State protesting against the enfranchisement of women. Senator Hoar called attention to the fact that the writer herself was an office-holder, a member of the State Board of Lunacy and Charity, to which Senator Vest answered:
Oh, no, Mr. President, this will not do. If we are to tear down all the blessed traditions, if we are to desolate our homes and firesides, if we are to unsex our mothers and wives and sisters and turn our blessed temples of domestic peace into ward political-assembly rooms, pass this joint resolution. But for one I thank God that I am so old-fashioned that I would not give one memory of my grandmother or of my mother for all the arguments that could be piled, Pelion upon Ossa, in favor of this political monstrosity.
I now present a pamphlet sent to me by a lady. I do not know whether she be wife or mother. She signs this pamphlet as Adeline D. T. Whitney. I have read it twice, and read it to pure and gentle and intellectual women. I shall not read it today for my strength does not suffice.[2] .... There is not one impure, unintellectual aspiration or thought throughout the whole of it. Would to God that I knew her, that I could thank ber on behalf of the society and politics of the United States for This production. She says to her own sex: "After all, men work for women; or, if they think they do not, it would leave them but sorry satisfaction to abandon them to such existence as they could arrange without us."
Oh, how true that is, how true!- ↑ The advocates of woman suffrage have repeatedly had bills in the various Legislatures asking that women might be appointed on the boards of all State institutions, and as physicians in all where women and children are placed, but up to the present day not one woman is allowed this privilege in Senator Vest's own State of Missouri.
- ↑ This does not accord with the argument of Senator Brown that man must do the voting for the family on account of his superior physical strength.