brook, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Susan B.
Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott.

[143] _An Appeal to the Women of the United States by the National
Woman Suffrage and Educational Committee, Washington, D. C._:

DEAR FRIENDS:--The question of your rights as citizens of the United
States, and of the grave responsibilities which a recognition of those
rights will involve, is becoming the great question of the day in this
country, and is the culmination of the great question which has been
struggling through the ages for solution, that of the highest freedom
and largest personal responsibility of the individual under such
necessary and wholesome restraints as are required by the welfare of
society. As you shall meet and act upon this question, so shall these
great questions of freedom and responsibility sweep on, or be
retarded, in their course.

This is pre-eminently the birthday of womanhood. The material has long
held in bondage the spiritual; henceforth the two, the material
refined by the spiritual, the spiritual energized by the material, are
to walk hand in hand for the moral regeneration of mankind. Mothers,
for the first time in history, are able to assert, not only their
inherent first right to the children they have borne, but their right
to be a protective and purifying power in the political society into
which those children are to enter. To fulfill, therefore, their whole
duty of motherhood, to satisfy their whole capacity in that divine
relation, they are called of God to participate with man in all the
responsibilities of human life, and to share with him every work of
brain and heart, refusing only those physical labors that are
inconsistent with the exalted duties and privileges of maternity, and
requiring these of men as the equivalent of those heavy yet necessary
burdens which women alone can bear.

Under the Constitution of the United States justly interpreted, you
were entitled to participate in the government of the country, in the
same manner as you were held to allegiance and subject to penalty. But
in the slow development of the great principles of freedom, you, and
all, have failed both to recognize and appreciate this right; but
to-day, when the rights and responsibilities of women are attracting
the attention of thoughtful minds throughout the whole civilized
world, this constitutional right, so long unobserved and unvalued, is
becoming one of prime importance, and calls upon all women