In this delegation, and in the convention which
has just been held in this city, women have come together who
never met before. People have asked me why I came.
I care nothing for suffrage so far as to stand beside men, or rush
to the polls, or take any privilege outside of my home, only, as
Mrs. Wallace says, for humanity. Years ago, when a little child,
I lost my mother, and I was brought up by a man. If I have not a
man's brain I had at least a man's instruction. He taught me that
to work in the cause of reform for women was just as great as to
work in the cause of reform for men. But in every effort I made in
the cause of reform I was combated in one direction or another.
I never took part with the suffragists. I never realized the
importance of their cause until we were beaten back on every aide
in the work of reform. If we attempted to put women in charge of
prisons, believing that wherever woman sins and suffers women
should be there to teach, help, and guide, every place was in the
hands of men. If we made an effort to get women on the school
boards we were combated and could do nothing. Everyplace seemed to
be changed, when there were good men in those places, by changes
of politics; and the mothers of the land, having had to prostrate
themselves as beggars, if not in fact, really in sentiment and
feeling, have become at last almost desperate.
In the State of Texas I had a niece living whose father was an
inmate of a lunatic asylum.
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