Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/502

Rh Miss Matilda Hindman, of Philadelphia, pays the following tribute to her parents:

In 1837, my father being a member of the school committee of the Union township, Washington county, secured equal salaries for women; and in spite of steady opposition, there was no difference made for four years. The women who taught the schools in the summer were paid the same as the men who taught in the winter. At the death of my father the board returned to the old system of half pay for women; the result was "incompetent teachers," furnishing the opposition with just the plea they desired—that women were not fit for school teachers. My mother remonstrated, but in vain. They replied, "women never received as much as men for any work"; "it did not cost as much to keep a woman as a man," and moreover, these school matters belonged to men, and women had no right to interfere. In 1842, my mother offered to board the teacher in her district, gratis, if the board would raise her salary proportionally. They received her proposition with scorn. She then refused to pay her taxes. Such was the respect for her in the community, and the sense of justice in regard to the teachers, that the authorities suffered the tax to go unpaid, and at the end of the year accepted the proposition, and for many years after, she boarded the teacher in her district, making the woman's net salary equal to that of the man.

My mother lived to see her daughters employed in her township on equal salaries with men. But in process of time, another board, for the express purpose of humiliating mother and daughters alike, passed a resolution to take two dollars a month from each of their salaries, when all three resigned. They all honored her, by carrying into their life-work the noble principles for which she suffered so much.

She was the grand-daughter of a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian minister, who, with his young family, was among the earliest settlers in the wilderness of what is now known as the prosperous and beautiful county of Washington, Pennsylvania. Her name was Sarah Campbell. She was born in 1798. From her earliest girlhood she rebelled against the injustice done women by the law. She felt acutely the wrong done her and her sisters by being denied an education equal to their brothers, and denied also an equal share of their inheritance. While the father possessed a large estate, and provided liberally for his sons, he left his daughters a mere pittance.

In view of such facts, it is folly to say that women were ever satisfied with the humiliating discriminations of sex they have endured in all periods, and in all ranks in society.

The first annual report of the association was prepared by Eliza Sproat Turner. She said:

We do not complain that man is slow to realize the injustice of his present attitude towards woman—an attitude once, from necessity, endurable; now, from too long continuance, grown intolerable. It would not be natural for him to feel it with equal keenness, It takes a great-minded fox to find out, what every goose knows, that foxes' teeth are cruel. And while we do not complain of this incapacity on his part, the advocates of this cause feel the necessity for woman to take upon herself whatever share in the management of their mutual affairs shall be needed to right the balance; concluding that the defects in legislation which she is, by reason of her position, more competent to understand, she should be more competent to remedy. Not these innovations alone, but others involving matters beyond individual interests, she expects to achieve by the power she shall gain through the exercise of her right of suffrage. We discern, in the consideration of nearly all questions of national welfare, a disposition to press unduly the interests of trade and commerce rather than the interests of the fireside.

Mary Grew presided, and has been elected president of the association every year from the beginning, performing the duties of the position with ability, earnestness and satisfaction. In the winter of 1870-71 the execu-