Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/553

Rh own sphere of action, and to have a voice in the laws and rulers under which they live. Suppose I should go to vote, and some man should push me back and say, "You want to be Governor, don't you?" "No," I reply, "I want to exercise my God-given right to vote." Such a taunt as this would be no more insulting than those now cast at women, when they demand rights so unjustly denied.

I make no claim that woman is fit to be a member of Congress or President; all I ask for her is what I ask for the negro, a fair field. All will admit that woman has a right to herself, to her own powers of locomotion, to her own earnings, but how few are prepared to admit her right to the ballot. But all rights are held by a precarious tenure, if this one be denied. When women are the constituents of men who make and administer the laws, they will pay due consideration to their interests and not before. The right of suffrage is the great right that guarantees all others.

Mr. Smith set forth the education, the dignity, the power of self-government, and took his seat amid great applause.

said: It is the duty of woman to resist taxation as long as she is not represented. It may involve the loss of friends as it surely will the loss of property. But let them all go; friends, house, garden spot, and all. The principle at issue requires the sacrifice. Resist, let the case be tried in the courts; be your own lawyers; base your cause on the admitted self-evident truth, that taxation and representation are inseparable. One such resistance, by the agitation that will grow out of it, will do more to set this question right than all the conventions in the world. There are $15,000,000 of taxable property owned by women of Boston who have no voice either in the use or imposition of the tax.

, a school teacher, said: That the natures of men and women showed that their spheres were not the same, and woman was only truly lovely and happy when in her own element. He wished woman to recognize the feminine element in her being, for if she understood this, it would guide her in everything. In the domestic animals even this difference was manifest. Women should be keepers at home, and mind domestic concerns. The true object of this Convention is, I fear, not so much to acquire any real or supposed rights, as to make the speakers and actors conspicuous. I urge those engaged in this movement to claim nothing masculine for woman.

said: Mr. Brigham's allusion to the animal world is not a happy one, as no animal has been discovered which legislated aay the rights of the female.

said: He would hand his esteemed friend over to Lucretia Mott, that he might be slain like Abimelech of old, by the hand of a woman; as evidently from his estimate of the sex, that would be the most humiliating death he could suffer. I trust no gentleman on this platform will consent to play the part of the armor-bearer in his behalf, and rescue him from his impending fate.

said: It was impossible for one man to have arbitrary