Good morning, it's Friday, Nov. 12, 2021, the day of the week when I reprise quotations intended to be uplifting or educational. Today's comes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the towering 19th century suffragist who was born on this date in 1815.
Before she'd said a single word to the delegates attending the first international conference on women's rights on the morning of March 25, 1888, Elizabeth Cady Stanton received a standing ovation. The enthusiastic applause must have been like that given to lifetime achievement Oscar recipients at the Academy Awards. It had been four decades since the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., and Stanton had been working for those rights even longer than that.
Although she reminded her audience American women did not yet have the vote, she expressed faith that it was only a matter of time. "We have opened a pathway," she said, "to the promised land."
In her speech that day, which RCP published a year and a half ago, Stanton once again made the case for women's equality and allowed herself to muse aloud about the difference that female voters and policymakers would make in the global policy questions of the age. These ranged from the cosmic (war and peace) to the relatively trivial, such the contemporaneous squabble between Canada and the U.S. over territorial fishing rights.
"As to the much-vexed question of the fisheries, we would say, in view of our vast Atlantic and Pacific coast, thousands of miles in extent, do let Canada have three miles of the ocean if she wants it," she said. "If the cod is the bone of contention, as it is the poorest of all fish, let the Canadians eat it in peace so long as we have oysters, shad, bass and the delicate salmon from our Western lakes and California."
This sounds to modern ears as though Ms. Stanton was being puckish. Perhaps there was some of that, but I think she was trying to show that women, absent the machismo and jingoistic impulses of men, would be reasonable compromisers when it came to public policy. She certainly thought they would be more civilized and compassionate. Speaking 26 years before the horrors of World War I, she said this: "The question is continually asked: If women had the right of suffrage, how would they vote on national questions? I think I might venture to say that the women on this platform would all be opposed to war."
She also said this: "As to a treaty with Russia to send back her political prisoners to be tortured in her prisons and the mines of Siberia, our verdict would be no, no. America must ever be the great university in which the lovers of freedom may safely graduate with the highest honors, and under our flag find peace and protection."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
