Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
In behalf of the sons, the brothers and the husbands of these
wage-earning women we ask for that political power which alone
will insure equality of pay without regard to sex. For the sake
of man's redemption and morality we demand that this injustice
shall cease, for it is not possible for woman to be half-starved
and man not dwarfed; for many women to be degraded and all men's
lives pure; for women to be fallen and no man lost.
We all know that man himself has been most willing to grant to
women every right, every opportunity. If he has hesitated it has
been rather from love and admiration of woman than from any
tyrannical desire of oppression. He has said that women must not
vote because they can not perform military duty. Can they not
serve the nation as well as those men, who during the last war
sent substitutes and to-day hold the highest places in the
Government? But we ask one question: Which every year does most
for the State, the soldier or the mother who risks her life not
to destroy other life but to create it? Of the two it would be
better to disfranchise the soldiers and enfranchise the mothers.
For much as the nation owes to the soldiers, she owes far more to
the mothers who in endless martyrdom make the nation a
possibility....
Man deserves that we should consider his present unhappy
condition. In all ages he has proved his reverence for woman by
embodying every virtue in female form, and has left none for
himself. Truth and chastity, mercy and peace, charity and
justice, all are represented as feminine, and lately, as a proof
of his devotion, he has erected at the entrance to the harbor of
our greatest metropolis a statue of liberty and this too is
represented as a woman.... And so we hail the men, liberty
enlightening a world where woman and man shall alike be free.
One interesting address followed another throughout the convention,
presenting the question of suffrage for women with appeal, humor,
logic, statistics and every variety of argument.
Mrs. Harriette Robinson Shattuck (Mass.) presented in striking
contrast The Women Who Ask and the Women Who Object. Mrs. Elizabeth
Boynton Harbert in a fine address told of Our Motherless Government.
Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) gave for the first time her
masterly speech, The Constitutional Rights of the Women of the United
States, which has been so widely circulated in pamphlet form, and
which closed with this peroration:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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