Debate on Woman Suffrage in the Senate of the United States

MISS ANTHONY. I was coming to that, I was going to say to all of you men in office here to-day that if you can not go forward and carry out either your Democratic or your Republican or your Greenback theories, for instance, on the finance, there is no great political power that is going to take you away from these halls and prevent you from doing all those other things which you want to do, and you can act out your own moral and intellectual convictions on this without let or hindrance.

SENATOR EDMUNDS. Without any danger to the public interests, you mean.

MISS ANTHONY. Without any danger to the public interests. I did not mean to make a bad insinuation. Senator.

I want to give you another reason why we appeal to you. In these three States where the question has been submitted and voted down we can not get another Legislature to resubmit it, because they say the people have expressed their opinion and decided no, and therefore nobody with any political sense would resubmit the question. It is therefore impossible in any one of those States. We have tried hard in Kansas for ten years to get the question resubmitted; the vote of that State seems to be taken as a finality. We ask you to lift the sixteenth amendment out of the arena of the public mass into the arena of thinking legislative brains, the brains of the nation, under the law and the Constitution. Not only do we ask it for that purpose, but when you will have by a two-thirds vote submitted the proposition to the several Legislatures, you have put the pin down and it never can go back. No subsequent Congress can revoke that submission of the proposition; there will be so much gained; it can not slide back. Then we will go to New York or to Pennsylvania and urge upon the Legislatures the ratification of that amendment. They may refuse; they may vote it down the first time. Then we will go to the next Legislature, and the next Legislature, and plead and plead, from year to year, if it takes ten years. It is an open question to every Legislature until we can get one that will ratify it, and when that Legislature has once voted and ratified it no subsequent legislation can revoke their ratification.

Thus, you perceive, Senators, that every step we would gain by this sixteenth amendment process is fast and not to be done over again. That is why I appeal to you especially. As I have shown you in the respective States, if we fail to educate the people of a whole State—and in Michigan it was only six months, and in Colorado less than six months—the State Legislatures say that is the end of it. I appeal to you, therefore, to adopt the course that we suggest.

Gentlemen of the committee, if there is a question that you want to ask me before I make my final appeal, I should like to have you put it now; any question as to constitutional law or your right to go forward. Of course you do not deny to us that this amendment will be right in the line of all the amendments heretofore. The eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth amendments are all in line prohibiting the States from doing something which they heretofore thought they had a right to do. Now we ask you to prohibit the States from denying to women their rights.

I want to show you in closing that of the great acts of justice done during the war and since the war the first one was a great military necessity. We never got one inch of headway in putting down the rebellion until the purpose of this great nation was declared that slavery should he abolished. Then, as if by magic, we went forward and put down the rebellion. At the close of the rebellion the nation stood again at a perfect deadlock. The Republican party was trembling in the balance, because it feared that it could not hold its position, until it should have secured by legislation to the Government what it had gained at the point of the sword, and when the nation declared its purpose to enfranchise the negro it was a political necessity. I do not want to take too much vainglory out of the heads of Republicans, but nevertheless it is a great national fact that neither of those great acts of beneficence to the negro race was done because of any high, overshadowing moral conviction on the part of any considerable minority even of the people of this nation, but simply because of a military necessity slavery was abolished, and simply because of a political necessity black men were enfranchised.

The blackest Republican State you had voted down negro suffrage, and that was Kansas in 1867; Michigan voted it down in 1867; Ohio voted it down in 1867. Iowa was the only State that ever voted negro suffrage by a majority of the citizens to which the question was submitted, and they had not more than seventy-five negroes in the whole State; so it was not a very practical question. Therefore, it may be fairly said, I think, that it was a military necessity that compelled one of those acts of justice, and a political necessity that compelled the other.

It seems to me that from the first word uttered by our dear friend, Mrs. ex-Governor Wallace, of Indiana, all the way down, we have been presenting to you the fact that there is a great moral necessity pressing upon this nation to-day, that you shall go forward and attach a sixteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution which shall put in the hands of the women of this nation the power to help make, shape, and control the social conditions of society everywhere. I appeal to you from that standpoint that you shall submit this proposition.

There is one other point to which I want to call your attention. The Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator EDMUNDS chairman, reported that the United States could do nothing to protect women in the right to vote under the amendments. Now I want to give you a few points where the United States interferes to take away the right to vote from women where the State has given it to them. In Wyoming, for instance, by a Democratic legislature, the women were enfranchised. They were not only allowed to vote but to sit upon juries, the same as men. Those of you who read the reports giving; the results of that action have not forgotten that the first result of women sitting upon juries was that wherever there was a violation of the whisky law they brought in verdicts accordingly for the execution of the law; and you will remember, too, that the first man who ever had a verdict of guilty for murder in the first degree in that Territory was tried by a jury made up largely of women. Always up to that day every jury had brought in a verdict of shot in self-defense, although the person shot down may have been entirely unarmed. Then, in cities like Cheyenne and Laramie, persons entered complaints against keepers of houses of ill-fame.

Women were on the jury, and the result was in every case that before the juries could bring in a bill of indictment the women had taken the train and left the town. Why do you hear no more of women sitting on juries in that Territory? Simply because the United States marshal, who is appointed by the President to go to Wyoming, refuses to put the names of women into the box from which the jury is drawn. There the United States Government interferes to take the right away.

A DELEGATE. I should like to state that Governor Hoyt, of Wyoming, who was the governor who signed the act giving to women this right, informed me that the right had been restored, and that his sister, who resides there, recently served on a jury.

MISS ANTHONY. I am glad to hear it. It is two years since I was there, but I was told that that was the case. In Utah the women were given the right to vote, but a year and a half ago their Legislative Assembly found that although they had the right to vote the Territorial law provided that only male voters should hold office. The Legislative Assembly of Utah passed a bill providing that women should be eligible to all the offices of the Territory. The school offices, superintendents of schools, were the offices in particular to which the women wanted to be elected. Governor Emory, appointed by the President of the United States, vetoed that bill. Thus the full operations of enfranchisement conferred by two of the Territories has been stopped by Federal interference.

You ask why I come here instead of going to the State Legislatures. You say that whenever the Legislatures extend the right of suffrage to us by the constitutions of their States we can get it. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado, Kansas, Oregon, all these States, have had the school suffrage extended by legislative enactment. If the question had been submitted to the rank and file of the people of Boston, with 66,000 men paying nothing but the poll-tax, they would have undoubtedly voted against letting women have the right to vote for members of the school board; but their intelligent representatives on the floor of the Legislature voted in favor of the extension of the school suffrage to the women. The first result in Boston has been the election of quite a number of women to the school board. In Minnesota, in the little town of Rochester, the school board declared its purpose to cut the women teachers' wages down. It did not propose to touch the principal, who was a man, but they proposed to cut all the women down from $50 to $35. One woman put her bonnet on and went over the entire town and said, "We have got a right to vote for this school board, and let us do so." They all turned out and voted, and not a single $35 man was re-elected, but all those who were in favor of paying $50.

It seems to be a sort of charity to let a woman teach school. You say here that if a woman has a father, mother, or brother, or anybody to support her, she can not have a place in the Departments. In the city of Rochester they cannot let a married woman teach school because she has got a husband, and it is supposed he ought to support her. The women are working in the Departments, as everywhere else, for half price, and the only pretext, you tell us, for keeping women there is because the Government can economize by employing women for less money. The other day when I saw a newspaper item stating that the Government proposed to compensate Miss Josephine Meeker for all her bravery, heroism, and terrible sufferings by giving her a place in the Interior Department, it made my blood boil to the ends of my fingers and toes. To give that girl a chance to work in the Department; to do just as much work as a man, and pay her half as much, was a charity. That was a beneficence on the part of this grand Government to her. We want the ballot for bread. When we do equal work we want equal wages.

MRS. SAXON. California, in her recent convention, prohibits the Legislature hereafter from enacting any law for woman's suffrage, does it not?

MISS ANTHONY. I do not know. I have not seen the new constitution.

MRS. SAXON. It does. The convention inserted a provision in the constitution that the Legislature could not act upon the subject at all.

MISS ANTHONY. Everywhere that we have gone, Senators, to ask our right at the hands of any legislative or political body, we have been the subjects of ridicule. For instance, I went before the great national Democratic convention in New York, in 1868, as a delegate from the New York Woman Suffrage Association, to ask that great party, now that it wanted to come to the front again, to put a genuine Jeffersonian plank in its platform, pledging the ballot to all citizens, women as well as men, should it come into power. You may remember how Mr. Seymour ordered my petition to be read, after looking at it in the most scrutinizing manner, when it was referred to the committee on resolutions, where it has slept the sleep of death from that day to this. But before the close of the convention a body of ignorant workingmen sent in a petition clamoring for greenbacks, and you remember that the Democratic party bought those men by putting a solid greenback plank in the platform.

Everybody supposed they would nominate Pendleton, or some other man of pronounced views, but instead of doing that they nominated Horatio Seymour, who stood on the fence, politically speaking. My friends, Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and women who have brains and education, women who are tax-payers, went there and petitioned for the practical application of the fundamental principles of our Government to one-half of the people. Those most ignorant workingmen, the vast mass of them foreigners, went there, and petitioned that that great political party should favor greenbacks. Why did they treat those workingmen with respect, and put a greenback plank in their platform, and only table us, and ignore us? Simply because the workingmen represented the power of the ballot. They could make or unmake the great Democratic party at that election. The women were powerless. We could be ridiculed and ignored with impunity, and so we were laughed at, and put on the table.

Then the Republicans went to Chicago, and they did just the same thing. They said the Government bonds must be paid in precisely the currency specified by the Congressional enactment, and Talleyrand himself could not have devised how not to say anything better than the Republicans did at Chicago on that question. Then they nominated a man who had not any financial opinions whatever, and who was not known, except for his military record, and they went into the campaign. Both those parties had this petition from us.

I met a woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., a short time ago. She came to me one morning and told me about the obscene shows licensed in that city, and said that she thought of memorializing the Legislature. I said, "Do; you can not do anything else; you are helpless, but you can petition. Of course they will laugh at you." Notwithstanding, I drew up a petition and she circulated it. Twelve hundred of the best citizens signed that petition, and the lady carried it to the Legislature, just as Mrs. Wallace took her petition in the Indiana Legislature. They read it, laughed at it, and laid it on the table; and at the close of the session, by a unanimous vote, they retired in a solid body to witness the obscene show themselves. After witnessing it, they not only allowed the license to continue for that year, but they have licensed it every year from that day to this, against all the protests of the petitioners. [Laughter.]

SENATOR EDMUNDS. Do not think we are wanting in respect to you and the ladies here because you say something that makes us laugh.

MISS ANTHONY. You are not laughing at me; you are treating me respectfully, because you are hearing my argument; you are not asleep, not one of you, and I am delighted.

Now, I am going to tell you one other fact. Seven thousand of the best citizens of Illinois petitioned the Legislature of 1877 to give them the poor privilege of voting on the license question. A gentleman presented their petition; the ladies were in the lobbies around the room. A gentleman made a motion that the president of the State association of the Christian Temperance Union be allowed to address the Legislature regarding the petition of the memorialists, when a gentleman sprang to his feet, and said it was well enough for the honorable gentleman to present the petition, and have it received and laid on the table, but "for a gentleman to rise in his seat and propose that the valuable time of the honorable gentlemen of the Illinois Legislature should be consumed in discussing the nonsense of those women is going a little too far. I move that the sergeant-at-arms be ordered to clear the hall of the house of representatives of the mob;" referring to those Christian women. Now, they had had the lobbyists of the whisky ring in that Legislature for years and years, not only around it at respectful distances, but inside the bar, and nobody ever made a motion to clear the halls of the whisky mob there. It only takes Christian women to make a mob.

MRS. SAXON. We were treated extremely respectfully in Louisiana. It showed plainly the temper of the convention when the present governor admitted that woman suffrage was a fact bound to come. They gave us the privilege of having women on the school boards, but then the officers are appointed by men who are politicians.

MISS ANTHONY. I want to read a few words that come from good authority, for black men at least. I find here a little extract that I copied years ago from the Anti-Slavery Standard of 1870. As you know, Wendell Phillips was the editor of that paper at that time:

"A man with the ballot in his hand is the master of the situation. He defines all his other rights; what is not already given him he takes."

That is exactly what we want, Senators. The rights you have not already given us; we want to get in such a position that we can take them.

"The ballot makes every class sovereign over its own fate. Corruption may steal from a man his independence; capital may starve, and intrigue fetter him, at times; but against all these, his vote, intelligently and honestly cast, is, in the long run, his full protection. If, in the struggle, his fort surrenders, it is only because it is betrayed from within. No power ever permanently wronged a voting class without its own consent."

Senators, I want to ask of you that you will, by the law and parliamentary rules of your committee, allow us to agitate this question by publishing this report and the report which you shall make upon our petitions, as I hope you will make a report. If your committee is so pressed with business that it can not possibly consider and report upon this question, I wish some of you would make a motion on the floor of the Senate that a special committee be appointed to take the whole question of the enfranchisement of women into consideration, and that that committee shall have nothing else to do. This off-year of politics, when there is nothing to do but to try how not to do it (politically, I mean, I am not speaking personally), is the best time you can have to consider the question of woman suffrage, and I ask you to use your influence with the Senate to have it specially attended to this year. Do not make us come here thirty years longer. It is twelve years since the first time I came before a Senate committee. I said then to Charles Sumner, if I could make the honorable Senator from Massachusetts believe that I feel the degradation and the humiliation of disfranchisement precisely as he would if his fellows had adjudged him incompetent from any cause whatever from having his opinion counted at the ballot-box we should have our right to vote in the twinkling of an eye.

REMARKS BY MRS. SARA A. SPENCER, OF WASHINGTON.

Mrs. SPENCER. Congress printed 10,000 copies of its proceedings concerning the memorial services of a dead man, Professor Henry. It cost me three months of hard work to have 3,000 copies of our arguments last year before the Committee on Privileges and Elections printed for 10,000,000 living women. I ask that the committee will have printed 10,000 copies of this report.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee have no power to order the printing. That can only be done by the order of the Senate. A resolution can be offered to that effect in the Senate. I have only to say, ladies, that you will admit that we have listened to you with great attention, and I can certainly say with very great interest. What you have said will be duly and earnestly considered by the committee.

Mrs. WALLACE. I wish to make just one remark in reference to what Senator Thurman said as to the popular vote being against woman suffrage. The popular vote is against it, but not the popular voice. Owing to the temperance agitation in the last six years the growth of the suffrage sentiment among the wives and mothers of this nation has largely increased.

Mrs. SPENCER. In behalf of the women of the United States, permit me to thank the Senate Judiciary Committee for their respectful, courteous, and close attention.

Mr. HOAR. Mr. President, I do not propose to make a speech at this late hour of the day; it would be cruel to the Senate; and I had not expected that this measure would be here this afternoon. I was absent on a public duty and came in just at the close of the speech of my honorable friend from Missouri [Mr. VEST]. I wish, however, to say one word in regard to what seemed to be the burden of his speech.

He says that the women who ask this change in our political organization are not simply seeking to be put upon school boards and upon boards of health and charity and upon all the large number of duties of a political nature for which he must confess they are fit, but he says they will want to be President of the United States, and want to be Senators, and want to be marshals and sheriffs, and that seems to him supremely ridiculous. Now I do not understand that that is the proposition. What they want to do and to be is to be eligible to such public duty as a majority of their fellow-citizens may think they are fitted for. The majority of public duties in this country do not require robust, physical health, or exposure to what is base or unhealthy; and when those duties are imposed upon anybody they will be imposed only upon such persons as are fit for them. But they want that if the majority of the American people think a woman like Queen Victoria, or Queen Elizabeth, or Queen Isabella of Spain, or Maria Theresa of Hungary (the four most brilliant sovereigns of any sex in modern history with only two or three exceptions), the fittest person to be President of the United States, they may be permitted to exercise their choice accordingly.

Old men are eligible to office, old men are allowed to vote, but we do not send old men to war, or make constables or watchmen or overseers of State prisons of old men; and it is utterly idle to suppose that the fitness to vote or the fitness to hold office has anything to do with the physical strength or with the particular mental qualities in regard to which the sexes differ from each other.

Mr. President, my honorable friend spoke of the French revolution and the horrors in which the women of Paris took part, and from that he would argue that American wives and mothers and sisters are not fit for the calm and temperate management of our American republican life. His argument would require him by the same logic to agree that republicanism itself is not fit for human society. The argument is the argument against popular government whether by man or woman, and the Senator only applies to this new phase of the claim of equal rights what his predecessors would argue against the rights we now have applied to us.

But the Senator thought it was unspeakably absurd that a woman with her sentiment and emotional nature and liability to be moved by passion and feeling should hold the office of Senator. Why, Mr. President, the Senator's own speech is a refutation of its own argument. Everybody knows that my honorable friend from Missouri is one of the most brilliant men in this country. He is a logician, he is an orator, he is a man of large experience, he is a lawyer entrusted with large interests; yet when he was called upon to put forth this great effort of his this afternoon and to argue this question which he thinks so clear, what did he do? He furnished the gush and the emotion and the eloquence, but when he came to any argument he had to call upon two women, Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Whitney to supply all that. [Laughter.] If Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Whitney have to make the argument in the Senate of the United States for the brilliant and distinguished Senator from Missouri it does not seem to me so absolutely ridiculous that they should have or that women like them should have seats here to make arguments of their own. [Manifestations of applause in the galleries.]

The joint resolution was reported to the Senate without amendment.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. If no amendment be proposed the question is, shall the joint resolution be engrossed for a third reading?

Mr. COCKRELL. Let us have the yeas and nays.

Mr. BLAIR. Why not take the yeas and nays on the passage?

Mr. COCKRELL. Very well.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The call is withdrawn.

The joint resolution was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading, and was read the third time.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Shall the joint resolution pass?

Mr. COCKRELL. I call for the yeas and nays.