230 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Tlie 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 suf- 

 frage 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 sym- 

 pathy with their efforts. Poets and authors in general were de- 

 nounced. 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, sanc- 

 tioned as it is by a prophetic apostle as one of the millennial re- 

 sults. Nor am I opposed to a woman's earning her own inde- 

 pendence in any lawful calling, and wish many more were open 

 to her which are now closed. Nor am I opposed to the organiza- 

 tion 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 defense- 

 less, by which they have the easiest work, the most safe and com- 

 fortable 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 em- 

 ployed 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. 



