This page has been validated.
570
History of Woman Suffrage.
God gave them; and if you deny or withhold them, you place yourself in antagonism with your Creator. The more humble and despised is the human being claiming those rights, the more prompt should be the feeling of every manly bosom to stand by that humble creature of God, and see that its right is not withheld from it! Is it a new thing in this country to allow civil rights to a woman?
Susan B. Anthony, who had been a teacher for fifteen years, gave an amusing description of her recent experience in attempting to speak at a teachers' convention. Paulina Wright Davis offered the following resolution:
Resolved, That inasmuch as this great movement is intended to meet the wants, not of America only, but of the whole world, a committee be appointed to prepare an address from this Convention to the women of Great Britain and the continent of Europe, setting forth our objects, and inviting their co-operation in the same.[1]
Wm. Lloyd Garrison: I second the resolution, because it shows the universality of our enterprise. I second it heartily, for it manifests the grandeur of the object we are pursuing. There never yet was a struggle for liberty which was not universal, though, for the time, it might have appeared to be no more than local. If the women of this country have to obtain rights which have been denied them, the women of England, of France, of the world, have to obtain the same; and I regard this as a struggle for the race, sublime as the world itself. It is right that this Convention should address the women of the whole world, in order that they should announce precisely how they regard their own position in the universe of God. What rights they claim are God-given; what rights they possess, and what rights they have still to achieve. It is time that the women of America should ask the women beyond the Atlantic to consider their own condition, and to co-operate with them in the same glorious struggle. There is not an argument that God ever permitted a human being to frame, that can be brought against this cause. This is a free Convention, and we are willing that any man or woman who has aught against its principles, should come here and freely urge it. And yet, with a free platform, where is the human being who cares to argue the question? Where is the man who presents himself decently, and proffers a word of reasonable argument against our cause? I have yet to see that man. Instead, we have blackguardism, defamation, rowdyism, profanity; we have all the indications that hell from beneath is stirred up against this divine Convention, for it is divine—it takes hold of heaven and the throne of God! (Hisses). Hiss, ye serpents! ye have nothing else to offer. There is not one of you to whom God has given a brain to fashion an argument. But it goes on record, and all the journals of this city will themselves bear testimony, that no one takes the platform, like
- ↑ The Committee were: Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, Marion C. Houghton, Lucy Stone, Caroline H. Dall, Paulina Wright Davis, Dr. Harriot K. Hunt, Mathilde Franceska Anneké, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.
