Resolved, That Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Samuel J. May, Ernestine L. Rose, William Hay, Susan B. Anthony, Burroughs Phillips, Antoinette L. Brown, W. H. Channing, and Lydia A. Jenkins, be a committee to prepare and to present an address to the Legislature of New York, at its next session, stating, as specifically as they shall see fit, the legal disabilities of women, and to ask a hearing before a joint committee, specially appointed to consider the whole subject of the just and equal rights of women.
Resolved, That Horace Greeley, Mary C. Vaughan, Abram Pryne, Sarah Pellet, and Matilda Joslyn Gage be a committee to prepare an address to capitalists and industrialists of New York, on the best modes of employing and remunerating the industry of women.
The President invited any one who saw errors or fallacies in the arguments brought forward, to make them apparent.
Mr. Pryne, of Cazenovia, editor of the Progressive Christian, said: If women desire to enter the ordinary avocations of men, they must be brave enough to become shopkeepers and mechanics. There is no law to prevent it, neither is there to woman's voting. The men have made an arrangement by which their votes are not counted, but still they might provide ballot-boxes, and decide upon whom they would prefer as magistrates and legislators. A man who was thus voted to stay at home, by an overwhelming majority of women, even if elected by the men, would find himself in an uncomfortable position.
Mr. Channing said he understood that in a town in Ohio the women did so, and cast sixty votes.
Mr. Pryne was glad to hear that there were practical women in Ohio. Man is where he is because he is what he is, and when woman gets the same elements of moral and physical power she will have no more wrongs to complain of.
Mrs. Rose said it was a true maxim that he who would be free, himself must strike the blow. But woman could not, as things were, help herself. As well might the slaveholder say that the slave was fit for no other condition while he consents to occupy that position. To a certain extent this is true, and the same principles apply to both classes. But all human beings are not martyrs; the majority accept the conditions in which they find themselves, rather than make their lives one long struggle for freedom. Woman must be educated to take the stand which Mr. Pryne invites her to assume. The only object for which woman is now reared is to be married; and is she fitted even for that; to become a companion, an assistant, an aid, a comforter to man; and above all, a mother? That alone; to fit a woman for that sphere; she must possess all the extended education which would fit her to take any position in life to which man aspires.
Mary F. Love said there might be hindrances in the way of woman too great for her to surmount. Men in their straggles for liberty have sometimes met insuperable obstacles; there have been unsuccessful revolutions at all stages of human development.
