Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
This is the work before us. This is the meaning of the desperate
unrest and unhappiness of women. It is this that has drawn us
here to enter our protest against the wicked, old, one-legged
order of things. Our honored Miss Anthony has gone through fire
and hail while she worked for her convictions. All of us have
wrought as best we might for the higher education of women, for
their pecuniary independence, for their civil and political
rights, fighting the world, the flesh and the devil.
My own work has been in the field of journalism. For nearly
twenty years I have faced here every form of disability because I
am a woman, have met defeat after defeat, till the iron has
entered my soul. Yet every day I have thanked God that I have
been permitted to bear my share in the tremendous struggle for
the development of women in the nineteenth century. Struggle
means development; it can come in no other way, and this will be
the grandest since creation began--the crowned, perfected woman.
For this the cry of womanhood has risen out of the depths through
the centuries. Up through agony and despair it has come, through
sin and shame, through poverty and martyrdom, through torture
which has wrung drops of blood from woman's lips, still up, up,
till it has reached the great white throne itself.
The enrollment committee reported a list of about one hundred thousand
names of persons asking for woman suffrage. The treasurer announced
the receipts for 1888 to be $12,510. All of the expenses of the great
International Council had been paid and a balance of nearly $300
remained.
The resolutions might be described as an epitomized recital of wrongs
and a Bill of Rights.
WHEREAS, Women possessed and exercised the right of suffrage in
the inauguration of this Government; and,
WHEREAS, They were deprived of this right by the arbitrary Acts
of successive State Legislatures in violation of the original
compact as seen in the early constitutions; therefore,
_Resolved_, That it is the duty of the several States to make
prompt restitution of these ancient rights, recognized by
innumerable precedents in English history, and to-day by the
gradual extension of the suffrage over vast territories.
WHEREAS, Woman's title deed to an equal share in the inheritance
left her by the fathers of the Republic has been examined and
proved by able lawyers; and,
WHEREAS, This right is already exercised in some form in one
hundred localities in different parts of the world; therefore,
_Resolved_, That sex is no longer considered a bar to the
exercise of suffrage by civilized nations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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