Susan B. Anthony

The History of the Women's Suffrage: The Flame Ignites


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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 be 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 been 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 Aryan 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