Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/240

230 The kind of education best suited to the idea of suffrage is a training in political history and present political issues; but the women who have talked loudly and vaguely of the right of suffrage for years have been the last to present such knowledge. I have read their History, attended their conventions, glanced at their magazines, but never have come upon the discussion of a single public issue. I think those most familiar with it will bear me out if I make the statement that their principal periodical, The Woman's Journal, edited by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Mr. Blackwell, and Alice Stone Blackwell, has not contained any presentations of questions of public policy in the past ten years.

One of the grievances of the suffrage leaders lay in the fact that the literary women of the country would express no sympathy with their efforts. Poets and authors in general were denounced. Gail Hamilton, who had the good of woman in her heart, who was better informed on public affairs than perhaps any other woman in the United States, and whose trenchant pen cut deep and spared not, always reprobated the cause. Mrs. Stowe stood aloof, and so did Catherine Beecher, though urged to the contrary course by Henry Ward Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker. In a letter to Mrs. Cutler, Catherine Beecher said: "I am not opposed to women's speaking in public to any who are willing to hear, nor am I opposed to women's preaching, sanctioned as it is by a prophetic apostle—as one of the millennial results. Nor am I opposed to a woman's earning her own independence in any lawful calling, and wish many more were open to her which are now closed. Nor am I opposed to the organization and agitation of women, as women, to set forth the wrongs suffered by great multitudes of our sex, which are multiform and most humiliating. Nor am I opposed to women's undertaking to govern boys and men—they always have, and they always will. Nor am I opposed to the claim that women have equal rights with men. I rather claim that they have the sacred superior rights that God and good men accord to the weak and defenseless, by which they have the easiest work, the most safe and comfortable places, and the largest share of all the most agreeable and desirable enjoyments of this life. My main objection to the woman-suffrage organization is this, that a wrong mode is employed to gain a right object. The right object sought is, to remedy the wrongs and relieve the sufferings of great multitudes of our sex; the wrong mode is that which aims to enforce by law instead of by love. It is one which assumes that man is the author and abettor of all these wrongs, and that he must be restrained and regulated by constitutions and laws, as the chief and most trustworthy methods. I hold that the fault is as much,