Appeal to the Women of New York.
Only printing. Leaflet: 7-3/8 x 4-5/8", 4pp; printed on off-white stock. Horizontal crease where folded at middle; tiny chip to left edge; largish pale splotch at upper margin front leaf (possibly remnant of paste). Generally very good.
Over the printed signatures of E. Cady Stanton. President: Lydia Mott, Sec. and Treas., Ernestine L. Rose, Martha C. Wright, and Susan B. Anthony. According to Ann Gordon, editor of THE SELECTED PAPERS OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Anthony attributed the leaflet to Stanton. Published just as Abraham Lincoln's election to President marked a dreadful turning point for the country, the leaflet reflects a fleeting moment of success for the nascent women's rights movement - a moment quickly lost as the nation girded for war.
In March, 1860 the New York legislature approved a bill, which accorded key rights to women. Stanton, Anthony, Rose, and other women’s rights advocates steadily had fought for such legislation for six years. When the New York women met at their annual women's rights convention in May, they reveled in the sweet glow of a long-sought victory. The glow of that victory is still evident: "Once more we appeal to you to make renewed efforts for the elevation of our sex. In our marital laws, we are now in advance of every state in the Union....Our last legislature passed a most liberal act, giving to married women their rights, to sue for damages of person or property, to their separate earnings and their children; and to the widow". Stanton enumerates other changes: more professions are open to women; women are “claiming and exercising their right to vote in church matters, in defiance of precedent, priest or Paul"; and the movement is making itself known abroad.
In six years, a constitutional convention will meet to review and revise the New York state constitution. "Among other changes demanded, is the right of suffrage for women". But it lies in the hands of women to ensure that such a change occurs: "we appeal to each and all—to every class and condition to inform themselves on this question, that women may no longer publish her degradation by declaring herself satisfied in her present position, nor her ignorance by asserting that she has ‘all the rights she wants’.” Women must exercise the power that is theirs. “Why is it that one-half the people of this nation are held in abject dependence—civilly, politically, socially, the slaves of man?” Stanton points to the mystery of ‘natural law’, the inequity of so-called ‘divine law’ and the discrimination codified in man’s laws: “To find out her natural rights, she must travel through such labyrinths of falsehood, that most minds stand appalled.... The religion of our day teaches that in the most sacred relations of the race, the woman must ever be subject to the man; that in the husband centres all power and learning.... Woman turns from what she is taught to believe are God's laws, to the laws of man; and in his written codes she finds herself still a slave. No girl of fifteen could read the laws concerning woman, made, executed and defended by those who are bound to her by every tie of affection, without a burst of righteous indignation". For Stanton, political rights for women are integrally to the larger issue, woman's essential humanity. Only in the last paragraph does Stanton return to the issue at hand—woman suffrage. The leaflet also prints at the text of the petition together with the remonstrance "How can any wife or mother, who to-day rejoices in her legal right to the earnings of her hands, and the children of her love, withhold the small pittance of a few hours or days in getting signatures to the petition”.
An early Elizabeth Cady Stanton statement on the rights of women, succinct and powerful, touching on themes which reverberated in her work and writings for the next forty years.
Sources: Franklin, THE CASE FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE, p. 28. Gordon, THE SELECTED PAPERS OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Volume I, p. 451.
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