Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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The move to Titusville, however, soon put my mother in touch with the crusade for equal political rights which was taking the place of the earlier movement for woman’s rights. The Civil War had slowed up that agitation; indeed, many of its best talking points had been conceded and were slowly going into practice. Most of the militants had thrown themselves into war work and, after the war, into the campaign for negro suffrage; but the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, for the first time introducing the word “male” into the Constitution, aroused a sense of outrage, not only in the advocates of equal rights but in many women who had not approved of previous agitations. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the greatest of the early leaders, failing to keep the humiliating distinction out of the Amendment, began a tremendous national crusade for woman’s suffrage. They marshaled a group of splendid women and undertook an intensive campaign meant to reach every woman in the country. It reached us in Titusville, even reached our home where my father and mother, always hospitable to crusaders, opened their doors to them. I remember best Mary Livermore and Frances Willard—not that either touched me, saw me; of this neglect I was acutely conscious. I noted, too, that the men we entertained did notice me, talked to me as a person—not merely as a possible member of a society they were promoting. There was Neal Dow—father by this time was a prohibitionist—who let me show him our Dante with Gustave Doré’s pictures. Men were nicer than women to me, I mentally noted.