Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw took for her subject Women vs. Indians, and
reviewed the suffrage amendment campaign in South Dakota the previous
year. In an address brimming and bubbling over with wit, satire and
pathos, she showed how much greater consideration the Indians received
from the men of that State than did women. She told how 45 per cent.
of the votes cast the preceding year were for male Indian suffrage and
only 37 per cent. for woman suffrage; how Indians in blankets and
moccasins were received in the State convention with the greatest
courtesy, and Susan B. Anthony and other eminent women were barely
tolerated; how, while these Indians were engaged in their ghost
dances, the white women were going up and down the State pleading for
the rights of citizens; how the law in that State gives not only the
property but the children to the husband, in the face of all the
hardships endured by those pioneer wives and mothers. She suggested
that the solution of the Indian question should be left to a
commission of women with Alice Fletcher at its head, and said in
closing: "Let all of us who love liberty solve these problems in
justice; and let us mete out to the Indian, to the negro, to the
foreigner, and to the woman, the justice which we demand for
ourselves, the liberty which we love for ourselves. Let us recognize
in each of them that One above, the Father of us all, and that all are
brothers, all are one."
The Moral and Political Emergency was presented by Mrs. Emma Smith
DeVoe (S. D.). Henry B. Blackwell and Mrs. Alice M. A. Pickler
described the South Dakota Campaign. Representative J. A. Pickler was
introduced by Miss Anthony as the candidate who, when told that if he
expressed his views on woman suffrage he would lose votes, expressed
them more freely than ever and ran ahead of his ticket; and his wife
as the woman who bade her husband to speak even if it lost him the
office, and who was herself the only Congressman's wife that ever took
the platform for the enfranchisement of women.
Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby took for her subject Ibsen's drama, A Doll's
House, and discussed its ethical problems, closing with the sentence:
"As long as the fighting qualities of woman remain, there is a chance
for the nation to make a robust, steady progress; but if these die out
and woman willingly surrenders herself for the sake of selfish ease to
the dominance of man, civilization is arrested and true manhood
becomes impossible." The convention ended with a scholarly address by
Wm. Lloyd Garrison (Mass.) on The Social Aspect of the Woman Question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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