The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty YearsHarper, Ida Husted
History
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years
Harper, Ida Husted
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES.--On Saturday evening the Broadway
Tabernacle reverberated with the shrill, defiant notes of Miss Lucy
Stone and her "sisters," who have thrown down the gauntlet to the
male friends of temperance and declared not literally "war to the
knife" but conflict with tongues.... Henceforth the women's rights
ladies--including among them the misses, Lucy herself, Emily Clark,
Susan B. Anthony, Antoinette Brown, some Harriets and Angelinas,
Melissas and Hannahs, with a Fanny too (and more's the pity for it
is a sweet name) and sundry matrons whose names are _household_
words in _newspapers_--are to be in open hostility to the regularly
constituted temperance agencies, under cover of association with
whom they have contrived to augment their notoriety. The delegates
at the Brick Church, who took the responsibility of knocking off
these parasites, deserve the thanks of the temperance friends the
Union through.... Such associations would mar any cause. Left to
themselves such women must fall into contempt; they have used the
temperance cause for a support long enough, and we are glad that
the seeming alliance has been thus formally disowned by the
temperance delegates.
The New York Sun, Moses Beach, editor, said:
The quiet duties of daughter, wife or mother are not congenial to
those hermaphrodite spirits who thirst to win the title of champion
of one sex and victor over the other. What is the love and
submission of one manly heart to the woman whose ambition it is to
sway the minds of multitudes as did a Demosthenes or a Cicero? What
are the tender affections and childish prattle of the family
circle, to women whose ears itch for the loud laugh and boisterous
cheer of the public assembly?...
Could a Christian man, cherishing a high regard for woman and for
the proprieties of life feel that he was promoting woman's
interests and the cause of temperance by being introduced to a
temperance meeting by Miss Susan B. Anthony, her ungainly form
rigged out in bloomer costume and provoking the thoughtless to
laughter and ridicule by her very motions upon the platform? Would
he feel that he was honoring the women of his country by accepting
as their representatives women whom they must and do despise? Will
any pretend to say that women, whose tongues have dishonored their
God and their Savior, while uttering praise of infidels and infidel
theories, are worthy to receive the suffrages of their Christian
sisters?...
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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