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Part of the American
History & Genealogy Project |
Woman Suffrage
Introduction by Mrs. John A. Logan
In preparing sketches of the heroic
women who have fought the battles and won the victories of the
woman suffragists of the United States one is deeply impressed
by the similarity in heroism, steadfastness of purpose,
indefatigable industry, conscientious convictions and
determination of these noble women and the women of the
Revolution of 1776. The women of those trying days were
sustained by their convictions on the subject of human rights,
and with the suffragists the movement was started as a revolt
against what they considered cruel injustice toward the supposed
weaker sex, and because women had not equal rights under the
laws of which men were the authors and administrators. From the
early days of the Republic and the persecution and cruel
decisions of judges and jurors, American women have kept alive a
righteous resentment over the dis-crimination against them in a
Republic that pretended to be founded upon principles of equal
justice for all mankind before the law. The smoldering fires of
indignation were fanned into a flame by such courageous women as
Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Caroline
M. Seymour Severance and a host of remarkable women who have
enlisted in the cause of equal rights for women. It would take
volumes to list their achievements by causing the enactment of
laws in every state in the Union, lightening the burdens of
women and in securing protection for them against all forms of
injustice. Mrs. C E. Lucky, president of the Knoxville, Ky.,
Equal Suffrage League, has recently summed up some of the work
of the woman suffragists in so graphic a form that it is
herewith submitted:
"Woman suffrage is a very live issue in the world at present,
and though voted down in many places it refuses to remain
quiescent. In five states in our country, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho,
Colorado and Washington, the entire franchise is granted to
women. School suffrage for women prevails in twenty-nine states
and territories. In Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland and
the Isle of Man, women have been granted equal political rights.
All suffrage except the right of vote for members of Parliament
has been granted in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Denmark
and Sweden. Norway has granted equal political rights to women,
with the exception of a slight property qualification. In Canada
the same privileges have been bestowed on unmarried women and
widows, while nearly all the Canadian provinces grant municipal
suffrage to women. Now, what are the resulting benefits of equal
suffrage? In America the states having full or partial school
suffrage for women have less than one per cent, of illiteracy.
(Tennessee, by the way, has 14.2 per cent.) In Colorado and some
other equal suffrage states, since women have been voting, there
have been established: A state industrial school for girls,
parents' and truant schools, compulsory education, compulsory
examination of eyes, ears, teeth and breathing capacity of
children, a law giving teachers equal pay for equal work, and a
law pensioning teachers after a certain number of years. All
these good results have come because mothers and teachers have
had the ballot. Equal suffrage has helped the home life, since
there is not a department of the home that is not touched by
politics. It has widened all forms of charity and philanthropy,
increasing their efficiency a hundred-fold. Colorado and the
other suffrage states have established a splendid pure food law,
a law raising the age of consent to eighteen, the indeterminate
sentence for persons convicted of crime, compulsory factory
inspection, the making of fathers and mothers joint heirs of
deceased children, a reform in the registration laws and passing
of the referendum, initiative and recall, state traveling
libraries and the local option laws, thus enabling many towns
and counties to go dry. Instead of thinking less of their homes
and children, women who vote consider them more, and work harder
for them.
Let us turn again to the question of education. The per capita
for school expenditure in Massachusetts is $4.96; Pennsylvania,
$3.52; Virginia, $1.07; North Carolina, sixty-six cents;
Georgia, ninety-seven- cents; Colorado, $5.08. Equal suffrage
wherever tried has given the best laws for the protection and
rescuing of young girls, boys and children. It has improved the
legal condition of women, giving them just control over their
property, and mothers equal rights over their children (in many
states the mother is not regarded as the parent of the child,
which can be willed away from her even before it is born.) The
ballot has benefited the working women, cutting down their hours
of hard, brutal labor and providing more sanitary surroundings
in their places of employment. Women have wonderfully improved
political life, which has become higher and cleaner because they
vote. Women support reforms and candidates, and public officers
are looking more carefully to their record and moral standing.
The fate of the mayor and chief of police of Seattle is a fine
instance of the way women will vote against moral and official
corruption. We need not expect the millennium to come because of
equal suffrage, but through it already changes for the better
have been made in legislation and in public ideals, and the same
subtle feminine influence that is felt in the home makes the
home exert itself in the political life, rendering moral
considerations superior to mere partisanship. 'The women of
Denver have elected me, and made possible the juvenile court,
said Judge Lindsay, and we know that Democrats and Republicans
united in his cause, the cause of children.
But there is another and, what we might term, the indirect
benefit resulting from equal suffrage. This is the influence of
public life and its great responsibilities upon women
themselves. In exercising the rights and duties of citizenship
they read and discuss questions of real importance. Their lives
widen out, they have enlarged sympathies and higher standards of
life for themselves and their country. They acquire an intense
wish to be of real use in the world, and they now know how to
work, and are at last given the power to work with individual
freedom and independence. The testimony of the most
distinguished men and women is that the results of equal
suffrage are good. Norway says: 'Nothing but good, nothing but
purity has come from suffrage.' New Zealand says: 'If again
brought to the question, not two men would be found to oppose.'
The same witness comes from all the lands beyond the seas, while
in our country the distinguished Judge Ben Lindsay says: 'We
have in Colorado the most advanced laws of any state in the
Union for the care and protection of the home and the children.
I believe I voice the general impression when I say we owe this
condition more to woman suffrage than to any other cause.
The results of woman suffrage have been so altogether
satisfactory that it is hard to understand how it encounters
opposition in other states. I never heard a criticism directed
against woman suffrage that ever worked out in practice, or, if
it did, was not equally applicable to male suffrage.' As briefly
as maybe I would like to base on these facts an appeal for votes
for women. I say nothing of the right to vote. That is a
self-evident truth. One writer says: 'All powers of government
are either delegated or assumed, and all assumed powers are
usurpations.' Since women never gave men such powers they are
usurpations; they are tyranny. Taxation without representation
is another form of oppression. Why is it tyranny for men and not
for women? Why should women, the mothers who bear and care for
and train the children, teachers who give education and noble
purpose in life, business women who work hard to support
themselves and others dependent on them, why should these find
themselves legal nonentities? Women are under the laws, governed
and punished by them, let them have a voice in the legislation.
The ballot will take them out of the company of idiots and
convicts, and make them the equals of husbands and sons. It will
bring equal pay for equal work, give the women the power to work
for the conservation of children, the best asset of the state.
These are vital questions, with which women are peculiarly
fitted to deal. Men lose, the world loses, if opposition to
equal suffrage prevents the intelligent co-operation of the
sexes.
Lincoln says: "No man is good enough to govern another without
the other's consent.' Certainly no man or body of men is good
enough to arbitrarily make laws that, without their consent,
control the other class of human beings known as women.
Roosevelt says: 'Our nation is that one among all the nations of
the earth, which holds in its hand the fate of the coming
years.' Oh, men, for sixty-two years we have sought from you our
right to stand by your side in helping to make our country the
greatest, the best governed in the world. We have asked for
bread, and you have given us a stone. We have asked for justice,
and you prate of chivalry and generosity. Cease to praise us
like angels and disfranchise us like idiots. Oh, women! let us
combine our forces and join the great movement that alone will
give us real power, that will bind all women into one solid
phalanx, and make it one of the most impressive and irresistible
forces of the present day."
History
of Woman's Suffrage |
Prominent Suffragists
Women of
America
Source: The Part Taken by Women in
American History, By Mrs. John A. Logan, Published by The Perry-Nalle
Publishing Company, Wilmington, Delaware, 1912.
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