Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/840

802 manifest desire of the audience, Mrs. Burleigh again came forward, and delivered a highly interesting and eloquent address upon the general subject of woman's improvement, under the epigrammatic title of "Woman's Right to be a Woman." An extract or two will show the spirit with which she treats the question.

"I appeal to every true man before me if he has not looked into the faces of well-dressed men so sensual and brutal in their expression, that he would sooner a hundredfold see a sister or daughter laid in her grave than entrusted to the guardianship of such a man. Will you not give to every woman the power to maintain the integrity of her womanhood—the ownership of herself? What means the right of the drunkard's wife to be a woman? It means the power to protect herself from his drunken hate and his more frightful drunken love. It means that she be armed with a vote to repress the horrid traffic that has made her husband a brute, or, failing to save him, that she escape with untarnished honor from his polluting arms. What signifies the right to be a woman to her who must endure the daily contact of a social villain, if it be not to have all human virtue as her ally when she snaps the tie that binds her to him, and vindicates the Divine validity of marriage by breaking the fetters of the fatal sham? What is involved in the right of the Magdalen to be a woman redeemed and disenthralled from the bondage of sin? What but the entire reconstruction of society with purity for a law and charity for the executive; with more of the divine mother in man, more of manly courage and self-respecting dignity in woman; in both more reverence for humanity and a more abiding faith in the indestructible possibilities of good in every human soul."

The Convention then adjourned sine die.

was held in Cleveland, Ohio, Nov. 22 and 23, 1870.

, first Vice-President, called the meeting to order, and addressed the audience substantially as follows:


 * I heartily congratulate you that you are again called together in this goodly city of Cleveland.

We stand to-day at the cradle of the Association, a child one year old, to celebrate its first birthday. There is nothing in the record of the past year that we have to blush for, or that we have to undo. If our work has been limited in its success, it has been because we have been limited in means. If we have not transformed the entire world it has been because the world has not poured its money into our coffers. But the great fact remains, as much as if we had accomplished a work ten times as large, that we have a great central organization, to which ten States have given a cordial and hearty support. Congress at Washington is but a small body. The amount it annually does and spends is nothing to that done and spent by the State governments. It is the keystone of our great national arch, the string upon which all State governments are strung. And so this Association is the keystone upon which all the auxiliary State organizations depend.

We meet here to-day, in a delegate meeting, for full and free discussion; none are proscribed, none prescribed. If there is anything new to be done,