Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/488

 hear nobody but the women, and the calm determination with which their bootheels contributed to put the male speakers down. I recall also their too-assiduous attentions in the streets outside when the meeting broke up.

Woman suffrage should be urged, in my opinion, not from any predictions of what women will do with their votes after they get them, but on the ground that by all the traditions of our government, by all the precepts of its early founders, by all the axioms which lie at the foundation of our political principles, woman needs the ballot for self-respect and self-protection.

The woman of old times who did not read books of political economy or attend public meetings, could retain her self-respect; but the woman of modern times, with every step she takes in the higher education, finds it harder to retain that self-respect while she is in a republican government and yet not a member of it. She can study all the books that I saw collected this morning in the political economy alcove of the Bryn Mawr College; she can master them all; she can know more about them perhaps than any man of her acquaintance; and yet to put one thing she has learned there in practice by the simple process of dropping a piece of paper into a ballot-box—she can no more do that than she could put out her slender finger and stop the planet in its course. That is what I mean by woman's needing the suffrage for self-respect.

Then as to self-protection. We know there have been great improvements in the laws in regard to women. What brought about those improvements? The steady labor of women like these on this platform, going before Legislatures year by year and asking for something they were not willing to give, the ballot; but, as a result of it, to keep the poor creatures quiet, some law was passed removing a restriction. The old English writer Pepys, according to his diary, after spending a good deal of money for himself finds a little left and buys his wife a new gown, because, he says, "It is fit that the poor wretch should have something to content her." I have seen many laws passed for the advantage of women and they were generally passed on that principle.

I remember going before the Rhode Island Legislature once with Lucy Stone and she unrolled with her peculiar persuasive power the wrong laws which existed in that commonwealth in regard to women. After the hearing was over the chairman of that committee, a judge who had served on it for years, said to her: "Mrs. Stone, all that you have stated this morning is true, and I am ashamed to think that I, who have been chairman for years of this judiciary committee, should have known in my secret heart that it,

was all true and should have done nothing to set these wrongs right until I was reminded of them by a woman." Again and again I have seen that experience. Women with bleeding feet, women with exhausted voices, women with worn-out lives, have lavished their strength to secure ordinary justice in the form of laws which a single woman inside the State House, armed with the position of member of the Legislature and representing a sex who had votes,