housekeeper, cook, washerwoman, and waiter-in-general, she might possibly inquire into the stewardship of her lord and master. And it seemed to me if that ever came to pass, a man who could say "no" so cavalierly, without even a "thank you, ma'am," or, "you're quite welcome," both could and would manage to make surroundings rather disagreeable to the party of the second part. So far no person who has thought much, read much, or suffered much, has refused to sign, and in the few hours which I have devoted to the work, three grandmothers nearly ninety years of age, wished to have their names recorded on the right side of the question, and in two of those instances the grandmother, daughter, and grandfather affixed their signatures, one after another.[1]
We have been permitted to copy the following private letter from A.J. Grover to Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is now at her home in Tenafly, N. J., busily at work with Miss Anthony and Mrs. Gage on the second volume of the "History of Woman Suffrage." The first volume should be on the center-table of every family in the land as a complete text-book on the woman suffrage question, which is to be one of the great issues, social and political, in the coming years. These three women have grown old and won their crowns of white hair in the cause of not only their sex, but of mankind:
My Dear Friend: You represent a movement of more importance to mankind than any that ever before claimed attention in the whole history of the race, viz.: the freedom of one-half of it. You have enforced this claim by half a century of heroic discussion—of persistent, unanswerable logic and appeal against the theory and practice of all nations, against all governments, codes and creeds. You proclaimed fifty years ago the novel doctrine that woman by nature is, and by law and usage should be, the absolute equal of man. A claim so self-evident should only have to be stated to be recognized by all civilized nations; and yet to this hour the highest civilization, equally with the lowest, is built on the slavery of woman. In the darkest corners of the earth and on the sunlit heights of civilization, the mothers of the race are by law, religion and custom doomed to degradation. And if the seal of their bondage is never to be broken, they themselves as well as the lords and masters they serve, are equally unconscious of the servitude. No religion, no civil government, has ever taught or recognized any other condition for woman than that of subjection. Against the accumulated precedents of all the ages, you and your noble coädjutors have rebelled in the face of derision for fifty long, weary years. Was ever such sublime womanly heroism and self-sacrifice before known? Was ever such worth of culture, such wealth of womanhood, laid on the altar of country and humanity? And all this comparatively unrecognized and unrewarded. Where is the boasted chivalry of the English-speaking nations? It is a virtue we boast of, but do not possess. It never, in fact, had any real existence based on genuine respect for woman. It is a bitter sarcasm in the mouth of an American male citizen. A few men like Theodore Parker, Joshua R. Giddings, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, Samuel J. May and Parker Pillsbury have measurably redeemed this nation, recognizing your claim for woman as self-evidently just and righteous, and coöperating with you in maintaining it. There are only a score or two of such men in a generation with sufficient chivalry or perception of justice to publicly claim for women the rights they themselves possess.
- ↑ When at Durand, near Davis, in 1877, Mrs. Davis and her husband drove over, and at the close of my lecture, she gave me her maiden name and said, "Do you not remember me? I sat by your side and fairly pushed you up in that teachers' convention at Rochester, in 1853, when you made that first speech you told about; and I have been most earnestly hoping and working for the enfranchisement of women ever since."—[S.B.A
