Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States,: 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, and January 25, 1887Various
History
Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States,: 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, and January 25, 1887
Various
Women -- Suffrage -- United States
MISS ANTHONY. I am glad to hear it. It is two years since I was
there, but I was told that that was the case. In Utah the women
were given the right to vote, but a year and a half ago their
Legislative Assembly found that although they had the right to
vote the Territorial law provided that only male voters should
hold office. The Legislative Assembly of Utah passed a bill
providing that women should be eligible to all the offices of the
Territory. The school offices, superintendents of schools, were
the offices in particular to which the women wanted to be elected.
Governor Emory, appointed by the President of the United States,
vetoed that bill. Thus the full operations of enfranchisement
conferred by two of the Territories has been stopped by Federal
interference.
You ask why I come here instead of going to the State
Legislatures. You say that whenever the Legislatures extend the
right of suffrage to us by the constitutions of their States we
can get it. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado,
Kansas, Oregon, all these States, have had the school suffrage
extended by legislative enactment. If the question had been
submitted to the rank and file of the people of Boston, with
66,000 men paying nothing but the poll-tax, they would have
undoubtedly voted against letting women have the right to vote for
members of the school board; but their intelligent representatives
on the floor of the Legislature voted in favor of the extension of
the school suffrage to the women. The first result in Boston has
been the election of quite a number of women to the school board.
In Minnesota, in the little town of Rochester, the school board
declared its purpose to cut the women teachers' wages down. It
did not propose to touch the principal, who was a man, but they
proposed to cut all the women down from $50 to $35. One woman put
her bonnet on and went over the entire town and said, "We have got
a right to vote for this school board, and let us do so." They all
turned out and voted, and not a single $35 man was re-elected, but
all those who were in favor of paying $50.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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