Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/877

Rh Miss Strickland, Miss Patridge, and Mrs. Dr. Mary F. Thomas. Mr. Blackwell reported the list of officers for the ensuing year.

Afterward addresses were made by Mr. Blackwell, Mrs. Elizabeth R. Churchill, Mrs. Samm, Miss M. Adele Hazlett, and Gen. Voris.

Mrs., of Chicago, said she came before the audience to speak upon the most important question of the day, important to one half, and through them to the other half of the community. This movement is no crusade of women against men, but an honest effort of both men and women to make one sex equal in all respects with the other. When our forefathers attempted to secure their own liberty they adopted the principle that all men are created free and equal, and are endowed with certain inalienable rights. Notwithstanding this, the Government allowed the maintenance of slavery for over three-quarters of a century. Rights are God-given. If any man can tell where a man gets his right to vote, he will find that woman obtained hers in the same place. The ballot, she claimed, was a means of educating the class who exercise the power of such ballot.

Mrs., of Ohio, said this question of woman suffrage was one that was claiming the attention of the best minds of Europe and America. Women think they have as good a right to the ballot as men, and this right they want to exercise. Lunatics and idiots are deprived of the ballot because they do not know how to use it. Criminals are denied it because they are outcasts of society and have proved themselves unworthy of it. Women are deprived of it because of their womanhood. The sexes, she said, were never made to be antagonistic. Experience proves that what is of interest to women is of interest to men. There is no branch of business or of industry in which concession is granted to women on account of their sex. Nobody will pay more to a woman for any work than they will to men for the same work, and in the making of a suit of clothes it is seen that they pay a man more than double the amount they will to a woman for the same work.

Prof. said that he was a recent convert to this movement. He had read the Bible, Bushnell, and Fairchild, and some others, and was convinced that women ought not to vote. When the question was submitted to the people by the Legislature, he commenced to read the Bible and Bushnell and others again. He found that Bushnell proved too much, and that the objections urged against women voting were equally good against nine-tenths of the men. The question of propriety—whether women should go to the polls—was another question which he considered. He did not now see why it was improper for woman to go where her husband or her son must go; and if the polls are not good places, decent men ought not to go there. He had all his life debated the question whether the University should be opened to ladies, and his first vote, cast as a Regent of the University, was in favor of the admission of women to the University. He was then opposed to their entering the medical department. But they next applied for admission to the law department, and he voted for that, and then, when they applied for admission to the medical department, he had to vote for that. He had never found out what right a man possesses to the ballot that a woman