The History of the Women's Suffrage: The Origin of the Movement (Illustrated Edition). Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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СКАЧАТЬ in luxurious and indolent pomp, like Venus newly risen from the ocean. They feel how much easier it is to receive the incense of honor and respect (however insincerely paid to them) without any effort of their own, than to undergo the patient toil after excellence which wrings from the heart of all that homage of true honor which can not be denied to it. They, unused to any noble labor (as all labor is), either physical or mental, will be careful, to a degree of splenetic antagonism, how they will allow the introduction, into the acknowledged rights and duties of their sex, of a new element which may establish the necessity of their being themselves energetic and efficient. We need never hope to find any of this class change, until compelled to do so by public sentiment. The opposition here is really rabid. Intellectual women! oh, they are monsters! As soon allow wild beasts to roam at large as these to be let loose on society. Like lions and tigers, keep them in their menagerie; perhaps they needn't be actually chained, but see that they are well secured in their cages! (Stamping, groans, and laughter).

      These are far more bitterly hostile than the men of small proportions, who are willing to have a great woman tower above them from time to time—as a Madame de Stael. Such a case, however, they would rank as an exception, not admit as a rule. To allow women to stand every day in the foremost lines of intellect and ability, is a thought altogether too expansive to be entertained by them.

      Such are the oppositions we meet; but they are all melting down like frost-work before the morning sun. The day is dawning when the intellect of woman shall be recognized as well as that of man, and when her rights shall meet an equal and cordial acknowledgment. The greatest wrong and injustice ever done to woman is that done to her intellectual nature. This, like Goliath among the Philistines, overtops all the rest. Drones are but the robbers of the hive; ladies educated to no purpose are but surfeited to a dronish condition on the sweets of literature. Such minds are not developed, but molded in a fashionable pattern.

      Lucy Stone said: It has been stated that we women were not fit for anything but to stay in the house! I look over the events of the last five years, and almost smile at the confutation of this statement which they supply. Let it not be supposed that I wish to depreciate the value of house-duties, or the worth of the woman who fitly discharges them. No! I think that any woman who stands on the throne of her own house, dispensing there the virtues of love, charity, and peace, and sends out of it into the world good men, who may help to make the world better, occupies a higher position than any crowned head. However, we said women could do more; they could enter the professions, and there serve society and do themselves honor. We said that women could be doctors of medicine. Well, we can now prove the statement by fact. Harriot K. Hunt is among us to-day, who, by recognized attainment and successful practice, has shown that women can be physicians, and good ones. You have in your city two women who are good physicians; there are female medical colleges, with their classes, as well ordered, and showing as good a proficiency as any classes of men. Thus that point is gained. It was said women could not be merchants. We thought they could; we saw nothing to prevent women from using the power of calculation, the knowledge of goods, and the industry necessary to make a successful trader. Here, again, we have abundant examples. Many women could be pointed to whose energy and ability for business have repaired the losses of their less competent husbands, I will mention a particular case. Mrs. Tyndal, of Lowell, Mass., has for years carried on business in a quiet way; she has made herself rich by conducting a ladies' shoe store in Lowell. She said to herself: "What is to hinder me from going into this business? I should know ladies' shoes, whether they were good or bad, and what price they can bring. The ladies should support me." And so they did, and that woman has given a proof that her sex does not incapacitate for successful mercantile operations.

      It is said women could not be ministers of religion. Last Sunday, at Metropolitan Hall, Antoinette L. Brown conducted divine service, and was joined in it by the largest congregation assembled within the walls of any building in this city. (Hisses). Some men hiss who had no mothers to teach them better. But I tell you that some men in New York, knowing that they can hear the word of God from a woman, as well as from a man, have called her to be their pastor, and she is to be ordained in this month. Some of you reporters said she was a Unitarian, but it is not so; she is among the most orthodox, and so is her church.

      We have caused woman's right to address an audience to be more fully recognized than before. I once addressed an assemblage of men, and did so without giving previous notice, because I feared the opposition of prejudice. A lady who was among the audience said to me afterward, "How could you do it? My blood ran cold when I saw you up there among those men!" "Why," I asked, "are they bad men?" "Oh, no! my own husband is one of them; but to see a woman mixing among men in promiscuous meetings, it was horrible!" That was six or seven years ago last fall; and that self-same woman, in Columbus, Ohio, was chosen to preside over a temperance meeting of men and women; yes, and she took the chair without the least objection! In Chicago, a woman is cashier of a bank; and the men gave her a majority of three hundred votes over her man-competitor. In another State, a woman is register of deeds. Women can be editors; two sit behind me, Paulina W. Davis and Mrs. Nichols. Thus we have an accumulation of facts to support our claims and our arguments.

      Daily Tribune, Sept. 7, 1853.

      The Woman's Rights Convention was somewhat disturbed last evening by persons whose ideas of the rights of free speech are these: two thousand people assemble to hear a given public question discussed under distinct announcement that certain persons whose general views are well known, are to speak throughout the evening. At least nineteen-twentieths come to hear those announced speakers, and will be bitterly disappointed if the opportunity be not afforded them. But one-twentieth have bought tickets and taken seats on purpose to prevent the hearing of those speakers, by hissing, yelling, and stamping, and all manner of unseemly interruptions. Under such circumstances, which should prevail; the right of the speakers to be heard and the great body of the audience to hear them according to the announcement, or the will of the disturbers who choose to say that nineteen out of twenty shall not have what they have paid for, and what the promised speakers are most willing to give them?

      To state the case exactly as it is, precludes the necessity of arguing it. We rejoice to say that the will of the great majority prevailed, and that the discussion which was marked in its earlier days by occasional tumult was closed in good order, and amid hushed and gratified attention. We ought, perhaps, to return thanks to the disturbers for so stirring the souls of the speakers that their words came gushing forth from their lips with exceeding fluency and power. We certainly never before heard Antoinette Brown, Mrs. Rose, and Lucy Stone speak with such power and unction as last night. It was never before so transparent that a hiss or a blackguard yell was the only answer that the case admitted of, and when Lucy Stone closed the discussion with some pungent, yet pathetic remarks on the sort of opposition that had been manifest, it was evident that if any of the rowdies had an ant-hole in the bottom of his boot, he would inevitably have sunk through it and disappeared forever.

      Herald, Sept. 7, 1853.

      THE LAST VAGARY OF THE GREELEY CLIQUE—THE WOMEN, THEIR RIGHTS, AND THEIR CHAMPIONS.

      The assemblage of rampant women which convened at the Tabernacle yesterday was an interesting phase in the comic history of the nineteenth century.

      We saw, in broad daylight, in a public hall in the city of New York, a gathering of unsexed women—unsexed in mind all of them, and many in habiliments—publicly propounding the doctrine that they should be allowed to step out of their appropriate sphere, and mingle in the busy walks of every-day life, to the neglect of those duties which both human and divine law have assigned to them. We do not stop to argue against so ridiculous a set of ideas. We will only inquire who are to perform those duties which we and our fathers before us have imagined belonged solely to women. Is the world to be depopulated? Are there to be no more children? Or are we to adopt the French mode, which is too well known to need explanation?

      Another reason why we will not answer the logic which is poured out from the lips of such persons as Lucy Stone, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, and their male coadjutors, СКАЧАТЬ