Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/742

712 the tone of her voice are more powerful over us than almost any man, be he eloquent as he may; but not only men are here, but women, also; and as our friend who has just spoken has addressed herself to men, I will address myself to women.

I have often thought that the obstacle in the way of a full allowance and recognition of woman's right to stand side by side with man in all the departments of life, and to add her feminine influence and fiber twined in with man's influence and fiber, in all things that are thought and done, that the obstacle lay more in woman than in man. I have often thought that men were more willing to accept these ideas and grant these claims than women were even to make the claims for themselves; and I have no doubt that those women who have labored, through so much difficulty, through so much scorn and obloquy, in behalf of these simple rights, will tell you that they have often found the greatest opposition among their own sex.

The simple proposition which, it seems to me, includes the whole of this matter, is, what I should call a self-evident truth—that, in all departments of life, men and women, made from the first to be co-mates and partners, should stand side by side, and work hand to hand. Not because men and women are identical, not because they are not different, but because they are different; because each has a special quality running through the whole organization of the man and the woman, which quality is needed to make a complete manhood and womanhood. And then there is another proposition, which is this: that whatever any human being can do well, that being has a right to do, and the ability of any person marks the sphere of that person. ("Hear"—"hear"). This, I say, I count to be strictly a self-evident proposition. (Applause). If you want to know what the level of water is at any particular spot upon the face of the earth, you do not force the water up with a force-pump, you do not build a great reservoir with high stone walls, to hold it, you simply leave it alone, and it finds its level. So, if you want to know what is the true sphere of man or woman, just leave the man or the woman alone, and the natural law, and the divine law, which can not be broken, and which are as sure in the moral and human world as they are in the external world, will settle the matter. If you want to know, really and sincerely, what woman's sphere is, leave her unhampered and untrammeled, and her own powers will find that sphere. She may make mistakes, and try, as man often does, to do things which she can not, but the experiment will settle the matter; and nothing can be more absurd than for man, especially, a priori, to establish the limits which shall bound woman's sphere, or for woman, as a mere matter of speculation, to debate what her sphere shall be, since the natural laws are revealed, not to speculation, but to action.

The obstacle to the progress of the simple ideas which underlie this movement and to their being carried out into practice, I take to be nothing else than this—the vis inertiæ of prejudice, the dead-weight of the customary and familiar—that which has been; and that is simply the dead-weight which hangs upon the wheels of every movement of reform. A thing has not not been, it is not customary, it is strange, it disturbs our ordinary modes of