Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
History
Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
Cure by ballot has been the one and only remedy suggested by Suffrage
conventions for all the ills, real or imaginary, that are endured by
women. As long ago as 1854, in a convention in Philadelphia, they uttered
the same sentiment. In commenting upon Mrs. Jane G. Swisshelm's book,
"Half a Century," they say: "While ever and anon during the last forty
years Mrs. Swisshelm has seized some of these dilettante literary women
with her metaphysical tweezers, and held them up to scorn for their
ridicule of the Woman Suffrage conventions, yet in her own recently
published work, in her mature years, she vouchsafes no words of approval
for those who have inaugurated the greatest movement of the centuries. ...
It is quite evident from her last pronunciamento that she has no just
appreciation of the importance and dignity of our demand for justice and
equality. A soldier without a leg is a fact so much more readily
understood than all women without ballots, and his loss so much more
readily comprehended and supplied, that we can hardly blame any one for
doing the work of the hour, rather than struggling a lifetime for an idea.
Hence it is not a matter of surprise that most women are more readily
enlisted in the suppression of evils in the concrete, than in advocating
the principles that underlie them in the abstract, and thus ultimately
choosing the broader and more lasting work."
In her "Reminiscences," contributed to the "History," Mrs. Emily Collins
says: "From 1858 to 1869 my home was in Rochester, N.Y. There, by brief
newspaper articles and in other ways, I sought to influence public
sentiment in favor of this fundamental reform. In 1868 a society was
organized there for the reformation of abandoned women. At one of its
meetings I endeavored to show how futile all their efforts would be while
women, by the laws of the land, were made a subject class."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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