Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

This is Women’s History Month, and last Sunday we celebrated Elva Kiernan’s 100th birthday. She was born in 1908. When women won the right to vote, in 1920, Elva was 12. When our congregation was first formed in 1916, women in America did not have the right to vote. Remarkably, it has taken eighty-eight years since women got the franchise; until a woman has become a serious contender for the nomination of a major party to be president of the United States. I am not in the least promoting her against her opponent who, remarkably, is an African American man.

Go back 160 years. In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention in New York began to wage a long, slow, nonviolent struggle to win the right to vote for women. At the time, a male supporter of that struggle, the Unitarian minister Samuel J. May, preached on “The Rights and Conditions of Women.” May said, “This entire disfranchisement of females is as unjust as the disfranchisement of the males would be; for there is nothing in their moral, mental or physical nature, that disqualifies them to understand correctly the true interests of the community, or to act wisely in reference to them.”

He continued, “I know not why silly men should be encouraged to speak, more than silly women; nor why the wise of one sex should be forbidden, any more than the wise of the other, to communicate what they possess to those, who may need it, and in the manner they prefer. To whomsoever God has given the power to instruct and control others, by their learning, their eloquence or their wit, to them he has given the authority to do so. I have heard some women speak in a manner far more convincing and impressive than most men that I have known were able to and so as amply to vindicate their right to stand up in the pulpit or the forum, as teachers of men.”
Susan B. Anthony was a good friend of Reverend Samuel May. In 1873, she was on trial for illegally voting in an election. Judge Hunt ordered the defendant to stand up, saying: (excerpt from trial)

Judge Hunt: “Has the prisoner anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?”
Miss Anthony: “Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.”
Judge Hunt: “The court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting.”
Miss Anthony: “May it please your honor, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons why sentence cannot, in justice, be pronounced against me. Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers as an offender against law, therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty, property and-“
Judge Hunt: “The court cannot allow the prisoner to go on.”
Miss Anthony: “But your honor will not deny me this one and only poor privilege of protest against this high-handed outrage upon my citizen’s rights. May it please the Court to remember that since the day of my arrest last November, this is the first time that either myself or any person of my disfranchised class has been allowed a word of defense before judge or jury-“
Judge Hunt: “The prisoner must sit down-the court cannot allow it.”
Miss Anthony: “All of my prosecutors, from the 8th ward corner grocery politician, who entered the complaint, to the United States Marshal, Commissioner, District Attorney, District Judge, your honor on the bench, not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, even then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, awake or asleep, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer. Even, under such circumstances, a commoner of England, tried before a jury of Lords, would have far less cause to complain than should I, a woman, tried before a jury of men. Even my counsel, the Honorable Henry R. Selden, who has argued my cause so ably, so earnestly, so unanswerably before your honor, is my political sovereign. Precisely as no disfranchised person is entitled to sit upon a jury, and no woman is entitled to the franchise, so, none but a regularly admitted lawyer is allowed to practice in the courts, and no woman can gain admission to the bar - hence, jury, judge, counsel, must all be of the superior class.”
Judge Hunt: “The Court must insist - the prisoner has been tried according to the established forms of law.”
Miss Anthony: “Yes, your honor, but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women; and hence, your honor’s ordered verdict of guilty; against a United States citizen for the exercise of ‘that citizen’s right to vote,’ simply because that citizen was a woman and not a man…”
Judge Hunt: “The court orders the prisoner to sit down. It will not allow another word.”
Miss Anthony: “When I was brought before your honor for trial, I hoped for a broad and liberal interpretation of the Constitution and its recent amendments. But failing to get this justice - failing, even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers - I ask not leniency at your hands-but rather the full rigors of the law.”
Judge Hunt: “The court must insist- (Here, the prisoner sat down.) The prisoner will stand up. (Here, Miss Anthony arose again.) The sentence of the Court is that you pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution.”
Miss Anthony: “May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper The Revolution four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.’”
Judge Hunt: “Madam, the Court will order you committed until the fine is paid.”

New Jersey was unique among the original thirteen states. In 1776, when it wrote its original constitution New Jersey allowed everyone worth a certain amount of money (50 Pounds), men and women, African American and white, the right to vote. Unfortunately, in 1807, there was a hotly disputed election and a law was passed restricting the right to vote to white males.

New Jersey is also the state, where in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson returned to his voting district in Princeton Borough for New Jersey’s special election to endorse women’s suffrage on the state level, but not on a national level. Two years later, some of the New Jersey’ suffragists were part of the group arrested for picketing in front of the White House in vigils called “Silent Sentinels.” They continued there until he announced his support for suffrage.

Pennsylvania had Lucretia Mott who demanded full political rights for women and proclaimed, “All men and women are created equal.” At the nation’s Centennial Anniversary in 1876 in Philadelphia, 150,000 people gathered at Independence Square for patriotic ceremonies. Susan B. Anthony, whose name was synonymous with women’s suffrage, could not let the opportunity pass, so without the knowledge or permission from the organizers, she ascended a platform and read a suffragette’s declaration of independence. Unfortunately, few of the men there were able to grasp the connection between the Declaration of Independence that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 and the one that Anthony read in 1876.

The right for women to have the vote and fully participate in democracy was and is a religious issue as well as a political issue. The fifth principle of Unitarian Universalism is to affirm and promote “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” Unlike what the Reverend Samuel May said in his sermon, in most churches during the suffrage movement you would hear anti suffrage messages. They said that women were refined and delicate spiritual creatures that should stand above the rough and tough realm of government and business. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of the Congregationalist preacher the Reverend Layman Beecher and brother to famed abolitionist theologian, Henry Ward Beecher, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and was an active abolitionist. Harriet wrote strong anti-suffragist articles. The battle cry of women who opposed suffrage was “Good women won’t vote; bad women will.”

Women wrote and published five well-funded anti-suffrage periodicals. An article that appeared in 1912 in Woman’s Protest, one of those periodicals, claimed, “There are more criminals and imbeciles to each 1,000 of population than ever before. When overwrought women have disturbed within themselves the process of nature, they impart a disturbance to their offspring, and instead of the development of a normal human being, there is one distorted in body or mind or in both.” (Max G. Schlapp) An article with the title “Disloyal to Their Sex” appeared in one during World War I that called into question the patriotism of the suffragists as “The Real Foes of Democracy.” (On the Issues, Spring 1995, “Phyllis Schafly’s Ancestors,” by Patricia Riley Dunlaf, pp. 22ff.)

Historians often ignored the Women’s Suffrage Movement as something needing little attention. They viewed it as an inconsequential cause and treated it with curiosity because it is about women. In reality, women’s suffrage was a totally nonviolent liberation movement. Half of the population of the United States was a powerless class, without vote, without representation in the government, not on juries and in very few places of power. The Movement was about winning democracy, liberation and freedom for half of the country’s population, and they did it nonviolently. This is a dramatic history that includes unbelievable dedication, intelligence, eloquence, betrayal and intrigue, long decades of frustration and disappointment that ultimately lead to victory. Never let anyone tell you that women were given the vote. They had to fight every inch of the way for almost eighty years to win it.

We still have not achieved the wider goal of women’s full equality and freedom. Yet, winning the vote was monumental, and ever since then the significance of women’s voting and political involvement has been a growing democratic force to be reckoned with. It has and is making gains for equity, justice and compassion.

We continue to need progressive leaders today in our homes, in our congregations, in our local communities and in our state and national corridors of power. We need those progressive leaders today because some of the same reactionary attitudes that kept the vote from Alice Paul, Susan B. Anthony, Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Carrie Chapman Catt, Sojourner Truth and many of our grandmothers and great grandmothers still exist, both here and around the world.

The road was hard; it was muddy and rough. However, the women who fought nonviolently for women’s liberation for nine decades knew in their hearts that they would get there. Those women who fought nonviolently for women’s liberation for nine decades knew that if they were going to be free, it meant that they had to put themselves on the line. They believed in things that gave them hope in the face of fierce opposition. They continued year after year to lift their voices with the question, why shouldn’t we have the vote and the power of democracy.

We do not understand how every single inch of democratic ground that we stand on today was gained by the hard work of what Susan B. Anthony called, “some little handful of women of the past.” Moreover, as her friend Cady Stanton said, they left the burden of liberation and justice on the shoulders of the younger women of the next generation. Now several generations past, we do start with great advantages over those who preceded us. For those who have been given much, much more is possible and much more is expected. The laws, customs, creeds, codes, and the power of government continues to need challenging to affirm and promote justice, equality and compassion for all.

Let your voice be heard.

Make sure your vote is always counted.