the century that has ballot-boxes. You
belong to the century of Tamerlane and Timour the Tartar; you
belong to China, where the women have no feet, because it is not
meant that they shall walk. You belong anywhere but in America;
and if you want an answer, walk down Broadway, and meet a hundred
thousand petticoats, and they are a hundred thousand answers; for
if woman can walk the streets, she can go to the ballot-box, and
any reason of indelicacy that forbids the one covers the other.

Men say, "Why do you come here? What good are you going to do?
You do nothing but talk." Oh, yes, we have done a great deal
besides talk! But suppose we had done nothing but talk? I saw a
poor man the other day, and said he (speaking of a certain period
in his life), "I felt very friendless and alone--I had only God
with me"; and he seemed to think that was not much. And so thirty
millions of thinking, reading people are constantly throwing it
in the teeth of reformers that they rely upon talk! What is talk?
Why, it is the representative of brains. And what is the
characteristic glory of the nineteenth century? That it is ruled
by brains, and not by muscle; that rifles are gone by, and ideas
have come in; and, of course, in such an era, talk is the
fountain-head of all things. But we have done a great deal. In
the first place, you will meet dozens of men who say, "Oh,
woman's right to property, the right of the wife to her own
earnings, we grant that; we always thought that; we have had that
idea for a dozen years." I met a man the other day in the cars,
and we read the statute of your New York Legislature. "Why," said
he, "that is nothing; I have assented to that for these fifteen
years." All I could say to that was this: "This agitation has
either given you the idea, or it has given you the courage to
utter it, for nobody ever heard it from you until to-day." ...

What do we toil for? Why, my friends, I do not care much whether
a woman actually goes to the ballot-box and votes--that is a
slight matter; and I shall not wait, either, to know whether
every woman in this audience wants to vote. Some of you were
saying to-day, in these very seats, coming here out of mere
curiosity, to see what certain fanatics could find to say, "Why,
I don't want any more rights