are not all there is of a nation. There are more vital interests—there is something which lies at the very base of the nation, without which it could not exist—the homes, the women and the children. It is the social conditions that need special consideration in our country's dealings with these new lands.

Miss Bates: .... In the presence of the events which have transpired during the past year, and in all the discussions pertaining to the new peoples who have suddenly become our protégés, seldom if ever does one hear a word about the women, who, all will admit, are a most important factor in the civilization— or the lack of it—which we have taken under our control.

We women are here at this time to do our best to awaken the public conscience to a realizing sense of the state of affairs. We are the result of what the religion, the education of the nineteenth century and the liberty which it has granted to women have made us. We are ready and willing and competent to befriend our less favored sisters beyond the seas, and to extend to them the benefits we enjoy, so far as they are able to receive them; but—the tragedy of it—in a certain sense we are utterly helpless to reach them and to give them what they, unconsciously to themselves, so grievously need. There is no place for the thought of the women of this land in the plans of the nation for the study of these questions.

No matter how much our speaker may think and write and publish on this subject—aye, and women like her—no matter how wise the conclusions they reach, is it at all likely that their voices will be listened to in the din and blare and clash of warring political parties, or respected in legislative halls? Or is it probable that the advocates of territorial expansion will pause a moment to ponder on the woman side of that question? We, to-day, are discussing this subject without even the shadow of a hope of putting our convictions into practice. Is it any wonder that women at large are dead to the importance of this matter? ....

I am in favor of pushing the question to the utmost—not that I have any hope that such a Commission will be appointed, but because it furnishes a most valuable argument for extending the suffrage to women: first, in order that, by its possession, they may have an uncontested, legally-defined right of serving on such commissions; and, second, because of the opportunity it offers for proving to the world the necessity of commissions like this for settling questions and conditions of which women form a central and integral part. Of course if we possessed the suffrage, we should have no necessity for a discussion like the present. Everything we are saying would seem like truisms then, instead of being contested point by point, as it is to-day. ....

Mr. Blackwell: .... In those islands are peoples ranging from absolute savagery to medieval civilization, from fighters with blow-guns and bows and arrows to fighters with Mauser rifles and modern artillery. Laws and institutions suited to the needs of one tribe are unsuited to those of another. Side by side are Catholicism, Mohammedanism and heathenism. Their amusements vary from cannibalism to cock-fighting. Their social status -ranges from barbarous promiscuity to Moslem polygamy and thence to Hindoo monogamy. But everywhere exist masculine domination and feminine subjection, under varied forms of political despotism, tempered with Protestant liberalism in the case of Hawaii. To establish over all these diverse social conditions the rigid principles of the English common law, which prevail largely in our jurisprudence, will perpetuate and intensify the tyranny of husband over wife, of father over offspring.

We see the consequences-already in the British West Indies, where negro women generally prefer to live outside of legal marriage because as wives they find themselves subjected to practical serfdom. In Jamaica 75 per cent. of the births are illegitimate for this reason. When I visited Haiti, I was told to my great surprise that the homes and small farms were usually owned by the women. Expressing my admiration of this chivalrous recognition of women's right to the homestead, I was informed that there was no such sentiment. It was solely because the men were so lazy and unreliable that the perpetuity of the race was endangered. The fathers of the children were here to-day and away to-morrow. They spent their time in loafing, drinking, gambling and plotting "revolutions." The women, anchored by the love for their children, lived in the little huts on their small plantations, raising yams and bananas, and if the men became too drunken and abusive the women ordered them to leave. Among those people, in a tropical climate, with land to squat upon, most of the work is done by the women. Let no one imagine that the so-called "matriarchate" of early ages was an ideal condition of society. It was based primarily upon the industrial and moral irresponsibility of men.

In our new possessions, side by side with these primitive conditions, we have great bodies of Chinese and Hindoo coolies, who represent ancient and fossilized types of civilized society, patient, economical, industrious, monogamous and exclusive in their family relations. The trouble is that where Western civilization interferes with Oriental abuses it does not go far enough. When in India the British government prohibited the custom of burning widows on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands, widows became the slaves of their husband's relatives, and were actually believed to be responsible for his death and were ill treated accordingly. When infanticide was forbidden and peace maintained, population multiplied until famine became chronic. The only salvation for the women of our new possessions lies in a legal recognition of their personal, industrial, social and political equality. If, as seems too probable, their rights shall be simply ignored in the reconstruction, women will suffer all the disabilities of the law, without the practical alleviations afforded by an enlightened public opinion. Such women, even more than those of our own States, will need the ballot as a means of self-protection. ....

Miss Anthony: I have been overflowing with wrath ever since the proposal was made to engraft our half-barbaric form of government on Hawaii and our other new possessions. I have been studying how to save, not them, but ourselves from the disgrace. This is "the first time the United States has ever tried to foist upon a new people the exclusively masculine form of government. Our business should be to give this people the highest form which has been attained by us. When our State governments were originally formed, there was no example of woman suffrage anywhere, but now we have a great deal of it, and everywhere it has done good. The principle is constantly spreading. ....

We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of j justice—that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessions upon the same terms as to the men—because we shall not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get it; our business is to make the demand. Suppose during these fifty years we had asked only for what we thought we could secure, where should we be now? Ask for the whole loaf and take what you can get.

Mrs. Mary L. Doe (Mich.), brought greetings from the American Federation of Labor. "Woman suffrage would find its most hopeful and fertile field among the labor organizations," she said; "the workingmen stood for weak and defenseless women even before they did for their own rights.'"? From Samuel Gompers, president of the Federation, she read the following letter:

The American Federation of Labor, at every convention where the subject has been brought up and discussed, has unfalteringly declared for equal legal, political and economic rights for women. At the convention held in Detroit, some thirteen years ago, a resolution to that effect was unanimously adopted. A petition to Congress for the submission of a constitutional amendment enfranchising women was circulated among our various unions, and within two months it received nearly 300,000 signatures and indorsements.

At the Kansas City convention last December, the question of woman's work was discussed, and the following declaration was unanimously adopted: "In view of the awful conditions under which woman is compelled to toil, this, the eighteenth annual convention of the American Federation of Labor, strongly urges the more general formation of trade unions of wage-working women, to the end that they may scientifically and permanently abolish the terrible evils accompanying their weakened, because unorganized state; and we emphatically reiterate the trade-union demand that women receive equal compensation for equal service performed."

You will see that there ought to be no question as to the attitude of the organized labor movement on this subject, notwithstanding the designing misrepresentations of enemies of our cause, who seek to place our movement in a false light. Let me say, too, that the declaration just quoted is not for compliment merely, for members of many of our organizations have been involved in long and sacrificing contests in order to secure to women equal pay for equal work, Please convey fraternal greetings to our friends who will meet at Grand Rapids.

When Mrs. Loraine Immen came forward with a greeting from the Michigan Elocutionists' Association, Miss Anthony spoke of the great change which had taken place in women's voices in the last twenty-five years. At an early Woman's Rights Convention, when she insisted that they should speak louder, one of them answered, "We are not here to screech; we are here to be ladies."

Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.) spoke entertainingly on The Hope of the Future:

The lessons of the past year have brought home to many of us more forcibly than any other recent events the injustice and cruelty of denying to women their proper share in deciding questions for the public good. We have seen the republic plunged into war in which women have borne a heavy share of the burdens. It should be the rule of all nations that no contest of arms should be entered into without the consent of the women. .... Another significant object lesson grew out of the war. When the time of election approached, the governmental authorities became much exercised over the means of providing for the voting of the soldiers. It is astonishing how much men think of their own right to vote. Extra sessions of the Legislatures were called to provide means of meeting this emergency. In this dilemma I ventured to write to the Governor of my State and suggest that he recommend the passing of a law empowering each soldier and sailor to send to some woman at home a proxy permitting her to vote for him. You can see how simple a plan this would be. Every man would have a beloved mother, a dear sister or some adored damsel whom he would be proud to have represent him at the polls, and the amount of money which this scheme would have saved to the State is enormous. The counting of the soldiers' votes when at last they were sent to New York cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In one instance, in a certain county where the board of supervisors had to be called together in two special sessions and the county officials summoned as if at a regular election, to count six votes, the amount reached $100 per vote!

Miss Frances A. Griffin (Ala.), a new speaker on the national platform, captured the audience with her rich voice and southern intonation as she discussed The Effects of Our Teaching:

The thanksgiving of the old Jew, "Lord, I thank Thee that Thou didst not make me a woman," doubtless came from a careful review of the situation. Like all of us, he had fortitude enough to bear his neighbors' afflictions. ....

Miss Anthony deals recklessly with years, apportioning yen to her friends as liberally as Napoleon dealt out kingdoms and duchies to his brothers and other relations. Her example has strengthened me; you never would have had this next remark but for Miss Anthony: Thirty-five: years ago I read a graduating essay. I knew I was doing an unwomanly thing, and in order to preserve what little womanliness I might have left, when I got up to read it I whispered the whole essay. I've quit that. Since I made up my mind to be heard, I have been heard. .... A great progress of women has gone on and is going on. Men for the most part are manageable; women are the converts needed. When women have their minds made up to vote, it will be with them as it was with me about being heard. ....

This is a new era for woman. If the larger sphere now open to her is not a new discovery, it is at least a new testament. The day will come that people will look back with shame on the time when brains and virtue were shut away from the ballot-box, if they belonged to a woman.

Miss Anna Caulfield (Mich.) pointed out The Achievements of Woman in Art. Mrs. May Wright Sewall (Ind.) spoke eloquently on The True Civilization of the World, saying in part:

In the new civilization the sense of personal responsibility is strong; it respects the child's individuality and also recognizes the unity of all educational agencies—kindergarten, school, college and university.

There is also a new theology, in which individual conscience is substituted for the dictates of authority, and which distinguishes between metaphysical doctrine and practical principle. It seeks the higher unity, all embracing.

The new political economy recognizes the right of the individual, and the body politic as composed of units, each one of which must be respected. Its whole effort is to preserve the rights of employers and to give equal recognition to the employed; to unify all those classes that have heretofore been kept divided.

The new civilization results from all these. The difficulties in realizing this perfect unit arise from selfishness. We have long recognized that individual selfishness is a defect, but national selfishness has been for a long time extolled under the name of patriotism, and has gone on cleaving great chasms between different peoples. In the new civilization the individual will recognize himself at his best in his relation to the whole. The different professions will recognize that what each contributes bears but a small ratio to what each receives from the rest. The different nationalities will recognize their respective dignities in just the proportion in which the whole must transcend any part. Then humanity will exceed national feeling and the unity of the race will exalt the dignity of the individual.

The resolution presented by Mrs. Sewall, member for the United States of the International Peace Union, rejoicing over the approaching Peace Conference at The Hague and assuring the commissioners from the United States of the sympathy of the women of this country, was unanimously adopted.

The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, national vice-president, whose childhood and early girlhood had been spent in Michigan, closed the Saturday evening meeting with a tender address on Working Partners, a graphic description of the pioneer days of this State and the hardships of its women, during which she said: "Women have been faithful partners and have done their full share of the work. A gentleman opposed to their enfranchisement once said to me, 'Women have never produced anything of any value to the world.' I told him the chief product of the women had been the men, and left it to him to decide whether the product was of any value. Is it said that women must not vote because they can not bear arms? Why, women's arms have borne all the armbearers of the world. We have no antique art in America, but we have antique laws. We do not look back to the antiquity of the world, but to the babyhood of the world. Who would think of calling a new-born infant antique? Yet laws made in the babyhood of the world are in this day of its manhood quoted for our guidance. Much has been said lately about 'the white man's burden', but the white man will never have a heavier burden to take up than himself."

Twelve churches offered their pulpits, which were filled by the women speakers Sunday morning.^[1] The regular convention services were held Sunday afternoon in the St. Cecilia building, a large audience being present. The Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell led the devotional exercises, and the Rev. Florence Kollock Crocker gave the sermon from the text: "Whether one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it." Afterwards Mrs. Sewall spoke on the coming Peace Congress at The Hague and, on motion of Melvin A. Root, a resolution was adopted that on May 15, the opening day of the congress, the women of our country assemble in public and send to it the voice of women in favor of peace. A touching letter from Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was read by Miss Anthony during the convention, in which she said: "We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet. We do not hold the ignorant class of men responsible for these outrages against women, but rather the published opinions of men in high positions, judges, bishops, presidents of colleges, editors, novelists and poets—all taught by the common and civil law. It is a sad reflection that the chains of woman's bondage have been forged by her own sires and sons. Every man who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed against her."

Monday evening Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, national treasurer, told of An Ohio Woman's Experience as Member of a School Board. She gave a lively account of her own nomination and election in Warren, and said in concluding: "It was not a war of women against men, but of liberalism against conservatism, of principle against prejudice, of the new against the old. It does not take any more time to clean up a schoolhouse and keep out scarlet fever than it does to nurse the children through the scarlet fever."

Mrs. Flora Beadle Renkes, School Commissioner of Barry

County, Mich., described Some Phases of Public School Work..

She advocated industrial and moral as well as intellectual training and all of this equally for both sexes.

Mrs. Minerva Welch, in considering Woman's Possibilities, said: "To my mind it is given to woman to develop the greatest possibilities in all the world. She can direct the character of generations. If woman ever gains the place God intended her to have it must be through the mother element. In Denver we have organized women's clubs for the study of art, literature and political science. We have learned to fraternize. Men have found that women bring their moral influence into politics, and the men also know that they must look to their own morals if they want office. Many questions have been sent to our State asking about the new conditions. Woman suffrage has proved a success, and the women can stand with heads erect, shoulder to shoulder with any one, knowing that they are full, free citizens of the State of Colorado and of the United States."

Miss Anthony then, by special request, gave a recital of all the facts connected with her arrest, trial and conviction for voting in 1872. Miss Shaw introduced her as a criminal, and Miss Anthony retorted, "Yes, a criminal out of jail, just like a good many of the brethren." With marvelous power she recalled all the details of that dramatic episode.

Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway (Ore.) gave an address on How to Win the Ballot, containing much sound sense. It was published in full by the Grand Rapids Democrat. Mrs. Evelyn H. Belden, president of the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association, spoke on Women and War, saying:

Did you ever have to live with heroes—with men who have survived the hardships and dangers of war? One of the reasons for my mildness in public is that I have to be mild at home. I live with the heroes of two wars. The elder put down the rebellion—so he tells me. The younger, for whom I am responsible, has accomplished an even more perilous feat; he met in mortal combat every day for six months the product of the commissary department of our late war. He is still alive, but "kicking"—and so is his mother!

Note that there were no women on the War Investigating Commission. Brutal officers, incompetent quartermasters and ignorant doctors were tried before a jury of their peers. Every department which was conducted without the help of women has been for months writhing under the probe of an official investigation, and is still writhing under the lash of public opinion.

When the war broke out, the women of Iowa, with the suffragists at their head, cheerfully consecrated themselves to the service of a State which does not recognize them as the equals of their own boys. I have one old trunk that made six trips to Chickamauga Park, filled with delicacies for the soldiers. About August I made up my mind to go and see things for myself. My husband was told it was no place for a woman there among 60,000 men and 1,500 animals; but he had business at home which he did not think I could attend to, and he thought I could go to Chickamauga just as well as he.

If there had been women on the commission, would they have pitched the camp five miles from water? Or provided only one horse and one mule to bring the water for two companies? Or ordered the soldiers to filter and boil their drinking water, without furnishing any filters or any vessels to boil it in? It is said that suffragists do not know how to keep house. If so, the men who managed the war must all be suffragists.

But Clara Barton and the women nurses have won golden opinions from every one. If any man had: given a tithe of what Helen Gould did, he could have had any office in the gift of the administration. So could she, if she had been a voter. She might even have been Secretary of War.

We raise our sons to die not for their country—no woman grudges her sons to her country—but to die unnecessarily of disease and neglect, because of red tape. ....

History furnishes no parallel to the women of America during the last year's war. They were fully alive to its issues, intelligently conversant with its causes, its purposes and possibilities; they studied' camp locations, conditions and military rules; and through the hand the heart found constant expression, as many a company of grateful boys can testify. The experience of this war ought to have effectually destroyed the last trace of medieval sentiment concerning the propriety of women mixing in the affairs of government, and also the last shadow of doubt as to the expediency of recognizing them as voters.

Mrs. Josephine K. Henry (Ky.) made an address sparkling with the epigrams for which she was noted, entitled A Plea for the Ballot:

.... The light and the eager interest in the faces of American women show that they are going somewhere; and when women have started for somewhere, they are harder to head off than a comet. .... All roads for women lead to suffrage, even if they do not know it. We are Daughters of Evolution, and who can stop old Dame Evolution? .... We must live up to our principles, or, as a nation, we are not going to live at all. Then it will be time for Liberty to throw down her torch, and go out of the enlightening business. .... "Woman's sphere'—these are the two hardest-worked words in the dictionary. .... They call in the mental and moral wreckage of foreign nations to help rule us. A man was asked, "How are you going to vote on the constitution?" He answered: "My constitution's mighty poorly; my mother was feeble before me." There is deep tragedy in giving such men control of the lives and property of American women. .... There is not so much the matter with the U. S. Constitution as with the constitutions of some of our statesmen. .... It is not an expansion of territory that we need so much as an expansion of justice to our own women. .... American men have had a hard struggle for their own liberty, and some of them are afraid there will not be liberty enough to go around. .... What relation is woman to the State? She is a very poor relation, yet her tax-money is demanded promptly.

Dr. Mary H. Barker Bates, of the Denver School Board, discussed Our Gains and Our Losses, and said in closing: "We have learned that in politics we must have a machine, only it should be used for good government, not for corruption. Make your machine as perfect as you can, without a flaw in it anywhere, and then use it for good ends." Mrs. Mary B. Clay (Ky.) gave a careful survey of conditions resulting from The Removal of Industries from the Home, which had forced woman ta follow them and made her an industrial factor in the outside world. Miss Griffin being again called on told these anecdotes:

In my home in Alabama there are four educated women. My father has passed away. My sisters are widows and I am an old maid. We have as our gardener a negro boy twenty-three years old. When he came to us he said that he had been in the Second Reader for ten years, but on election day he goes over and votes to represent our family. If we complain of having no vote on the expenditure of our tax-money, we are told we must "influence" men; in other words, we must influence that gardener. But when we start to do so, and ask him how he means to vote, he says he doesn't know yet, because he hasn't seen "Uncle Peter," the colored minister.

In my section men are chivalric and say, "Don't you know that you shall have everything you ask as ladies? Don't you know that we are your natural protectors?" But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.

On the islands off our coast there was a large population that could not read or write. A missionary-spirited woman went there to help educate them. After awhile she was made a member of the school board, which consisted of a few white men and more negroes. The president of the board, a colored man, was disgusted at the elevation of a woman to that dignity, and when she was sworn in he resigned, saying, "Now you've swore her in, you've got to swear me out; I'm not going to sit on no board with no woman."

During the convention Miss Anthony made an earnest appeal for co-operation in the equal suffrage work, saying: "Why is it the duty of the little handful on this platform to be talking and working for the enfranchisement of women any more than that of all of you who sit here to-night? Every woman can do something for the cause. She who is true to it at her own fireside, who speaks the right word to her guests, to her children and her neighbors' children, does an educational work as valuable as that of the woman who speaks from the platform." She also urged a wider reading of the equal rights papers, the Woman's Journal, Tribune, Standard, Wisconsin Citizen, etc., and suffrage pamphlets and leaflets. She defended herself against the accusation of abusing the men, saying, "We have not been fighting the 'male' citizen anywhere but in the statute books."

Eighty-seven delegates representing twenty-two States were present at this convention. The treasurer reported the receipts of the past year to be $14,020. Mrs. Chapman Catt, chairman of the Organization Committee, related the work done by the suffrage organizations in behalf of the Spanish-American War. She described also the efforts made to obtain suffrage for women in the new constitution of Louisiana the preceding year, which resulted in securing the franchise for taxpaying women on all matters submitted ta taxpayers. The work in different States and Territories, especially in Arizona and Oklahoma, was sketched in detail, and will be found in their respective chapters.

In concluding her report as chairman of the Legislative Committee, Mrs. Blake called attention to the more hopeful character of this record as compared to that of last year, and urged upon all 'State presidents the importance of having some one to represent the interests of women constantly at their capitals during the legislative sessions, not only to secure favorable legislation but to prevent that inimical to their interests, citing the case of New Mexico, where a law which infringes on the right of dower was recently passed without the knowledge of women.

Mrs. Elnora M. Babcock (N. Y.) was made chairman of National Press Work, with power to appoint a chairman in each State. The customary telegram of congratulation and appreciation was sent to the honorary president, Mrs. Stanton. Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborne (N. Y.) was appointed fraternal delegate to the International Council of Women to meet in London in June. Greetings were received through fraternal delegates, Mrs. Jessie R. Denney, from the Ancient Order of United Workingmen, and Mrs. Emma A. Wheeler from the Canadian W. C. T. U. The letter to Miss Anthony from its president, Mrs. Annie O. Rutherford, said: "A vigorous campaign is being carried on in every Province in favor of equal suffrage, with fair hope of success in most of them. We wish for your convention a most successful issue, and that your life, whose grand pioneer work has made it easy for those who follow after, may be spared many years yet to help broaden the path and uplift the cause of humanity." Many letters and telegrams were received from State suffrage associations and from individuals. Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood (D. C.) wrote: 'As a delegate to the ninth annual convention of the International League of Press Clubs just held in Baltimore, I succeeded in gaining recognition on equal terms for women journalists in the space to be allotted to men journalists in the Exposition at Paris in 1900."

A lively discussion was caused by a resolution offered by Mrs. Lottie Wilson Jackson, a delegate from Michigan, so light-complexioned as hardly to suggest a tincture of African blood, that "colored women ought not be compelled to ride in smoking cars, and that suitable accommodations should be provided for them." It was finally tabled as being outside the province of the convention.^[2]

The memorial resolutions were presented by the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who said: "These tributes are largely to older men and women with whom I was associated long ago and it is a pleasure to recall their noble services to humanity in times when they and their work were far more unpopular than to-day. There are twenty-five on my list, yet I think there was only one of the entire number who was not more than fifty years old, and most of them reached on toward the eighties and nineties. All were earnest advocates of equal suffrage, but there were kindred causes to which most of them were also devoted. .... Laura P. Haviland spent seventy years of her life in Michigan, the last five here in Grand Rapids. At one time she assumed the care of nine orphan children; at another, during the Civil War she was the active agent who freed from prison a large number of Union soldiers held upon false charges. She labored for every good cause and was a simple Quaker in religion and life. ....

"Parker Pillsbury of New Hampshire, who died last year, aged 88, known as a life-long worker for the oppressed before the Civil War, gave much of his energy to the cause of anti-slavery. When that noble philanthropy was split in two throughout its whole length because one-half would not let women serve on committees with men or raise their voices publicly for those who were dumb and helpless, Parker Pillsbury stood by the side of Abby Kelly and the Grimké sisters. His terse, characteristic, uncompromising language, his cheerful braving of prejudice, his sympathetic claim for justice to womanhood, made him one of the noblest of men. ....

"In the long and many-sided history of the woman's cause, Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage made a deep and lasting mark. I recall her as she came first upon our platform at the Syracuse Woman's Rights Convention in 1852, a young mother of two children, yet with a heart also for a wider cause. Wendell Phillips said of her then, She came to us an unknown woman. She leaves us a co-worker whose reputation is established. ....

"The Hon. Nelson W. Dingley was able officially to help our movement with efficient good-will. His vote was recorded for the admission of States with a woman suffrage constitution."

Mrs. Blackwell paid personal tribute to most of those who had passed away, and Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby continued the memorial, speaking at length of the splendid work of Mrs. Gage; of Mrs. Flora M. Kimball and Mrs. Abigail Bush, of California but early Eastern pioneers; Mrs. Sarah M. Kimball of Utah; Mrs. Frances Bagley and Dr. Charlotte Levanway of Michigan; and a long list of men and women in various States who had done their part in aiding the cause of equal suffrage. She concluded with eloquent words of appreciation of the services of Robert Purvis of Philadelphia, and presented the following resolutions sent by Mrs. Stanton:

During the period of reconstruction, the popular cry was, "This is the negro's hour," and Republicans and Abolitionists alike insisted that woman's claim to the suffrage must be held in abeyance until the negro was safe beyond peradventure. Distinguished politicians, lawyers and congressmen declared that woman as well as the negro was enfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment, yet reformers and politicians denounced those women who would not keep silent, while the Republican and anti-slavery press ignored their demands altogether. In this dark hour of woman's struggle, forsaken by all those who once recognized her civil and political rights, two noble men steadfastly maintained that it was not only woman's right but her duty to push her claims while the constitutional door was open and the rights of citizens in a republic were under discussion; therefore,

Resolved, That women owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Purvis and Parker Pillsbury for their fearless advocacy of our cause, when to do so was considered to be treason to a great party measure, involving life and liberty for the colored race.

Resolved, That in the death of men of such exalted virtue, true to principle under the most trying circumstances, sacrificing the ties of friendship and the respect of their compeers, they are conspicuous as the moral heroes of the nineteenth century.

The memorial service was closed with prayer by the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, who voiced the gratitude for the inspiration of such lives as these and the hope that this generation might carry the work on to its full fruition.

 

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The keynote to the speeches and action of this convention was the status of women in our new possessions. At a preliminary meeting of the Business Committee, held in the home of Mrs. Chapman Catt at Bensonhurst-by-the-Sea, N. Y., Jan. 2, 1899, the following "open letter" had been prepared and sent to every member of Congress:

To The Senate And House Of Representatives: We respectfully request that in the qualifications for voters in the proposed Constitution for the new Territory of Hawaii the word "male" be omitted.

The declared intention of the United States in annexing the Hawaiian Islands is to give them the benefits of the most advanced civilization, and it is a truism that the progress of civilization in every country is measured by the approach of women toward the ideal of equal rights with men.

Under barbarism the struggle for existence is entirely on the physical plane. The woman freely enters the arena and her failure or success depends wholly upon her own strength. When life rises to the intellectual plane public opinion is expressed in law. Justice demands that we shall not offer to women emerging from barbarism the ball and chain of a sex disqualification while we hold out to men the crown of self-government.

The trend of civilization is closely in the direction of equal rights for women. [Then followed a list of the gains for woman suffrage.]

The Hon. John D. Long, Secretary of the Navy, calls the opposition to woman suffrage a "slowly melting glacier of bourbonism and prejudice." The melting is going on steadily all over our country, and it would be most inopportune to impose upon our new possessions abroad the antiquated restrictions which we are fast discarding at home.

We, therefore, petition your Honorable Body that, upon whatever conditions and qualifications the right of suffrage is granted to Hawaiian men, it shall be granted to Hawaiian women.^[3]

Notwithstanding this appeal, and special petitions also from the Suffrage Associations of the forty-five States, our Congress provided a constitution in which the word "male" was introduced more frequently than in the Constitution of the United States or of any State, in the determination to bar out Hawaiian women from voting and holding office. It was declared that only "male" citizens should fill any office or vote for any officer, a sweeping restriction which is not made in a single State of our Union. Not satisfied with this infamous abuse of power, our Congress refused to this new Territory a privilege enjoyed by every other Territory in the United States—that of having the power vested in its Legislature to grant woman suffrage—and provided that this Territorial Legislature must submit the question to the voters. It took care, however, to enfranchise every male being in the Islands—Kanaka, Japanese and Portuguese—and it will be only by their permission that even the American and English women residing there ever can possess the suffrage.

The members of the commission who drafted this constitution were President Sanford B. Dole and Associate Justice W. F. Frear of Hawaii; Senators John T. Morgan, Ala.; Shelby M. Cullom, Ills.; Representative Robert R. Hitt, Ills. Justice Frear said over his own signature, Feb. 11, 1899: "I proposed at a meeting of the Hawaiian Commission that the Legislature be permitted to authorize woman suffrage, and President Dole supported me, but the other members of the commission took a different view." In other words, the Hawaiian members favored the enfranchisement of their women but were overruled by the American members. If but one of the latter had stood by those from Hawaii its women would not have been placed, as they now are, under greater subjection even than those of the United States, and far greater than they were before the annexation of the Islands. Yet after the consummation of this shameful act the world was asked to rejoice over the creation of a new republic!

There is not the slightest reason to hope that the appeals for justice to the women of the Philippines will meet with any greater success, as it is the policy of our Government to give to men every incentive to study its institutions and fit themselves for an intelligent voice in their control, but to discourage all interest on the part of women and to prevent them absolutely from any participation. Having held American women in subjection for a century and a quarter, it now shows a determination to place the same handicap upon the women of our newly-acquired possessions.

 

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During the spring of 1902, just before this volume goes to the publishers, the U. S. Senate Philippine Commission has been summoning before it a number of persons competent to give expert testimony as to existing conditions in those Islands. Among these were Judge W. H. Taft, who for the past year has been Governor of the Philippines and speaks with high authority; and Archbishop Nozaleda, who has been connected with the Catholic church in the Islands for twenty-six years, and Archbishop since 1889, and who has the fullest understanding of the natives. Governor Taft said in answer to the committee:

The fact is that, not only among the Tagalogs but also among the Christian Filipinos, the woman is the active manager of the family, so if you expect to confer political power on the Filipinos it ought to be given to the women.

Archbishop Nozaleda testified as follows: (Senate Document 190, p. 109.)

The woman is better than the man in every way—in intelligence, in virtue and in labor—and a great deal more economical. She is very much given to trade and trafficking. If any rights and privileges are to be granted to the natives, do not give them to the men but to the women.

Q. Then you think it would be much better to give the women the right to vote than the men?

A. O, much better. Why, even in the fields it is the women who do the work; the men who go to the cock fights and gamble. The woman is the one who supports the man there; so every law of justice demands that even in political life they should have the privilege over the men.

The action which our Government will eventually take in conferring the suffrage on the Filipinos can not be recorded in this volume, but the prophecy is here made that, in spite of the above testimony, and much more of the same nature which has been given by correspondents in the Philippines and by many who have returned from there, the Government of the United States will enfranchise the inferior male inhabitants and hold as political subjects the superior women of these Islands. And again the world will be called upon to greet another republic!

 

1. Miss Anthony spoke to a crowded house in the Fountain Street Baptist Church on The Moral Influence of Women, and the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw to another great audience in the Park Congregational Church from the text, "Only be thou strong and very courageous." Calvary Baptist Church was filled to overflowing to hear Miss Laura Clay on The Bible for Equal Rights. Interested congregations listened to the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who preached at the Division Street Methodist Church from the text, "Knowledge shall increase"; Miss Laura Gregg, who spoke at the Second Baptist Church on My Country, 'Tis of Thee; Mrs. Colby, at the Plainfield Avenue Methodist Church, on The Legend of Lilith; Miss Lena Morrow at Memorial Church, Miss Lucy E. Textor at All Souls, and Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton and various members of the convention in other pulpits.
2. The following resolutions were adopted:   That we reaffirm our devotion to the immortal principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and we call for its application in the case of women citizens.   We protest against the introduction of the word "male" in the suffrage clause of the proposed Constitution of Hawaii, and declare that upon whatever terms the franchise may be granted to men, it should be granted also to women.   In all the great questions of war and peace, currency, tariff and taxation, annexation of foreign territory and alien races, women are vitally interested and should have an equal expression at the ballot-box, and we recommend to the President of the United States the appointment of a committee of women to investigate the condition of women in our new island territories.   We congratulate the women of Ireland who have just voted for the first time for municipal and county officers, and we call attention to the fact that 75 per cent. of the qualified women voted, and that the dispatches say they discharged their duty in a serious and businesslike spirit, with a keen eye to the personal merits of candidates.   We congratulate the women of Colorado, whose Legislature lately passed a resolution testifying to the good effects of equal suffrage by a vote of 45 to 3 in the House, and 30 to I in the Senate.   We congratulate the women of New Orleans, who are about to vote for the first time, On a tax levy for sewerage and drainage, and we commend their patriotic activity in collecting the signatures of 2,000 taxpaying women of that city in behalf of clean streets and a pure water supply.   We congratulate the women of France, who have just voted for the first time for judges of tribunals of commerce, and we call attention to the fact that in Paris, of the qualified voters, men and women taken together, only 14 per cent. voted, but of the women 30 per cent. voted.   We congratulate the women of Kansas on the increased municipal vote of April, 1899, over the entire State, Kansas City alone registering 4,800 women and casting over 3,000 women's votes at the municipal election.   We thank the House of Representatives of Oklahoma for its vote of 14 to 9, and of Arizona for its vote of 19 to 5, for woman suffrage, and regret that the question did not reach the Councils of these Territories.   We thank the Legislature of California for its enactment, with only one dissenting vote in the House and six in the Senate, of a school suffrage law (which failed to receive the approval of the Governor); also we thank the Legislatures of Connecticut and Ohio, which have defeated bills to repeal the existing school suffrage laws of those States.   We thank the legislators of Oregon who have just submitted an amendment granting suffrage to women by a vote of 48 to 6 in the House and 25 to I in the Senate, and we hope that Oregon will add a fifth star to our equal suffrage flag.   This association is non-sectarian and non-partisan, and asks for the ballot not for the sake of advancing any specific measure, but as a matter of justice to the whole human family. In all the States where equal suffrage campaigns are pending we advise women and men to base their plea on the ground of clear and obvious justice, and not to indulge in predictions as to what women will do with the ballot before it is secured.   We protest against women being counted in the basis of representation of State and nation so long as they are not permitted to vote for their representatives.   We appreciate the friendly attitude of the American Federation of Labor, the National Grange and other public bodies of voters, as shown by their resolutions indorsing the legal, political and economic equality of women.   We rejoice in the Peace Congress about to meet at The Hague, and hope it may be preliminary to the establishment of international arbitration.
3. See also Chap. XXIII for further efforts to protect the women of Hawaii.