continue to be until you adopt a plan founded upon truly
republican principles. When, a few years ago, you put the ballot
into the hands of the swarming masses of freedmen who had
gathered here with the ignorance and vices of slaves, and refused
to enfranchise women, white or colored, you gave this District no
fair trial of a republican form of government. You did not even
protect the interests of the colored race. You admitted that the
colored man was not really free until he held the ballot in his
hand, and therefore you enfranchised him and left the woman twice
his slave. I know colored women in Washington far the superiors,
intellectually and morally, of the masses of men, who declare
that they now endure wrongs and abuses unknown in slavery.

There is not an interest in this District that is not as vital to
me as to any man in Washington--that is not more vital to me than
it can be to any member of this honorable body. As a citizen,
seeking the welfare of this community, as a wife and mother
desiring the safety of my children, which of you can claim a
deeper interest than I in questions of markets, taxes, finance,
banks, railroads, highways, the public debt and interest thereon,
boards of health, sanitary and police regulations, station-houses
(wherein I find many a wreck of womanhood, ruined in her youth
and beauty), schools, asylums, and charities? Why deny me a voice
in any or all of these? Do you doubt that I would use the ballot
in the interests of order, retrenchment, and reform? Do you deny
a right of mine, which you will admit I know how to prize,
because there are women who do not appreciate its value, do not
demand it, possibly might not (any better than men) know how to
use it? What a mockery of justice! What a flagrant violation of
individual rights! I would cry out against it if no other woman
in the land felt the wrong. But among the 10,000,000 of mothers
of 14,000,000 of children in this country, vast numbers of
thoughtful, philanthropic, and pure women have come to see this
truth, and desire to express their mother love and home love at
the ballot-box!

Frederick Douglass once said: "Whole nations have been bathed in
blood to establish the simplest possible propositions. For
instance, that a man's head is _his_ head; hi