It is one of the saddest, the most discouraging, features of any reform to find its worst foes are they of its own household. But the woman movement is not unique in this particular. Other reforms have presented the self-same characteristic. He who is familiar with the history of labor-saving machinery in this country knows that its introduction was fought inch by inch by that very class whose condition it was especially designed to ameliorate. If the Jews were the first to crucify instead of receive their Messiah, we know that the bad precedent which they established has not been lost upon succeeding generations. My friends, every reform begets a vast amount of ignorant opposition before which its advocates must simply possess their souls in patience.
This opposition among women shows itself in two distinct ways. The first kind manifests itself in holding meetings, framing petitions, and soliciting signatures, asking Congress to withhold the right of suffrage from the women of the land. I make no quarrel with that kind of opposition, nay, more, I entertain for it a certain kind of regard, for two reasons: First, because any decision that is candid and the result of reflection, entitles the holder to respect, but secondly and mainly, because it is no opposition at all. These persons are our friends, doing just what we are, no more and no less. For, mind you, it is not the mere dropping of the ballot once or twice a year on the part of woman to which public opinion is such a dead set. It is that which follows the ballot, that which the ballot involves. It is the office holding, the introduction of woman into public life, this stepping outside of what has always been considered her particular sphere. And so these women, who are memorializing Legislatures to deny their sisters the ballot, are doing our work, in that they are breaking the crust of that bitter prejudice which says that a woman's business is to keep house and tend babies, utterly regardless of the fact that every community contains scores of women who have neither houses to keep, nor babies to tend; doing our work in their own way, to be sure, in a way that reflects little credit on their good sense, but we shall not be particular about that if they are not. My verdict for such women is, let them alone. We shall be the losers if they ever find out their mistake.
But that kind of opposition which we dread the most, which takes the courage out of the most courageous, and the heart out of the most earnest, is the opposition of utter insensibility, of stolid indifference, which the mass of women exhibit, not only to this question, but to any question that does not touch their immediate personal interests. If I had a cause, of whatever kind, to advocate on its merits alone, one argument to make that appealed to a reasonable intellect, a discriminating judgment, I should want an audience not of women. It is a sad, a humiliating fact that the great mass of women are not thinkers.
At the morning session Colonel Higginson read a letter from Henry Ward Beecher.
