“Now walk with me a few blocks onward. A different portion of the city is reached. Here are carriages filled with ladies dressed in velvets and furs. Their dainty persons adorned with flashing jewels. They throng the operas, concerts, reception rooms, while faultlessly attired swains hang upon their every word. Their life is one round of seeming pleasure. Daily and nightly emotions, aspirations, good and true and pure, are recklessly trodden under foot. Fair hands are sold while hearts are crushed. The highest bidder is sure to win the stake. They take the yellow gold their fair bodies have bought them and with it deck the casket whose contents are one mass of corruption. The smiling lips hide the starving aching heart.
“And whence comes the gold for which this daily barter of souls take place? Coined from the life blood of the poor. Every cup of the intoxicating wine of life they lift to their lips is seasoned with the sweat, the life blood of the toiling masses. Sighs are woven into the glittering meshes of their silken robes. Crystallized tears are the pearls the seamstress has sewn into the glittering folds as she plied her needle in the dead of night.
“And the fawning swains? The lady whose dower is the most golden is the favored one. The oily tongues daily, hourly, fabricate the smooth falsehoods. They swear love eternal, and for the time being make martyrs of themselves to worship at the golden shrine. What matters it that he has led a life that would lay low the silver head of a fond mother; a life that would paralyze a proud and loving sister’s heart; that would blanch the confiding maiden’s cheek,—could they but know. But they do not know, and so the sensualist transmits the germ of poison and disease to the coming generation.
“Women accept such moral and physical wrecks of humanity, with hollow skulls added to their other numerous imperfections, and in nine cases out of ten the women are just as shallow brained as the men they accept. While the man of fashion is seen at the gambling table, at the racecourse and in the drinking saloons, flirting with gaudily dressed girls, the woman of fashion discusses the latest style of party dress, counting on her finger-tips how many masculine hearts have been laid at her feet, and, in order to kill time, pores over the latest novel.
“And from this seed, sown in such reckless fashion, the coming generations are to grow. What is to furnish genius to those unborn generations? Whence is to come the soulful man and woman? How is purity to thrive in an atmosphere of poison and corruption?
“When we enter the realm of the law and look into the records of crime, we find the account simply appalling. When we read the number of divorces granted, and the vaster number applied for and not granted, we wonder whether there are any left who still honestly advocate wedlock. Read the pleas upon which those divorces have been granted and they will show you that so long as loveless marriages are entered into, so long as men and women are mismated, just so long will the marriage bond mean a galling bondage; and so long as such marriages are entered into and children begotten from them; so long as the prospective mother sees in the coming child only an added burden; so long as this child is undesigned and undesired; and so long as the gestating mother suffers for and craves what are impossibilities to her, just so long will there be crimes and records of crimes; just so long will prisons be filled with criminals.
“What is the most numerous of the reasons that form the pleas for divorce? ‘Illicit love’! In spite of all laws; in spite of the iron hand of custom, in spite of the trampling underfoot of all the tender passions known to the human heart, that heart demands and will have its rights. What matters it if society has cased it in outward fetters that are supposed to confine it to prescribed limits. When nature demands its rights this casing becomes too small; the fetters too weak to bind. The frail, weak human heart expands and swells until its bonds burst and like a caged bird regaining its freedom, the heart seeks its mate in the free wild wood to follow nature’s law. The divine law of freedom is written deep within the human heart. No matter how deeply it is encrusted under the ice of mercenary motives; no matter how firmly clutched by social custom, when love comes knocking for admittance all, everything, must give way before his all-conquering power. Bar and double bar the doors, but ‘Love still laughs at locksmiths,’ and ‘Love will find a way where wolves fear to prey.’
“O, Love! love! love! How thy holy, thy soul-redeeming power has been defamed! Unholy passion, that burns and sears with vice the hearts of men, has oft been mistaken for that holy flame. Love, sacred love will elevate, will cleanse from all impurities, will awake ambition, will be an incentive to noble deeds, to a noble life. But passion alone enervates, disgusts, wears out both body and soul; it drags down its votaries to groveling depths.
“But how seldom do mothers teach their children the difference between the two? The smiling mother gives her innocent daughter to a hoary head and a seared heart if there is but a golden covering to them. A ‘splendid match’—from a worldly view—is all that is needed. But the sequel too often shows how splendid the match has been. Only when the heart is still in death does it no longer throb with pain and sickening dread at the touch of him who should have thrilled her whole being with exquisite happiness. How many are able to read aright the story in the still white face?
“Go visit the homes of the dead and see there the number of graves that entomb the forms of youthful wives and mothers. Go enter the abodes of the insane and count the rows of staring eyes proclaiming a living death,—all caused by the barter of sex life. Go through the length and breadth of the land and see the signs of heart-break; the pitiful misery that is the lot of mankind, and all caused by ‘Man’s inhumanity to man,’ and especially man’s inhumanity to woman.
“Go where you will, into lordly mansions of the rich, into the hovels of the lowly poor, and see the subjection of woman unto man. He rides roughshod over her most sacred and tender ideals. Every hope in the once bounding heart has been crushed. Her fate is to please her ‘lord and master,’—to keep his home for him; to entertain his guests; to bear his children; to rear them for him to dispose of as he may see fit—thus forcing her to bring into the world a race of slaves, a race degenerated by having implanted in the heart of the unborn child all the evil passions that naturally rankle in the breast of woman so enslaved and outraged.
“The soul is unthought of in this reproduction, which merely takes place to satisfy the animal in man. The desire, the inclinations of the mother, are not considered. To cater to the passions of man, to be the mother of undesired children is her natural sphere in life. She must thank God that she has been selected thus to be the instrument to perpetuate the race. Home, sweet home, has been sung until it echoes and re-echoes throughout the land, but to millions of women it has been simply a prison, a hellish prison.
“The church, ‘the man of God,’ its instrument, stands upon one side. On the other side stands the state. In case the church is not strong enough to control woman, the state holds up to her aching eyes the terrors of the ‘law of the land.’
“Oh, the path of woman is a straight and narrow one! Woe unto her if she dares to depart therefrom. And yet you wonder how it is that criminals throng the land; that there are so many that will not respect the rights of others. Did anyone ever respect any rights of the mother that bore them? Why; she had no rights! Then how could any one respect them? Bound by man-made law and church superstition from her infancy her fate is linked fast with that of the working class. She and they must alike be kept in subjection.
“O, workingmen, O ye toilers, ye producers! O womankind! mothers of coming generations, awake, arise, and hand in hand, break the bonds that enthrall you, that enslave you, body and soul. Refuse to longer be any man’s slave. Assert your rights. Clamor for your freedom, and rest not until you have obtained it.
“It is impossible that in squalor and filth, purity should be gestated. Assert your freedom, O women! Demand it, clamor for it, fight for it! Never for one moment cease to struggle for it. Be united in your efforts, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, and the day is sure to come when victory shall be yours.”
“I am afraid,” the speaker went on,—“I am afraid I have been telling you more of the evils that need reform than of the methods of securing that reform; and, while I am radical in the extreme, yet I condemn not one single method or idea that may help to bring about one single reform, be it ever so small. ‘Rome was not built in a day,’ and the world will not be reformed in a day, or a week, or a month, or a year. But as the days and weeks and months and years speed by, each reform will furnish its aid in bringing about the much desired result. Everyone who is working for reform, or in other words, working for humanity’s best welfare, no matter in what line it may be, is doing his or her share of the work, and will doubtless receive the full credit that is due them. Only this I would add, while everyone is riding his or her own hobby, I would look beneath this mass of corruption and unearth the underlying cause. To lay the ax to the root is what must be done in order to fell the giant, and to be able to do this we want freedom, freedom, freedom! No more laws to bind our thoughts and shackle our hands. We want to be free, to let the hearts within our bosoms beat as they will; free to follow the dictates of our normal desires; free to extricate ourselves from the old and customary when we recognize it as evil; free to let our souls soar into the regions above the clouds; free to enter the upper chambers of the mind; free to tear down the structure of rottenness that enables the few to drain the life blood of the millions and to coin it into shining gold wherewith to perpetuate their power. Free to use our own inheritance, the grand gifts of nature.
“O thou glorious, O thou great, grand, redeeming ‘Liberty’! Thou shalt yet wave over this beautiful world the banner of holy brotherly love! Thou shalt yet secure to us this much needed freedom. Thou shalt yet see its fruits in the coming generation of a new-born people,—when poverty, hunger and misery will be unknown! When crime will be a forgotten word; when the rule of the church, like that of the state, will be a thing no longer remembered; when prisons will be swept from the face of the earth; when justice, glory-crowned, at the right shall stand; when charity no longer has a place, since her vocation shall be ended; when the awaiting of unborn humanity will be regarded the coming of a joyous event, and when disease shall have succumbed to the master hand of science, death no longer a dreaded monster, but a friend that comes only as a result of nature, to claim those that have lived their glorious life to the end, and who fain would resign that hold upon it in exchange for the peaceful rest that follows the well-performed labor of the day.
“O, friends and comrades! to hasten that day I ask you to join the band that but yesterday was small indeed, but which today has swelled to such size as to alarm those that would place their feet upon your necks, and which will continue to swell more rapidly day by day until the down-trodden will arise as one man to demand their natural birth right.”
With glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes the speaker took her seat amid deafening applause.