else, and cried out, 'Oh, God! why don't they call the reserves into action? We could help them.'"
Gentlemen, very few of us are very young women. We have forty, fifty, some of us seventy years of life behind us. We have stood on this eminence where you in your mistaken kindness and gallantry placed us, and we have been all this time looking down upon the battle-field of life where you have been engaged, single-handed and alone. Those of us who have had half a century have seen the ranks of men who started out in life with us shortened one half as they have gone. Here is a husband, there a brother or a father, men as dear to us as drops of our own heart's blood. We have seen them steadily sacrificed by means more appalling than those of Gettysburg, men literally slaughtered by licentiousness and drunkenness, and all the while we have looked on and been able to do nothing, and our agony has become so great that we exclaim, "Oh, God! why don't these brothers of ours call us, the reserves, into action? We could help them."
When I look back to the days of our great war, I remember that women sprang up every day all over the country—women of whom it was not before believed there was any patriotic blood in their veins. We all came together by one common instinct—saying, "What shall we do?" I could tell you of women who have died from exposure and suffering in the war. Hundreds of the very best women of the Northwest went down voluntarily as nurses, and in other capacities, and assisted suffering and dying men, until they themselves were almost at death's door. "When women do military duty, they shall vote!" We did do military duty. We did not cease our labors till all the soldiers had come home, wearied with their services. We have earned recognition at the hands of this government, and we ought to have it. Knowing, then, the qualities of woman and her courage and bravery under trials, I can never cease to demand that she shall have just as large a sphere as man has. All we want is, that you shall leave us free to act.
Mrs. Livermore then spoke of the attempts of men to define the sphere of women. Let the sphere of woman be tested by the aspiration and ability of their own minds, and let it be limited only by what we are able to do. Don't fear that women will not marry and make good wives if allowed legal equality with men. They even now make as good wives as men do husbands. Trust God. This talk of woman getting out of her sphere is sheer lack of faith in God. He has given us our natures. The gentlest woman is transformed into a tigress when you go between her and her baby. There's no sense, therefore, in the fear that the paltry lures of politicians will draw women from the home circle. There is no necessity to enact laws to keep women women. Woman's sphere is that which she can fill, whether it be sea-captain, merchant, school-teacher, or wife and mother.
Only two millions of women are among the producers of the country—five millions are wives and mothers, and eight millions are rusting out in idleness and frivolity. Take eight millions of men from the world of commerce and productive work; the deficit will be immediately felt. Add to the producers of the world eight millions of skilled women, and the quickening would be felt everywhere. Mrs. Livermore also urged the admission of women to political life from considerations drawn from the increase of the foreign element. East and West is a huge, ignorant, semi-barbarous