Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Among the most interesting and valuable features of all national
conventions are the reports of the work in the various States and yet
because of the large number it is impossible to give specific mention
or quotations. They were varied on this occasion by the reports from
foreign countries--Venezuela, Chili, Japan, China, Australia, New
Zealand, the Philippines, Porto Rico, Canada, Great Britain, Norway,
Sweden, Russia, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and
France. These had been obtained at the request of Mrs. Catt from
ambassadors, consuls or persons appointed by them and represented
months of labor. Several evenings were largely devoted to addresses by
delegates from other countries; one by Public School Inspector James
L. Hughes, Toronto; the English Woman in Politics, Florence Fenwick
Miller; the Australian Woman in Politics, Vida Goldstein; Women in
South American Republics, Carolina Huidobro; Women in Porto Rico,
Resident Commissioner Federico Degetau; Women in the Philippines,
Harriet Potter Nourse; Deborah, Emmy Evald, Sweden; Women in Egypt and
Jerusalem, Lydia von Finkelstein Mountford; Women in Turkey, Florence
Fensham, Dean of American College for Girls in Constantinople; Women
in Germany, Antoine Stolle.
When the report for Porto Rico was made Miss Shaw supplemented it with
a graphic account of a trip to the West Indies with Mrs. Lydia Avery
Coonley Ward of Chicago, which she had just finished, telling of the
position of women, the marriage laws, etc. The work of the National
Council of Women was presented by the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer (R.
I.); the report of the affiliated Friends' Equal Rights Association by
Mrs. Mariana W. Chapman (N. Y.), its president.
The Sunday afternoon services in the church were conducted by the Rev.
Anna Garlin Spencer, assisted by the Rev. Olympia Brown and the Rev.
Anna Howard Shaw.[21] Mrs. Spencer first defined the ideal of womanly
character held by the older poets and philosophers, quoting Milton's
line describing Adam and Eve: "He for God only; she for God in him,"
and the expression used by the hard, old father of Tennyson's
"Princess": "Man to command and woman to obey." She then expressed the
modern ideal as that of devotion to the same essentials but different
in expression. "Woman is not called to a new kingdom but to a larger
occupancy of that which has been hers from the beginning. The woman
with the child in her arms was the beginning of the family; the hearth
fire and the altar fire grew from this; the elder child teaching the
younger was the beginning of the school. We are making over all these
inherited traditions and inherited tendencies and socializing them....
The ideal woman is no longer a far-away Madonna with her feet on the
clouds; she is as divine but she is human. What means the humanizing
of religion and the passing of harsh, old creeds but that a greater,
more human, more womanly influence is felt in all the relations of
life."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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