now in 1885 his vote is ever adverse to women's enfranchisement. When the fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution was proposed, in which the negro's liberty and his right to the ballot were to be established, an effort was made to secure in it some recognition of the rights of woman. Massachusetts sent a petition, headed with the name of Lydia Maria Child, against the introduction of the word "male" in the proposed amendment. When this petition was offered to the greatest of America's emancipation leaders, for presentation to congress, he received and presented it under protest. He thought the woman question should not be forced at such a time, and the only answer from congress this "woman-intruding" petition received was found in the fourteenth amendment itself, in which the word "male," with unnecessary iteration, was repeated, so that there might be no mistake in future concerning woman's rights, under the Constitution of the United States.[1]
The war was over. The rights of the black man, for whom the women had worked and waited, were secured, but under the new amendment, by which his race had been made free, the white women of the United States were more securely held in political slavery. It was time, indeed, to hold conventions and agitate anew the question of woman's rights. The lesson of the war had been well learned. Women had been taught to understand politics, the "science of government," and to take an interest in public events; and some who before the war had not thought upon the matter, began to ask themselves why thousands of ignorant men should be made voters and they, or their sex, still kept in bondage under the law.
In 1866, May 31, the first meeting of the American Equal Rights Association was held at the Meionaon in Boston.[2] In 1868 the call for a New England convention was issued and the meeting was held November 18, 19, at Horticultural Hall, Boston. James Freeman Clarke presided. In this convention sat many of the distinguished men and women of the New England States,[3]
- ↑ As an original question, no friend of woman suffrage can deny that it was a mean thing to put the word "male" into the fourteenth amendment. It was, doubtless, wise to adopt that amendment. It was an extension of the right of suffrage, and so far in the line of American progress, yet it was also an implied denial of the suffrage to women.—[Warrington in the Springfield Republican.
- ↑ See Vol. II., page 178.
- ↑ John Neal came from Maine; Nathaniel and Armenia White from New Hampshire; Isabella Hooker from Connecticut; Thomas W. Higginson from Rhode Island; and John G. Whittier, Samuel May, jr., Gilbert Haven, John T. Sargent, Frank W. Bird, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, William S. Robinson, Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, with a host of others, from Massachusetts. Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell, who then lived in New Jersey, were also among the speakers.
