THE SOUTHERN WOMAN BECOMES A “CLUBABLE” BEING.

In every individual life there enter events which in their enlarged influence are analogous to epoch-making periods in the nation’s history. Such, surely, was my meeting with Susan B. Anthony, when she visited the New Orleans Exposition in 1885. I had long kept a vivid and dear picture of her in the inner sanctuary of my mind; had become acquainted through the press with the vigor of her intellect and the native independence and integrity of her character; had known she was a woman “born out of due season,” who had already spent fifty years of her life trying to make “the rank and file” of women and men see that the human race in all its social relations is in bondage, while woman occupies a position less than free. I had so long been one with her in spirit and principles that I was not prepared to feel so like a little chicken looking into the shell out of which it has just stepped, as I did feel on coming face to face with all the expansiveness her many years of service for women had wrought her own justice-loving personality.

New Orleans stretched out a friendly hand to Miss Anthony. The surprise of finding her a simple, motherly, gentle-mannered woman instead of the typical woman’s-rights exponent, disarmed and warmed their hearts, so that press and people received her cordially. She was invited to address the city public schools, and spoke to many appreciative audiences during the few weeks New Orleans had the uplift of her presence. In a private letter of that date she said to me: “I remember my visit to the Crescent City with a great deal of pleasure, and cherish the friendships I made there. We are finding out quite a good many fine things about women in the Gulf States, so that I think you may feel proud that so much true growth went on—even while that other problem of freedom was being settled.

“Susan B. Anthony.”

Miss Anthony’s work here made a permanent impression on public thought; the personal hospitality of the people meant a certain sort of receptivity of her cause, for which the war era and the more trying decade following it was a period of incubation; for unquestionably all times of stress and effort and experience of soul are seasons of enlargement, of suggestion, and form the matrix of a new life. If movement be once started in original cell structures, reforming is sure, and the new species depends on the character of the environment. Heart-rending and irremediable as were the personal effects of the war to thousands, there is little doubt but that it has resulted in definite gain to the whole people, by establishing a system of self-reliance in place of reliance upon the labor of others; and even more through the liberation of the general mind from captivity to the belief in the ethical rectitude of human slavery.

But it takes the North a long time to come to any true understanding of the Southern people. Certain transient, exterior features—which are as impermanent as the conditions that created them—have been mistaken for their real character, which depends upon indwelling ideals—and these have always been thoroughly American. The leisure for thought and study which ante-bellum ease allowed to many molded a high-thinking type that was true to the best intellectual and Christian models, as the character of Southern public men has evidenced. The simple integrity of the Southern ideal has had no match in national life except in the rigid standard of New England. Puritan and Huguenot—far apart as they seem—were like founders of the rugged righteousness of American principles; and in so far as we have forgotten our origin, has the national character lost its purity.

The love of freedom is ingrained in the ideals of the South. Its apparent conservatism is not hostility to the new nor intense devotion to the old; it is more an inevitable result of thin population scattered over wide areas, with little opportunity for the frequent and direct contact which is indispensable to the rapid and general development of a common idea. It is not true that Southern men are more opposed than others to the freedom of women. The several Codes show that the Southern States were the first to remove the inequality of women as to property rights. It must also be remembered that a vigorous propaganda for the enfranchisement of women has been conducted for fifty years, at great expense of time and talent, all over the North, while it may be said to have just begun in the South.

If in 1890 any effort had been made by the National American Woman Suffrage Association to influence the Constitutional Convention then in session in Mississippi, the woman’s ballot on an educational basis might have been secured. Henry Blackwell was the only prominent Northern suffragist who seemed to have a wide-open eye on that convention. What he could he did, gratis, to help the cause, and won the friendship and gratitude of many in that State. The leading women who were applied to offered not one word of appreciation of the situation—doubtless because they were accustomed to expecting nothing good out of Nazareth; perhaps also because they would not aid what seemed an unrighteous effort to eliminate the negro vote.

It is not the first time in suffrage history that the white woman has been sacrificed to the brother in black. A political necessity brought within a few votes the political equality of woman. If Mississippi had then settled the race question on the only statesmanlike and just plan—by enfranchising intelligence and disfranchising ignorance—other States would have followed; for the South generally desires a model for a just and legal white supremacy—without the patent subterfuge of “grandfather clauses.” The heartbreak of any human soul or cause is not to have been equal to its opportunity. The whole woman’s movement is yet bearing the consequences of that eclipse of vision ten years ago.

The first ground broken in the cultivation of greater privileges for Louisiana women was the organization of the Woman’s Club of New Orleans. In 1884—as narrated in its history prepared for the World’s Columbian Exposition—in response to a notice in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, twelve women met in the parlor of the Young Men’s Christian Association and organized the first Woman’s Club in the South.

Miss Elizabeth Bisland, now Mrs. Charles W. Wetmore of New York, was its first president. Miss Bisland had already earned fair fame in literature, and the South was justly proud of her. She afterwards challenged the world’s notice by her swift girdling of the globe in the interest of the Cosmopolitan Magazine. The charter members of the pioneer club were of the heroic type, and amid fluctuations of hope and despair, forced on by the irresistible spirit of the age, founded a society which numbered its members by hundreds, and which secured and retained the sympathy and respect of the people.

The Constitution provided at first only for working women, but afterward eliminated this restriction. It stated that, evolved as it was from a progressive civilization, its movements must be elastic, its work versatile and comprehensive. It estimated its own scope as follows: “The vital and influential work of our club must always be along sociological lines. The term embraces pursuits of study and pastime, our labors and relaxations. In the aggregate we are breaking down and removing barriers of local prejudice; we are assisting intellectual growth and spiritual ambition in the community of which we are a dignified and effective body—for the immense economy of moral force made possible by a permanent organization such as ours, is well understood by the thoughtful.” It extended hospitality in the public recognition of extraordinary achievements by women, and helped to bring aspirants in art, literature and sociology before appreciative audiences, and introduced to New Orleans many world-renowned women and men.

Being the first woman’s club in the South it was the subject of peculiar interest and attention from other organizations of women, and was wise enough, from the beginning, to ally itself with the general movement. Its delegate was a conspicuous part of the National Convention of Women’s Clubs, held in New York in 1889, under the auspices of Sorosis; in 1892 it was represented in the Convention of Federated Clubs, in Chicago, by its president and delegate, and was present in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1894. It was the host, in connection with Portia Club, in 1895, of the “Association for the Advancement of Women,” which enjoyed for a week the novelty of the Crescent City and its environs.

Through its initiation, matrons were placed in station houses and a bed was furnished in the “Women’s and Children’s Hospital.” It petitioned for a revocation of Mrs. Maybrick’s sentence, and distributed rations to the sufferers in the great overflows of the Mississippi and Texas rivers. It is clearly manifest from the foregoing that the Woman’s Club was the initial step of whatever progression women have made through subsequent organizations.Following the enlarging influence of the New Orleans Exposition in 1885-86, there came the great contest to overthrow the Louisiana State Lottery. The whole energy of the church and every citizen was called into action all over the State. Women’s Lottery Leagues were formed in every town,—that in New Orleans numbering 900 members; it was denominated “the crowning influence that resulted in victory.” It is impossible to overestimate the liberative value for woman of this struggle brought to a successful issue; or to reckon how far back into inertia she would have been thrown by defeat; for the first time in our post-bellum history it united women of all classes and ages in a common moral and political battle-ground. The federal anti-lottery law which has secured the results of this victory may prove to be an invaluable precedent for anti-trust legislation.

In 1892, in response to my invitation, some of the strong, progressive and intellectual women of New Orleans were ready to meet at my house and organize the first suffrage association in Louisiana. It was formed with nine members, and was called the “Portia Club.” The officers were Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, president; Mrs. Jas. M. Ferguson, vice-president; Mrs. Evelyn Ordway, treasurer. Through its influence Governor Foster appointed four women on the school boards of some of the Northern parishes of Louisiana. It has done excellent educational work by the discussion of such subjects as “Is the Woman in the Wage-earning World a Benefit to Civilization?” “Is Organization Beneficial to Labor?” “Has the State of Wyoming been Benefited by Woman Suffrage?” “Would Municipal Suffrage for Women be a Benefit in New Orleans?” “The Initiative and Referendum;” “The Republic of Venice;” “Disabilities of Women in Louisiana.” The Portias have maintained a leading part in all public causes that have enlisted women, and in the interests of full suffrage were heard by the Suffrage Committee of the Constitutional Convention of 1898.

On the occasion of Miss Susan B. Anthony’s seventieth birthday, a reception at my house brought together not only those favorable to our undertaking but many whom it was desirable to enlist. When that gentle-faced, lion-hearted pioneer, Lucy Stone, yielded up her beautiful, self-effacing life, the Portia Club held a fitting memorial service. Mrs. Clara C. Hoffman made a most memorable suffrage address for the Portias in this city, which aroused tremendous enthusiasm. She lectured extensively elsewhere in the State, and wrote to me as follows after her visit here: “It is generally claimed that Southern people are conservative and bitterly opposed to any mention of equal suffrage. In my recent tour I found them not only willing but anxious to hear the subject discussed. I came into Louisiana at the request of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Convention, and had been informed that I must not say anything about suffrage, as the people would not bear it. In my first address I reviewed the hindering causes that delay and prevent the establishment of needed reforms, and showed the danger of enfranchising all the vice and ignorance in the land without seeking to counteract it; but I said not a word about what the counteractant might be. The convention closed with Sunday services; but before the day was gone I received an invitation from leading citizens—professional and business men—to speak in the Opera House in Shreveport at their expense, on Monday night, on woman suffrage. A packed audience greeted me when I was cordially introduced by a prominent lawyer. I presented arguments, answered objections. Round after round of applause interrupted, and many crowded about at the close, expressing themselves with utmost warmth. How is that for Shreveport, and Louisiana?”

Later Mrs. Hoffman spoke at Monroe and Lake Charles with equal acceptance. One of our city papers said of her: “Mrs. Hoffman entered bravely upon her subject, interspersing her remarks with delicious bits of witticism. She is a forcible and brilliant speaker, a radical of the radicals, but disarms by her clear, genial manner of presenting truth.”

Besides the women’s societies in the various churches, which have done so much to widen the field of woman’s thought and endeavor, the Arena Club of New Orleans, under the leadership of Mrs. James M. Ferguson, has been a vital force. While tacitly endorsing suffrage, it advances social, political and economic questions of the day. Its latest efforts have been to create sentiment for anti-trust legislation.

There has been a valuable period of training through Auxiliaries. Every great movement, social and religious, had its Woman’s Auxiliary. These helped to reveal to woman her own capacities and her utter want of power. But the day of the Auxiliary is done. If some of the auxiliary women have not yet found out what woman ought to do, they have discovered the next best thing—what not to do!

In 1895 an amicable division of the Portia Club was made, the offshoot becoming the Era Club—Equal Rights Association. It was a vigorous child, full of progressive energy, and soon outgrew its mother. Its original members, like the Portia, were nine, as follows: Mmes. Ferguson, Ordway, Hereford, Pierce, Misses Brewer, Brown, Koppel, Nobles, Van Horn. At this juncture Miss Anthony, accompanied by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, strengthened our hearts and cause by her presence. It was again my privilege to entertain her in my home. She spoke to an enthusiastic audience and Mrs. Catt was complimented in the same way. The next morning the following letter from a leading member of the New Orleans bar was brought to Miss Anthony by a member of the Portia Club: “That was a great meeting last night. When people are willing to stand for three long hours and listen to speakers it means something. There were ten or twelve men and a score of women standing within ten feet of me, and not one of them who did not remain to the end. There are few men who can hold an audience in that way. I looked around the Assembly Hall and counted near me eight of my legal confrÈres. One of the most distinguished lawyers in the State told me in court this morning that Mrs. Catt’s argument was one of the finest speeches he had ever listened to. Yesterday I was asked at dinner to define the word ‘oratory.’ Mrs. Catt is an exponent of ‘the art of moving human hearts to beat in unison with her own’—which is the end and aim of oratory,—and was that quality which made the Athenians who heard Demosthenes declare that they would ‘fight Philip.’ Give the speaker a lawyer’s compliments.”

Miss Anthony was much moved by this letter. “All this,” she said, “is so much sweeter than the ridicule that used to come to me in those early days when I stood alone.”

Committees from the Portia and Era Clubs met in November, 1896, in the parlors of the Woman’s Club, and organized a State Woman Suffrage Association, with Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, president; Mrs. Eveleyn Ordway, vice-president; Miss Matilda P. Hero, corresponding secretary; Miss Belle Van Horn, recording secretary; Mrs. Boseley, treasurer; Mrs. Helen Behrens, an ardent and able pioneer and present worker in the cause, being made our first delegate to a National Convention.

In 1898, the Era Club, in the name of Louisiana women, presented to the Suffrage Committee of the Constitutional Convention, then in session in New Orleans, the following petition: “In view of the fact that one of the purposes of this Convention is to provide an educational qualification for the exercise of the franchise by which to guard more carefully the welfare of the State, we, the undersigned, believing that still another change would likewise conduce greatly to the welfare of our people, pray that your honorable body will, after deciding upon the qualifications deemed necessary, extend the franchise with the same qualifications to the women of this State.”

Mrs. Evelyn Ordway, one of the most efficient and public-spirited women of New Orleans, as president of the Era Club, wisely and bravely led the women’s campaign. Owing to a rain which flooded the city, the most of the woman’s contingent were prisoners in their homes on the day the petition was procured. Mrs. Lewis S. Graham, and Misses Katharine Nobles, Kate and Jennie Gordon alone were able to cross the submerged streets to the Committee room. Mrs. Graham made the leading address, and was ably supported by her colleagues. Mrs. Carrie Chapman-Catt, aided by Misses Laura Clay, Mary Hay and Frances Griffin, had been busy creating public sentiment by means of brilliant addresses both in and out of the Convention. Dr. Dickson Bruns should be ever held in grateful memory for his constant and unflinching efforts in behalf of the woman’s petition, which was presented in Convention by the Hon. Anthony W. Faulkner of Monroe.

There were many women and a few noble men who were deeply stirred over the fate of our memorial. I wrote to Miss Belle Kearney just after this hearing: “You are needed right here, this very day, to speak what the women want said for them now that the other speakers are gone away. I am so dead tired and heart-sore that I almost wish I were lying quiet in my grave waiting for the resurrection! God help all women, young and old! They are a man-neglected, God-forgotten lot, here in Louisiana, when they ask simply for a reasonable recognition, and justice under the Constitution now being constructed, and under which they must be governed and pay taxes. We pray in vain, work always in vain. How that grand old martyr, Susan Anthony, can still hold out is a marvel. The Convention has apparently forgotten the women. They discuss the needs of every man and his qualification for the ballot. Yet, good women brought such men into the world to keep other women in subjection and minority forever!—still, they love that sinner, man, better than their own souls—and I know they will continue that way to the end. But it is hard lines to be kept waiting. The dead can wait, but we cannot! Oh, Lord, how long!”

Once again, however, it was proven that nothing is ever quite so bad as it seems, for the convention did give the right to vote to all taxpaying women—a mere crumb—but a prophetic-crumb. This much being gained led, in 1899, to the organization, through the initiative of the Era Club, of the “Woman’s League for Sewerage and Drainage.” That variable and imponderable quantity, “influence,” now had added to its much invoked “womanly sweetness”—power—a power which could not only be felt but which would have to be counted.

Mrs. Ordway tells in a little review of the movement, that several months previous to the election many of those who voted would have scouted the idea that they should do so unwomanly a deed;—voting belonged to men. Many did not even know that they had a right to vote. The question proposed to them was one affecting the health and prosperity of New Orleans—whether or not they were willing to be additionally taxed in order to secure pure water and an effective system of drainage. There were about 10,000 taxpaying women in the city, many of them small householders, owning the little homes in which they dwelt. Owing to New Orleans being peculiarly situated below the level of the Mississippi river, and to the fact that there is no underground drainage, many parts of the city are inundated during heavy rains. There was much at stake. No wonder the women were interested, and that parlor and mass meetings were held, in which women were not only invited but urged—even by the mayor and other prominent men—to come forward with their votes. When election day arrived, women found that they did want the franchise, one-third of the votes cast being contributed by them. After months of hard work and a house-to-house canvass for signatures of taxpaying women, who would vote personally or by proxy, the battle was won, as was universally conceded, by the energy of the woman’s ballot.

Very many men and women soon realized the need of full suffrage for women, in a quickly succeeding campaign for the election of municipal officers who would properly carry out the people’s intent for sewerage and drainage. Though they could not vote every courtesy and respect was accorded the women, and their influence was appealed to by the respective sides. The day has dawned for woman’s full enfranchisement in Louisiana.

In her farewell address after the victory the president of the Woman’s League, Miss Kate M. Gordon,—president of the Era Club,—who had led the women’s forces with an intelligent courage and dignity that won universal admiration, stated as follows: “At one time the success of this great work was seriously threatened by an element of conservatism raising the cry, ‘It is simply suffrage movement!’ While it is hard to disassociate suffrage from any work which depends on a vote for success, and while the word, defined by Worcester, means ‘a vote, the act of voting,’ yet it seems a poor commentary on the intelligence, patriotism and even sagacity of that conservatism to raise the question when the life of a city was trembling in the balance, and that city their home.

“In justice to women holding suffrage views, I ask are they to be treated as a class apart because they believe intelligence and not sex should be the determining power in government? Is there any wrong in believing that power added to influence would be a factor in creating and enforcing laws for a higher moral standard? Where is the woman, who, holding the power, would not use it to enforce the laws for the protection of minors, and to give to character at least the same protection given to property? Where is the woman who would withhold her power from creating and enforcing a law to read; ‘Equal pay for equal work’? Is it unwomanly to believe the wife’s wages should belong to the wife who earned them? Is it unnatural to resent being classed with idiots, insane, criminal and minors—and so on, ad infinitum?

“The Woman’s League contributed with no sacrifice of womanliness, but with a sacrifice of personal comfort, to an education against apathy and indifference, to the Godlike charity of helping men to help themselves—the keynote of physical as well as moral regeneration. As women throw the power of your influence against the dangers of proxies. The proxy vote is not a personal expression; it is giving manifold power into the hands of one individual, and therefore un-American.”

This wide-awake Era Club has now a petition before the trustees of Tulane University praying that this progressive institution will no longer refuse to open its Medical School to women. It also memorialized its last legislature for the right to be accorded to women to witness a legal document; for, incredible as it may seem, there still remains among Louisiana statutes, as a survival of the French habit of thought, toward females, the disability of a woman to sign a paper as a witness.

Soon after the New Orleans Exposition, Miss Susan B. Anthony wrote me, while I was president of the Louisiana Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: “I long to see the grand hosts of the Temperance women of this nation standing as a unit demanding the one and only weapon that can smite to the heart the liquor-traffic. The Kansas women’s first vote has sent worse terror to the soul of the whisky alliance of the nation than it ever knew before.” The temperance hosts through bitter defeats long ago learned that they cannot carry their cause without the ballot, and “as a unit” they may be said to desire it and to work for it. They know Miss Anthony spoke words of soberness and experience. The first day there was a great debate, in the Constitutional Convention of our neighbor State, on methods of suffrage, about the middle of the day some one met a pale, haggard prince of liquor dealers rushing excitedly from the gates of the Capital. “My God!” he exclaimed, “if they let the women in our business is dead! We must do something!”—and he hurried to convene his partners in iniquity. What they did is not proclaimed; but immediately nearly every newspaper in the State began to pour in gatling-gun volleys against enfranchising women.

About the time Miss Anthony wrote me respecting Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton coming to lecture. “I do not want her,” she said, “to be translated before all of your splendid New Orleans women have seen and heard her.” And so I feel about Miss Anthony, I do not want her “to be translated” until she has seen the Louisiana woman vote as unrestrictedly as the Louisiana man.

But I should like to ask this question of those men and women—and there are many such—who are convinced of the righteousness of the women’s ballot, but who do not come forward and strengthen the struggling vanguard of a great movement,—

“Why is it that you choose to blow
Your bugle in the rear?
The helper is the man divine
Who tells us something new;—
The man who tells us something new
And points the road ahead;
Whose tent is with the forward few—
And not among the dead.
You spy not what the future holds,
A-bugling in the rear.
You’re harking back to times outworn,
A-bugling in the rear.”