Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/430

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University of Vermont Opened to Women.
389

tain tate is and has been especially liberty-loving. But during the two brief visits we made last winter, we were told again and again, by Vermont men, that the only reason for the non-introduction of slavery was the impracticability of that form of labor among the Green Mountains—that slavery could never have been made profitable there, and that this, and not principle and heroic love of freedom, prevented Vermont from ever being a slave State. Nowhere, not even in the roughest and remotest West, have we met with such vulgar rudeness, ill-manners and heroic lying as we encountered in Vermont. The lecturers who were invited into the State by the Vermont Woman Suffrage Association, composed wholly of men, were in many instances left unsupported by them, allowed to meet the frequently rough audiences as best they could, to pay their own bills, and to manage the campaign as they might. At the very first intimation of opposition on the part of the Montpelier Argus, the Watchman and the Burlington Free Press—an unworthy trio of papers that appear to control the majority—many members of the State association showed the "white feather," and either apologetically backed out of the canvass, or ignominiously kept silent in the background. There was, therefore, nothing like a thorough discussion of the question, no fair meeting of truth and error, not even an attempt to canvass the State. For, not ambitious to waste their efforts on such flinty soil, the men and women who were invited to labor there shook off the dust (snow) of Vermont from their feet, and turned to more hopeful fields of labor.

Let it not be supposed, however, that this vote of the delegates of the constitutional convention is any indication of the sentiment of the women on this question. The fact that 231 women of lawful age, residents of Brattleborough, and 96 of Newfane, sent a petition for woman suffrage, with their reasons for asking it, to Charles K. Field, delegate from that town to the constitutional convention; that petitions from other hundreds of women have been forwarded to congress, praying for a sixteenth amendment; that, by letters and personal statements, we know the most intelligent and thoughtful women everywhere rebel against the State laws whose heathenism, despotism and absurdity were so well shown by Mrs. Nichols in 1845—all these facts are proofs that the sentiment of Vermont women is not represented by the constitutional convention now in session at Montpelier.—[M. A. L.

August 12, 1871, our Burlington correspondent says:

While conventions, picnics and bazar meetings, in the cause of woman suffrage, have been held in our sister States, an event has very quietly occurred with us which we deem an important step in the right direction, viz.: the admission of women to the University. By an almost unanimous vote of the corporation, a few conservatives opposing it, the matter was referred to the faculty, who are understood to be heartily in favor of the "new departure." The college that has thus thrown its doors wide open to all, is the University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, founded by the munificence of General Ira Allen in 1791. It commenced operations in 1800; the Federal troops used its buildings for barracks in the war of 1812; the buildings (and library) were burned in 1824, and reconstructed[Pg 390] in the following year, when the corner-stone was laid by General Lafayette. It sent forth nearly all its sons to the great rebellion. Indeed, at one time its condition served to remind one of the lines of Holmes—