Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/796

Rh the evening. While Mr. Campbell was taking care of the horse, I filled out bills before taking off my hat and duster; in fifteen minutes they were being distributed, and at eight o'clock I was speaking to a good-sized audience.

On October 1, a monster meeting was held in the Lawrence street Methodist Church, and was addressed by Lucy Stone, Miss Matilda Hindman, Mrs. Campbell, and Dr. Avery. The most intense interest was manifested, and the excellent speeches heartily applauded.

The next day (Sunday) the Rev. Dr. Bliss of the Presbyterian Church, preached a sermon in his own pulpit, on "Woman Suffrage and the Model Wife and Mother," in which he alluded to "certain brawling, ranting women, bristling for their rights," and said God had intended woman to be a wife and mother, and the eternal fitness of things forbade her to be anything else. If women could vote, those who were wives now would live in endless bickerings with their husbands over politics, and those who were not wives would not marry."

These utterences brought out many replies. One was in the column edited by "Mrs. Schlachtfeld," and may perhaps be quoted as a specimen of her editorial work, such being, as we have intimated, her one service to suffrage, and that incognito:

One of the daily, dismal forecasts of the male Cassandras of our time is, that in the event of women becoming emancipated from the legal thralldom that disables them, they will acquire a sudden distaste for matrimony, the direful consequences of which will be a gradual extermination of homes, and the extinction of the human species. This is an artless and extremely suggestive lament. In the first place—accepting that prophecy as true—why will women not marry? Because, they will then be independent of men; because in a fair field for competition where ability and not sex shall determine employment and remuneration, women will have an equal chance with men for distinction and reward, for triumphs commercial and professional as well as social, and hence, needing men less, either to make them homes, or to gratify indirectly their ambitions, their affections will become atrophied, the springs of domestic life will disappear in the arid sands of an unfeminine publicity, and marriage, with all the wearying cares and burdens and anxieties that it inevitably brings to every earnest woman, will be regarded more and more as a state to be shunned. The few who enter it will be compassionated much as a minister is who undertakes a dangerous foreign mission. Men will stand mateless, and the ruins of the hymeneal altars everywhere crumble mournfully away, and be known to tradition only by their vanishing inscriptions: "To the unknown god." But it is ill jesting over that which tugs at every woman's heartstrings and which impinges upon the very life-centres of society. If women, on being made really free to choose, will not marry, then we must arraign men on the charge of having made the married state so irksome and distasteful to women that they prefer celibacy when they dare enjoy it. Observe, however, the inconsistency of another line of reasoning running parallel with this in the floating literature of the day: "Motherhood," these writers say, "is the natural vocation of women; is, indeed, an instinct so mighty, even if unconscious, that it draws women toward matrimony with a yearning as irresistible as that which pulls the great sea upon the land in blind response to the moon." If this be true, society is safe, and women will still be wives, no matter how much they may exult in political freedom, no matter how alluringly individual careers may open before them, nor how accessible the tempting prizes of human ambition may become.

Well, the day came,—the dies irae for one side or the other, and it proved to be for the "one." The measure was defeated. Ten thousand votes were for it, twenty thousand against it. Women remained at the polls all day,