Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/199

Suffrage Committee in the Capitol, and she was heard with much interest. Beginning with the playful manner which rendered her speeches so attractive, she closed with great seriousness:

I suppose these honorable gentlemen think that we women want the earth, when we only want half of it. We call their attention to the fact that our brethren have encroached upon the sphere of woman. They have definitely marked out that sphere, and then they have proceeded with their incursion by the power of invention. They have taken away the loom and the spinning-jenny, and they have obliged Jenny to seek her occupation somewhere else. They have set even the tune of the old knitting-needle to humming by steam. So that we women, full of vigor and desire to be active and useful and to react upon the world around us, finding our industrial occupations largely gone, have been obliged to seek out a new territory and to pre-empt from the sphere of our brothers some of that which they have hitherto considered their own.

I know it is a sentiment of chivalry in some good men which hinders them from giving us the ballot. They think we might not be what they admire so much; they think we should be lacking in womanliness of character. I ask you to notice if the women who have been in this International Council, if the women who are school teachers all over this nation, if these hundreds of thousands are not a womanly set of women, and yet they have gone outside of the old sphere. We believe that in the time of peace women can come forward and with peaceful plans can use weapons which are grand and womanly, and that their thoughts, winged with hope and the force of the heart given to them, will have an effect far mightier than physical power. For that reason we ask you that they shall be allowed to stand at the ballot-box, because we believe that there every person expresses his individuality. The majesty or the meanness of a person comes out at the ballot-box more than anywhere else. The ballot is the compendium of all there is in civilization, and of all that civilization has done for us. We believe that the mothers who had the good sense to train noble men, like you who have achieved high positions, had the good sense to train your sisters in the same way, and that it is a pity the State has lost that other half of the conservative power which comes from a Christian rearing and a Christian character.

I have spoken thus on the principles which have made me, a conservative woman, devoted to the idea of the ballot, and one in heart with all these good and true suffrage women, though not one in organic community. I represent before you the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and not a suffrage society, but I bring these principles to your sight, and I ask you, my brothers, to be grand and chivalrous towards us in this new departure which we now wish to make.

I ask you to remember that it is women who have given the costliest hostages to fortune, and out into the battle of life they have sent