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
It will be noticed that these women are in Mr. McAllister's Four
Hundred, but not of it. They do not go in for frivolity. They go in
for charity, for working among the masses, for elevating standards
of living and morals in the slums of the city. They have awakened
to the fact of the other half, and of how that other half lives,
and they have expressed their indignation over the small salaries
paid women for doing men's work; over the dishonest men in
political places, put there because they could vote and control the
votes of a number of saloon loungers; over the wretched lot of the
woman school teacher, ill-paid and neglected because useless on
election day.
And to go back a little further, the most of these society women
are the products of that higher education which the pioneer
suffragists made possible. They are women of wide reading, of
independent thought, of much self-reliance. They began to wonder
why they could not vote, when the sloping-shouldered,
sloping-skulled youths who proposed to marry them, or had married
them, had that right and did not exercise it and showed no
information and no concern as to the rottenness of the local
government.... The upper class of women are enlisted. Woman
suffrage is the one interesting subject of discussion in the whole
fashionable quarter.
This campaign brought also another surprise. In all the forty years of
suffrage work, one of the stumbling-blocks had been the utter apathy of
women themselves, who took no interest either for or against, but now
they seemed to be aroused all along the line. In Albany a small body of
women calling themselves "Remonstrants" suddenly sprung into existence.
For a number of years there had been a handful of women in Massachusetts
under that title, but this was the first appearance of the species in
New York. They seemed to be fathered by Bishop William Croswell Doane,
and mothered by Mrs. John V. L. Pruyn. Seven men and a number of women
were present at the first meeting in that lady's parlor, and they formed
an organization to counteract the vicious efforts of those women who
were asking for political freedom. Evidently under the direction of her
spiritual adviser, Mrs. Pruyn submitted a set of resolutions, which were
adopted, begging the Constitutional Convention "not to strike out the
word 'male';" setting forth "that suffrage was not a natural right; that
there was no reason why this privilege should be extended to women; that
no taxation without representation did not mean that every citizen
should vote; that universal suffrage was a mistake; that the possession
of the suffrage would take women into conflicts for which they were
wholly unfitted; and that it would rudely disturb the strong and growing
spirit of chivalry." Another branch was formed in Brooklyn with Mrs.
Lyman Abbott at its head and the Outlook at its back, edited by Rev.
Lyman Abbott.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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