The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 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 2 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
We demand that every citizen of the United States shall be allowed
to cast one free and unrestricted ballot in all public elections,
and that such ballot shall be counted as cast; that such laws shall
be enacted and enforced as will secure to every citizen, be he rich
or poor, native or foreign, white or black, this sovereign right
guaranteed by the Constitution. The free and honest popular ballot,
the just and equal representation of all the people, as well as
their just and equal protection under the laws, are the foundation
of our republican institutions, and the party will never relax its
efforts until the integrity of the ballot and the purity of
elections shall be guaranteed and protected in every State.
This was identical with the one adopted in 1888, at which time a number
of women had telegraphed the chairman asking if the convention intended
it to apply to women, and he had answered that he did not understand it
to have any such intention. Therefore the women who went to the
Republican convention of 1892 asking for bread, received instead "the
water in which the eggs had been boiled."
There were present at this convention two regularly appointed women
delegates from Wyoming, and the difference in the attention bestowed
upon them and upon those who came to press the claims of the great class
of the disfranchised, ought to have been an object lesson to all who
assert that women will lose the respect of men when they enter
politics. Not a newspaper in the country had a slur to cast on these
women delegates. The Boston Globe made this pertinent comment: "An
elective queen in this country is no more out of place than one seated
by hereditary consent abroad. It is no rash prediction to assert that
the child is now born who will see a woman in the presidential chair.
Thomas Jefferson will not be fully vindicated until this government
rests upon the consent of all the governed."
After just five days at home Miss Anthony left for Chicago to attend the
Democratic National Convention, June 21, which was requested to adopt
the following plank: "Whether we view the suffrage as a privilege or as
a natural right, it belongs equally to every citizen of good character
and legal age under government; hence women as well as men should enjoy
the dignity and protection of the ballot in their own hands."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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