On what authority, save that of the gross regality of physical strength, do you deny to a thoughtful, educated, tax-paying person the common rights of citizenship because she is a woman? I am a property-owner, the head of a household. By what right do you assume to define and curtail for me my prerogatives as a citizen, while as a tax-payer you make not the slightest distinction between me and a man? Leave to my own perception what is proper for me as a lady, to my own discretion what is wise for me as a woman, to my own conscience what is my duty to my race and to my God. Leave to unerring nature to protect the subtle boundaries which define the distinctive life and action of the sexes, while you as a legislator do everything in your power to secure to every creature of God an equal chance to make the best and most of himself.
If American men could say, as Huxley says, "I scorn to lay a single obstacle in the way of those whom nature from the beginning has so heavily burdened," the sexes would cease to war, men and women would reign together, the equal companions, friends, helpers and lovers that nature intended they should be. But what is love, tenderness, protection, even, unless rooted in justice? Tyranny and servitude, that is all, brute supremacy, spiritual slavery. By what authority do you say that the country is not prepared for a more enlightened franchise, for political equality, if even six women citizens, earnest, eloquent, long-suffering, come to you and demand both?
All the women's papers expressed indignation, and there was general rejoicing when, at the next election, Mr. Wadleigh was superseded by Hon. Henry W. Blair.
The first favorable consideration this question ever received from the Senate was the minority report of this committee, signed by Senators George F. Hoar, John H. Mitchell and Angus Cameron, an unanswerable argument for the enfranchisement of women.2 It declared that "the people of the United States are committed to the doctrine of universal suffrage by their constitution, their history and their opinions, and by it they must stand or fall." One week later the bill admitting women to practice before the Supreme Court passed the Senate, grandly advocated by Senators McDonald, Sargent and Hoar.
After the convention Miss Anthony went to Tenafly with Mrs. Stanton for a few days, to aid in disentangling the mass of material which was being prepared for the History; then started again into the lecture field, commencing at Skowhegan, Me. She lectured through New Hampshire and Vermont, taking long sleigh-rides from point to point, through wind and sleet, but comforted by the thought that many of her audience had done likewise to receive the gospel she preached. On her way westward she stopped at home for one short day, the first for four months, and then started on the old route through the States of the Middle West, this year adding Kentucky to the list. It is not essential to a full appreciation of her work to follow in detail these tours, which extended through a number of years and were full of pleasant as well as disagreeable features; nor is it possible to quote extensively the comments of the press. Miss Anthony undoubtedly has been as widely written up as any lecturer, and she seldom received less than a column in each paper of every town visited. Large numbers of these notices have been carefully preserved in those wonderful scrap-books which cover a period of fifty years.
At first her demands seemed so radical and the idea of a woman on the platform was so contrary to the precedent of all the ages, that the tone of the press, almost without exception, was contemptuous or denunciatory. As the justice of her claims began to dawn upon the minds of enlightened people, as many other prominent women joined in advocating the same reforms, and as these were adopted, one after another, without serious consequences, the public mind awakened to the remarkable change which was being wrought, and in a large measure gave its approval. When the masses of people throughout the country came to see and hear and know Miss Anthony, they resented the way in which she had been misrepresented. There was in her manner and words so much of dignity, earnestness and sincerity that "those who came to scoff remained to pray," and this change of sentiment was nowhere so marked as in the newspapers. Even those who differed radically from her views paid tribute to the persistence with which she had urged them and the sacrifices she had made for them during the past thirty years. Not only had there been developed a recognition of her high purposes and noble life, but also of her great intellectual ability and clear comprehension of all the issues of the day. An extract from the Terre Haute Express, February 12, 1879, illustrates this:
Miss Anthony's lecture was full of fine passages and strong appeals, and replete with well-stated facts in support of her arguments. She has wonderful command of language, and her speech at times flows with such rapidity that no reporter could do her justice or catch a tithe of the brilliance of her sayings. Moreover, there are not half of our public men who are nearly so well posted in the political affairs of our country as she, or who, knowing them, could frame them so solidly in argument. If the women of the nation were half so high-minded or even half so earnest, their title to the franchise might soon be granted.3
Another Indiana paper thus voiced the changing sentiment: "The fact is, that like the advance agent of any great reform—especially if a woman—Susan B. Anthony has been so belied and maligned by the press in years gone by that many who do not stop to think had come to believe her a perfect ogre, a cross-grained, incongruous old maid whom nobody could like, when the truth of the matter is, one has but to look at and listen to her, either in public or private, to realize that she is a pure, generous, deep-thinking, womanly woman. Simply because she has lived her own life, spoken her own thoughts and stood upon her own platform, the masses have condemned her; but history has already recorded her as one of the most earnest, hard-working reformers of the day. If the women of this country only knew how many changes and ameliorations have been made in the laws regarding themselves through her unselfish, persistent efforts, at her approach they would all rise up and call her blessed." But that there still existed editors of the old-time caliber, this extract from the Richmond, Ky., Herald, October 29, 1879, shows:
Miss Anthony is above the medium height for women, dresses plainly, is uncomely in person, has rather coarse, rugged features and masculine manners. Her piece, which doubtless she has been studying for thirty or forty years, was very well delivered for a woman, containing no original thought, but full of old hackneyed ideas, which every female suffrage shrieker has hurled from the stump against "ignorant men and small boys," for time out of mind all over this country and every other country where they could command an audience of curious people willing to throw away an hour or two on a vain, futile and foolish harangue, proposing to transform men into women and women into men. Such dissatisfied females should not hurl anathemas at men, forsooth, because they happened to be born into the world women instead of men. God alone is responsible for the difference between the sexes, and he is able to bear it. Men are not to blame that women are women, for there is not a man in this whole land who wouldn't rather have a boy baby than a gal baby any time. There never was a newly-married man when he learned that his first born was a girl, that didn't try to tear out his hair by the roots because it wasn't a boy.... If this tirade against men is to be persisted in, we see no escape for man except to quit his foolishness and have no more children, unless he can have some sort of guarantee that they will all be boys. It will have come to a strange pass indeed when the good women of this land, who, as mothers, have the nurture, training and admonition of every boy from his cradle to mature manhood, are unwilling to trust in the hands of their own offspring the destinies of the nation.
That such an attack can not be attributed to sectional prejudice may be proved by this extract from a column of vituperation in the Grand Rapids, Mich., Times, during this same trip, headed "Spinster Susan's Suffrage Show:"
A "miss" of an uncertain number of years, more or less brains, a slimsy figure, nut-cracker face and store teeth, goes raiding about the country attempting to teach mothers and wives their duty.... As is the yellow-fever to the South, the grasshopper to the plains, and diphtheria to our northern cities, so is Susan B. Anthony and her class to all true, pure, lovely women. The sirocco of the desert blows no hotter or more tainting breath in the face of the traveller, than does this woman against all men who do not believe as she does, and no pestilence makes sadder havoc among them than would Susan B. Anthony if she had the power. The women who make homes, who are sources of comfort