The torch bearer : $b a look forward and back at the Woman's journal, the organ of the woman's movement — John Shaqi
The torch bearer : $b a look forward and back at the Woman's journal, the organ of the woman's movementRyan, Agnes E.
History
The torch bearer : $b a look forward and back at the Woman's journal, the organ of the woman's movement
Ryan, Agnes E.
Woman's journal (Boston, Mass. : 1870); Women -- Suffrage -- United States
So wonderful are the days in which we are living and so rapidly is
the canvas being crowded with the record of achievement in the woman's
movement that it is time for readers of the Woman's Journal and for
all suffragists to know somewhat intimately and as never before what
goes on in the four little rooms in Boston where the organ of the
suffrage movement is prepared for its readers each week.
Before telling what has been done and what is planned and hoped, it
will perhaps be well to give a little picture of the paper which to
many has been the "Suffrage Bible" since it was started over forty-six
years ago by Lucy Stone, Henry B. Blackwell and the little band of
woman's rights pioneers who saw, almost at the dawn of the movement,
the need of an organ.
Before the charter for the Woman's Journal was granted in 1870,
$10,000 had to be paid into its treasury. This was at a time when
there were few millionaires in the world, and $10,000 then must have
looked like as many millions today.
How ardent, then, must have been the few, how eloquent the
presentation, to have raised $10,000 with which to start a paper for
the sole purpose of advocating equal rights for women! But they were
ardent and eloquent, and from the road to martyrdom they have come to
us through history as great men and women of their time. The pages of
the Woman's Journal are brilliant with their sayings, and the reports
of the early stockholders' meetings echo the voices of that pioneer
band led by Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone and
Julia Ward Howe.
Never for a single week since 1870 have the women of the country been
without a mouthpiece to voice their needs and wrongs. This has
been due chiefly to the fact that the Stone-Blackwell family has
continuously given not only of its services in editing and managing
the paper, but also has made generous contributions for years to
enable the paper to continue.
So much in brief for the forty years from 1870 to 1910. From July 1,
1910, to September 30, 1912, the financial support of the paper was
assumed by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After
that it fell to the manager of the paper either to get contributions
to meet the deficit each year or to borrow. On October 1, 1912, Miss
Blackwell contributed $2,000; on January 31, 1914, she again gave the
paper $2,000.
With the exception of these $4,000, I have raised or borrowed each
year the necessary money, over and above receipts, to keep the paper
going. With the beginning of 1915 Miss Blackwell began to feel that
she could not continue indefinitely to make up a deficit, and she
began seriously to consider cutting the size of the paper to four
pages or making it a monthly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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