1850 are shaking this land with a new infidelity. Now, this infidelity is a good deal older than the New Testament. When man began his pilgrimage from the cradle of Asia, woman was not allowed to speak before a court of justice. To kill a woman was just as great a sin as to kill a cow, and no greater. To sell an unlicensed herb in the city of Calcutta, was exactly the same crime as to kill a woman. She did not belong to the human race. Come down thousands of years, and the civilization of Greece said, "Woman has not got enough of truth in her to be trusted in the court of justice;" and, if her husband wants to give her to a brother or friend, he can take her to their door, and say, "Here, I give you this." And so it continues till you reach the feudal ages; when woman, though she might be queen or duchess, was often not competent to testify in a court of justice. She had not soul enough, men believed, to know a truth from a lie. That is the code of the feudal system. But all at once the world has waked up, and thinks a man is not a man because he has a pound of muscle, or because he has a stalwart arm; but because he has thoughts, ideas, purposes: he can commit crime, and he is capable of virtue.
No man is born in a day. A baby is always six months old before he is twenty-one. Our fathers, who first reasoned that God made all men equal, said: "You sha'n't hang a man until you have asked him if he consents to the law." Some meddlesome fanatic, engaged in setting up type, conceived the idea, that he need not pay his tax till he was represented before the law: then why should woman do so? Now, I ask, what possible reason is there that woman, as a mother, as a wife, as a laborer, as a capitalist, as an artist, as a citizen, should be subjected to any laws except such as govern man? What moral reason is there for this, under the American idea? Does not the same interest, the same strong tie, bind the mother to her children, that bind the father? Has she not the same capacity to teach them that the father has? and often more? Now, the law says: "If the father be living, the mother is nothing; but, if the father be dead, the mother is everything." Did she inherit from her husband his great intellect? If she did not, what is the common sense of such a statute? The mother has the same rights, in regard to her children, that the father has: there should be no distinction.
Yours is not a new reform. The gentleman who occupied the platform a few moments ago gave the common representation of this cause: "If a husband doesn't do about right, his wife will pull his hair; and, if you let her have her way, she may vote the Democratic ticket, and he the Republican; and vice versa." Well, now, my dear friend, suppose it were just so; it is too late to complain. That point has long been settled; if you will read history a little, you will see it was settled against you. In the time of Luther, it was a question: "Can a woman choose her own creed?" The feudal ages said: "No; she believes as her husband believes, of course." But the reformers said: "She ought to think for herself; her husband is not her God." "But," it was objected, "should there be difference of opinion between man and wife, the husband believing one creed and the wife another, there would be continual discord." But the reply was: "God settled that; God has settled it that every responsible conscience should have a right to his own creed." And Christendom said: "Amen." The reformers of Europe, to this day, have allowed freedom of opinion; and who says that the experience of three centuries has found the husband and wife grappling each other's throats on religious differences? It would be Papal and absurd to deny woman her religious rights. Then why should she not be allowed to choose her party?
We claim the precedents in this matter. It was arranged and agreed upon, in the reform of Europe, that women should have the right to choose their religious creeds. I say, therefore, this is not a new cause; it is an old one. It is as old as the American idea. We are individuals by virtue of our brains, not by virtue of our muscles. "Why do you women meddle in politics?" asked Napoleon of De Staël. "Sire, so long as you will hang us, we must ask the reason," was the answer. The whole political philosophy of the subject is in that. The instant you say, "Woman is not competent to go to the ballot-box," I reply: "She is not competent to go to the gallows or the State prison. If she is competent to go to the State prison, then she is competent to go to the ballot-box, and tell how thieves should be punished." [Applause].
Man is a man because he thinks. Woman has already begun to think. She has touched literature with the wand of her enchantment, and it rises to her level, until woman becomes an author as well as reader. And what is the result? We do not have to expurgate the literature of the nineteenth century before placing it in the hands of youth. Those who write for the lower level sink down to dwell with their kind.
Mr. Sargent and Mr. Clarke expatiated on the wholesome influence of the side-by-side progress of the sexes. There are no women more deserving of your honest approbation than those who dare to work singly for the elevation of their sex....
Woman's Rights and Negro Rights! What rights have either women or negroes that we have any reason to respect? The world says: "None!"
There has lately been a petition carried into the British Parliament, asking—for what? It asks that the laws of marriage and divorce shall be brought into conformity with the creed and civilization of Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. The state of British law, on the bill of divorce, was a disgrace to the British statute-book. Whose was the intellect and whose the heart to point out, and who had the courage to look in the face of British wealth and conservatism, and claim that the law of divorce was a disgrace to modern civilization? It was the women of Great Britain that first said her statute-book disgraced her. Who could say, that if those women had been voters, they might not have reformed it?
Douglas Jerrold said: "Woman knows she is omnipotent"; and so she is. She may be ignorant, she may not have a dollar, she may have no right given her to testify in the court of justice; she may be a slave, chained by a dozen statutes; but, when her husband loves her, she is his queen and mistress, in spite of them all; and the world knows it. All history bears testimony to this omnipotent influence. What we are here for is to clear up the choked channel; make hidden power confess itself, and feel its responsibility, feel how much rests upon it, and therefore gird itself to its duty. We are to say to the women: "Yours is one-half of the human race. Come to the ballot-box, and feel, when you cast a vote in regard to some great moral question, the dread post you fill, and fit yourself for it." Woman at home controls her son, guides her husband—in reality, makes him vote—but acknowledges no responsibility, and receives no education for such a throne. By her caprices in private life, she often ruins the manhood of her husband, and checks the enthusiastic purposes of her son.
Many a young girl, in her married life, loses her husband, and thus is left a widow with two or three children. Now, who is to educate them and control them? We see, if left to her own resources, the intellect which she possesses, and which has remained in a comparatively dormant state, displayed in its full power. What a depth of heart lay hidden in that woman! She takes her husband's business—guides it as though it were a trifle; she takes her sons, and leads them; sets her daughters an example; like a master-leader, she governs the whole household. That is woman's influence. What made that woman? Responsibility. Call her out from weakness, lay upon her soul the burden of her children's education, and she is no longer a girl, but a woman!
Horace Greeley once said to Margaret Fuller: "If you should ask a woman to carry a ship round Cape Horn, how would she go to work to do it? Let her do this, and I will give up the question." In the fall of 1856, a Boston girl, only twenty years of age, accompanied her husband to California. A brain-fever laid him low. In the presence of mutiny and delirium, she took his vacant post, preserved order, and carried her cargo safe to its destined port. Looking in the face of Mr. Greeley, Miss Fuller said: "Lo! my dear Horace, it is done; now say, what shall woman: do next?" [Cheers].
Mrs. Caroline H. Dall then dismissed the assembly.52
In The Liberator of July 6, 1860, we find a brief mention of what was called Mrs. Dall's "Drawing-room" Convention, in which it was proposed to present the artistic and æsthetic view of the question. The meeting was held June 1st, in the Melodeon. Mrs. Caroline M. Severance presided. Mrs. Dall, Rev. Samuel J. May, R. J. Hinton, Moses (Harriet Tubman), James Freeman Clarke, Dr. Mercy B. Jackson, Elizabeth M. Powell, and Wendell Phillips took part in the discussions.
We close our chapter on Massachusetts, with a few extracts from a sermon by Theodore Parker, to show his position on the most momentous