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HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.
This growth of public sentiment has been occasioned by the needs of the children and the working women of that great State. I come here to ask you to make a niche in the statesmanship and legislation of the nation for the domestic interests of the people. You recognize that the masculine thought is more often turned to material and political interests. I claim that the mother-thought, the woman-element needed, is to supplement the statesmanship of American men on political and industrial affairs with domestic legislation.
In her closing address Miss Anthony took up the question of obtaining suffrage for women through the States instead of Congress and said:
My answer is that I do not wish to see the women of the thirty-eight States of this Union compelled to leave their homes to canvass each one of these, school district by school district. It is asking too much of a moneyless class. The joint earnings of the marriage co-partnership in all the States belong legally to the husband. It is only that wife who goes outside the home to work whom the law permits to own and control the money she earns. Therefore, to ask of women, the vast majority of whom are without an independent dollar of their own, to make a thorough canvass of their several States, is asking an impossibility.
We have already made the experiment of canvassing four States —Kansas in 1867, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, Nebraska in 1882—and in each, with the best campaign possible for us to make, we obtained a vote of only one-third. One man out of every three voted for the enfranchisement of the women of his household, while two out of every three voted against it.
We beg, therefore, that instead of insisting that a majority of the individual voters must be converted before women shall have the franchise, you will give us the more hopeful task of appealing to the representative men in the Legislatures of the several States. You need not fear that we shall get suffrage too quickly if Congress submits the proposition, for even then we shall have a long siege in going from Legislature to Legislature to secure the vote of threefourths of the States necessary to ratify the amendment. It may require twenty years after Congress has taken the initiative step, to obtain action by the requisite number, but once submitted by Congress it always will stand until ratified by the States.Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s paper on Self-Government the Best Means of Self-Development was read to the committee. A few extracts will serve to show its broad scope:
The basic idea of a republic is the right of self-government, the right of every citizen to choose his own representatives and to have a voice in the laws under which he lives. As this right can be secured only by the exercise of the suffrage, the ballot in the hand of
