Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/94

it is but respectful to a very large number of people in all our States that there should be a committee to receive and consider and report upon these petitions which come to us from time to time.

The House refused to allow a vote.

The Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage granted a hearing March 7, 1884, at 10:30 a. m., in the Senate reception room, to the speakers and delegates in attendance at the convention, the entire committee being present.^[1] In introducing the speakers Miss Anthony said: "This is the sixteenth year that we have come before Congress in person, and the nineteenth by petitions, asking national protection for the citizen's right to vote, when the citizen happens to be a woman."

Mrs. Harriet R. Shattuck (Mass.): We canvassed four localities in the city of Boston, two in smaller cities, two in country districts and made one record also of school teachers in nine schools of one town. The teachers were unanimously in favor of woman suffrage, and in the nine localities we found that the proportion of women in favor was very much larger than of those opposed. The total of women canvassed was 814. Those in favor were 405, those opposed, 44; indifferent, 166; refused to sign, 160; not seen, 39. These canvasses were made by respectable, responsible women, and they swore before a Justice of the Peace as to the truth of their statements. Thus we have in Massachusetts this reliable canvass of women showing those in favor are to those opposed as nine to one. . . . .

Mrs. May Wright Sewall (Ind.): . . . . My friend has said that men have always kept us just a little below them where they could shower upon us favors and they have done that generously. So they have, but, gentlemen, has your sex been more generous to women than they have been generous toward you in their favors? Neither can dispense with the service of the other, neither can dispense with the reverence of the other or with the aid of the other in social life. The men of this nation are rapidly finding that they can not dispense with the service of woman in business life. I know that they are also feeling the need of the moral support of woman in their political life.

You, gentlemen, by lifting the women of the nation into political equality would simply place us where we could lift you where you never yet have stood upon a moral equality with us. I do not speak to you as individuals but as the representatives of your sex, as I stand here the representative of mine, and never until we are your equals politically will the moral standard for men be what

1. This committee was composed of Senators Cockrell (Mo.), Fair (Nev.), Brown (Ga.), Anthony (R. I.), Blair (N. H.). Palmer (Mich.). Lapham (N. Y.).