Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/424

 before the bar of God and take my sentence. Men who denounce us do so because they are ignorant of what they do. Woman has broken the silence of the century. Her question to God is, Who shall interpret Thee to me? The churches of this day have not begun to conceive of what Christianity means.

"It is not true that all women should be married and the managers of homes. There is not more than one woman in five capable of motherhood in its highest possible state, and I may say that not one man in ten is fitted for fatherhood. We strongly advocate that no woman and man should marry until they are instructed in the science of home duties. Instead of woman suffrage breaking up families, it has just the opposite effect. In the State of Wyoming where it has existed thirty years, there is a larger per cent. of marriages and a less of divorces than in any other State in the Union. Because a woman is a suffragist is no reason that she may not be a good housekeeper. The two most perfect housekeepers I ever knew in my life were members of my congregation in New England—one was a suffragist and the other had no thought of the rights of women."

After the services almost every woman in the congregation crowded forward to shake the hand of the speaker.

On Monday evening the national character of the convention was conspicuously demonstrated, as the speakers represented the East, the South, the Middle West and the Pacific Slope. Mrs. Florence Howe Hall (N. J.), the highly educated daughter of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, read a charming farce entitled The Judgment of Minerva, the suffragists and the antis, as goddesses, bringing their cause before Jupiter, with a decision, of course, in favor of the former. Miss Diana Hirschler, a young lawyer of Boston, presented Woman's Position in the Law in a paper which was in itself an illustration of the benefit of a legal training. Mrs. Virginia D. Young (S. C.) told the Story of Woman Suffrage in the South, and sketched the history of the progressive Southern woman, beginning as follows:

The woman suffragists of the South have suffered in the pillory of public derision. It has been as deadly a setting up in the stocks as ever New England practiced on her martyrs to freedom. The women who have led in this revolt against old ideals have had to be as heroic as the men who stormed San Juan heights in the contest for Santiago de Cuba.

It is out of date to be carried in a sedan chair when one can fly around on a bicycle, and though in our conservative South, we have still some preachers with Florida moss on their chins, who storm at the woman on her wheel as riding straight to hell, we