Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/236

 Society at large, based on the principle that might makes right, has in a measure excluded women from the profitable industries of the world, and where she has gained a foothold her labor is at a discount. Man occupies the ground and holds the key to the situation. As employer, he plays the cheap labor of a disfranchised class against the employe, thus in a measure undermining his independence, making wife and daughter in the world of work the rivals of husband and father.

The family, too, is based on the idea of woman's subordination, and man has no interest, as far as he sees, in emancipating her from that despotism by which his narrow, selfish interests are maintained under the law and religion of the country.

Here, then, is a fourfold bondage, so many cords tightly twisted together, strong for one purpose. To attempt to undo one is to loosen all. To my mind, if we had at first bravely untwisted all the strands of this fourfold cord which bound us, and demanded equality in the whole round of the circle, while perhaps, we should have had a harder battle to fight, it would have been more effective and far shorter. Let us henceforth meet conservatives on their own ground and admit that suffrage for woman does mean political, religious, industrial and social freedom—a new and a higher civilization.

Woman's happiness and development are of more importance than all man's institutions. If constitutions and statute laws stand in the way of woman's emancipation, they must be amended to meet her wants and needs, of which she is a better judge than man possibly can be. If church canons and scriptures do not admit of woman's equal recognition in all the sacred offices, then they must be revised in harmony with that idea. If the present family life is necessarily based on man's headship, then we must build a new domestic altar, at which the mother shall have equal dignity, honor and power; and we do not propose to wait another century to secure all this; the time has come.

Miss Anthony, with an allusion to pioneer days, then introduced Lucy Stone, who, amid much applause, said that, while this was the first time she had stood beside Susan B. Anthony in a Washington suffrage convention, she had stood beside her on more than one hard-fought battle-field before many of those present were born. After sketching briefly the progress of the last forty years and giving some trying personal experiences, she said in conclusion: "The vote will not make a man of a woman, but it will enable her to demand and receive many things which are hers by right; to do the things which ought to be done, to prevent what ought not to be done. Women and men can help each other in making the world better. This is not an anti-man movement, but an effort toward the highest good of the race. We can