Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
When we remember that the first foot to touch Plymouth Rock was a
woman's--that in the first settlement of this country women
endured trials and privations and stood bravely at the post of
duty, even fighting in the ranks that we might have a
republic--and that in our great Western world women came at an
early day to make the wilderness blossom as the rose, and rocked
their babies' cradles in the log cabins when the Indians'
war-whoop was heard on the prairies and the wolves howled around
their doors--when we remember that in the last war thousands of
women in the Northwest bravely took upon themselves the work of
the households and the fields that their husbands and sons might
fight the battles of liberty--when we recollect all this, and
then are told that loyal women, pioneer women, the descendants of
the Pilgrim Fathers, are not even to ask for the right of
suffrage lest the Scandinavians should be offended, it is time to
rise in indignation and ask, Whose country is this? Who made it?
Who have periled their lives for it?
Our American women are property holders and pay large taxes; but
the foreigner who has lived only one year in the State, and ten
days in the precinct, who does not own a foot of land, may vote
away their property in the form of taxes in the most reckless
manner, regardless of their interests and their rights. Women are
well-educated; they are graduating from our colleges; they are
reading and thinking and writing; and yet they are the political
inferiors of all the riff-raff of Europe that is poured upon our
shores. It is unbearable. There is no language that can express
the enormous injustice done to women....
We can not separate subjects and say we will vote on temperance
or on school matters, for all these questions are part of
government.... When women as well as men are voters, the church
will get some recognition. I marvel that all ministers are not in
favor of woman suffrage, when I consider that their audiences are
almost entirely composed of women and that the church to-day is
brought into disrepute because it is made up of disfranchised
members. The minister would stand a hundred-fold higher than he
does now if women had the suffrage. Everybody would want to know
what the minister was saying to those women voters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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