Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (95 page)

With Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was at the forefront of the nineteenth-century American movement for women’s rights. Married to the journalist and abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in a ceremony that left out the word “obey,” she proved a powerful orator and took an active part in the first American convention for women’s rights, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. There she drew up a declaration of sentiments, patterned on the Declaration of Independence, that many consider the first persuasive document of the American women’s rights movement; it began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.” With her associate Susan B. Anthony, she espoused the right of a wife to divorce a drunken or brutal husband, a position at that time considered the height of uppityness. Until her death in 1902, she used her skills as writer and speaker to urge economic and legal rights as well as political equality for women.

When Mrs. Stanton addressed the Washington convention, her speech began with a litany of vices, carefully catalogued as “the masculine element” in a male-dominated world. To a modern audience, her closing analogy of nature and human behavior suggests the pathetic fallacy (John Ruskin’s term for ascribing human traits or sympathies to nature), but her arguments against acquisition and materialism still hold force.

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I URGE A
sixteenth amendment, because “manhood suffrage,” or a man’s government, is civil, religious, and social disorganization. The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war,
violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease, and death. See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages of history reveal! Through what slavery, slaughter, and sacrifice, through what inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds, the soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries, while mercy has veiled her face and all hearts have been dead alike to love and hope!

The male element has held high carnival thus far; it has fairly run riot from the beginning, overpowering the feminine element everywhere, crushing out all the diviner qualities in human nature, until we know but little of true manhood and womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing, for it has scarce been recognized as a power until within the last century. Society is but the reflection of man himself, untempered by woman’s thought; the hard iron rule we feel alike in the church, the state, and the home. No one need wonder at the disorganization, at the fragmentary condition of everything, when we remember that man, who represents but half a complete being, with but half an idea on every subject, has undertaken the absolute control of all sublunary matters.

People object to the demands of those whom they choose to call the strong-minded, because they say “the right of suffrage will make the women masculine.” That is just the difficulty in which we are involved today. Though disfranchised, we have few women in the best sense; we have simply so many reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine gender. The strong, natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed and ignored in dependence, for so long as man feeds woman she will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his condition. To keep a foothold in society, woman must be as near like man as possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices, and vices. She must respect his statutes, though they strip her of every inalienable right, and conflict with that higher law written by the finger of God on her own soul. She must look at everything from its dollar-and-cent point of view, or she is a mere romancer. She must accept things as they are and make the best of them. To mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jails, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every form, all this would be mere sentimentalizing. To protest against the intrigue, bribery, and corruption of public life, to desire that her sons might follow some business that did not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding selfishness, would be arrant nonsense.

In this way man has been molding woman to his ideas by direct and positive influences, while she, if not a negation, has used indirect means
to control him, and in most cases developed the very characteristics both in him and herself that needed repression. And now man himself stands appalled at the results of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness that falsehood, selfishness, and violence are the law of life. The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railroads, or specie payments but a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of thought and action.

We ask woman’s enfranchisement, as the first step toward the recognition of that essential element in government that can only secure the health, strength, and prosperity of the nation. Whatever is done to lift woman to her true position will help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for the race.

In speaking of the masculine element, I do not wish to be understood to say that all men are hard, selfish, and brutal, for many of the most beautiful spirits the world has known have been clothed with manhood; but I refer to those characteristics, though often marked in woman, that distinguish what is called the stronger sex. For example, the love of acquisition and conquest, the very pioneers of civilization, when expended on the earth, the sea, the elements, the riches and forces of nature, are powers of destruction when used to subjugate one man to another or to sacrifice nations to ambition.

Here that great conservator of woman’s love, if permitted to assert itself, as it naturally would in freedom against oppression, violence, and war, would hold all these destructive forces in check, for woman knows the cost of life better than man does, and not with her consent would one drop of blood ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain.

With violence and disturbance in the natural world, we see a constant effort to maintain an equilibrium of forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may reign supreme. There is a striking analogy between matter and mind, and the present disorganization of society warns us that in the dethronement of woman we have let loose the elements of violence and ruin that she only has the power to curb. If the civilization of the age calls for an extension of the suffrage, surely a government of the most virtuous educated men and women would better represent the whole and protect the interests of all than could the representation of either sex alone.

Born a slave named Isabella, this American abolitionist received her freedom when New York State emancipated slaves in 1827. She moved to New York City, heard what she believed to be heavenly voices, and took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843, when she quit being a maidservant to become an evangelist. Her opening line was a stunner: “Children, I talk to God and God talks to me!”

Sojourner Truth traveled throughout the North (a “sojourner” stays only temporarily in one place) to spread a message that combined religious and abolitionist ideas. After a despondent speech by Frederick Douglass in 1850, she asked her frequent platform mate a question that still reverberates in theological circles: “Frederick, is God dead?” Although illiterate, this mother of five powerfully conveyed her equal-rights message in dialect, with plain words and commonsense reasoning, drawing on her own experiences to persuade listeners of her sincerity. During the Civil War, President Lincoln appointed her counselor to the freedmen of the capital.

Blacks and women were in competition for suffrage, and few black women attended early women’s rights meetings. Sojourner Truth was an exception; at the 1851 Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, in Akron, she spoke of feminism with the same fervor that marked her preaching on abolitionism and religion. Through a conversational form of direct address (“Well, children”) and the use of repetition (the question “And ain’t I a woman?” is raised four times), Sojourner Truth moved listeners in the early days of the fight for women’s rights. She said she wanted her language reported in standard English, “not as if I was saying tickety-ump-ump-nicky-nacky,” and in some quotation books her “ain’ts” are changed to “aren’ts,” but I think such editorial prettification loses the flavor and force of the eloquence.

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WELL, CHILDREN, WHERE
there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ’twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm. I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [Intellect, someone whispers.] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or Negro’s rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.

On the first day of 1831, after seven weeks in a Baltimore jail following a libel conviction, editor William Lloyd Garrison returned to his native Massachusetts to found the
Liberator
.

“I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice,” he wrote in his first issue. “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard!” He did not, and he was; Garrison continued the
Liberator
for thirty-five years, until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed; though its circulation never exceeded three thousand, its editor’s rousing, intemperate tone helped fan the passion of abolition; the newspaper also provided an outlet for ideas on women’s suffrage and prohibition of the sale of liquor.

Garrison was a secessionist himself; in 1843, he advocated northern secession from the Union because, in his fierce words, “the compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” permitting human slavery in the colonies. This extremism did not endear the editor to others working for emancipation without war, trying vainly to effect change without the bloodshed and hatred of regional conquest. Garrison even opposed the Civil War as a fraud until Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Freedom in late 1862.

The following speech, delivered in 1854, is typical of his absolutism. Its style rejects platitudes and embraces certitudes; it hammers home declarative sentences; it parades “if… then” consequential reasoning; and it will be heard.

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…LET ME DEFINE
my positions, and at the same time challenge anyone to show wherein they are untenable. I am a believer in that portion of the Declaration of American Independence in which it is set forth, as among self-evident truths, “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Hence, I am an abolitionist. Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form—and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing—with indignation and abhorrence. Not to cherish these feelings would be recreancy to principle. They who desire me to be dumb on the subject of slavery, unless I will open my mouth in its defense, ask me to give the lie to my professions, to degrade my manhood, and to stain my soul. I will not be a liar, a poltroon, or a hypocrite, to accommodate any party, to gratify any sect, to escape any odium or peril, to save any interest, to preserve any institution, or to promote any object. Convince me that one man may rightfully make another man his slave, and I will no longer subscribe to the Declaration of Independence. Convince me that liberty is not the inalienable birthright of every human being, of whatever complexion or clime, and I will give that instrument to the consuming fire. I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together. I do not know how to worship God and Mammon at the same time. If other men choose to go upon all fours, I choose to stand erect, as God designed every man to stand. If, practically falsifying its heaven-attested principles, this nation denounces me for refusing to imitate its example, then, adhering all the more tenaciously to those principles, I will not cease to rebuke it for its guilty inconsistency. Numerically, the contest may be an unequal one, for the time being; but the author of liberty and the source of justice, the adorable God, is more than multitudinous, and he will defend the right. My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery or ceasing to prate of the rights of man….