Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
A woman's whole education to-day is toward direct results. She
has been educated away from the old indirect ideal of the
boarding-school. There she was taught to be a persuasive
ornament, now she is taught to be an individual mind, will and
conscience and to use these in acting herself. I hold that there
is no more graphic illustration of inconsistent waste than the
spectacle of a college-trained woman falsifying her entire
education by shying away from suffrage.... The time has gone by
when a college woman can be allowed to be noncommittal on this
subject. If she has not thought about equal suffrage she must do
so now, exactly as persons of intelligence were compelled to
think about slavery in the time of Garrison, or about the
reformation in the time of Martin Luther. To those who try to get
out of it it is not unfitting to quote Thomas Huxley's famous
sentence: "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who dare not
reason is a coward; he who can not reason is a fool." ...
It devolves upon the college woman more than upon any other one
type to face and conquer a retarding tendency which is becoming
marked in this country. I refer to the anti-feminization
movement. Dr. Stanley Hall has given voice to it in education;
Dr. Lyman Abbott quavers about it in religion; the committee on
tariff revision is an example of it in politics. When women sent
a petition to the committee against raising the duties on certain
necessities of life of which they were the chief consumers, the
chairman said: "It doesn't make any difference whether these
women send in a petition signed by 500 or 5,000 names, they will
receive no consideration. Let them talk things over in their
clubs and other organizations; this will occupy them and do no
one any harm; but it will not affect the tariff." On the same day
the committee accorded a deferential hearing to a deputation of
lumbermen.... This discrimination against woman, the vague
feeling that she has been allowed to get on too fast, to get out
of control, that she has slipped into too large activities while
the good man slept, has come upon us at the very time when
Scandinavia and Germany and England are getting rid of their
simian chivalry. It is notorious that America, which once was the
progressive nation, has been for a generation in a comatose state
in the matter of social ideas. It is high time that our college
women should stand solid against the blind superstition, whose
mother is fear and whose father is egoism, that women can not be
trusted in public affairs....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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