Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States

The arguments in favor of the enfranchisement of women are truths strong and unanswerable, and as old as the free institutions of our Government. The principle of "taxation without representation is tyranny" applies to women as well as men, and is as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago.

Our demand for the ballot is the great onward step of the century, and not, as some claim, the idiosyncracies of a few unbalanced minds.

Every argument that has been urged against this question of woman's suffrage has been urged against every reform. Yet the reforms have fought their way onward and become a part of the glorious history of humanity.

So it will be with suffrage. "You can stop the crowing of the cock, but you can not stop the dawn of the morning." And now, gentlemen, you are responsible, not for the laws you find on the statute books, but for those you leave there.

REMARKS BY MRS. MARY SEYMOUR HOWELL.

Miss ANTHONY. I now introduce to the committee Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell, the president of the Albany, N.Y., State society.

Mrs. HOWELL. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: Miss Anthony gives me five minutes. I shall have to talk very rapidly. I ask you for the ballot because of the very first principle that is often repeated to you, that "taxation without representation is tyranny." I come from the city of Albany, where many of my sisters are taxed for millions of dollars. There are three or four women in the city of Albany who are worth their millions, and yet they have no voice in the laws that govern and control them. One of our great State senators has said that you can not argue five minutes against woman suffrage without repudiating every principle that this great Republic is founded upon.

I ask you also for the ballot for the large class of women who are not taxed. They need it more than the women who are taxed, I have found in every work that I have conducted that because I am a woman I am not paid for that work as a man is paid for similar work.

You have heard, and perhaps some of you are thinking—I hope not—that women should be at home. I wish to say to you that there are millions of women in the United States who have no homes. There are millions of women who are trying to earn their bread and hold their purity sacred. For that class of women I appeal to you. In the city of Albany there are hundreds of women in our factories making the shirts that you can buy for $1.50 and $2, and all those women are paid for making the shirts is 4 cents apiece. There are in the State of New York 18,000 teachers. When I was a teacher and taught with gentlemen in our academies, I received about one-fourth of the pay because I happened to be a woman. I consider it an insult that forever burns in my soul, that I am to be handed a mere pittance in comparison with what man receives for same quality of work. When I was sent out by our superintendent of public instruction to hold conventions of teachers, as I have often done in our State of New York, and when I did one-third more work than the men teachers so sent out, but because I was a woman and had not the ballot, I was only paid about half as much as the man; and saying that once to our superintendent of public instruction in Albany, he said, "Mrs. Howell, just as soon as you get the ballot and have a political influence in the work you will have the same pay as a man."

We ask for the ballot for that great army of fallen women who walk our streets and who break up our homes and ruin our husbands and our dear boys. We ask it for those women. The ballot will lift them up. Hundreds and thousands of women give up their purity for the sake of starving children and families. There is many a woman who goes to a life of degradation and pollution shedding burning tears over her 4-cent shirts.

We ask for the ballot for the good of the race, Huxley says, "admitting for the sake of argument that woman is the weaker, mentally and physically, for that reason she should have the ballot and should have every help that the world can give her." When you debar from your councils and legislative halls the purity, the spirituality, and the love of woman then those legislative halls and those councils are apt to become coarse and brutal, God gave us to you to help you in this little journey to a better land, and by our love and our intellect to help to make our country pure and noble, and if you would have statesmen you must have states we men to bear them.

I ask you also for the ballot that I may decide what I am. I stand before you, but I do not know to-day whether I am legally a "person" according to the law. It has been decided in some States that we are not "persons." In the State of New York, in one village, it was decided that women are not inhabitants. So I should like to know whether I am a person, whether I am an inhabitant, and above all I ask you for the ballot that I may become a citizen of this great Republic.

Gentlemen, you see before you this great convention of women from the Atlantic slopes to the Pacific Ocean, from the North to the South. We are in dead earnest. A reform never goes backward. This is a question that is before the American nation. Will you do your duty and give us our liberty, or will you leave it for braver hearts to do what must be done? For, like our forefathers, we will ask until we have gained it. Ever the world goes round and round; Ever the truth comes uppermost; and ever is justice done.

REMARKS BY MRS. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.

Miss ANTHONY. I now have the pleasure of introducing to the committee Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake, of New York. New York is a great State, and therefore it has three representatives here to-day.

Mrs. BLAKE. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: A recent writer in an English magazine, in speaking of the great advantage which to-day flows to the laboring classes of that nation from having received the right of suffrage, made the statement that disfranchised classes are oppressed, not because there is any desire whatever to do injustice to them, but because they are forgotten. We have year after year and session after session of our legislatures and of our Congresses proved the correctness of this statement. While we have nothing to complain of in the courtesy which we receive in private life, still when we see masses of men assembled together for political action, whether it be of the nation or of the State, we find that the women are totally forgotten.

In the limited time that is mine I cannot go into any lengthy exposition upon this point. I will simply call your attention to the total forgetfulness of the Congress of the United States to the debt owed to the women of this nation during the war. You have passed a pension bill upon which there has been much comment throughout the nation, and yet, when an old army nurse applies for a pension, a woman who is broken down by her devotion to the nation in hospitals and upon the battle-field, she is met at the door of the Pension Bureau by this statement, "the Government has made no appropriation for the services of women in the war." One of these women is an old nurse whom some of you may remember, Mother Bickerdyke, who went out onto many a battle-field when she was in the prime of life, twenty years ago, and at the risk of her life lifted men, who were wounded, in her arms, and carried them to a place of safety. She is an old woman now, and where is she? What reward the nation bestowed to her faithful services? The nation has a pension for every man who has served this nation, even down to the boy recruit who was out but three months; but Mother Bickerdyke, though her health has never been good since her service then, is earning her living at the wash-tub, a monument to the ingratitude of a Republic as great as was that when Belisarius begged in the streets of Rome.

I bring up this illustration alone out of innumerable others that are possible, to try to impress upon your minds that we are forgotten. It is not from any unkindness on your part. Who would think for one moment, looking upon the kindly faces of this committee, that any man on it would do an injustice to women, especially if she were old and feeble? But because we have no right to vote, as I said, our interests are overlooked and forgotten.

It is often said that we have too many voters; that the aggregate of vice and ignorance among us should not be increased by giving women the right of suffrage. I wish to remind you of the fact that in the enormous immigration that pours to our shores every year, numbering somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million, there come, twice as many men as women. The figures for the last year were two hundred and twenty-three thousand men, and one hundred and thirteen thousand women.

What does this mean? It means a steady influx of this foreign element; it means a constant preponderance of the masculine over the feminine; and it means also, of course, a preponderance of the voting power of the foreigner as compared to the native born. To those who fear that our American institutions are threatened by this gigantic inroad of foreigners I commend the reflection that the best safeguard against any such preponderance of foreign nations or of foreign influence is to put the ballot in the hands of the American-born women, And of all other women also, so that if the foreign-born man overbalances us in numbers we shall be always in a preponderance on the side of the liberty which is secured by our institutions.

It is because, as many of my predecessors have said, of the different elements represented by the two sexes, that we are asking for this liberty. When I was recently in the capitol of my own State of New York, I was reminded there of the difference of temperament between the sexes by seeing how children act when coming to the doors of the capitol, which have been constructed so that they are very hard to open. Whether that is because they want to keep us women out or not I am not able to say; but for some reason the doors are so constructed that it is nearly impossible to open them. I saw a number of little girls coming in through those doors—every child held the door for those who were to follow. A number of little boys followed just after, and every boy rushed through and let the door shut in the face of the one who was coming behind him. That is a good illustration of the different qualities of the sexes. Those boys were not unkind, they simply represented that onward push which is one of the grandest characteristics of your sex; and the little girls, on the other hand, represented that gentleness and thoughtfulness of others which is eminently a characteristic of women.

This woman element is needed in every branch of the Government. Look at the wholesale destruction of the forests throughout our nation, which has gone on until it brings direct destruction to the land on the lines of the great rivers of the West, and threatens us even in New York with destroying at once the beauty and usefulness of our far-famed Hudson. If women were in the Government do you not think they would protect the economic interests of the nation? They are the born and trained economists of the world, and when you call them to your assistance you will find an element that has not heretofore been felt with the weight which it deserves.

As we walk through the Capitol we are struck with the significance of the symbolism on every side; we view the adornments in the beautiful room, and we find here everywhere emblematically woman's figure. Here is woman representing even war, and there are women representing grace and loveliness and the fullness of the harvest; and, above all, they are extending their protecting arms over the little children. Gentlemen, I leave you under this symbolism, hoping that you will see in it the type of a coming day when we shall have women and men united together in the national councils in this great building.

REMARKS BY DR. CLEMENCE S. LOZIER.

Miss ANTHONY. I meant to have said, as I introduced Mrs. Blake, that sitting on the sofa is Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, who declines to speak, but I want her to stand up, because she represents New York city.

Dr. LOZIER. I thank you, I am very happy to be here, but I am not a fluent speaker. I feel in my heart that I know what justice means; that I know what mercy means, and in all my rounds of duty in my profession I am happy to extend not only food but shelter to many poor ones. The need of the ballot for working-girls and those who pay no taxes is not understood. The Saviour said, seeing the poor widow cast her two mites, which make a farthing, into the public treasury, "This poor widow hath cast more in than all they which have cast into the treasury." I see this among the poor working-girls of the city of New York; sick, in a little garret bedroom, perhaps, and although needing medical care and needing food, they will say to me, "above all things else, if I could only pay the rent." The rent of their little rooms goes into the coffers of their landlords and pays taxes. The poor women of the city of New York and everywhere are the grandest upholders of this Government. I believe they pay indirectly more taxes than the monopoly kings of our country. It is for them that I want the ballot.

REMARKS BY MRS. ELIZABETH BOYNTON HARBERT.

Miss ANTHONY. I now introduce to the committee Mrs. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, of Illinois, and before Mrs. Harbert speaks I wish to say that for the last six years she has edited a department of the Chicago Inter-Ocean called the "Women's Kingdom."

Mrs. HARBERT. Mr. Chairman and honorable gentlemen of the committee, after the eloquent rhetoric to which you have listened I merely come in these five minutes with a plain statement of facts. Some friends have said, "Here is the same company of women that year after year besiege you with their petitions." We are here to-day in a representative capacity. From the great State of Illinois I come, representing 200,000 men and women of that State who have recorded their written petitions for woman's ballot, 90,000 of these being citizens under the law—male voters; those 90,000 having signed petitions for the right of women to vote on the temperance question; 90,000 women also signed those petitions; 50,000 men and women signed the petitions for the school vote, and nearly 60,000 more have signed petitions that the right of suffrage might be accorded to woman.

This growth of public sentiment has been occasioned by the needs of the children and the working-women of that great State. I come here to ask you to make a niche in the statesmanship and legislation of the nation for the domestic interests of the people. You recognize that the masculine thought is more often turned to the material and political interests of the nation. I claim that the mother thought, the woman element needed, is to supplement the concurrent statesmanship of American men on political and industrial affairs with the domestic legislation of the nation.

There are good men and women who believe that women should use their influence merely through their social sphere. I believe both of the great parties are represented by us. You remember that a few weeks ago when there came across the country the news of the decision of the Supreme Court as regards the negro race the politicians sprang to the platform, and our editors hastened to their sanctums, to proclaim to the people that that did not interfere with the civil rights of the negro; that only their social rights were affected, and that the civil rights of man, those rights worth dying for, were not affected. Gentlemen, we who are trying to help the men in our municipal governments, who are trying to save the children from our poor-houses, begin to realize that whatever is good and essential for the liberty of the black man is good for the white woman and for all women. We are here to claim that whatever liberty has done for you it should be allowed to do for us. Take a single glance through the past; recognize the position of American manhood before the world to-day, and whatever liberty has done for you, liberty will surely do for the mothers of the race.

MRS. SARAH E. WALL.

Miss ANTHONY. Gentlemen of the committee, here is another woman I wish to show you, Sarah E. Wall, of Worcester, Mass., who, for the last twenty-five years, has resisted the tax gatherer when he came around. I want you to look at her. She looks very harmless, but she will not pay a dollar of tax. She says when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will give her the right of representation she will pay her taxes. I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.

REMARKS BY MISS SUSAN B. ANTHONY.

Miss ANTHONY. I wish I could state the avocations and professions of the various women who have spoken in our convention during the last three days. I do not wish to speak disparagingly in regard to the men in Congress, but I doubt if a man on the floor of either House could have made a better speech than some of those which have been made by women during this convention. Twenty-six States and Territories are represented with live women, traveling all the way from Kansas, Arkansas, Oregon, and Washington Territory. It does seem to me that after all these years of coming up to this Capitol an impression should be made upon the minds of legislators that we are never to be silenced until we gain the demand. We have never had in the whole thirty years of our agitation so many States represented in any convention as we had this year.

This fact shows the growth of public sentiment. Mrs. Duniway is here all the way from Oregon, and you say, when Mrs. Duniway is doing so well up there, and is so hopeful of carrying the State of Oregon, why do not you all rest satisfied with that plan of gaining the suffrage? My answer is that I do not wish to see the women of the thirty-eight States of this Union compelled to leave their homes and canvass each State, school district by school district. It is asking too much of a moneyless class of people, disfranchised by the constitution of every State in the Union. The joint earnings of the marriage copartnership in all the States belong legally to the husband. If the wife goes outside the home to work, the law in most of the States permits her to own and control the money thus earned. We have not a single State in the Union where the wife's earnings inside the marriage copartnership are owned by her. Therefore, to ask the vast majority of women who are thus situated, without an independent dollar of their own, to make a canvass of the States is asking to much.

Mrs. GOUGAR. Why did they not ask the negro to do that?

Miss ANTHONY. Of course the negro was not asked to go begging the white man from school district to school district to get his ballot. If it was known that we could be driven to the ballot-box: like a flock of sheep, and all vote for one party, there would be a bid made for us; but that is not done, because we can not promise you any such thing; because we stand before you and honestly tell you that the women of this nation are educated equally with the men, and that they, too, have political opinions. There is not a woman on our platform, there is scarcely a woman in this city of Washington, whether the wife of a Senator or a Congressman—I do not believe you can find a score of women in the whole nation—who have not opinions on the pending Presidential election. We all have opinions; we all have parties. Some of us like one party and one candidate and some another.

Therefore we can not promise you that women will vote as a unit when they are enfranchised. Suppose the Democrats shall put a woman suffrage plank in their platform in their Presidential convention, and nominate an open and avowed friend of woman suffrage to stand upon that platform; we can not pledge you that all the women of this nation will work for the success of that party, nor can I pledge you that they will all vote for the Republican party if it should be the one to take the lead in their enfranchisement. Our women will not toe a mark anywhere; they will think and act for themselves, and when they are enfranchised they will divide upon all political questions, as do intelligent, educated men.

I have tried the experiment of canvassing four States prior to Oregon, and in each State with the best canvass that it was possible for us to make we obtained a vote of one-third. One man out of every three men voted for the enfranchisement of the women of their households, while two voted against it. But we are proud to say that our splendid minority is always composed of the very best men of the State, and I think Senator PALMER will agree with me that the forty thousand men of Michigan who voted for the enfranchisement of the women of his State were really the picked men in intelligence, in culture, in morals, in standing, and in every direction.

It is too much to say that the majority of the voters in any State are superior, educated, and capable, or that they investigate every question thoroughly, and cast the ballot thereon intelligently. We all know that the majority of the voters of any State are not of that stamp. The vast masses of the people, the laboring classes, have all they can do in their struggle to get food and shelter for their families. They have very little time or opportunity to study great questions of constitutional law.

Because of this impossibility for women to canvass the States over and over to educate the rank and file of the voters we come to you to ask you to make it possible for the Legislatures of the thirty-eight States to settle the question, where we shall have a few representative men assembled before whom we can make our appeals and arguments.

This method of settling the question by the Legislatures is just as much in the line of States' rights as is that of the popular vote. The one question before you is, will you insist that a majority of the individual voters of every State must be converted before its women shall have the right to vote, or will you allow the matter to be settled by the representative men in the Legislatures of the several States? You need not fear that we shall get suffrage too quickly if Congress shall submit the proposition, for even then we shall have a hard time in going from Legislature to Legislature to secure the two-thirds votes of three-fourths of the States necessary to ratify the amendment. It may take twenty years after Congress has taken the initiative step to make action by the State Legislatures possible.

I pray you, gentlemen, that you will make your report to the Senate speedily. I know you are ready to make a favorable one. Some of our speakers may not have known this as well as I. I ask you to make a report and to bring it to a discussion and a vote on the floor of the Senate.

You ask me if we want to press this question to a vote provided there is not a majority to carry it. I say yes, because we want the reflex influence of the discussion and of the opinions of Senators to go back into the States to help us to educate the people of the States.

Senator LAPHAM. It would require a two-thirds vote in both, the House and the Senate to submit the amendment to the State Legislatures for ratification.

Miss ANTHONY. I know that it requires a two-thirds vote of both Houses. But still, I repeat, even if you can not get the two-thirds vote, we ask you to report the bill and bring it to a discussion and a vote at the earliest day possible. We feel that this question should be brought before Congress at every session. We ask this little attention from Congressmen whose salaries are paid from the taxes; women do their share for the support of this great Government, We think we are entitled to two or three days of each session of Congress in both the Senate and House. Therefore I ask of you to help us to a discussion in the Senate this session. There is no reason why the Senate, composed of seventy-six of the most intelligent and liberty-loving men of the nation, shall not pass the resolution by a two-thirds vote, I really believe it will do so if the friends on this committee and on the floor of the Senate will champion the measure as earnestly as if it were to benefit themselves instead of their mothers and sisters. Gentlemen, I thank you for this hearing granted, and I hope the telegraph wires will soon tell us that your report is presented, and that a discussion is inaugurated on the floor of the Senate.

ARGUMENTS OF THE WOMAN-SUFFRAGE DELEGATES BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE, JANUARY 23, 1880.