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
Miss Anthony was greeted with a rousing Chautauqua salute. "I am
delighted beyond measure," she said, "that at last the women of
this great national body have found there is only one way by which
they can reach their desired end, and that is by the ballot. What
is 'gospel suffrage?' It is a system by which truth and justice
might be made the uppermost principles of government. Every
election is the solution of a mathematical problem, the figuring
out of what the majority desire. We have in this country
mercantile, mining, manufacturing and all kinds of business by
which money can be made. The interests of every one of these are
put into the political scale, but when the moral issues are put in
the other side the material pull them down. Why? Because the moral
issues are not weighted with votes. The men who are associated with
women in movements of reform get no more in the way of legislation
than do women themselves, because when they go to the legislatures
or to Congress they have back of them only a disfranchised class.
"If you would have your requests granted your legislators must know
that you are a part of a body of constituents who stand with
ballots in their hands. Women, we might as well be dogs baying the
moon as petitioners without the power to vote! If you have no care
for yourselves, you should at least take pity on the men associated
with you in your good works. So long as State constitutions say
that all may vote when twenty-one, save idiots, lunatics, convicts
and women, you are brought down politically to the level of those
others disfranchised. This discrimination is a relic of the dark
ages. The most ignorant and degraded man who walks to the polls
feels himself superior to the most intelligent woman. We should
demand the wiping out of all legislation which keeps us
disfranchised.
Almost every sentence of this brief address was punctuated with applause
from the immense audience.
Always when in Cleveland Miss Anthony was a guest at the palatial home
of Mrs. Louisa Southworth, At this time, with her hostess' permission,
she had summoned the entire National-American Board to a business
meeting, and all were entertained under this hospitable roof. For thirty
years Mrs. Southworth had been among the leading representatives of the
suffrage movement in northern Ohio, and during all that time had been
Miss Anthony's staunch and unfailing friend. She had given thousands of
dollars to the suffrage cause, and hundreds to Miss Anthony for her
personal use. On this occasion she presented her with $1,000 to open the
much desired national headquarters. One such supporter in every State
would win many battles which are lost because of insufficient funds to
do the necessary work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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