ballot is of little value to an unawakened, unaspiring people; their masters will look after matters. But American women are not unawakened or unaspiring. To many of them, life has grown painful, because their advancing ideal is dishonored by a sense of violated justice. Along with large freedom has come developed faculty, awakened desire, conscious power and public spirit. Precisely because their actual freedom is so large and sweet, they are galled by every rusty link of the old political chain. Not the mere handling of a ballot do they crave, but the position of unchallenged and unqualified equality, and the removal of the old brand of inferiority, which weakens alike their self-respect and their hold on the respect of others.
At present, the position of woman in the State is false, contradictory and uncomfortable. She has ceased to be a nobody; but she is not yet conceded to be a somebody. As she has gained many rights which were once denied, the old theory which made her a slave is overthrown; as she has not gained the absolute and chartered right of self-government, the new theory of her equality is not yet established. Of that equality suffrage is the symbol, as in this country it is now the symbol for men. She demands to be the custodian of her own affairs, and not to hold them by sufferance. She demands to be equal behind the law and in the law, as well as before the law.
The Committee on Nominations reported the list of officers[1] for the ensuing year.
Miss Eastman said: There are many questions of profound interest occupying the minds of the community, and people come together to unravel if possible the complications of business and human obligations; questions of railroads, of tariffs, of the protection of dumb animals, and, most important of all, of the delicate relations of society to the unfortunate classes, and of equity between man and man. All these need the consideration which is made possible by the accumulated wisdom of centuries and the insight which eighteen hundred years' study of Christian principles have developed. But I shall never get over a sense of anachronism, of being out of time, in arguing at this late day a claim for so fundamental a thing as human freedom. I rub my eyes to make sure that I have not been in a Rip Van Winkle slumber for a few centuries, and am not coming before a nineteenth century audience with an untimely protest against a wrong long since abolished, and of which children only hear nowadays in their study of history, or when their parents draw a picture of the sad old times when an injustice prevailed against one half the people, and these the mothers, wives, and daughters. But no! we have none of us been permitted to betake ourselves to a mount of delight and to rest in enchanted slumber while the great wrongs righted themselves. We are here on the hither side of the conflict and must put our puny human strength into the work. Though this is the nineteenth century after Christ, we are here—in the most civilized, or perhaps I should better say, the least uncivilized country on the face of the globe—to urge the right of one half the human race to the same personal freedom and voice in the control of its own and the general interests as are possessed by the other half.
- ↑ President: Mrs. Mary A. Livermore.
