POLITICAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF WOMEN. 85 



the peace, negro judges of the courts, negro members of Congress, 

 and in more than one State negro Legislatures, which proceeded 

 in a summary way to confiscate the property of the late masters 

 by taxation, ostensibly expended in public works and largely 

 wasted by private plunder. If the effect of raising to the grade 

 of voters the whole mass of illiterate slaves was to give them the 

 whole political control of several States, why will not this com- 

 plete, enfranchisement of women give them the political control in 

 all the older States, where they will be in the numerical majority ? 



If it be urged that the great body of women in this country 

 have no taste for politics and do not desire office, and that their 

 domestic duties exempt them from the responsibility of office, the 

 same conditions might have been urged in behalf of the f reedmen. 

 They knew nothing about politics, did not care for office, and 

 were under the necessity of earning their living and getting for 

 themselves and their children homes, fortunes, and the rudiments 

 of education. In that very condition a few bright colored men, 

 native and immigrant, and many cunning white men, carpet-hag 

 adventurers, intervened as the freed men's special friends and took 

 the offices the negroes could not hold. May not a like experience 

 follow woman suffrage ? A few restless women, mostly those 

 whose domestic relations are out of gear or who have failed in a 

 congenial social career, will find themselves at leisure to pose as 

 nominees and candidates to represent their whole sex, and they 

 will remember, in the distribution of such offices as they do not 

 aspire for, those cunning men who, believing that the millennium 

 of woman's rights was coming, had made themselves prominent 

 in advocating them. 



II. What wrongs are there affecting society which the women's 

 vote and the political power it gives will set right ? What dis- 

 ability or oppression does woman suffer at the hands of man, 

 which she must rise in her physical might to redress ? Every 

 other agitation for social or political reform now rife, or that has 

 been rife in my day, has been able to justify itself by a flagrant 

 abuse repugnant to the universal sentiments of mankind. Slavery, 

 intemperance, the poverty and privations that have been caused 

 by unjust distribution of the products of industry all these are 

 palpable evils that denunciation can not exaggerate nor eloquence 

 winged by strong emotion overstate. But the woman's grievance 

 against man in these modern times, in any civilized country, what 

 is it ? The moment you begin to sum it up, the moment you un- 

 dertake to tabulate and itemize it, you provoke the indignation of 

 all generous and intelligent women. The moment you attempt 

 to inflate its emptiness with the breath of invective you have to 

 deal with hysteric fancies rather than hard facts, or consciously 

 to enact a make-believe. 



