Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
The popular objection to woman suffrage is that it would "double
the ignorant vote." The patent answer to this is, abolish the
ignorant vote. Our legislators have this power in their own
hands. There have been various restrictions in the past for men.
We are willing to abide by the same for women, provided the
insurmountable qualification of sex be forever removed....
Surely, when we compel all classes to learn to read and write and
thus open to themselves the door of knowledge not by force but by
the promise of a privilege all intelligent citizens enjoy, we are
benefactors, not tyrants. To stimulate them to climb the first
rounds of the ladder that they may reach the divine heights where
they shall be as gods, knowing good and evil, by withholding the
citizen's right to vote for a few years will be a blessing to
them as well as to the State....
Mrs. Stanton had made her last address in person to a national
convention in 1892, when she resigned the presidency of the
association--that incomparable essay on The Solitude of Self--but she
never had failed to send her annual battle cry. The one to this
convention, which began the fulfilment of her dream of a world-wide
movement for woman suffrage, was written with all her old-time logic
and forceful argument and it proved to be her last, as her long and
valuable life was ended the next November.
Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton (O.) read the paper of Mrs. Caroline
Hallowell Miller (Md.), detained at the last moment, on Why We Come
Again, in which she explained why the suffragists would continue to
come to Washington and haunt Congress until their object, a Federal
Amendment, had been attained. The humor for which Mrs. Miller, a staid
"Quaker," was noted sparkled in its sentences although she protested
that she was entirely serious. Miss Anthony introduced Henry B.
Blackwell (Mass.) with the quaint remark: "He was the husband of Lucy
Stone; I don't think he can quite represent her but he will do the
best he can!" Mr. Blackwell briefly reviewed the agitation for women
suffrage during the first half of the 19th century. He told of meeting
Lucy Stone in 1850 and being so charmed he advised his elder brother
to make her acquaintance; of hearing her address a Massachusetts
constitutional convention in 1852 with William Lloyd Garrison and
Wendell Phillips; of making his own first suffrage speech in
Cleveland, O., in 1853 and of his marriage in 1855. In presenting the
next speaker Miss Anthony said: "Mr. Blackwell alluded to his brother,
who did not marry Lucy but Antoinette--the Rev. Antoinette Brown
Blackwell, the first ordained woman minister--who will now address
you." Her paper on Chivalry was a clear analysis of the changed ideas
of this word, touching with sarcasm on that of the days when the
effort for the rights of women began, a chivalry which gave the person
and property of the wife, the guardianship of the children, all her
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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