The Hour Not Yet.
725
Bliss, who had declared in his pulpit that "the only two women the Bible mentioned as having meddled in politics were Jezebel and Herodias," was there also, to warn men not to vote for equal rights for women. At other polls I saw colored men, once slaves, electioneering and voting against the rights of women. When remonstrated with, one said: "We want the women at home cooking our dinners." A shrewd colored woman asked whether they had provided any dinner to cook, and added that most of the colored women there had to earn their dinner as well as cook it.
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Hear the conclusion of the whole matter. In the words of the last editorial of the woman's column in the Rocky Mountain News:
Woman's hour has not yet struck! The chimes that were waiting to ring out the tidings of her liberty—the candles furtively stored against an illumination which should typify a new influx of light, the achievement of a victory whose meaning and promise at least seemed to those who both prayed and worked for it, neither trivial nor selfish—all these are relegated to the guardianship of Patience and Hope. Colorado has refused to enfranchise its women.******The Germans, the Catholics, and the negroes were said to be against us. Naturally, those who themselves most keenly feel, or most recently have felt, the galling yoke of arbitrary rule, are most disposed to derive a certain enjoyment from the daily contemplation of a noble class still in bondage.*****But all opposition, in whatever guise, comes back at last to be written under one rubric—the immaturity of woman, We make this dispassionate statement of a fact. We feel neither scorn nor anger, and we trust that we shall excite none. It is a fault which time will cure, but meantime it is the grand factor in our account. Every other argument has been met— every other stronghold of opposition taken. Woman's claim to the ballot has been shown to rest in justice on the very foundation stone of democratic government—has been, from the Christian standpoint, as completely exonerated from the charge of impiety as ever anti-slavery and anti-polygamy were, and the fact which was the slogan of the anti-suffragists still remains: the mass of the women do not want it. We do not quarrel with the fact, but state it to give the real reason for our failures—the real objective point for our future work.
The complacency with which we are able to state without fear of contradiction that the body of intelligent and thoughtful women do want suffrage must not obscure our perception of the equal truth of what we have just stated above. To accept this verity and turn our energies toward the emancipation of our own sex—toward their emancipation from frivolous aims, petty prejudices, and that attitude toward the other sex which is really the sycophancy born of vanity and weakness; to make them recognize the State as a multiplication of their own families, and patriotism as the broadening of their love of home; to make them see that that mother will be most respected whose son does not, when a downy beard is grown, suddenly tower above her in the supercilious enjoyment of an artificial superiority—a superiority which consists simply, as Figaro says, in his having taken the trouble to be born; to make them see, finally, that in the highest exercise of all the powers with which God has endowed her, woman can no more refuse the duties of citizenship, than she can refuse the duties of wifehood and motherhood, once having accepted those sacred relations. This is our first duty, and this the scope of our work, if we would attain suffrage in 1879, or even in 1900.
