Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Miss Clara Barton (D. C.) spoke in a touching manner of the great
service rendered to humanity by Dr. Harriet N. Austin, who assisted
Dr. James C. Jackson to establish the "Home on the Hillside," the
Dansville (N. Y.) Sanitorium. Henry B. Blackwell told of John L.
Whiting, "a power and a strength to the Massachusetts Suffrage
Association for many years, one of those rare men not made smaller by
wealth, and always willing to give himself, his mind, his heart, his
money, to help the cause of woman." The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw said in
part:
I have been asked to speak a word of Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson. It
has been said by some people that we have wrongfully quoted Mr.
Emerson as being on our side. His biographers appear to have put
in his early statements and forgotten to include his later
declarations, which were all in favor of the enfranchisement of
women.
I was once sent to Concord by the Massachusetts society to hold a
meeting. The churches were closed against suffrage speakers and
there was not money enough to pay for a hall. Mrs. Ralph Waldo
Emerson heard the meeting was to be given up, and she sent a
message to the lady having the work in charge, saying: "Shall it
be said that here in Concord, where the Revolutionary war began,
there is no place to speak for the freedom of women? Get the best
hall in town and I will pay for it." So on that occasion and on
another Mrs. Emerson paid for the hall and sent a kind word to
the meeting, declaring herself in favor of the suffrage for
women, and stating that her husband's views and her own were
identical on this question. She had the New England trait of
being a good wife, a good mother and a good housekeeper, and Mr.
Emerson's home was a restful and blessed place. We sometimes
forget the wives of great men in thinking of the greatness of
their husbands, but Mrs. Emerson was as great in her way as Mr.
Emerson in his, and no more faithful friend to woman and to
woman's advancement ever has lived among us.[90]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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