Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

by Unknown

  Social Reformer Maria Stewart Advocates Education for Black Women

  “Let every female heart become united….”

  Maria Stewart rose in Boston’s Franklin Hall on September 21, 1832, and delivered the first public lecture ever given by an American woman, following by four years the first such address by the British-born Frances Wright. Mrs. Stewart’s speech was directed to her fellow black women of the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society with a clear message: “Daughters of Africa, awake! arise! distinguish yourselves.”

  Born Maria Miller in Connecticut in 1803 and orphaned at an early age, Maria Stewart became a servant to a clergyman’s family. She was married in 1826 in Boston and widowed three years later. A conversion to Christianity and the desire for education led to her “calling” as a writer and teacher and to her moving from Boston to New York and eventually to Washington, Before she left Boston, however, the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison encouraged her work by publishing some of her essays.

  Addressing her audience with a series of questions, Maria Stewart sought equality for blacks through increased education. Her secular sermonizing drew heavily on biblical imagery (“hanging our heads like bulrushes”) and parallel structure (“Look at our young men…. Look at our middle-aged men…. Look at our aged sires…”).

  In 1832, however, a hostile audience—male and female—was not ready for such messages, particularly from a woman on a public platform. After a year of increasingly angry reactions from the public, Maria Stewart decided to leave Boston, and despite a distinguished career as an educator and hospital administrator, she chose never to give another public speech.

  ***

  OH, DO NOT say you cannot make anything of your children; but say, with the help and assistance of God, we will try. Perhaps you will say that you cannot send them to high schools and academies. You can have them taught in the first rudiments of useful knowledge, and then you can have private teachers, who will instruct them in the higher branches.

  It is of no use for us to sit with our hands folded, hanging our heads like bulrushes, lamenting our wretched condition; but let us make a mighty effort, and arise. Let every female heart become united, and let us raise a fund ourselves; and at the end of one year and a half, we might be able to lay the cornerstone for the building of a high school, that the higher branches of knowledge might be enjoyed by us.

  Do you ask, what can we do? Unite and build a store of your own. Fill one side with dry goods and the other with groceries. Do you ask, where is the money? We have spent more than enough for nonsense to do what building we should want. We have never had an opportunity of displaying our talents; therefore the world thinks we know nothing….

  Few white persons of either sex are willing to spend their lives and bury their talents in performing mean, servile labor. And such is the horrible idea that I entertain respecting a life of servitude, that if I conceived of there being no possibility of my rising above the condition of servant, I would gladly hail death as a welcome messenger. Oh, horrible idea, indeed, to possess noble souls, aspiring after high and honorable acquirements, yet confined by the chains of ignorance and poverty to lives of continual drudgery and toil.

  Neither do I know of any who have enriched themselves by spending their lives as house domestics, washing windows, shaking carpets, brushing boots, or tending upon gentlemen’s tables. I have learned, by bitter experience, that continued hard labor deadens the energies of the soul and benumbs the faculties of the mind; the ideas become confined, the mind barren. Continual hard labor irritates our tempers and sours our dispositions; the whole system becomes worn out with toil and fatigue, and we care but little whether we live or die.

  I do not consider it derogatory, my friends, for persons to live out to service. There are many whose inclination leads them to aspire no higher: and I would highly commend the performance of almost anything for an honest livelihood; but where constitutional strength is wanting, labor of this kind, in its mildest form is painful: and, doubtless, many are the prayers that have ascended to heaven from Afric’s daughters for strength to perform their work. Most of our color have dragged out a miserable existence of servitude from the cradle to the grave. And what literary acquirements can be made, or useful knowledge derived, from either maps, books or charts, by those who continually drudge from Monday morning until Sunday noon?…

  O ye fairer sisters, whose hands are never soiled, whose nerves and muscles are never strained, go learn by experience! Had we had the opportunity that you have had to improve our moral and mental faculties, what would have hindered our intellects from being as bright, and our manners from being as dignified, as yours? Had it been our lot to have been nursed in the lap of affluence and ease, and to have basked beneath the smiles and sunshine of fortune, should we not have naturally supposed that we were never made to toil? And why are not our forms as delicate and our constitutions as slender as yours? Is not the workmanship as curious and complete?…

  Look at our young men—smart, active, and energetic, with souls filled with ambitious fire; if they look forward, alas! What are their prospects? They can be nothing but the humblest laborer, on account of their dark complexion; hence many of them lose their ambition and become worthless.

  Look at our middle-aged men, clad in their rusty plaids and coats. In winter, every cent they earn goes to buy their wood and pay their rent; their poor wives also toil beyond their strength, to help support their families.

  Look at our aged sires, whose heads are whitened with the frosts of seventy winters, with their old wood saws on their backs. Alas, what keeps us so? Prejudice, ignorance and poverty.

  But ah! Did the pilgrims, when they first landed on these shores, quietly compose themselves, and say, “The Britons have all the money and all the power, and we must continue their servants forever?” Did they sluggishly sigh and say, “Our lot is hard; the Indians own the soil, and we cannot cultivate it?” No, they first made powerful efforts to raise themselves. And, my brethren have you made a powerful effort? Have you prayed the legislature for mercy’s sake to grant you all the rights and privileges of free citizens, that your daughters may rise to that degree of respectability which true merit deserves, and your sons above the servile situations which most of them fill?

  Suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pleads for Women’s Rights

  “Whatever is done to lift woman to her true position will help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for the race.”

  “We ask woman’s enfranchisement.” said Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her 1868 address at the Woman Suffrage Convention in Washington.

  With Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was at the forefront of the nineteenth-century American movement for women’s rights. Married to the journalist and abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in a ceremony that left out the word “obey,” she proved a powerful orator and took an active part in the first American convention for women’s rights, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. There she drew up a declaration of sentiments, patterned on the Declaration of Independence, that many consider the first persuasive document of the American women’s rights movement; it began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.” With her associate Susan B. Anthony, she espoused the right of a wife to divorce a drunken or brutal husband, a position at that time considered the height of uppityness. Until her death in 1902, she used her skills as writer and speaker to urge economic and legal rights as well as political equality for women.

  When Mrs. Stanton addressed the Washington convention, her speech began with a litany of vices, carefully catalogued as “the masculine element” in a male-dominated world. To a modern audience, her closing analogy of nature and human behavior suggests the pathetic fallacy (John Ruskin’s term for ascribing human traits or sympathies to nature), but her arguments against acquisition and materialism still hold force.

  ***

  I URGE A sixteenth amendment, because “manhoo
d suffrage,” or a man’s government, is civil, religious, and social disorganization. The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease, and death. See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages of history reveal! Through what slavery, slaughter, and sacrifice, through what inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds, the soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries, while mercy has veiled her face and all hearts have been dead alike to love and hope!

  The male element has held high carnival thus far; it has fairly run riot from the beginning, overpowering the feminine element everywhere, crushing out all the diviner qualities in human nature, until we know but little of true manhood and womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing, for it has scarce been recognized as a power until within the last century. Society is but the reflection of man himself, untempered by woman’s thought; the hard iron rule we feel alike in the church, the state, and the home. No one need wonder at the disorganization, at the fragmentary condition of everything, when we remember that man, who represents but half a complete being, with but half an idea on every subject, has undertaken the absolute control of all sublunary matters.

  People object to the demands of those whom they choose to call the strong-minded, because they say “the right of suffrage will make the women masculine.” That is just the difficulty in which we are involved today. Though disfranchised, we have few women in the best sense; we have simply so many reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine gender. The strong, natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed and ignored in dependence, for so long as man feeds woman she will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his condition. To keep a foothold in society, woman must be as near like man as possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices, and vices. She must respect his statutes, though they strip her of every inalienable right, and conflict with that higher law written by the finger of God on her own soul. She must look at everything from its dollar-and-cent point of view, or she is a mere romancer. She must accept things as they are and make the best of them. To mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jails, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every form, all this would be mere sentimentalizing. To protest against the intrigue, bribery, and corruption of public life, to desire that her sons might follow some business that did not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding selfishness, would be arrant nonsense.

  In this way man has been molding woman to his ideas by direct and positive influences, while she, if not a negation, has used indirect means to control him, and in most cases developed the very characteristics both in him and herself that needed repression. And now man himself stands appalled at the results of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness that falsehood, selfishness, and violence are the law of life. The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railroads, or specie payments but a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of thought and action.

  We ask woman’s enfranchisement, as the first step toward the recognition of that essential element in government that can only secure the health, strength, and prosperity of the nation. Whatever is done to lift woman to her true position will help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for the race.

  In speaking of the masculine element, I do not wish to be understood to say that all men are hard, selfish, and brutal, for many of the most beautiful spirits the world has known have been clothed with manhood; but I refer to those characteristics, though often marked in woman, that distinguish what is called the stronger sex. For example, the love of acquisition and conquest, the very pioneers of civilization, when expended on the earth, the sea, the elements, the riches and forces of nature, are powers of destruction when used to subjugate one man to another or to sacrifice nations to ambition.

  Here that great conservator of woman’s love, if permitted to assert itself, as it naturally would in freedom against oppression, violence, and war, would hold all these destructive forces in check, for woman knows the cost of life better than man does, and not with her consent would one drop of blood ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain.

  With violence and disturbance in the natural world, we see a constant effort to maintain an equilibrium of forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may reign supreme. There is a striking analogy between matter and mind, and the present disorganization of society warns us that in the dethronement of woman we have let loose the elements of violence and ruin that she only has the power to curb. If the civilization of the age calls for an extension of the suffrage, surely a government of the most virtuous educated men and women would better represent the whole and protect the interests of all than could the representation of either sex alone.

  Evangelist Sojourner Truth Speaks for Women’s Rights

  “And ain’t I a woman? Look at me!”

  Born a slave named Isabella, this American abolitionist received her freedom when New York State emancipated slaves in 1827. She moved to New York City, heard what she believed to be heavenly voices, and took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843, when she quit being a maidservant to become an evangelist. Her opening line was a stunner: “Children, I talk to God and God talks to me!”

  Sojourner Truth traveled throughout the North (a “sojourner” stays only temporarily in one place) to spread a message that combined religious and abolitionist ideas. After a despondent speech by Frederick Douglass in 1850, she asked her frequent platform mate a question that still reverberates in theological circles: “Frederick, is God dead?” Although illiterate, this mother of five powerfully conveyed her equal-rights message in dialect, with plain words and commonsense reasoning, drawing on her own experiences to persuade listeners of her sincerity. During the Civil War, President Lincoln appointed her counselor to the freedmen of the capital.

  Blacks and women were in competition for suffrage, and few black women attended early women’s rights meetings. Sojourner Truth was an exception; at the 1851 Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, in Akron, she spoke of feminism with the same fervor that marked her preaching on abolitionism and religion. Through a conversational form of direct address (“Well, children”) and the use of repetition (the question “And ain’t I a woman?” is raised four times), Sojourner Truth moved listeners in the early days of the fight for women’s rights. She said she wanted her language reported in standard English, “not as if I was saying tickety-ump-ump-nicky-nacky,” and in some quotation books her “ain’ts” are changed to “aren’ts,” but I think such editorial prettification loses the flavor and force of the eloquence.

  ***

  WELL, CHILDREN, WHERE there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ’twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

  That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm. I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

  Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [Intellect, someone whispers.] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women�
�s rights or Negro’s rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?

  Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him.

  If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

  Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.

  Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison Admits of No Compromise with the Evil of Slavery

  “My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery or ceasing to prate of the rights of man.”