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
Senators, I want to ask of you that you will, by the law and
parliamentary rules of your committee, allow us to agitate this
question by publishing this report and the report which you shall
make upon our petitions, as I hope you will make a report. If your
committee is so pressed with business that it can not possibly
consider and report upon this question, I wish some of you would
make a motion on the floor of the Senate that a special committee
be appointed to take the whole question of the enfranchisement
of women into consideration, and that that committee shall have
nothing else to do. This off-year of politics, when there is
nothing to do but to try how not to do it (politically, I mean,
I am not speaking personally), is the best time you can have to
consider the question of woman suffrage, and I ask you to use your
influence with the Senate to have it specially attended to this
year. Do not make us come here thirty years longer. It is twelve
years since the first time I came before a Senate committee. I
said then to Charles Sumner, if I could make the honorable Senator
from Massachusetts believe that I feel the degradation and the
humiliation of disfranchisement precisely as he would if his
fellows had adjudged him incompetent from any cause whatever from
having his opinion counted at the ballot-box we should have our
right to vote in the twinkling of an eye.
REMARKS BY MRS. SARA A. SPENCER, OF WASHINGTON.
Mrs. SPENCER. Congress printed 10,000 copies of its proceedings
concerning the memorial services of a dead man, Professor Henry.
It cost me three months of hard work to have 3,000 copies of
our arguments last year before the Committee on Privileges and
Elections printed for 10,000,000 living women. I ask that the
committee will have printed 10,000 copies of this report.
The CHAIRMAN. The committee have no power to order the printing.
That can only be done by the order of the Senate. A resolution
can be offered to that effect in the Senate. I have only to say,
ladies, that you will admit that we have listened to you with
great attention, and I can certainly say with very great interest.
What you have said will be duly and earnestly considered by the
committee.
Mrs. WALLACE. I wish to make just one remark in reference to what
Senator Thurman said as to the popular vote being against woman
suffrage. The popular vote is against it, but not the popular
voice. Owing to the temperance agitation in the last six years the
growth of the suffrage sentiment among the wives and mothers of
this nation has largely increased.
Mrs. SPENCER. In behalf of the women of the United States, permit
me to thank the Senate Judiciary Committee for their respectful,
courteous, and close attention.
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