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COURAGEOUS WOMEN OF NEW YORK STATE
The Fundamental Principle of a
Republic
Anna Howard Shaw, the President
of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, is the
fourth from the left. Standing to her left is Ella Hawley
Crossett of Warsaw, New York, who was elected President of
the New York Suffrage Association at this convention. -
University of Rochester.
It follows the full text transcript of
Anna Howard Shaw's The Fundamental Principle
of a Republic speech, delivered at Ogdensburg, New York
- June 21, 1915.
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When I came into
your hall tonight, |
I thought of the
last time I was in your city. Twenty-one years
ago I came here with Susan B. Anthony, and we
came for exactly the same purpose as that for
which we are here tonight. Boys have been born
since that time and have become voters, and the
women are still trying to persuade American men
to believe in the fundamental principles of
democracy, and I never quite feel as if it was a
fair field to argue this question with men,
because in doing it you have to assume that a
man who professes to believe in a Republican
form of government does not believe in a
Republican form of government, for the only
thing that woman's enfranchisement means at all
is that a government which claims to be a
Republic should be a Republic, and not an
aristocracy. The difficulty with discussing this
question with those who oppose us is that they
make any number of arguments but none of them
have anything to do with Woman's Suffrage; they
always have something to do with something else,
therefore the arguments which we have to make
rarely ever have anything to do with the
subject, because we have to answer our opponents
who always escape the subject as far as possible
in order to have any sort of reason in
connection with what they say.
Now one of two
things is true: either a Republic is a desirable
form of government, or else it is not. If it is,
then we should have it, if it is not then we
ought not to pretend that we have it. We ought
at least be true to our ideals, and the men of
New York have for the first time in their lives,
the rare opportunity on the second day of next
November, of making the state truly a part of
the Republic. It is the greatest opportunity
which has ever come to the men of the state.
They have never had so serious a problem to
solve before, they will never have a more
serious problem to solve in any future of our
nation's life, and the thing that disturbs me
more than anything else in connection with it is
that so few people realize what a profound
problem they have to solve on November 2. It is
not merely a trifling matter; it is not a little
thing that does not concern the state, it is the
most vital problem we could have, and any man
who goes to the polls on the second day of next
November without thoroughly informing himself in
regard to this subject is unworthy to be a
citizen of this state, and unfit to cast a
ballot.
If woman's
suffrage is wrong, it is a great wrong; if it is
right, it is a profound and fundamental
principle, and we all know, if we know what a
Republic is, that it is the fundamental
principle upon which a Republic must rise. Let
us see where we are as a people; how we act here
and what we think we are. The difficulty with
the men of this country is that they are so
consistent in their inconsistency that they are
not aware of having been inconsistent; because
their consistency has been so continuous and
their inconsistency so consecutive that it has
never been broken, from the beginning of our
Nation's life to the present time. If we trace
our history back we will find that from the very
dawn of our existence as a people, men have been
imbued with a spirit and a vision more lofty
than they have been able to live; they have been
led by visions of the sublimest truth, both in
regard to religion and in regard to government
that ever inspired the souls of men from the
time the Puritans left the old world to come to
this country, led by the Divine ideal which is
the sublimest and the supremest ideal in
religious freedom which men have ever known, the
theory that a man has a right to worship God
according to the dictates of his own conscience,
without the intervention of any other man or any
other group of men. And it was this theory, this
vision of the right of the human soul which led
men first to the shores of this country.
Now, nobody can
deny that they are sincere, honest, and earnest
men. No one can deny that the Puritans were men
of profound conviction, and yet these men who
gave up everything in behalf of an ideal, hardly
established their communities in this new
country before they began to practice exactly
the same sort of persecutions on other men which
had been practiced upon them. They settled in
their communities on the New England shores and
when they formed their compacts by which they
governed their local societies, they permitted
no man to have a voice in the affairs unless he
was a member of the church, and not a member of
any church, but a member of the particular
church which dominated the particular community
in which he happened to be. In Massachusetts
they drove the Baptists down to Rhode Island; in
Connecticut they drove the Presbyterians over to
New Jersey; they burned the Quakers in
Massachusetts and ducked the witches, and no
colony, either Catholic or Protestant allowed a
Jew to have a voice. And so a man must worship
God according to the conscience of the
particular community in which he was located,
and yet they called that religious freedom, they
were not able to live the ideal of religious
liberty, and from that time to this the men of
this government have been following along the
same line of inconsistency, while they too have
been following a vision of equal grandeur and
power.
Never in the
history of the world did it dawn upon the human
mind as it dawned upon your ancestors, what it
would mean for men to be free. They got the
vision of a government in which the people would
be the supreme power, and so inspired by this
vision men wrote such documents as were went
from the Massachusetts legislature, from the New
York legislature and from the Pennsylvania group
over to the Parliament of Great Britain, which
rang with the profoundest measures of freedom
and justice. They did not equivocate in a single
word when they wrote the Declaration of
Independence; no one can dream that these men
had not got the sublimest ideal of democracy
which had ever dawned upon the souls of men. But
as soon as the war was over and our government
was formed, instead of asking the question, who
shall be the governing force in this great new
Republic, when they brought those thirteen
little territories together, they began to
eliminate instead of include the men who should
be the great governing forces, and they said,
who shall have the voice in this great new
Republic, and you would have supposed that such
men as fought the Revolutionary War would have
been able to answer that every man who has
fought, everyone who has given up all he has and
all he has been able to accumulate shall be
free, it never entered their minds. These
excellent ancestors of yours had not been away
from the old world long enough to realize that
man is of more value than his purse, so they
said every man who has an estate in the
government shall have a voice; and they said
what shall that estate be? And they answered
that a man who had property valued at two
hundred and fifty dollars will be able to cast a
vote, and so they sang "The land of the free and
the home of the brave." And they wrote into
their Constitution, "All males who pay taxes on
$250 shall cast a vote," and they called
themselves a Republic, and we call ourselves a
Republic, and they were not quite so much of a
Republic that we should be called a Republic
yet. We might call ourselves angels, but that
wouldn't make us angels, you have got to be an
angel before you are an angel, and you have got
to be a Republic before you are a Republic. Now
what did we do? Before the word "male" in the
local compacts, they wrote the word
"Church-members"; and they wrote in the word
"taxpayer." Then there arose a great Democrat,
Thomas Jefferson, who looked down into the day
when you and I are living and saw that the
rapidly accumulated wealth in the hands of a few
men would endanger the liberties of the people,
and he knew what you and I know, that no power
under heaven or among men is known in a Republic
by which men can defend their liberties except
by the power of the ballot, and so the
Democratic party took another step in the
evolution of the Republic out of a monarchy and
they rubbed out the word "taxpayer" and wrote in
the word "white", and then the Democrats thought
the millennium had come, and they sang " The
land of the free and the home of the brave" as
lustily as the Republicans had sung it before
them and spoke of the divine right of motherhood
with the same thrill in their voices and at the
same time they were selling mother's babies by
the pound on the auction block-and mothers apart
from their babies. Another arose who said a man
is not a good citizen because he is white, he is
a good citizen because he is a man, and the
Republican party took out that progressive
evolutionary eraser and rubbed out the word
"white" from before the word "male' and could
not think of another word to put in there- they
were all in, black and white, rich and poor,
wise and otherwise, drunk and sober; not a man
left out to be put in, and so the Republicans
could not write anything before the word "male",
and they had to let the little word, "male" stay
alone by itself.
And God said in
the beginning, "It is not good for man to stand
alone." That is why we are here tonight, and
that is all that woman's suffrage means; just to
repeat again and again that first declaration of
the Divine, "It is not good for man to stand
alone," and so the women of this state are
asking that the word "male" shall be stricken
out of the Constitution altogether and that the
Constitution stand as it ought to have stood in
the beginning and as it must before this state
is any part of a Republic. Every citizen
possessing the necessary qualifications shall be
entitled to cast one vote at every election, and
have that vote counted. We are not asking as our
Anti-Suffrage friends think we are, for any of
awful things that we hear will happen if we are
allowed to vote; we are simply asking that that
government which professes to be a Republic
shall be a Republic and not pretend to be what
it is not.
Now what is a
Republic? Take your dictionary, encyclopedia
lexicon or anything else you like and look up
the definition and you will find that a Republic
is a form of government in which the laws are
enacted by representatives elected by the
people. Now when did the people of New York ever
elect their own representatives? Never in the
world. The men of New York have, and I grant you
that men are people, admirable people, as far as
they go, but they only go half way. There is
still another half of the people who have not
elected representatives, and you never read a
definition of a Republic in which half of the
people elect representatives to govern the whole
of the people. That is an aristocracy and that
is just what we are. We have been many kinds of
aristocracies. We have been a hierarchy of
church members, than an oligarchy of sex.
There are two old
theories, which are dying today. Dying hard, but
dying. One of them is dying on the plains of
Flanders and the Mountains of Galicia and
Austria, and that is the theory of the divine
right of kings. The other is dying here in the
state of New York and Massachusetts and New
Jersey and Pennsylvania and that is the divine
right of sex. Neither of them had a foundation
in reason, or justice, or common sense.
Now I want to make
this proposition, and I believe every man will
accept it. Of course he will if he is
intelligent. Whenever a Republic prescribes the
qualifications as applying equally to all the
citizens of the Republic, when the Republic says
in order to vote, a citizen must be twenty-one
years of age, it applies to all alike, there is
no discrimination against any race or sex. When
the government says that a citizen must be a
native-born citizen or a naturalized citizen
that applies to all; we are either born or
naturalized, somehow or other we are here.
Whenever the government says that a citizen, in
order to vote, must be a resident of a community
a certain length of time, and of the state a
certain length of time and of the nation a
certain length of time, that applies to all
equally. There is no discrimination. We might go
further and we might say that in order to vote
the citizen must be able to read his ballot. We
have not gone that far yet. We have been very
careful of male ignorance in these United
States. I was much interested, as perhaps many
of you, in reading the Congressional Record this
last winter over the debate over the immigration
bill, and when that illiteracy clause was
introduced into the immigration bill, what fear
there was in the souls of men for fear we would
do injustice to some of the people who might
want to come to our shores, and I was much and I
was much interested in the language in which the
President vetoed the bill, when he declared that
by inserting the clause we would keep out of our
shores a large body of very excellent people. I
could not help wondering then how it happens
that male ignorance is so much less ignorant
than female ignorance. When I hear people say
that if women were permitted to vote a large
body of ignorant people would vote, and
therefore because an ignorant woman would vote,
no intelligent women should be allowed to vote,
I wonder why we have made it so easy for male
ignorance and so hard for female ignorance.
When I was a girl,
years ago, I lived in the back woods and there
the number of votes cast at each election
depended entirely upon the size of the ballot
box. We had what was known as the old- tissue
ballots and the man who got the most tissue in
was the man elected. Now the best part of our
community was very much disturbed by this
method, and they did not know what to do in
order to get a ballot both safe and secret; but
they heard that over in Australia, where the
women voted, they had a ballot which was both
safe and secret, so we went over there and we
got the Australian ballot and we brought it
here. But when we got it over we found it was
not adapted to this country, because in
Australia they have to be able to read their
ballot. Now the question was how could we adapt
it to our conditions? Someone discovered that if
you should put a symbol at the head of each
column, like a rooster, or an eagle, or a hand
holding a hammer, that if a man has intelligence
to know the difference between a rooster and an
eagle he will know which political party to vote
for, and when the ballot was adapted it was a
very beautiful ballot, it looked like a page
from Life.
Now almost any
American could vote that ballot, or if she had
not that intelligence to know the difference
between an eagle and a rooster, we could take
the eagle out and put in the hen. Now when we
take so much pains to adapt the ballot to the
male intelligence of the United States, we
should be very humble when we talk about female
ignorance. Now if we should take a vote and the
men had to read their ballot in order to vote
it, more women could vote than men. But when the
government says not only that you must be
twenty-one years of age, a resident of the
community and native born or naturalized, those
are qualifications, but when it says that an
elector must be a male, that is not a
qualification for citizenship; that is an
insurmountable barrier between one half of the
people and the other half of the citizens and
their rights as citizens. No such nation can
call itself a Republic. It is only an
aristocracy. That barrier must be removed before
the government can become a Republic, and that
is exactly what we are asking right now, that
the last step in the evolutionary process be
taken on November 2 and that this great state of
New York shall become in fact as it is in
theory, a part of a government of the people, by
the people, and for the people.
Men know the
inconsistencies themselves; they realize it in
one way while they do not realize it in another,
because you never heard a man make a political
speech when he did not speak of this country as
a whole as though the thing existed which does
not exist and that is that the people were
equally free, because you hear them declare over
and over again on the Fourth of July "under God
the people rule." They know it is not true, but
they say it with a great hurrah, and they repeat
over and over again that clause from the
Declaration of Independence. "Governments derive
their just powers from the consent of the
governed," and they see how they can prevent
half of us from giving our consent to anything,
and then they give it to us on the Fourth of
July in two languages, so if it is not true in
one it will be in the other. Vox populi, vox
dei - The voice of the people is the
voice of God, and the orator forgets that in
the people's voice there is a soprano as well as
a bass. If the voice of the people is the voice
of God, how are we ever going to know what God's
voice is when we are content to listen to a bass
solo? Now if it is true that the voice of the
people is the voice of God, we will never know
what the Deity's voice in government is until
the bass and soprano are mingled together, the
result of which will be the divine harmony. Take
any of the magnificent appeals for freedom,
which men make, and rob them of their universal
application and you take the very life and soul
out of them.
Where is the
difficulty? Just in one thing and one thing
only, that men are so sentimental. We used to
believe that women were the sentimental sex, but
they can not hold a tallow candle compared with
the arc light of the men. Men are so sentimental
in their attitude about women that they cannot
reason about them. Now men are usually very fair
to each other. I think the average man
recognizes that he has no more right to anything
at the hands of the government than has every
other man. He has no right at all to anything to
which every other man has not an equal right
with himself. He says why have I a right to
certain things in the government; why have I a
right to life and liberty; why have I a right to
this or this? Does he say because I am a man?
Not at all, because I am human, and being human
I have a right to everything which belongs to
humanity, and every right which any other human
being has, I have. And then he says of his
neighbor, and my neighbor he also is human,
therefore every right which belongs to me as a
human being, belongs to him as a human being,
and I have no right to anything under the
government to which he is not equally entitled.
And then up comes a woman, and then they say now
she's a woman; she is not quite human, but she
is my wife, or my sister, or my daughter, or an
aunt, or my cousin. She is not quite human; she
is only related to a human, and being related to
a human a human will take care of her.
So we have had
that care-taking human being to look after us
and they have not recognized that women too are
equally human with men. Now if men could forget
for a minute I believe the anti-suffragists say
that we want men to forget that we are related
to them, they don't know me if for a minute they
could forget our relationship and remember that
we are equally human with themselves, then they
would say yes, and this human being, not because
she is a woman, but because she is human is
entitled to every privilege and every right
under the government which I, as a human being
am entitled to. The only reason men do not see
as fairly in regard to women as they do in
regard to each other is because they have looked
upon us from an altogether different plane than
what they have looked at men; that is because
women have been the homemakers while men have
been the so- called protectors, in the period of
the world's civilization when people needed to
be protected. I know that they say that men
protect us now and when we ask them what they
are protecting us from the only answer they can
give is from themselves. I do not think that men
need any very great credit for protecting us
from themselves. They are not protecting us from
any special thing from which we could not
protect ourselves except themselves. Now this
old time idea of protection was all right when
the world needed this protection, but today the
protection in civilization comes from within and
not from without.
What are the
arguments, which our good Anti-friends give us?
We know that lately they have stopped to argue
and call suffragists all sorts of creatures. If
there is anything we believe that we do not
believe, we have not heard about them, so the
cry goes out of this; the cry of the infant's
mind; the cry of a little child. The
anti-suffragists' cries are all the cries of
little children who are afraid of the unborn and
are forever crying, "The goblins will catch you
if you don't watch out." So that anything that
has not been should not be and all that is
right, when as a matter of fact if the world
believed that we would be in a statical
condition and never move, except back like a
crab. And so the cry goes on.
When suffragists
are feminists, and when I ask what that is no
one is able to tell me. I would give anything to
know what a feminist is. They say, would you
like to be a feminist? If I could find out I
would, you either have to be masculine or
feminine and I prefer feminine. Then they cry
that we are socialists, and anarchists. Just how
a human can be both at the same time, I really
do not know. If I know what socialism means it
means absolute government and anarchism means no
government at all. So we are feminists,
socialists, anarchists, and Mormons or
spinsters. Now that is about the list. I have
not heard the last speech. Now as a matter of
fact, as a unit we are nothing, as individuals
we are like all other individuals.
We have our
theories, our beliefs, but as suffragists we
have but one belief, but one principle, but one
theory and that is the right of a human being to
have a voice in the government, under which he
or she lives, on that we agree, if on nothing
else. Whether we agree or not on religion or
politics we are concerned. A clergyman asked me
the other day, " By the way, what church does
your official board belong to?" I said I don't
know. He said, " Don't you know what religion
your official board believes?" I said, "Really
it never occurred to me, but I will (? p.154
bottom- could not read print) them up and see,
they are not elected to my board because they
believe in any particular church. We had no
concern either as to what we believe as
religionists or as to what we believe as women
in regard to theories of government, except that
one fundamental theory in the right of
democracy. We do not believe in this fad or the
other, but whenever any question is to be
settled in any community, then the people of
that community shall settle that question, the
women people equally with the men people. That
is all there is to it, and yet when it comes to
arguing our case they bring up all sorts of
arguments, and the beauty of it is they always
answer all their own arguments. They never make
an argument, but they answer it. When I was
asked to answer one of their debates I said, "
What is the use? Divide up their literature and
let them destroy themselves."
I was followed up
last year by a young, married woman from New
Jersey. She left her husband home for three
months to tell the women that their place was at
home, and that they could not leave home long
enough to go to the ballot box, and she brought
all her arguments out in pairs and backed them
up by statistics. The anti-suffragists can
gather more statistics than any other person I
ever saw, and there is nothing so sweet and calm
as when they say, " You cannot deny this,
because here are the figures, and figures never
lie." Well they don't but some liars figure.
When they start
out they always begin the same. She started by
proving that it was no use to give the women the
ballot because if they did have it they would
not use it, and she had statistics to prove it.
If we would not use it then I really can not see
the harm of giving it to us, we would not hurt
anybody with it and what an easy way for you men
to get rid of us. No more suffrage meetings,
never any nagging you again, no one could blame
you for anything that went wrong with the town,
if it did not run right, all you would have to
say is, you have the power, why don't you go
ahead and clean up.
Then the young
lady, unfortunately for her first argument,
proved by statistics, of which she had many, the
awful results which happened where women did
have the ballot; what awful laws have been
brought about by women's vote; the conditions
that prevail in the homes and how deeply women
get interested in politics, because women are
hysterical, and we can not think of anything
else, we just forget our families, cease to care
for our children, cease to love our husbands and
just go to the polls and vote and keep on voting
for ten hours a day 365 days in the year, never
let up, if we ever get to the polls once you
will never get us home, so that the women will
not vote at all, and they will not do anything
but vote. Now these are two very strong
anti-suffrage arguments and they can prove them
by figures. Then they will tell you that if
women are permitted to vote it will be a great
expense and no use because wives will vote just
as their husbands do; even if we have no
husbands, that would not effect the result
because we would vote just as our husbands would
vote if we had one. How I wish the
anti-suffragists could make the men believe
that; if they could make men believe that the
women would vote just as they wanted them to do
you think we would ever have to make another
speech or hold another meeting, we would have to
vote whether we wanted to or not.
And then the very
one who will tell you that women will vote just
as their husbands do will tell you in five
minutes that they will not vote as their
husbands will and then the discord in the homes,
and the divorce. Why, they have discovered that
in Colorado there are more divorces than there
were before women began to vote, but they have
forgotten to tell you that there are four times
as many people in Colorado today as there were
when women began to vote, and that may have some
effect, particularly as these people went from
the East. Then they will tell you all the
trouble that happens in the home. A gentleman
told me that in California and when he was
talking I had a wonderful thing pass through my
mind, because he said that he and his wife had
lived together for twenty years and never had a
difference in opinion in the whole twenty years
and he was afraid if women began to vote that
his wife would vote differently from him and
then that beautiful harmony which they had had
for twenty years would be broken, and all the
time he was talking I could not help wondering
which was the idiot because I knew that no
intelligent human beings could live together for
twenty years and not have a differences of
opinion. All the time he was talking I looked at
that splendid type of manhood and thought, how
would a man feel being tagged up by a little
woman for twenty years saying, "Me too, me too."
I would not want to live in a house with a human
being for twenty years who agreed with
everything I said. The stagnation of a frog pond
would be hilarious compared to that. What a
reflection is that on men. If we should say that
about men we would never hear the last of it.
Now it may be that the kind of men being that
the anti-suffragists live with is that kind, but
they are not the kind we live with and we could
not do it. Great big overgrown babies! Cannot be
disputed without having a row! While we do not
believe that men are saints, by any means, we do
believe that the average American man is a
fairly good sort of fellow.
In fact my theory
of the whole matter is exactly opposite, because
instead of believing that men and women will
quarrel, I think just the opposite thing will
happen. I think just about six weeks before
election a sort of honeymoon will start and it
will continue until they will think they are
again hanging over the gate, all in order to get
each other's votes. When men want each other's
votes they do not go up and knock them down;
they are very solicitous of each other, if they
are thirsty or need a smoke or well we don't
worry about home. The husband and wife who are
quarreling after the vote are quarreling now.
Then the other
belief that the women would not vote if they had
a vote and would not do anything else; and would
vote just as their husbands vote, and would not
vote like their husbands; that women have so
many burdens that they cannot bear another
burden, and that women are the leisure class.
I remember having
Reverend Dr. Abbott speak before the
anti-suffrage meeting in Brooklyn and he stated
that if women were permitted to vote we would
not have so much time for charity and
philanthropy, and I would like to say, "Thank
God, there will not be so much need of charity
and philanthropy." The end and aim of the
suffrage is not to furnish an opportunity for
excellent old ladies to be charitable. There are
two words that we ought to be able to get along
without, and they are charity and philanthropy.
They are not needed in a Republic. If we put in
the word "opportunity" instead, that is what
Republics stand for. Our doctrine is not to
extend the length of our bread lines or the size
of our soup kitchens, what we need is for men to
have the opportunity to buy their own bread and
eat their own soup. We women have used up our
lives and strength in fool charities, and we
have made more paupers than we have ever helped
by the folly of our charities and
philanthropies; the unorganized methods by which
we deal with the conditions of society, and
instead of giving people charity we must learn
to give them an opportunity to develop and make
themselves capable of earning the bread; no
human being has the right to live without toil;
toil of some kind, and that old theory that we
used to hear "The world owes a man a living"
never was true and never will be true. This
world does not owe anybody a living, what it
does owe to every human being is the opportunity
to earn a living. We have a right to the
opportunity and then the right to the living
thereafter. We want it. No woman, any more than
a man, has the right to live an idle life in
this world, we must learn to give back something
for the space occupied and we must do our duty
wherever duty calls, and the woman herself must
decide where her duty calls, just as a man does.
Now they tell us
we should not vote because we have not the time,
we are so burdened that we should not have any
more burdens. Then, if that is so, I think we
ought to allow the women to vote instead of the
men, since we pay a man anywhere from a third to
a half more than we do women it would be better
to use up the cheap time of the women instead of
the dear time of the men. And talking about time
you would think it took about a week to vote.
A dear, good
friend of mine in Omaha said, "Now Miss. Shaw,"
and she held up her child in her arms, "is not
this my job." I said it certainly is, and then
she said, "How can I go to the polls and vote
and neglect my baby?" I said, "Has your husband
a job?" and she said, "Why you know he has." I
did know it; he was a banker and a very busy
one. I said, "Yet your husband said he was going
to leave husband and go down to the polls and
vote," and she said, "Oh yes, he is so very
interested in election." Then I said, "What an
advantage you have over your husband, he has to
leave his job and you can take your job with you
and you do not need to neglect your job." Is it
not strange that the only time a woman might
neglect her baby is on election day, and then
the dear old Antis hold up their hands and say,
"You have neglected your baby." A woman can
belong to a whist club and go once a week and
play whist, she cannot take her baby to the
whist club, and she has to keep whist herself
without trying to keep a baby whist. She can go
to the theatre, to church or a picnic and no one
is worrying about the baby, but to vote and
everyone cries out about the neglect. You would
think on Election Day that a woman grabbed up
her baby and started out and just dropped it
somewhere and paid no attention to it. It used
to be asked when we had the question Ðbox, "Who
will take care of the babies?" I did not know
what person could be got to take care of all the
babies, so I thought I would go out West and
find out. I went to Denver and I found that they
took care of their babies just the same on
election day as they did on every other day;
they took their baby along with them, when they
went to put a letter in a box they took their
baby along and when they went to put their
ballot in the box they took their baby along. If
the mother had to stand in line and the baby got
restless she would joggle the go-cart and when
she went in to vote a neighbor would joggle the
go-cart and if there was no neighbor there was
the candidate and he would joggle the cart. That
is one day in the year when you can get a
hundred people to take care of any number of
babies. I have never worried about the babies on
Election Day since that time.
Then the people
will tell you that women are so burdened with
their duties that they can not vote, and they
will tell you that women are the leisure class
and the men are worked to death: but the
funniest argument of the lady who followed me
about in the West: Out there they were great in
the temperance question, and she declared that
we were not prohibition, or she declared that we
were. Now in North Dakota which is one of the
first prohibition states, and they are dry
because they want to be dry. In that state she
wanted to prove to them that if women were
allowed to vote they would vote North Dakota wet
and she had her figures; that women had not
voted San Francisco dry, or Portland dry, or
Chicago dry. Of course we had not voted on the
question in Chicago, but that did not matter.
Then we went to Montana, which is wet. They have
it wet there because they want it wet, so that
any argument that she could bring to bear upon
them to prove that we would make North Dakota
wet and keep it wet would have given us the
state, but that would not work, so she brought
out the figures out of her pocket to prove to
the men of Montana that if women were allowed to
vote in Montana they would vote Montana dry. She
proved that in two years in Illinois they had
voted ninety-six towns dry, and that at that
rate we would soon get over Montana and have it
dry. Then I went to Nebraska and as soon as I
reached there a reporter came and asked me the
question, " How are the women going to vote on
the prohibition question?" I said, " I really
don't know. I know how we will vote in North
Dakota, we will vote wet in North Dakota; in
Montana we will vote dry, but how we will vote
in Nebraska, I don't know, but I will let you
know just as soon as the lady from New Jersey
comes."
We will either
vote as our husbands vote or we will not vote as
our husbands vote. We either have time to vote
or we don't have time to vote. We will either
not vote at all or we will vote all the time. It
reminds me of the story of the old Irish woman
who had twin boys and they were so much alike
that the neighbors could not tell them apart, so
one of the neighbors said, " Now Mrs. Mahoney,
you have two of the finest twin boys I ever saw
in all my life, but how do you know them apart."
"Oh," she says, "That's easy enough any one
could tell them apart. When I want to know which
is which I just put my finger in Patsey's mouth
and if he bites it is Mikey."
Now what does it
matter whether the women will vote as their
husbands do or will not vote; whether they have
time or have not; or whether they will vote for
prohibition or not. What has that to do with the
fundamental question of democracy, no one has
yet discovered. Bu they cannot argue on that;
they cannot argue on the fundamental basis of
our existence so that they have to get off on
all of these side tricks to get anything
approaching an argument. So they tell you that
democracy is a form of government. It is not. It
was before governments were; it will prevail
when governments cease to be; it is more than a
form of government; it is a great spiritual
force emanating from the heart of the Infinite,
transforming human character until some day,
some day in the distant future, man by the power
of the spirit of democracy, will be able to look
back into the face of the Infinite and answer,
as man can not answer today, " One is our
Father, even God, and all we people are the
children of one family." And when democracy has
taken possession of human lives no man will ask
from him to grant to his neighbor, whether that
neighbor be a man or woman; no man will then be
willing to allow another man to rise to power on
his shoulders, nor will he be willing to rise to
power on the shoulders of another prostrate
human being. Bu that has not yet taken
possession of us, but some day we will be free,
and we are getting nearer and nearer to it all
the time; and never in the history of our
country had the men and women of this nation a
better right to approach it than they have
today; never in the history of the nation did it
stand out so splendidly as it stands today, and
never ought we men and women to be more grateful
for anything than that there presides in the
White House today a man of peace.
As so our good
friends go on with one thing after another and
they say if women should vote they will have to
sit on the jury and they ask whether we will
like to see a woman sitting on a jury. I have
seen some juries that ought to be sat on and I
have seen some women that would be glad to sit
on anything. When a woman stands up all day
behind a counter, or when she stands all day
doing a washing she is glad enough to sit; and
when she stands for seventy-five cents she would
like to sit for two dollars a day. But don't you
think we need some women on juries in this
country? You read your paper and you read that
one day last week or the week before or the week
before a little girl went out to school and
never came back; another little girl was sent on
an errand and never came back; another little
girl was left in charge of a little sister and
her mother went out to work and when she
returned the little girl was not there, and you
read it over and over again, and the horror of
it strikes you. You read that in these United
States five thousand young girls go out and
never come back, don't you think that the men
and women the vampires of our country who fatten
and grow rich on the ignorance and innocence of
children would rather face Satan himself than a
jury of mothers. I would like to see some juries
of mothers. I lived in the slums of Boston for
three years and I know the need of juries of
mothers.
Then they tell us
that if women were permitted to vote that they
would take office, and you would suppose that we
just took office in this country. There is a
difference of getting an office in this country
and in Europe. In England, a man stands for
Parliament and in this country he runs for
Congress, and so long as it is a question of
running for office I don't think women have much
chance, especially with our present hobbles.
There are some women who want to hold office and
I may as well own up. I am one of them. I have
been wanting to hold office for more than
thirty- five years. Thirty-five years ago I
lived in the slums of Boston and ever since then
I have wanted to hold office. I have applied to
the major to be made an officer; I wanted to be
the greatest office holder in the world, I
wanted the position of the man I think is to be
the most envied, as far as the ability to do
good is concerned, and that is a policeman. I
have always wanted to be a policeman and I have
applied to be appointed policeman and the very
first question that was asked me was, "Could you
knock a man down and take him to jail?" That is
some people's idea of the highest service that a
policeman can render a community. Knock somebody
down and take him to jail! My idea is not so
much to arrest criminals as it is to prevent
crime. That is what is needed in the police
force of every community. When I lived for three
years in the back alleys of Boston. I saw there
that it was needed to prevent crime and from
that day? This I believe there is no great
public gathering of any sort whatever where we
do not need women on the police force; we need
them at every moving picture show, every dance
house, every restaurant, every hotel, and every
great store with a great bargain counter and
every park and every resort where the vampires
who fatten on the crimes and vices of men and
women gather. We need women on the police force
and we will have them there some day.
If women vote,
will they go to war? They are great on having us
fight. They tell you that the government rests
on force, but there are a great many kinds of
force in this world, and never in the history of
man were the words of the Scriptures proved to
the extent that they are today, that the men of
the nation that lives by the sword shall die by
the sword. When I was speaking in North Dakota
from an automobile with a great crowd and a
great number of men gathered around a man who
had been sitting in front of a store whittling a
stick called out to another man and asked if
women get the vote will they go over to Germany
and fight the Germans? I said, "Why no, why
should we go over to Germany and fight Germans?"
"If Germans come over here would you fight?" I
said, "Why should we women fight men, but if
Germany should send an army of women over here,
then we would show you what we would do. We
would go down and meet them and say, "Come on,
let's go up to the opera house and talk this
matter over." It might grow wearisome but it
would not be death.
Would it not be
better if the heads of the governments in Europe
had talked things over? What might have happened
to the world if a dozen men had gotten together
in Europe and settled the awful controversy,
which is today discriminating the nations of
Europe? We women got together there last year,
over in Rome, the delegates from twenty-eight
different nations of women, and for two weeks we
discussed problems which had like interests to
us all. They were all kinds of Protestants, both
kinds of Catholics, Roman, and Greek, three were
Jews and Mohamedans, but we were not there to
discuss our different religious beliefs, but we
were there to discuss the things that were of
vital importance to us all, and at the end of
the two weeks, after the discussions were over
we passed a great number of resolutions. We
discussed white slavery, the immigration laws,
we discussed the spread of contagious and
infectious diseases; we discussed various forms
of education, and various forms of juvenile
criminals, every question which every nation has
to meet, and at the end of two weeks we passed
many resolutions, but two of them were passed
unanimously. One was presented by myself as
Chairman on the Committee on Suffrage and on
that resolution we called upon all civilizations
of the world to give to women equal rights with
men and there was not a dissenting vote.
The other
resolution was on peace. We believed then and
many of us believe today, notwithstanding all
the discussion that is going on, we believe and
we will continue to believe that preparedness
for war is an incentive to war, and the only
hope of permanent peace is the systematic and
scientific disarmament of all the nations of the
world, and we passed a resolution and passed it
unanimously to that effect. A few days afterward
I attended a large reception given by the
American ambassador, and there was an Italian
diplomat there and he spoke rather
superciliously and said, " You women think you
have been having a very remarkable convention,
and I understand that a resolution on peace was
offered by the Germans, the French women
seconded it, and the British presiding presented
it and it was carried unanimously." We none of
us dreamed what was taking place at that time,
but he knew and we learned it before we arrived
home, that awful, awful thing that was about to
sweep over the nations of the world. The
American ambassador replied to the Italian
diplomat and said, "Yes Prince, it was a
remarkable convention, and it is a remarkable
thing that the only people who can get together
internationally and discuss their various
problems without acrimony and without a sword at
their side are the women of the world, but we
men, even when we go to the Hague to discuss
peace, we go with a sword dangling at our side."
It is remarkable that even at this age men can
not discuss international problems and discuss
them in peace.
When I turned away
from that place up in North Dakota that man in
the crowd called out again, just as we were
leaving, and said, "Well what does a woman know
about war anyway?" I had read my paper that
morning and I knew what the awful headline was,
and I saw a gentleman standing in the crowd with
a paper in his pocket, and I said, "Will that
gentleman hold the paper up." And he held it up,
and the headline read, "250,000 Men Killed Since
the War Began". I said, "You ask me what a woman
knows about war? No woman can read that line and
comprehend the awful horror; no woman knows the
significance of 250,000 dead men, but you tell
me that one man lay dead and I might be able to
tell you something of its awful meaning to one
woman. I would know that years before a woman
whose heart beat in unison with her love and her
desire for motherhood walked day by day with her
face to an open grave, with courage, which no
man has ever surpassed, and if she did not fill
that grave, if she lived, and if there was laid
in her arms a tiny little bit of helpless
humanity, I would know that there went out from
her soul such a cry of thankfulness as none save
a mother could know. And then I would know, what
men have not yet learned that women are human;
that they have human hopes and human passions,
aspirations and desires as men have, and I would
know that that mother had laid aside all those
hopes and aspirations for herself, laid them
aside for her boy, and if after years had passed
by she forgot her nights of sleeplessness and
her days of fatiguing toil in her care of her
growing boy, and when at last he became a man
and she stood looking up into his eyes and
beheld him, bone of her bone and flesh of her
flesh, for out of her woman's life she had
carved twenty beautiful years that went into the
making of a man; and there he stands, the most
wonderful thing in all the world; for in all the
Universe of God there is nothing more sublimely
wonderful than a strong limbed, clean hearted,
keen brained, aggressive young man, standing as
he does on the border line of life, ready to
reach out and grapple with its problems. O, how
wonderful he is, and he is hers. She gave her
life for him, and in an hour this country calls
him out and in an hour he lies dead; that
wonderful, wonderful thing lies dead; and
sitting by his side, that mother looking into
the dark years to come knows that when her son
died her life's hope died with him, and in the
face of that wretched motherhood, what man dare
ask what a woman knows of war. And that is not
all. Read your papers, you can not read it
because it is not printable; you cannot tell it
because it is not speakable, you cannot even
think it because it is not thinkable, the
horrible crimes perpetrated against women by the
blood drunken men of the war.
You read your
paper again and the second headlines read, "It
Costs Twenty Millions of Dollars a Day," for
what? To buy the material to slaughter the
splendid results of civilization of the
centuries. Men whom it has taken centuries to
build up and make into great scientific forces
of brain, the flower of the manhood of the great
nations of Europe, and we spend twenty millions
of dollars a day to blot out all the results of
civilization of hundreds and hundreds of years.
And what do we do? We lay a mortgage on every
unborn child for a hundred and more years to
come. Mortgage his brain, his brawn, and every
pulse of his heart in order to pay the debt, to
buy the material to slaughter the men of our
country. And that is not all, the greatest crime
of war is the crime against the unborn. Read
what they are doing. They are calling out every
man, every young man, and every virile man from
seventeen to forty-five or fifty years old; they
are calling them out. All the splendid
scientific force and energy of the splendid
virile manhood are being called out to be food
for the cannon, and they are leaving behind the
degenerate, defective imbecile, the unfit, the
criminals, the diseased to be the fathers of
children yet to be born. The crime of crimes of
the war is the crime against the unborn
children, and in the face of the fact that women
are driven out of the home shall men ask if
women shall fight if they are permitted to vote.
No, we women do
not want the ballot in order that we may fight,
but we do want the ballot in order that we may
help men to keep from fighting, whether it is in
the home or in the state, just as the home is
not without the man, so the state is not without
the woman, and you can no more build up homes
without men than you can build up the state
without women. We are needed everywhere where
human problems are to be solved. Men and women
must go through this world together from the
cradle to the grave; it is God's way and the
fundamental principle of a Republican form of
government.
More History
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