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
The legislature of New York had ordered the necessary measures to be
taken for a delegate convention to revise the constitution. Governor
Hill in 1887 and Governor Flower in 1892 had recommended that women
should have a representation in this convention. The bill, as it finally
passed both branches of the legislature, provided that any male or
female citizen above the age of twenty-one should be eligible to
election as delegate. When the district conventions were called to
choose these, both Democrats and Republicans refused to nominate any
woman. As the delegates would draw $10 a day for five months, the
political plums were entirely too valuable to give to a disfranchised
class. The Republicans of Miss Anthony's district would not consider
even her nomination, although she was recognized as the peer of any man
in the State in a knowledge of constitutional law. The Democrats in that
district, who were in a hopeless minority, made the one exception and,
as a compliment, nominated Mrs. Jean Brooks Greenleaf, who ran several
hundred votes ahead of the ticket.
The women then proceeded to inaugurate a great campaign in order to
create a public sentiment which would demand from this convention an
amendment conferring suffrage on women. To begin this, which would
require a vast amount of money, they had not a dollar. No delegate owed
his election to a woman, nor could any woman further his ambition for
future honors to which his record in this body might prove a
stepping-stone. So far as any political power was concerned, women were
of less force than the proverbial fly on the wagon wheel, and the
majority of men who go into a convention of this kind do so from that
particular sort of lofty patriotism which sees an official position in
the near or distant future. On the other hand, the element which is
forever and unalterably opposed to any move in the direction of suffrage
for women, represented the dominant financial and political power in the
greatest metropolis in America, whose ramifications extend to every
city, village and cross-roads in the State. With its money and its votes
this element can make and unmake politicians at will, and under present
conditions, with the ballot in the hands of men only, it is virtually an
impossibility for a candidate to be elected if this organization exert
its influence against him. How to persuade the parties and the
individual men to risk defeat until they succeed in the enfranchisement
of women, which alone will destroy the absolute domination of this
oligarchy, is a problem yet to be solved. That the women of New York
dared attempt it, showed courage and determination of the highest order.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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