all State Legislatures to act on this question, that when the old liberty bell rings in the dawn of the new century, we may all be free and equal citizens of a true republic.
Miss Anthony said that man neither supports woman nor protects her. The census reports show that two million women are entirely independent of men in regard to employments. Thousands of women do work outside the home from necessity. A million women are engaged in domestic service providing for their own necessities, and a million more are supporting their families and drunken husbands.
Letters were read from Dr. Mary Thomas, President of the Indiana Association, and from Clara Barton, then traveling in Italy, deploring the subject condition of women in foreign lands. The day after the Convention the ladies received their friends in the spacious parlors at Willard's Hotel. Congressmen, lawyers, clergymen, and many bright girls from the departments were among the guests. Nothing indicates the progress of a reform more readily than the cordial social recognition of its leaders. While pausing now and then to note the adverse winds we are compelled to encounter in the jealousies, discords, and divisions of friends, and in the ridicule and misrepresentation of enemies, a broader vision shows us that the great tidal waves of thought are all flowing in one direction.
May 11, 1875, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the suffrage movement was held in the new Masonic Temple, Twenty-third street, New York. This magnificent Hall for the first time echoed to the demands of woman for an equal share in the great interests of the world.
The convention was opened with prayer by the Rev. Olympia Brown, who referred most impressively to the coming Centennial, expressing the hope that the Fourth of July, 1876, might indeed be a day of jubilee, in which liberty and justice would be secured to the whole people. The resolutions[1] were discussed with great spirit by
- ↑ Resolved, That as complete individual development depends on the harmonious exercise of our three-fold nature, and undue power given to either deranges and undermines the whole being, so in the nation, a complete experiment of self-government can be made only by the equal recognition of the rights of all citizens, and in their homogeneous education into the laws of national life. Resolved, That the decision of Chief Justice Waite, in the case of Virginia L. Minor of Missouri, that according to the Federal Constitution woman is a citizen, but not entitled to the right of suffrage, is more infamous and retrogressive in principle at this hour, than was Chief-Justice Tancy's decision in the Dred Scott case, that a black man was not a United States citizen, and therefore not entitled to the rights of a citizen of every State. Whereas, By the recent decisions of the Supreme Court in the case of Myra Bradwell of Illinois, and of Virginia L. Minor of Missouri, the Federal Constitution is declared powerless to protect the civil and political rights of woman. Resolved, That it is the duty of Congress to take the necessary steps to secure an amendment to the Constitution that shall prohibit the several States from disfranchising citizens of the United States on account of sex.
