And shall an American woman shrink from her duty when there is so much power in her hands for good? I know that a great many women have not been educated up to a condition that would teach them fully how to act. Like the slave, they have had too much thinking and acting done for them, until now they feel incompetent to discharge these duties for themselves. Our great duty, then, which we who know better should consider imposed upon us, is that of educating women up to the proper standard. Shall we be beggars for that which is, of right, ours? Shall there not be one law for the brothers and the daughters throughout this entire country? As Mr. Beecher has well said, women have borne their full share of martyrdom; and it strikes me that it is now about time for her redemption from the evils of her position. If she has to suffer from the evils of a defective or vicious system of laws, put in her hands the power to protect herself, to mitigate the sufferings of her sex, to preserve and defend the right and to suppress the wrong.
Mrs. Miriam M. Cole spoke at some length. The spirit of '76, she said, influenced Mrs. John Adams to write to her husband to inquire if it were generous in American men to keep their wives in thraldom, when they were emancipating the whole earth. Had the spirit of that letter animated the wife of Mr. Lincoln when his emancipation proclamation was issued, how pertinently could she have made the same inquiry! The laws regarding women were written down so plain that those may run who read, and they who read had better run.
Mrs. Celia Burleigh said: Several references have been made to the work of women in the church. I am glad to be able to introduce to you now the pastor of one of the most popular churches of New Haven, and whose church, I am happy to say, is crowded every Sunday—Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford.
Mrs. Hanaford said: Speaking with Horace Greeley a few weeks ago, he replied to my query why he was not in favor of woman suffrage, by saying that he did not think women would gain the opportunity of suffrage or improve the opportunity if they had it, until they should come to consider suffrage a duty, and he declared that he had never known any one to advocate woman suffrage on the ground of duty.
I was amazed at his assertion in the face of all the speeches and lectures which such women as Lucretia Mott and her conscientious co-laborers had made and delivered during the last twenty years. The very next night, I heard Anna Dickinson in the largest hall in New Haven, and before nearly 3,000 people, urge the women present to consider their duty to this vast Republic in which we dwell, and whose starry banner is as dear to women as to men. The keynote of her bugle-call to the rescue was the idea of duty, and that is the idea which inspires the women on this platform to-day, while thousands of hearts throughout our Union respond, with the same sentiment, to their appeals from the platform, the pulpit, and the press.
Leading reformers of the world are telling us in clarion notes, and in thunder tones, with the voice of warning or of appeal, that woman owes service to the State, and that it is her duty to strive earnestly that she may have that ballot in her own hand which shall be at once her educator and protector, her sceptre and her sword. But I have heard the Master's voice, speaking through Lucy Stone and her co-workers, and speaking in my own