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"I WAS BORN TO MAKE BARRELS, BUT
THEY WOULDN'T LET ME"
Address to the American Equal Rights
Association
It follows the full text transcript of
Frances D. Gage's Address to the AERA,
delivered at the first anniversary of the American Equal
Rights Association, held at the Church of the Puritans, New
York - May 9 and 10, 1867.
Transcript according to H.M.
Parkhurst's phonographic report - Library of Congress.
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First Day - Morning Session |
I have but little
to say because it is almost 2 o'clock, and
hungry and weary people are not good listeners
to speeches. I shall confine my remarks
therefore to one special point brought up this
morning and not fully discussed.
Sojourner Truth
gave us the whole truth in about fifteen words:
"If I am
responsible for the deeds done in my body,
the same as the white male citizen is, I
have a right to all the rights he has to
help him through the world."
I shall speak for
the slave woman at the South. I have always
lifted my voice for her when I have spoken at
all. I will not give up the slave woman into the
hands of man, to do with her as he pleases
hereafter. I know the plea that was made to me
in South Carolina, and down in the Mississippi
valley. They said, "You give us a nominal
freedom, but you leave us under the heel of our
husbands, who are tyrants almost equal to our
masters."
The former slave
man of the South has learned his lesson of
oppression and wrong of his old master; and they
think the wife has no right to her earnings. I
was often asked, "Why don't the Government pay
my wife's earnings to me?" When acting for the
Freedman's Aid Society, the orders came to us to
compel marriage, or to separate families. I
issued the order as I was bound to do, as
General Superintendent of the Fourth Division
under General Saxton. The men came to me and
wanted to be married, because they said if they
were married in the church, they could manage
the women, and take care of their money, but if
they were not married in the church the women
took their own wages and did just as they had a
mind to. But the women came to me and said, "We
don't want to be married in the church, because
if we are our our husbands will whip the
children and whip us if they want to; they are
no better than old masters."
The biggest
quarrel I had with the colored people down
there, was with a plantation man because I would
not furnish a nurse for his child. "No, Nero,"
said I, "I cannot hire a nurse for your child
while Nancy works in the cotton field." "But
what is we to do? I'se a poor miserable man and
can't work half the time, and Nancy is a good
strong hand; and we must have a nurse." He went
away in utter disgust, and declared to the
people outside that I had got the miserablest
notion he had ever heard, to spoil a good field
hand like his Nancy to nurse her own baby.
We were told the other day by Wendell Phillips,
upon the Anti-Slavery platform, that it takes
people forty years to outgrow an old idea. And
he proved to us, if his silver words are good
for anything, that it took five years to outgrow
old ideas. The slave population of the South is
not yet removed a hundred years from the
barbarism of Africa, where women have no rights,
no privileges, but are trampled under foot in
all the savagism of the past. And the slave man
has looked on to see his master will everything
as he willed, and he has learned the lesson from
his master.
Mr. Higginson told
us that the slave-master never understood the
slave. I know that to be the fact. Neither do
men understand woman to-day, because she has
always been held subservient to him. Now it is
proposed to give manhood the suffrage, in all
these Southern States, and to leave the poor
slave woman bound under the ban of the direct
curse of slavery to him who is the father of her
children.
It is decreed upon all the statute books of
slavery that the child shall follow the
condition of the mother. That has been the
decree from the beginning of this awful slave
system; that the whitest woman, the child of a
slave mother, whose hair curled down to her
waist, and whose blue eyes of beauty were a lure
to the Statesman of the South, should be a
slave, though the Governor of the State were her
father. Are you to leave her there yet, and
desecrate marriage, by making it such a bond of
slavery that the woman shall say, "I do not want
to be married to suffer oppression!" Are you to
force prostitution and wrong upon those people
by these unjust laws?" Are you to compel
wickedness and crime? Are you going to let it
stand upon the statute books of the southern
States that the only woman free to work for her
own child shall be the mother of illegitimate
children? That is the consequence of what you
are doing to the people who in all time past,
since they have lived upon this continent, have
been denied the right of sacred marriage; and
who must have, as Wendell Phillips tell us,
forty years to outgrow the past, or to educate
them.
We are told by Mr. Phillips to flood the South
with spelling-books. Who is to carry them there?
Who, to-day, is teaching the southern
people;--for I am talking now in behalf of the
colored woman of the South, forgetting my own
degradation. Who have carried the spelling-book
to the South? The women of the North, gathering
up their strength, have been sent down by all
these great Societies to teach. The colored men
of the South are to vote, while they deny the
ballot to their teacher! It is said that women
do not want to vote in this country. I tell you,
it is a libel upon womanhood. I care not who
says it. I am in earnest. They do want to vote.
Fifty-two thousand pulpits in this country have
been teaching women the lesson that has been
taught them for centuries, that they must not
think about voting. But when fifty-two thousand
pulpits, or fifty-two thousand politicians, at
the beginning of this war, lifted up their
voices and asked of women, "Come out and help
us," did they stand back? In every hamlet, in
every village, in every cabin and every palace,
in every home in the whole United States, they
rose up and went to work. They worked for the
government; they worked for the nation; they
worked for their sons, their husbands, their
fathers, their brothers, their friends. They
worked night and day. Who found women to stand
back when this great public opinion that bad
been crushing them so long and forbidding them
to work, at last lifted itself up and said, "You
may work?" (Applause.)
I have been travelling all winter long, with a
few intervals of rest, talking not upon Equal
Rights, but upon the subject of Temperance; and
whenever I said to my crowded audiences that we
must give to woman the right to vote that she
may purify the nation of this great sin, there
went up shouts and clapping of hands of men and
women. They are ready for this work. What we
want is to crystallize the public opinion of all
ranks of society in its favor. There is great
fear that if woman is allowed to vote, she will
lose something of her high and excellent
character. If it is right for woman to have the
suffrage, it is not right to talk of expediency.
If giving woman the ballot will cause her to
lose her prestige, it is because she ought to
lose it. If she gains physical strength, and
loses that effeminate delicacy that provides for
nothing and cares for nothing but its own
selfish, quiet enjoyment, I shall rejoice with
joy unspeakable. My strong hands have titled the
fields; and in my early childhood have harnessed
the horse, and brought the wood to the door;
have led him to the blacksmith's shop to be
shod. These are things I do not often tell in
public. I have braved public opinion; I have
tilled my garden; I have brought myself up from
fainting weakness occasioned by accident and
broken bones. I have taken care of myself,
supported myself, and asked nothing from the
world; I find my womanhood not one bit degraded.
(Applause.)
A thousand times in the last years, in this
struggle for bread, have I been asked, "Why
don't you let you sons support you?" My answer
is, "My six sons have their own duties. My six
boys have their own labors. God gives me
strength to earn my own bread, and I will do it
as long as I can." (Applause.)
That is what I
want to teach the womanhood of the country. I
did not mean to talk so long, but I assure you I
talk in earnest. If I sometimes, by a slip of
the tongue, make some little mistake--for I have
not been educated in the schools, (a log cabin
schoolhouse in the wilderness gave me all I
have)--you will excuse me, for I mean no
injustice to any one. And if to-night it will
not crowd some better woman or man from the
platform, I shall be glad to speak to you again.
Mrs. Mott:
The argument that has been made that women do
not want to vote is like that which we had to
meet in the early days of the Anti-Slavery
enterprise that the slaves did not want to be
free. I remember that in one of our earliest
Woman's Rights Conventions, in Syracuse, the
reply was made to this argument, that woman was
not much to be blamed, because the power of the
government and of the church, that was vested in
man by the laws, made it impossible for woman to
rise, just as it was impossible for the slave to
rise while the chains were around him, and while
the slaveholder's foot was upon his neck. The
common and civil law of England made woman a
cypher, and blotted out her civil existence upon
her marriage. Blackstone, in his commentaries,
says that the law made the husband and wife one
person, and that person the husband. This being
the power of the husband over the wife, as
established by law, that despotism followed
which must ever be exercised, when power is
vested in one over another, be it man or woman,
to the great injury of the victim. The law had
crushed woman; and the Church, supporting the
law, had assumed that the bible forbade women
from using her rights. And if she asked to be a
religious teacher, the perversion of the words
of Paul was presented to keep her back. When she
became a wife, the Church stepped in, and
asserted the authority of the husband, and made
the wife acknowledge her inferiority and promise
obedience to him. That extends down to the
present time. That is the law of marriage now
among the great body of religious professors in
the land; and it is well for woman to know it.
Until she can be brought to a sense of her
natural and inalienable rights, to go forth and
defend herself against these chains of society,
she will be kept in this low state.
The resolution which was offered in Syracuse, as
nearly as I remember it, was that as the
assertion that the slave did not want his
freedom, and would not take it if offered to
him, only proved the depth of his degradation,
so the assertion that woman had all the rights
she wanted only gave evidence how far the
influences of the law and customs, and the
perverted application of the Scriptures, had
encircled and crushed her. This was fifteen or
twenty years ago. Times are altered since. In
the Temperance reformation, and in the great
reformatory movements of our age, woman's powers
have been called into action. They are beginning
to see that another state of things is possible
for them, and they are beginning to demand their
rights. Why should this church be granted for
such a meeting as this, but for the progress of
the cause? Why are so many women present, ready
to respond to the most ultra and most radical
sentiments here, but that woman has grown, and
is able to assume her rights?
In regard to the remark of Mrs. Gage that by the
want of the consecration of marriages by the
Church, the sacred and holy ordinance of
marriage is prostituted I wish to say that it
does not follow that marriages unattended by
religious ceremonies are therefore not true
marriages. It is now two hundred years since
George Fox took the ground, far in advance of
the age in which he lived, that the parties
themselves were sufficient for the marriage
union; that marriage did not necessarily require
either to be sanctified by the minister or
legalized by the
magistrate; but that the parties themselves,
acknowledging the religious obligation of so
sacred a union, were sufficient. And in that
Society, the parties were at liberty to appoint
their own time and place, and to invite such of
their friends and neighbors as they wished to be
present; then, in acknowledgment of the divine
presence, their obligations to each other were
announced, entirely reciprocal, with no
assumption of authority on the one hand or
promise of obedience on the other; but entire
reciprocity, and a pledge of fidelity and
affection until death should separate them. For
two hundred years, the marriages in the Society
of Friends thus conducted, have been held as
sacred, the union has been as harmonious, and
the management of the children as free from
complaint, as any other marriages in the
community. The Parliament of England, after a
time, saw fit to legalize such marriages; and so
in our own country do the laws of the several
States.
In many of the States the laws have been so
modified that the wife now stands in a very
different position as regards the right of
property and other rights, from that which she
occupied fifteen or twenty years ago. You see
the same advance in the literary world. I
remember when Maria Edgeworth and her sister
first published their works, that they were
afraid to publish their own name, and borrowed
the name of their father. So Frances Power Cobbe
was not able to write under her own name, and
she issued her "Intuitive Morals" without a
name; and her father was so much pleased with
the work, without knowing it was his daughter's,
that it led to an acknowledgement after a while.
The objection has been made to me--"Here you
assume equality and independence. Now, I feel
dependent on my husband for everything." Women
in our Society do not feel dependent for
anything. There are independent themselves; and
in the true relation of marriage the husband and
wife will be equal. Let woman be properly
educated; let her physically, intellectually and
morally be properly developed; and then, in the
marriage relation, in spite of law and custom
and religious errors, the independence of the
husband and wife will be equal.
I was delighted with the remarks made in our
Anti-Slavery meeting by our friend Durant, that
the conscience, and the sense of right in man,
was the basis of law. The idea seemed rather
new; but it occurred to me that our friend
Burleigh told us that, twenty years ago. We were
told, too, that when the work of the
Anti-Slavery Society should be finished, there
would still be work to do. And although Wendell
Phillips is sensitive with regard to the
introduction of this question upon the
Anti-Slavery platform, adhering so strictly to
the Constitution of that Society that he does
not want anything attached to it of the other
great reforms of the day which do not
legitimately belong to it, I think we shall find
that he will continue to be as able an advocate
for woman as he has been, and that he really
does not lower our standard in any respect.
Stephen S. Foster:
Will you give us the evidence that the statement
that the women of this country do not want the
ballot is not true? I should be glad to believe
that; but in may experience the worst opposition
to the progress of Woman's Right has come from
woman herself. The greatest indifference to the
cause is to found among women, and not among
men. I wish it were not so. I hope I am
mistaken. But I believe nine out of every ten of
our public speakers will tell you that they find
more help, more sympathy from men than from
women.
Rev. S.J. May:
I should like to have that question settled, so
far as the women present are concerned. Will as
many of you as will vote when the right is
awarded to you, please to manifest it by rising.
Nearly the whole of the ladies present
immediately arose. Indeed, the reporter, from
the platform, could not see a single lady who
retained to seat.
Mrs. Gage:
During the last fifteen years, with the utmost
industry I could use in ascertaining the public
opinion in this country, I have never found one
solitary instance of a woman, whom I could meet
alone by her fireside, where there was no fear
of public opinion, or the minister, or the
law-maker, or her father, or her husband, who
did not tell me she would like to vote.
(Applause.)
I never found a
slave in my life, who, removed from the presence
of the people about him, would not tell me he
wanted liberty--never one. I have been in the
slave States for years. I have been in the
slave-pens, and upon the plantations, and have
stood beside the slave as he worked in the sugar
cane and the cotton-field; and I never found one
who dared in the presence of white men to say he
wanted freedom. When women and young girls are
asked if they want to vote, they are almost
always in just that situation where they are
afraid to speak what they think; and no wonder
they so often say they do not want to vote.
[On motion, the meeting adjourned until 71/2
o'clock this evening.]
First Day - Evening Session
Mrs. President, it seems to be
my fate to come in at the eleventh hour. We have been
talking about the right to the ballot. Why do we want it?
What does it confer? What will it give us? We closed our
argument at three o'clock to-day by a discussion whether the
women of this country and the colored men of this country
wanted the ballot. I said that it was a libel on the
womanhood of this country, to say they do not want it; and I
repeat that assertion. Woman may say in public that she does
not want it, because it is unpopular and unfashionable for
her to want it; but when you tell her what the ballot can
do, she will always answer you that she wants it. Why do we
want it? Because it is right, and because there are wrongs
in the community that can be righted in no other way.
After the discussions we have had to-night, I want to turn
to a fresh subject. Last evening I attended the meeting of
the National Temperance Association at Cooper Institute. A
great audience was assembled there, to listen to the
arguments against the most gigantic evil that now pervades
the American Republic. Men took the position that only a
prohibitory law could put an end to the great evil of
intemperance. New York has its two hundred millions of
invested capital to sell death and destruction to the men of
this country who are weak enough to purchase. There are
eight thousand licensed liquor establishments in this city,
to drag down humanity. It was asserted there by Wendell
Phillips that intemperance had its root in our Saxon blood,
that demanded a stimulus; and he argued from that
standpoint. If intemperance has its root in the Saxon blood,
that demands a stimulus, why is it that the womanhood of
this nation is not at the grog-shops to-day? Are women not
Saxons? It was asserted, both by Mr. Phillips and by
President Hopkins, of Union College, that the liquor traffic
must be regulated by law.
A man may do what he likes in
his own house, said they; he may burn his furniture; he may
take poison; he may light his cigar with his greenbacks; but
if he carries his evil outside of his own house, if he
increases my taxes, if he makes it dangerous for me or for
my children to walk the streets, then it may be prohibited
by law. I was at Harrisburg, a few days ago, at the State
Temperance Convention. Horace Greeley asserted that there
was progress upon the subject of temperance; and he went
back to the time when ardent spirits were drank in the
household, when every table had its decanter, and the wife,
children and husband drank together. Now, said he, it is a
rare thing to find the dram-bottle in the home. It has been
put out. But what put the dram-bottle out of the home? It
was put out because the education and refinement and power
of woman became so strong in the home, that she said, "It
must go out; we can't have it here." (Applause.)
Then the voters of the United
States, the white male citizens, went to work and licensed
these nuisances that could not be in the home, at all the
corners of the streets. I demand the ballot for woman
to-day, that she may vote down these nuisances, the
dram-shops, there also, as she drove them out of the home.
(Applause.)
What privilege does the vote give to the "white male
citizen" of the United States? Did you ever analyze a
voter--hold him up and see what he was? Shall I give you a
picture of him? Not as my friend Parker Pillsbury has drawn
the picture to-night will I draw it. What is the "white male
citizen"--the voter in the Republic of the United States?
More than any potentate or any king in all Europe. Louis
Napoleon dares not walk the streets of his own city without
his bodyguard around him, with their bayonets. The Czar of
Russia is afraid for his own life among his people. Kings
and potentates are always afraid; but the "free white male
citizen" of the United States, with the ballot in his hand,
goes where he lists, does what he pleases. He owns himself,
his earnings, his genius, his talent, his eloquence, his
power, all there is of him. All that God has given him is
his, to do with as he pleases, subject to no power but such
laws as have an equal bearing upon every other man in like
circumstances, and responsible to no power but his own
conscience and his God. He builds colleges; he lifts up
humanity or he casts it down. He is the lawgiver, the maker,
as it were, of the nation. His single vote may turn the
destiny of the whole Republic for good or ill. There is no
link in the chain of human possibilities that can add one
single power to the "white male citizen" of America.
Now we ask that you shall put into the hands of every human
soul this same power to go forward and do good works
wherever it can. The country has rung within the last few
days because one colored girl, with a little black blood in
her veins, has been cast out of the Pittsburg Methodist
College. It ought to ring until such a thing shall be
impossible. But when Cambridge, and Yale, and Union, and
Lansing, and all the other institutions of the country, West
Point included, aided by national patronage, shut out every
woman and every colored man in the land, who has anything to
say? There is not a single college instituted by the
original government patronage of lands to public schools and
colleges, that allows a woman to set her foot inside of its
walls as a student. Is this no injustice? Is it no wrong?
When men stand upon the public platform and deliver
elaborate essays on women and their right of suffrage, they
talk about their weakness, their devotion to fashion and
idleness. What else have they given women to do? Almost
every profession in the land is filled by men; every college
sends forth the men to fill the highest places. When the law
said that no married woman should do business in her own
name, sue or be sued, own property, own herself or her
earnings, what had she to do? That laid the foundation for
precisely the state of things you see to-day.
But I deny that, as a class, the women of America, black or
white, are idle. We are always busy. What have we done? Look
over this audience, go out upon your streets, go through the
world where you will, and every human soul you meet is the
work of woman. She has given it life; she has educated it,
whether for good or evil. She it is that must lie at the
foundation of your country, because God gave her the holiest
mission ever laid upon the heart of a human soul--the
mission of the mother.
We are told that home is woman's sphere. So it is, and man's
sphere, too; for I tell you that that is a poor home which
has not in it a man to feel that it is the most sacred place
he knows. If duty requires him to go out into the world and
flight its battles, who blames him, or puts a ban upon him?
Men complain that woman does not love home now, that she is
not satisfied with her mission. I answer that this
discontent arises out of the one fact, that you have
attempted to mould seventeen millions of human souls in one
shape, and make them all do one thing.
Take away your restrictions,
open all doors, leave women at liberty to go where they
will. As old Sojourner Truth said twenty years ago, at the
first Women's Rights Convention in Ohio, "Leave them where
God left them, with their inalienable rights," and they will
adjust themselves to their convictions of their duties,
their responsibilities, and their powers, and society will
find harmony within itself. The caged bird forgets how to
build its nest. The wing of the eagle is as strong to soar
to the sun as that of her mate, who never says to her,
"back, feeble one, to your nest, and there brood in dull
inactivity until I give you permission to leave!" But when
her duties called her there, who ever found her unfaithful
to her trust? The foot of the wild roe is as strong and
swift in the race as that of her antlered companion. She
goes by his side, she feeds in the same pasture, drinks from
the same running brook, but is ever true also to her
maternal duties and cares.
If we are a nation of imbeciles, if womanhood is weak, it is
the laws and customs of society which have made us what we
are. If you want health, strength, energy, force,
temperance, purity, honesty, deal justly with the mothers of
this country; then they will give you nobler and stronger
men than haggling politicians, or the grogshop emissaries
that buy up the votes of your manhood.
Why is it that Republicans are so weak and wavering to-day?
There is a law upon the statute book of every southern State
that the child shall follow the condition of the mother.
There is a law in the physical code of humanity, written by
the finger of the Almighty, that never was and never will be
repealed, that the child shall follow the condition of the
mother. You have never taught the women of this country the
sacredness of freedom. You have never called out the mother
to generous action. You have never said to the motherhood of
this country, "Upon you rests the responsibility of making
the Republic what it should be. We invest you with the
power; now assume that responsibility and act upon it, or we
shall call you to account for your neglect of duty."
It has been charged upon woman that she does nothing well.
What have you given us to do well? What freedom have you
give us to act independently and earnestly? When I was in
San Domingo, I found a little colony of American colored
people that went ever there is 1825.
They retained their American customs, and especially their
little American church, outside of the Catholic, which
overspread the whole country. In an obscure room in an old
ruin they sung the old hymns, and lived the old life of the
United States. I asked how this thing was, and they answered
that among those that went over so long ago were a few from
Chester County, Penn., who were brought up among the
Quakers, and had learned to read. Wherever a mother had
learned to read, she had educated all her children so that
they could read; but wherever there was a mother that could
not read, that family had lapsed off from the old customs of
the past.
Give us education. When we have a right to vote, there will
not be a school-door in the United States shut to woman.
When we have the right to vote, I believe that the womanhood
that demanded that the dram-bottle should go out of the
home, will demand that the dram-bottle shall be put away
from among men. She will say, You have no right to take
poison, and make my home a discomfort, or destroy the
greenbacks, which should be the mutual possession of the
household, by lighting your cigar. She will tell the world,
under the new regime, that it is not the Saxon blood that
demands a stimulant; but in the new morality it will be as
wicked for a man to be drunken as for a woman to be
drunken-- as disreputable for a man to be licentious as for
a woman to be licentious-- as wicked and perverse for a man
to go down to the lower depths of iniquity and folly as for
a woman. And the great law uttered upon Sinai amid its
thunders, will again be remembered, and will apply as much
to man as to woman. Now, it is not so. One code of morality
governs the voter, another the woman. As the slaveholder
enacted laws that made his own vices crimes in the slave, so
men enact laws that make their vices crimes in woman. And
this is why we want suffrage for woman.
I ask the ballot, not because of its individual advantage to
myself, but because I know and feel that individual rights,
guaranteed to every citizen, must harmonize the world, if
there is any power to do it this side of heaven. And so, not
quite eighty years old, as old Sojourner said she was, but
standing upon the brink of threescore, having looked this
question in the face from my girlhood up-- having labored in
almost every vocation in life that falls to the lot of
womanhood, as a worker on the farm, a worker in the
household, a wife, a mother, a seamstress, a cook-- and I
tell you, my friends, that I can make better biscuit than I
can lectures-- as one who has tried to study what is for the
best interest of society, I ask you candidly to survey this
subject in all its bearings. Why may we not take our
position as human beings enjoying all the privileges which
the Creator bestowed, without restriction other than falls
upon every other human being in the community?
A friend of mine, writing from Charleston the other day,
just after the ballot went down there, says that he was told
by a colored man, "I met my old master, and he bowed so low
to me I didn't hardly know which was the negro and which was
the white man." When we hold the ballot, we shall stand just
there. Men will forget to tell us that politics are
degrading. They will bow low, and actually respect the women
to whom they now talk platitudes; and silly flatteries,
sparkling eyes, rosy cheeks, pearly teeth, ruby lips, the
soft and delicate hands of refinement and beauty, will not
be the burden of their song; but the strength, the power,
the energy, the force, the intellect and the nerve, which
the womanhood of this country will bring to bear, and which
will infuse itself through all the ranks of society, must
make all its men and women wiser and better. (Applause.)
[The Association then adjourned until Friday morning, 101/2
o'clock.]
Second Day -
Evening Session
It is not to-day as it was
before the war. It is not to-day as it was before woman took
her destiny in her hand and went out upon the battle-fields,
and into the camp, and endured hunger and cold for the sake
of her country. The whole country has been vitalized by this
war. What if woman did not carry the bayonet on the
battle-field? She carried that which gave more strength and
energy. Travelling through Illinois, I saw the women bind
the sheaf, bring in the harvest, and plow the fields, that
men might fight the battles. When such women come up now and
ask for the right of suffrage, who will deny their request?
In the winter of 1859, the law was passed in New York giving
to married women the right to their own earnings. It was
said frequently then that women did not want the right to
their own earnings. We were asked if we wanted to create
separation in families. But did any revolution or any
special trouble grow out from this recognition of woman's
right? You see women everywhere to-day earnestly striving to
find a place to earn their bread. Madame Demorest has become
a leader of fashion, teaching women to make up what Stewart
imports; and she has a branch establishment in every large
city in the Union clear to Montana. I do not know but some
of those ladies cutting out garments, and setting the
fashions of the day, might aspire to the Presidential chair;
and perhaps they would be quite as capable as the present
incumbent--a tailor. (Applause.)
The complaint comes up everywhere that woman is wedded to
frivolity, and fashion, and idleness. Was there ever so busy
a nation of human souls as our nation of women to-day?
Within three months they have put on new trimmings, and
turned their dresses inside out and upside down, and the
whole country has been at work, as bees work in the hive,
getting things ready for summer wear. Is this idleness? And
why do they do this? Simply because the doors to more
profitable employment are closed, and they have nothing else
to do. Give them a chance to earn five dollars a day in
honorable work, and crocheting would go by the board. Give
woman the ballot, and no medical college will refuse her
admission or deny her a diploma. Give woman the ballot, and
every avenue of industry, everything that can give strength
and life to her soul, will be as open to her as to man.
Three years ago I found myself without the means of life. I
wanted a home. I had read about the beauties of a home, and
woman's appropriate sphere; and so I got a little home, and
went into it, and tried to get work. My old eyes would not
see to sew nicely, I was too feeble to wash, and so I tended
the garden. After a year had gone by I found that staying in
this beautiful home, and placing myself in woman's sphere,
had not brought me a dollar to pay my bills. So setting all
these theories at defiance, I said I will go and lecture;
and I went out into the lecturing field. I have money to pay
my bills to-day; but I could not have it were I to cling to
the sphere of home.
If a woman is doing the work of a good man's home, she is
doing her part, and she will not desire to go out from it
for any ordinary cause. But if she can make two dollars to
his one, allowing him to carry out his part of the
appointments of life, why should not she do it? When we can
be allowed to do the thousand things that womanly hands can
do as well as those of men, we shall make our lives useful.
But take my word for it, as an old mother, with her
grandchildren gathered about her, you will not find woman
deserting the highest instincts of her nature, or leaving
the home of her husband and children.
Why do you scold us, poor weak women, for being fashionable
and dressy, when snares are set at every corner to tempt us?
What would become of your dry-goods merchants and your
commerce if we did not wear handsome dresses--if the women
of this country were to become thus sensible to-day? Your
great stores on Broadway would be closed, and your stalwart
six-feet men would have to find something else to do besides
measuring tapes and ribbons. The whole country would undergo
a transformation. But it would be better for the country. It
would not take five years to pay the national debt, interest
and all, if you will apply the money spent by men for
tobacco and whiskey--if men will learn to be decent. I think
it is a great deal better to wear a pretty flower or ribbon
than to smoke cigars. It is a great deal better, and less
damaging to the conscience, to wear a handsome silk dress,
than for a man to put "an enemy into his mouth to steal away
his brains."
I honestly and conscientiously believe that we ought to make
the rights of humanity equal for all classes of the
community of adult years and of sound mind. I do not ask
that the girl should vote at eighteen, because she should
not be her own woman until she is twenty-one--at the same
age with the boy; and having raised both boys and girls, I
think I have a right to say that. Give us freedom from these
miserable prejudices, these restrictions and tyrannies of
society, and let us judge for ourselves. If it is true, as
science asserts, that girls inherit more of the character of
their father, while the boys follow in a more direct line
their mother, then how is it possible that women should not
have the same aspirations as men? I was born a mechanic, and
made a barrel before I was ten years old. The cooper told my
father, "Fanny made that barrel, and has done it quicker and
better than any boy I have had after six months' training."
My father looked at it and said, "What a pity that you were
not born a boy, so that you could be good for something. Run
into the house, child, and go to knitting." So I went and
knit stockings, and my father hired an apprentice boy, and
paid him two dollars a week for making barrels. Now, I was
born to make barrels, but they would not let me. Thousands
of girls are born with mechanical fingers. Thousands of
girls have a muscular development that could do the work of
the world as well as men; and there are thousands of men
born to effeminacy and weakness.
[Mrs. Stanton then addressed the meeting. As her line of
argument was a summary of that recently made before the
Judiciary Committee of the Legislature, and already
published, it need not here be repeated.
Miss Anthony announced that they would have another
opportunity to hear Sojourner Truth, and, for the
information of those who did not know, she would say that
Sojourner was for forty years a slave in this State. She is
not a product of the barbarism of South Carolina, but of the
barbarism of New York, and one of her fingers was chopped
off by her cruel master in a moment of anger.]
More History
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