s wife's
earnings and her children, she is in worse bondage than before;
because in many cases the task of providing for helpless children
and an idle, lazy, husband, is imposed on the patient wife and
mother; and, with this sudden elevation to citizenship, which the
mass of stupid, ignorant negroes look upon as entitling them to
great honor, I regard the future state of the negro woman,
without the ballot in her hand, as deplorable. And what is said
of the ignorant black man can as truthfully be said of the
ignorant white man; they all regard woman as an inferior being.
She is their helpless, household slave. He is her ruler, her
law-giver, her conscience, her judge and jury, and the prisoner
at the bar has no appeal. This XVth Amendment thrusts all women
still further down in the scale of degradation, and I consider it
neither praiseworthy nor magnanimous for women to assert that
they are willing to hold their claims in abeyance, until all
shades and types of men have the franchise. It is admitting a
false principle, which all women, who are loyal to truth and
justice, should immediately reject. For over twenty-five years,
the advocates of woman suffrage have been trying to bring this
vital question before the country. They have accomplished
herculean tasks and still it is up-hill work. Shall they, after
battling so long with ignorance, prejudice and unreasoning
customs, stand quietly back and obsequiously say they are willing
that the floodgates shall be opened and a still greater mass of
ignorance, vice and degradation let in to overpower their little
army, and set this question back for a century? Their solemn duty
to future generations forbids such a compromise.

The advocates of the XVth Amendment tell us we ought to accept
the half loaf when we can not get the whole. I do not see that
woman gets any part of the loaf, not even a crumb that falls
from the rich man's table. It may appear very magnanimous for
men, who have never known the degradation of being thrust down in
the scale of humanity by reason of their sex, to urge these
yielding measures upon women, they can not and do not know our
feelings on the subject, and I regard it as neither just nor
generous to eternally compel women to yield on all questions (no
matter how humi