Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States

The document is as follows:

ARGUMENTS BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE, UNITED STATES SENATE, MARCH 7, 1884.

By a committee of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association, in favor of a sixteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, that shall protect the right of women citizens to vote in the several States of the Union.

Order of proceeding.

The CHAIRMAN (Senator COCKRELL). We have allotted the time to be divided as the speakers may desire among themselves. We are now ready to hear the ladies.

Miss SUSAN B. ANTHONY. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the select committee: This is the sixteenth time that we have come before Congress in person, and the nineteenth annually by petitions. Ever since the war, from the winter of 1865-'66, we have regularly sent up petitions asking for the national protection of the citizen's right to vote when the citizen happens to be a woman. We are here again for the same purpose. I do not propose to speak now, but to introduce the other speakers, and at the close perhaps will state to the committee the reasons why we come to Congress. The other speakers will give their thought from the standpoint of their respective States. I will first introduce to the committee Mrs. Harriet R. Shattuck, of Boston, Mass.

REMARKS BY MRS. HARRIET R. SHATTUCK.

Mrs. SHATTUCK. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen: It seems as if it were almost unnecessary for us to come here at this meeting, because I feel that all we have to say and all we have to claim is known to you, and we can not add anything to what has been said in the past sixteen years.

But I should like to say one thing, and that is, that in my work it has seemed that if we could convince everybody of the motives of the suffragists we would go far toward removing prejudices. I know that those motives are very much misunderstood. Persons think of us as ambitious women, who are desirous for fame, and who merely come forward to make speeches and get before the public, or else they think that we are unfortunate beings with no homes, or unhappy wives, who are getting our livelihood in this sort of way. If we could convince every man who has a vote in this Republic that this is not the case, I believe we could go far toward removing the prejudice against us. If we could make them see that we are working here merely because we know that the cause is right, and we feel that we must work for it, that there is a power outside of ourselves which impels us onward, which says to us: go forward and speak to the people and try to bring them up to a sense of their duty and of our right. This is the belief that I have in regard to our position on this question. It is a matter of duty with us, and that is all.

In Massachusetts I represent a very much larger number of women than is supposed. It has always been said that very few women wish to vote. Believing that this objection, although it has nothing to do with the rights of the cause, ought to be met, the association of which I am president inaugurated last year a sort of canvass, which I believe never had been attempted before, whereby we obtained the proportion of women in favor and opposed to suffrage in different localities of our State. We took four localities in the city of Boston, two in smaller cities, and two in the country districts, and one also of school teachers in nine schools of one town. Those school teachers were unanimously in favor of suffrage, and in the nine localities we found that the proportion of women in favor was very large as against those opposed. The total of women canvassed was 814. Those in favor were 405; those opposed, 44; indifferent, 166; refused to sign, 160; not seen, 39. This, you see, is a very large proportion in favor. Those indifferent, and those who were not seen, were not included, because we claim that nobody can yet say that they are opposed or in favor until they declare themselves; but the 405 in favor against the 44 opposed were as 9 to 1. These canvasses were made by women who were of perfect respectability and responsibility, and they swore before a justice of the peace as to the truth of their statements.

So we have in Massachusetts this reliable canvass of the number of women in favor as to those opposed, and we find that it is 9 to 1.

These women, then, are the class whom I represent here, and they are women who can not come here themselves. Very few women in the country can come here and do this work, or do the work in their States, because they are in their homes attending to their duties, but none the less are they believers in this cause. We would not any more than any man in the country ask a woman to leave her home duties to go into this work, but a few of us are so situated that we can do it, and we come here and we go to the State Legislatures representing all the women of the country in this work.

What we ask is, not that we may have the ballot to obtain any particular thing, although we know that better things will come about from it, but merely because it is our right, and as a matter of justice we claim it as human beings and as citizens, and as moral, responsible, and spiritual beings, whose voice ought to be heard in the Government, and who ought to take hand with men and help the world to become better.

Gentlemen, you have kept women just a little step below you. It is only a short step. You shower down favors upon us it is true, still we remain below you, the recipients of favors without the right to take what is our own. We ask that this shall be changed; that you shall take us by the hand and lift us up to the same political level with you, where we shall have rights with you, and stand equal with you before the law.

REMARKS BY MRS. MAY WRIGHT SEWALL.

Miss ANTHONY. I will now introduce to the committee Mrs. May Wright Sewall, of Indianapolis, who is the chairman of our executive committee.

Mrs. SEWALL. Gentlemen of the committee: Gentlemen, I believe, differ somewhat in their political opinions. It will not then be surprising, I suppose, that I should differ somewhat from my friend in regard to the knowledge that you probably possess upon our question. I do not believe that you know all that we know about the women of this country, for I believe that if you did know even all that I know, and my knowledge is much more limited than that of many of my sisters, long ago the sixteenth amendment, for which we ask, would have been passed through your influence.

I remember that when I was here two years ago and had the honor of appearing before the committee, who granted us, on that occasion, what you are so kind and courteous to grant on this occasion, an opportunity to speak before you, I told you that I represented at least seventy thousand women who had asked for the ballot in my State, and I tried then to remind the members of the committee that had seventy thousand Indiana men asked for any measure from the Congress that then occupied this Capitol, that measure would have secured the most deliberate consideration from their hands, and, in all probability, its passage by the Congress. Of that there can be no doubt.

I do not wish to exaggerate my constituency, but during the last two years, and since I had the honor of addressing the committee, the work of woman suffrage has progressed very rapidly in my State. The number of women who have found themselves in circumstances to work openly, and whose spirit has been drawn into it, has largely increased, and as the workers have multiplied the results have increased. While we have not taken the careful canvass that has been so wisely and judiciously taken in Massachusetts, so that I can present to you the exact number of women who would to-day appeal for suffrage, I know that I can, far within the bounds of possible truth, state that while I represented seventy thousand women in my State two years ago, who desired the adoption of the sixteenth amendment, I represent to-day twice that number.

Should any one come up from Indiana, pivotal State as it has been long called in national elections, saying that he represented the wish of one hundred and forty thousand Indiana men, gentlemen, would you scorn his appeal? Would you treat it lightly? Not at all. You know that it would receive the most candid consideration. You know that it would receive not merely respectful consideration, but immediate and prompt and just action upon your part.

I have been told since I have reached Washington that of all women in the country Indiana women have the least to complain of, and the least reason for coming to the United States Capitol with their petitions and the statement of their needs, because we have received from our own Legislature such amendments and amelioration of the old unjust laws. In one sense it is true that we are the recipients in our own State of many civil rights and of a very large degree of civil equality. It is true that as respects property rights, and as respects industrial rights, the women of my own State may perhaps be the envy of all other women in the land, but, gentlemen, you have always told men that the greater their rights and the more numerous their privileges the greater their responsibilities. That is equally true of woman, and simply because our property rights are enlarged, because our industrial field is enlarged, because we have more women who are producers in the industrial world, recognized as such, who own property in their own names, and consequently pay taxes upon that property, and thereby have greater financial and larger social, as well as industrial and business interests at stake in our own commonwealth, and in the manner in which the administration of national affairs is conducted—because of all these privileges we the more need the power which shall emphasize our influence upon political action.

You know that industrial and property rights are in the hands of the law-makers and the executors of the laws. Therefore, because of our advanced position in that matter, we the more need the recognition of our political equality. I say the recognition of our political equality, because I believe the equality already exists. I believe it waits simply for your recognition; that were the Constitution now justly construed, and the word "citizens," as used in your Constitution, justly applied it would include us, the women of this country. So I ask for the recognition of an equality that we already possess.

Further, because of what we have we ask for more. Because of the duties that we are commanded to do, we ask for more. My friend has said, and it is true in some respects, that men have always kept us just a little below them where they could shower upon us favors, and they have always done that generously. So they have, but, gentlemen, has your sex been more generous in its favors to women than women have been generous toward your sex in their favors? Neither one can do without the other: neither can dispense with the service of the other; neither can dispense with the reverence of the other, with the aid of the other in domestic life, in social life. The men of this nation are rapidly finding that they can not dispense with the service of women in business life. I know that they are also feeling the need of what they call the moral support of women in their public life, and in their political life.

I always feel that it is not for women alone that I appeal. As men have long represented me, or assumed to do so, and as the men of my own family always have done so justly and most chivalrously, I feel that in my appeal for political recognition I represent them; that I represent my husband and my brother and the interest of the sex to which they belong, for you, gentlemen, by lifting the women of the nation into political equality would simply place us where we could lift you where you never yet have stood, upon a moral equality with us. Gentlemen, that is true. You know it as well as I. I do not speak to you as individuals; I speak to you as the representatives of your sex, as I stand here the representative of mine; and never until we are your equals politically will the moral standard for men be what it now is for women, and it is none too high. Let it grow the more elevated by our growth in spirituality, by every aspiration which we receive from the God whence we draw our life and whence we draw our impulses of life. Let our standard remain where it is and be more elevated. Yours must come up to match it, and never will it until we are your equals politically. So it is for men, as well as for women, that I make my appeal.

I know that there are some gentlemen upon this committee who, when we were here two years ago, had something to say about the rights of the States and of their disinclination to interfere with the rights of the States in this matter. I have great sympathy with the gentlemen from the South, who, I hope, do not forget that they are representing the women of the South in their work here at the national capital. Already some Northern States are making rapid strides towards the enfranchisement of their women. The men of some of the Northern States see that they can no longer accomplish the purposes politically which they desire to accomplish without the aid of the women of their respective States. Washington is the third Territory that has added women to its voting force, and consequently to its political power at the national capital as well as its own capital. Oregon will undoubtedly, as her representative will tell you to-day, soon add its women to its voting force. The men who believe, that each State must be left to do this for itself will soon find that the balance of power between the North and South is destroyed, unless the women of the South are brought forward to add to the political force of the South as the women of the North are being brought forward to add to the political force of the North.

This should not be acted upon as a partisan measure. We do not appeal to you as Republicans or as Democrats. We have among us Republicans and Democrats; we have our party affiliations. We, of course, were reared with our brothers under the political belief and faith of our fathers, and probably as much influenced by that rearing as our brothers were. We shall go to strengthen both the political parties, neither one nor the other the more, probably. So that it is not as a partisan measure; it is as a just measure, which is our due, not because of what we are, gentlemen, but because of what you are, and because of what we are through you, of what you shall be through us; of what we, men and women, both are by virtue of our heritage and our one Father, our one mother eternal, the spirit created and progressive, that has thus far sustained us, and that will carry us and you forward to the action which we demand of you to take, and to the results which we anticipate will attend upon that action.

REMARKS BY MRS. HELEN M. GOUGAR.

Miss Anthony. I think I will call upon the other representative of the State of Indiana to speak now, Mrs. Helen M. Gougar, of Lafayette, Ind.

Mrs. Gougar. Gentlemen, we are here on behalf of the women citizens of this Republic, asking for political freedom. I maintain that there is no political question paramount to that of woman suffrage before the people of America to-day. Political parties would fain have us believe that tariff is the great question of the hour. Political parties know better. It is an insult to the intelligence of the present hour to say that when one-half of the citizens of this Republic are denied a direct voice in making the laws under which they shall live, that tariff, or that the civil rights of the negro, or any other question that can be brought up, is equal to the one of giving political freedom to women. So I come to ask you, as representative men, making laws to govern the women the same as the men of this country (and there is not a law that you make in the United States Congress in which woman has not an equal interest with man), to take the word "male" out of the constitutions of the United States and the several States, as you have taken the word "white" out, and give to us women a voice in the laws under which we live.

You ask me why I am inclined to be practical in my view of this question. In the first place, speaking from my own standpoint, I ask you to let me have a voice in the laws under which I shall live because the older empires of the earth are sending in upon our American shores a population drawing very largely from the asylums, yes, from the penitentiaries, the jails, and the poor-houses of the Old World. They are emptying those men upon our shores, and within a few months they are intrusted with the ballot, the law-making power in this Republic, and they and their representatives are seated in official and legislative positions. I, as an American-born woman, to-day enter my protest at being compelled to live under laws made by this class of men very largely, and myself being rendered utterly incapable of the protection that can only come from the ballot. While I would not have you take this right or privilege from those men whom we invite to our shores, I do ask you, in the face of this immense foreign immigration, to enfranchise the tax-paying, intelligent, moral, native-born women of America.

Miss Anthony. And foreign women, too.

Mrs. Gougar. Miss Anthony suggests an amendment, and I indorse it most heartily, and foreign women too, because if we let a foreign man vote I say let the foreign woman vote. I am in favor of universal suffrage.

Gentlemen, I ask this as a matter of justice; I ask it because it is an insult to the intelligence of the present to draw the sex line upon any right whatever. I know there are many objections urged, and I am sure that you have considered this question; but I only make the demand from the standpoint, not of sex, but of humanity.

As a Northern woman, as a woman from Indiana, I know that we have the intelligent, thinking, cultured, pure, patriotic men and women with us. We have the women who are engaged in philanthropic enterprises. We have in our own State the signatures of over 5,000 of the school teachers asking for woman's ballot. I ask you if the United States Government does not need the voice of those 5,000 educated school teachers as much as it needs the voice of the 240 male criminals who are, on an average, sent out of the penitentiary of Indiana every year, who go to the ballot-box upon every question whatever, and make laws under which those school teachers must live, and under which the mothers of our State must keep their homes and rear their children?

On behalf of the mothers of this country I demand that their hands shall be loosened before the ballot-box, and that they shall have the privilege of throwing the mother heart into the laws that shall follow their sons not only to the age of majority that only has been made legal, but is never recognized, and so I ask you to let the mothers carry their influence in protecting laws around the footsteps of those boys, even after their hair has turned gray and they have seats in the United States Congress. I ask you to give them the power to throw protecting laws around those boys to the very confines of eternity. This can be done in no indirect way; it can not be done by the silent influence; it can not be done by prayer. While I do not underestimate the power of prayer, I say give me my ballot on election day that shall send pure men, good men, intelligent men, statesmen, instead of the modern politician, into our legislative halls. I would rather have that ballot on election day than the prayers of all the disfranchised women in the universe.

So I ask you to loosen our hands. I ask you to let us join with you in developing this science of human government. What is politics after all but the science of government? We are interested in these questions, and we are investigating them already. We have our opinions. Recently an able man has said that we have been grandly developed physically and mentally, but as a nation we are a political infant. So we are, gentlemen; we are to-day in America politically simply an infant. Why is it? It is because we have not recognized God's family plan in government—man and woman together. He created the male and female, and gave them dominion together. We have dominion in every other interest in society, and why shall we not stand shoulder to shoulder and have dominion, in the science in government, in making the laws under which we shall live?

We are taxed to support this Government—this immense Capitol building is built largely from the industries of the tax-paying women of this country—and yet we are denied the slightest voice in distributing our taxes. Our foreparents did not object to taxation, but they did object to taxation without representation, and we, as thinking, industrious, active American women, object to taxation without representation. We are willing to contribute our share to the support of this Government, as we always have done, but we have a right to ask for our little yes and no in the form of the ballot so that we shall have a direct influence in distributing the taxes.

Gentlemen, I am amenable to the gallows and the penitentiary, and it is no more than right that I shall have a voice in framing the laws under which I shall he rewarded or punished. Am I asking too much of you as representative men of this great Government when I ask you to let me have a voice in making the laws under which I shall be rewarded or punished? It is written in the law of every State in this Union that a person in the courts shall have a jury of his peers, yet so long as the word "male" stands as it does in the Constitutions of the United States and the States no woman in any State of this Union can have a jury of her peers, I protest in the name of justice against going into the court-room and being compelled to run the gauntlet of the gutter and of the saloon—yes, even of the police court and of the jail—as we are compelled to do to select a male jury to try the interests of women, whether relating to life, property, or reputation. So long as the word "male" is in our constitutions just so long we can not have a jury of our peers in any State in the Union.

I ask that the women shall have the right of the ballot that they may go into our legislative halls and there provide for the prevention rather than the cure of crime. I ask you on behalf of the twelve hundred children under twelve years of age who are in the poor-houses of Indiana, of the sixteen hundred in the poor-houses of Illinois, and on that average in every State in the Union, that you shall take the word "male" out of the constitutions and allow the women of this country to sit in legislative halls and provide homes for and look after the little waifs of society. There are hundreds of moral questions to-day requiring the assistance of the moral element of womanhood to help make the laws under which we shall live.

Gentlemen, the political party that lives in the future must fight the moral battles of humanity. The day of blood is passed; the day of brain and heart is upon us; and I ask you to let the moral constituency that resides in woman's nature be represented. Let me say right here that I do not believe that there is morality in sex, but the social customs have been such that woman has been held to a higher standard. May the day hasten when the social custom shall hold man to as high a moral standard as it to-day holds woman.

This is the condition of things. The political party that presumes to fight the moral battles of the future must have the women in its ranks. We are non-partisan, as has been well said by my friend from Indiana [Mrs. Sewall.] We come Democrats, Republicans, and Greenbackers, and I expect if there were a half dozen other political parties some of us would belong to them. We ask this beneficent action upon your part because we believe that the intelligence and the justice of the hour is demanding it. We do not want a political party action. We want you to keep this question out of the canvass. We ask you in the name of justice and humanity alone, and not on the part of party.

I hold in my hand a petition sent from one district in the State of Illinois with the request that I bear it to you. Out of three hundred electors the names of two hundred stand in this petition that I shall leave in your hands. In this list stand not the wife-whippers, not the drunkards, not the dissolute, but every minister in that town, every editor in that town, every professional man in that town, every banker, and every prominent business man in that town of three hundred electors. I believe that petitions could be rolled up in this way in every town in the Northern and in many of the Southern States. I leave this petition with you for your consideration.

Upon no question whatever has such a large number of petitions been sent as upon this demand for woman suffrage. You have the petitions in your hands, and I ask you in the name of justice and humanity not to let this Congress adjourn without action.

You ask us if we are impatient. Yes; we are impatient. Some of us may die, and I want our grand old standard-bearer, Susan B. Anthony, whose name will go down to history beside that of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Wendell Phillips—I want that woman to go to heaven a free angel from this Republic. The power lies in your hands to make us all free. May the blessing of God be upon the hearts of every one of you, gentlemen; may the scales of prejudice fall from your eyes, and may you, representing the Senate of the United States, have the grand honor of telegraphing to us, to the millions of waiting women from one end of this country to the other, that the sixteenth amendment has been submitted to the ratification of the several legislatures of our States striking the word "male" out of the constitutions; and that this shall be, as we promise it to be, a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.

REMARKS BY MRS. ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY.

Miss Anthony. I now, gentlemen of the committee, introduce to you Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway, from the extreme Northwest; and before she speaks I wish to say that she has been the one canvasser in the great State of Oregon and Washington Territory, and that it is to Mrs. Duniway that the women of Washington Territory are more indebted than to all other influences for their enfranchisement.

Mrs. Duniway. Gentlemen of the committee, do you think it possible that an agitation like this can go on and on forever without a victory? Do you not see that the golden moment has come for this grand committee to achieve immortality upon the grandest idea that has ever stirred the heart-beats of American citizens, and will you not in the magnanimity of noble purposes rise to meet the situation and, accede to our demand, which in your hearts you must know is just?

I do not come before you, gentlemen, with the expectation to instruct you in regard to the laws of our country. The women around us are law-abiding women. They are the mothers, many of them, of true and noble men, the wives, many of them, of grand, free husbands, who are listening, watching, waiting eagerly for successful tidings of this great experiment.

There never was a grander theory of government than that of these United States. Never were grander principles enunciated upon any platform, never so grand before and never can be grander again, than the declaration that "all men," including of course all women, since women are amenable to the laws, "are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights * * * that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Gentlemen, are we allowed the opportunity of consent? These women who are here from Maine to Oregon, from the Straits of Fuca to the reefs of Florida, who in their representative capacity have come up here so often, augmented in their numbers year by year, looking with eyes of hope and hearts of faith, but oftentimes with hopes deferred, upon the final solution of this great problem, which it is so much in your hands to hasten in its solution—these women are in earnest. My State is far away beyond the confines of the Rocky Mountains, away over beside the singing Pacific sea, but the spirit of liberty is among us there, and the public heart has been stirred. The hearts of our men have been moved to listen to our demands, and in Washington Territory, as one speaker has informed you, women to-day are endowed with full and free enfranchisement, and the rejoicing throughout that Territory is universal.