Florida FAST Practice Test 4

Address to the Committee on Suffrage (1894)

¹Gentlemen of the Committee: I come before you not as a stranger to this Capitol, but as one who has climbed its steps for eleven winters, carrying the same petition and receiving the same courteous reply. You have been kind to us. You have offered us chairs and lemonade and the assurance that our cause will be "taken under advisement." I have begun to suspect that advisement is a large building with no doors.

²I ask today for something narrower than you may fear. I do not ask that the women of this state be given the vote in every election. I ask only that they be permitted to vote for the members of the school boards that govern the education of their own children.

³Consider who now holds that power. In the town of Elmira Springs, the school board consists of a banker, a lumber merchant, and a gentleman who, I am told, has not set foot in a schoolhouse since he left one at the age of twelve. Each is an honorable man. Not one of them has ever sat up through the night with a child who could not learn to read, or walked a daughter to a school whose stove had gone cold. The mothers of Elmira Springs have done these things a thousand times. Yet the law counts their knowledge as nothing and the banker's as everything.

⁴It is said that women do not need the vote because their husbands vote for them. I have heard this argument for eleven years, and I grant that it has a certain charm. But a vote cast for me is not my vote, any more than a meal eaten for me is my dinner. And what of the widow? What of the woman whose husband is at sea, or in the mines, or in his grave? Does her child deserve a voice less than her neighbor's?

⁵It is said, too, that politics would coarsen women—that the polling place is no fit room for a lady. Gentlemen, I have seen the polling place. It is a school. In half the districts of this state, men cast their ballots in the very rooms where women teach their children six days a week. If the room is fit for a woman to teach in, it is fit for a woman to vote in.

⁶I would remind you that in Kansas and in many other states, women already vote in school elections, and the republic has not fallen. The schools have not closed. The husbands of Kansas, so far as I can learn, still eat their suppers. What has changed is that the mothers who know most about the schools now have a say in how they are run.

⁷Some of you will tell me that the time is not yet. When, then? Shall we wait until every child now in school has grown and gone? The child who is eight years old this winter will not be eight again. Her one chance at a good teacher, a warm room, a book that is not falling apart, comes now, in these years, and it will not come back for any vote you cast later.

⁸I am not here to shame you. You did not write the law that silences us; you inherited it, as we did. But you can mend it. That is the difference between you and your fathers: they did not know better, and you do.

⁹Gentlemen, the school belongs to the people who sustain it, and no one sustains it more than the mothers of this state. We wash the clothes the children wear to it. We hear the lessons recited at our tables. We nurse the children when the fever comes through a crowded classroom. We ask now only to have a voice in the place that has always had our hearts.

¹⁰Give us that voice, and you will find us not your rivals but your partners. Deny it, and you will find us here again next winter, and the winter after that—for we have learned patience in a hard school, and we are very good students.