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 takes all too many of us women from our homes and from the works
of charity and education in our respective localities, even to come
to Washington, session after session, until Congress shall have
submitted the proposition, and then to go from legislature to
legislature, urging its adoption. But when you insist that we shall
beg at the feet of each individual voter of every one of the
States, native and foreign, black and white, learned and ignorant,
you doom us to incalculable hardships and sacrifices, and to most
exasperating insults and humiliations. I pray you to save us from
the fate of waiting and working for our freedom until we shall have
educated the ignorant masses of men to consent to give their wives
and sisters equality of rights with themselves. You surely will not
compel us to await the enlightenment of all the freedmen of this
nation and the newly-made voters from the monarchial governments of
the old world!
Liberty for one's self is a natural instinct possessed alike by all
men, but to be willing to accord liberty to another is the result
of education, of self-discipline, of the practice of the golden
rule. Therefore we ask that the question of equality of rights to
women shall be decided by the picked men of the nation in Congress,
and the picked men of the several States in their respective
legislatures.
The Senate committee again submitted a majority report in favor of a
Sixteenth Amendment enfranchising women, signed by T. W. Palmer, Blair,
Lapham and Anthony. The minority report, by Joseph E. Brown, Cockrell
and Fair, began: "The undersigned believe that the Creator intended that
the sphere of the males and females of our race should be different,"
etc.
The House Judiciary Committee gave a majority report in the
negative.[21] The minority report in favor was signed by Thomas B. Reed,
Maine; Ezra B. Taylor, Ohio; Thomas M. Browne, Indiana; Moses A. McCoid,
Iowa. It is one of the keenest, clearest expositions of the absurdity of
the objections against woman suffrage that ever has been made, and ends
with this trenchant paragraph:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account