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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
us of our modern Wyoming, he did not mention that no sooner was suffrage conferred on women than the thieves, tramps and hard characters that infest every new territory vanished. The social evil fled from Wyoming when the first woman sat on the jury. The chief justice gives his testimony that after years of trial, woman’s suffrage is a success. There have been less robberies and murders in Wyoming than in any state in the Union. There has never yet been a woman committed to the penitentiary.
It surprises me how a man like Mr. Platt can go so far in his contempt for injustice to women, and yet be willing to perpetuate it. It teaches me the lesson with yet stronger force, that we women must make our own laws, and trust to no man’s sentimental ideas of doling out to us a standard of freedom he would not accept for himself.
The distinguished president of the Stanford University, in his lecture on sex, as it is treated from a scientific standpoint, shows how the old theories are exploded. Alas, how much of the story of the sufferings of women may be traced to this subject? Even the great Aristotle held that the mother was only the nurse of the child; she was but as the field that nourishes the grain. In Aeschylus the doctrine laid down is that the son is not a parricide because it was only his mother that he slew. You all know the story of how Agamemnon was slain by Clytemnestra, and how her son avenged the death of his father. Apollo himself pleaded for Orestes. He said the mother does not generate what is called her child.
In Greece the mother has no other part in the marriage of her children than to bear the nuptial torch, and to prepare the peculiar repast for the women. In the marriage of Iphigenia at Aulis, the mother, Clytemnestra, angrily demanded a place near her daughter during the ceremony as a maternal right. Agamemnon had not asked her consent. She asks him anxiously of what country Achilles is, and where he will carry her child.
It was an illustrious French physician who first attacked the robbery of the mother. Armed with all the resources of modern science, he claimed for her that she was equal in all things from the first. Nature had always proclaimed the equality of the mother in her child. She suffers for it. She knows neither pain nor fatigue when it is in danger. What mother ever forgets the death of her little one? The newly-made mound that covers it is always fresh in her memory. Neither the marriage nor the death of her children divide them from her. For them she has endured through the ages the barbarity of men’s laws. Many a husband has held his wife silent under the worst outrage because she knew he would strike her through her children.
Almost all famous men declare they owed what they have become to their mothers. Schiller, Lamartine and our own Washington are examples. St. Augustine was converted by his mother; St. Chrysostom was educated by his mother; St. Basil was saved, he tells us, through maternal love, and St. Louis was sanctified by his strong and holy mother. Professor Jordan says that the first difference came from the female having the care of the young. The male works to feed her and the little ones. The valuation of the male by the female is measured by this care for herself and young. Nature here stamps the legitimate use of man. He was made to toil for and care for his family. Pie is a miserable wretch when he shirks this task; he is so made' that he finds his chief happiness with wife and child. There is a fiction in law and society that all men support their families, and that all women are supported by them. Never was there a greater fallacy. Fully two-thirds of the women of today earn their own bread. In San Francisco, one-half of the married women of the poorer class help to support their families. In my school of more than one thousand pupils, more than half the mothers support their children. Numbers of them are not widows, but have the sole support of their families because of worthless husbands.
No man of the nineteenth century has had a wider influence on its thought than John Stuart Mill. No man’s influence of our time will last longer or weigh more with the generations that will come after us. If there is a woman here who has not read