Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
She thought the speediest solution of the vexed problem of
prostitution was profitable work for the rising generation of
girls. The best legislation on the social vice was in removing
the legal disabilities that cripple all their powers. Woman, in
order to be equally independent with man, must have a fair and
equal chance. He is in nowise restricted from doing, in every
department of human exertion, all he is able to do. If he is bold
and ambitious, and desires fame, every avenue is open to him. He
may blend science and art, producing a competence for his
support, until he chains them to the car of his genius, and, with
Fulton and Morse, wins a crown of imperishable gratitude. If he
desires to tread the path of knowledge up to its glorious
temple-summit, he can, as he pleases, take either of the learned
professions as instruments of pecuniary independence, while he
plumes his wings for a higher and higher ascent. Not so with
woman. Her rights are not recognized as equal; her sphere is
circumscribed--not by her ability, but by her sex. If, perchance,
her taste leads her to excellence, in the way they give her leave
to tread, she is worshiped as almost divine; but if she reaches
for laurels they have in view, the wings of her genius are
clipped because she is a woman.
Dr. Harriot K. Hunt, of Boston, the first woman who practiced medicine
in this country, spoke on the medical education of women.
Sarah Tyndale, a successful merchant in Philadelphia, on the business
capacity of woman.
Antoinette L. Brown, a graduate of Oberlin College, and a student in
Theology, made a logical argument on woman's position in the Bible,
claiming her complete equality with man, the simultaneous creation of
the sexes, and their moral responsibilities as individual and
imperative.
The debates on the resolutions were spicy, pointed, and logical, and
were deeply interesting, continuing with crowded audiences through two
entire days. In these debates Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Wendell
Phillips, William Henry Channing, Ernestine L. Rose, Frederick
Douglass, Martha Mowry, Abby Kelly and Stephen Foster, Elizabeth B.
Chase, James N. Buffam, Sojourner Truth, Eliab Capron, and Joseph C.
Hathaway, took part. As there was no phonographic reporter present,
most of the best speaking, that was extemporaneous, can not be handed
down to history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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