Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/244

224 those of men, we shall make our lives useful. But take my word for it, as an old mother, with her grandchildren gathered about her, you will not find woman deserting the highest instincts of her nature, or leaving the home of her husband and children.

Why do you scold us, poor weak women, for being fashionable and dressy, when snares are set at every corner to tempt us? What would become of your dry-goods merchants and your commerce if we did not wear handsome dresses—if the women of this country were to become thus sensible to-day? Your great stores on Broadway would be closed, and your stalwart six-feet men would have to find something else to do besides measuring tapes and ribbons. The whole country would undergo a transformation. But it would be better for the country. It would not take five years to pay the national debt, interest and all, if you will apply the money spent by men for tobacco and whisky—if men will learn to be decent. I think it is a great deal better to wear a pretty flower or ribbon than to smoke cigars. It is a great deal better, and less damaging to the conscience, to wear a handsome silk dress, than for a man to put "an enemy into his mouth to steal away his brains."

I honestly and conscientiously believe that we ought to make the rights of humanity equal for all classes of the community of adult years and of sound mind. I do not ask that the girl should vote at eighteen, but at twenty-one—the same age with the boy; and having raised both boys and girls, I think I have a right to say that. Give us freedom from these miserable prejudices, these restrictions and tyrannies of society, and let us judge for ourselves. If it is true, as science asserts, that girls inherit more of the character of their father, while the boys follow in a more direct line their mother, then how is it possible that women should not have the same aspirations as men? I was born a mechanic, and made a barrel before I was ten years old. The cooper told my father, "Fanny made that barrel, and has done it quicker and better than any boy I have had after six months' training." My father looked at it and said, "What a pity that you were not born a boy, so that you could be good for something. Run into the house, child, and go to knitting." So I went and knit stockings, and my father hired an apprentice boy, and paid him two dollars a week for making barrels. Now, I was born to make barrels, but they would not let me. Thousands of girls are born with mechanical fingers. Thousands of girls have a muscular development that could do the work of the world as well as men; and there are thousands of men born to effeminacy and weakness.

Mrs. Stanton then addressed the meeting. As her line of argument was a summary of that recently made before the Judiciary Committee of the Legislature, and already published, it need not here be repeated.

Miss announced that they would have another opportunity to hear Sojourner Truth, and, for the information of those who did not know, she would say that Sojourner was for forty years a slave in this State. She is not a product of the barbarism of South Carolina, but of the barbarism of New York, and one of her fingers was chopped off by her cruel master in a moment of anger.

said: I have lived on through all that has taken place these forty years in the anti-slavery cause, and I have plead with all the force