The Women of the Suffrage Movement. Jane Addams

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      There never was a cause with so much unembodied strength, and with so little working power; and the problem is how to vitalize and organize it. One of two things, I think, must occur; either man must be made to see and feel, as he never has done yet, the need of woman's help in the great field of human government, and so demand it; or woman must arise and come forward as she never has, and take her place. I still think that one of the main hindrances is with women. The fact is, that the worst bugbear is the never-seen, ever-felt law of caste which has always walled woman around, and which few have the courage to step over.

      At the close of the convention Miss Anthony accepted the invitation of Mrs. Hooker, the State president, to join her in a month's tour through Connecticut. They spoke in nineteen different cities and towns, Mrs. Hooker assuming all financial responsibility and paying Miss Anthony $25 for each lecture. They had excellent audiences and were entertained in many beautiful homes. In Miss Anthony's diary, March 11, she says: "Senator Sumner died today, the noblest Roman of them all; true to the negro, but never a public word for woman. How I have pleaded with him for years, and he always admitted that his principles logically carried out gave woman an equal guarantee with man."

      In the spring of 1874 the women's temperance crusade began in Rochester and, although their methods were very different from those Miss Anthony would have employed, she met with them at their request to help them organize. After this was effected they called on her for a speech and she said in brief:

I am always glad to welcome every association of women for any good purpose, because I know that they will quickly learn the impossibility of accomplishing any substantial end. Women never realize their inability to effect a reform until they attempt it, and then they find how closely interwoven with politics are all such matters, and how entirely without political power are they themselves.... Now my good women, the best thing this organization will do for you will be to show you how utterly powerless you are to put down the liquor traffic. You never can talk down or sing down or pray down an institution which is voted into existence. You never will be able to lessen this evil until you have votes. Frederick Douglass used to tell how, when he was a Maryland slave and a good Methodist, he would go into the farthest corner of the tobacco field and pray God to bring him liberty; but God never answered his prayers until he prayed with his heels. And so, dear friends, He never will answer yours for the suppression of the liquor traffic until you are able to pray with your ballots.3

      Miss Anthony's sentiments on this question are further expressed in a letter to her brother Daniel R., editor Leavenworth Times:

      I like the Times' article on the women's whiskey war. Emerson says, "God answers only such prayers as men themselves answer." After ignorant and helpless mothers have transmitted to their children the drunkard's appetite, God can not answer their prayers to prevent them from gratifying it. But this crusade will educate the women who engage in it to use the one and only means of regulating or prohibiting the traffic in liquor—that of the ballot. As soon as they find this crusade experiment a failure, which they certainly will, because all spasmodic, sensational religious efforts are transient and fleeting, they will realize the enduring strength and usefulness of the franchise. However little that is permanent may come of this movement, it is good in itself because anything is better for women than tame submission to the evils around them; and when they find kind words, entreaties and tears avail nothing, they will surely try the virtue of stones (votes) to bring down the great demon that desolates their homes.

      An entry in the journal made soon afterward says: "I dropped into the Industrial Congress today and was invited to speak. I told the men that the degraded labor of women made them quite as heavy a millstone round the necks of working-men as is the Heathen Chinese." And a few days later: "Dr. Dio Lewis called today, and I went to hear him speak this evening. Same old story—men make and break the laws, and women by love and persuasion must soften their hearts to abandon their wickedness. Never a hint that women should have anything to do with the making and enforcing of the laws. They must only coax."

      The diary shows over one hundred letters written by Miss Anthony's own hand in arranging for the May Anniversary in New York, while she sat at the bedside of her mother, who was very ill. Many cordial answers were received, among them one from Josephine E. Butler, of England. Mary L. Booth thus closed her reply: "Pray believe that I always hold you in affectionate remembrance as one of the most sincere, earnest and disinterested women whom it has ever been my fortune to meet, and whom I shall always be glad to hear from or to see." Mrs. Stanton sent an extract from a letter of Martha C. Wright, saying: "Our only hope is in the gradual accession of thinking men and women, and in our indomitable Susan."

      At Miss Anthony's earnest desire, Mrs. Wright was elected president of the association and this proved to be her last appearance on that platform which she had graced for many years. An interesting feature of the meeting was the presence of the veteran worker, Ernestine L. Rose, who was back from England on a visit. During this May meeting a telegram was sent over the country stating: "Miss Anthony stalked down the aisle with faded alpaca dress to the top of her boots, blue cotton umbrella and white cotton gloves, perched herself on the platform, crossed her legs, pulled out her snuff-box and passed it around. On the platform were Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Gage, Mrs. Rose and other noted women, all dressed in unmentionables cut bias, and smoking penny drab cigars. Susan was quite drunk." The New York Herald, which rarely had a good word for the suffrage conventions, in a long and respectful account of this same meeting, said:

      There was a perfume of Fifth Avenue about the audience. Carriages in livery rolled up to the door. The striking contrast of this audience with that of other years, in the almost perfect conformity of the manner and dress of the women to those of other women who rule in the fashionable world and are supposed to look down upon these knights-errant of the sex, was not greater than that between the treatment of Miss Anthony now and in other times. In former years they came to scoff at this wiry and resolute champion of her sex. Now every word she utters is received with almost reverent rapture. Yesterday brought together as intelligent and perhaps as refined an audience of ladies as might he gathered in the city. Miss Anthony was dressed with her usual simplicity in black silk. She read the call for the convention and made thereon one of her characteristic addresses, full of fire and prophecy.

      During the summer of 1874 Miss Anthony lectured in many places in Massachusetts and New York, striving to pay the interest and reduce by a little her pressing debts, and slipping home occasionally to see her mother who was carefully tended by the devoted sister Mary. At one of these times she writes in her diary: "It is always so good to get into my own humble bed." August 22 she sent a letter of congratulation on his fiftieth birthday to her brother Daniel R. After referring to the $50 he sent to her at the close of her half century, she says:

      Though I can not return my love and wishes in the same kind, they are none the less for your joy and peace in the future, neither is my rejoicing less over the success of your first half of life. From your many experiences, whether they have been such as you would have chosen or not, strength, growth, discipline have resulted, and sometimes I think all the adverse winds of life are needed to check our ever-rising vain-glory in our own power and success.... Whatever comes to those closely united by marriage or by blood, the one lesson from recent developments in Brooklyn is that none of the parties ever should take in an outside person as confidant. If the twain can not themselves restore their oneness, none other can. If parents and children, brothers and sisters, can not adjust their own differences among themselves, it is in vain they look to friends outside.

      What lessons we are having that not only is honesty the best policy, but that there is nothing but most dreadful disaster in any policy which is not based on absolute honesty. The fact is, nothing is worth the getting, if that has to be done by cunning, falsehood, deception. Whether it be wealth, position, office or the society of one we love, if we have to steal it, though it may be sweet and seemingly real and lasting, the exposure of the illicit means of gaining СКАЧАТЬ