Eighty Years and More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 480 pages of information about Eighty Years and More; Reminiscences 1815-1897.

Eighty Years and More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 480 pages of information about Eighty Years and More; Reminiscences 1815-1897.
should not be thought of.  But Miss Allison soon proved her capabilities and the falseness of these prophecies by taking her place in the engine room and managing its workings with perfect ease.  Six power looms, on which women wove carpets, webbing, silks, etc., were run by this engine.  At a later period the printing of The New Century for Woman, a paper published by the centennial commission in the woman’s building, was done by its means.  Miss Allison declared the work to be more cleanly, more pleasant, and infinitely less fatiguing than cooking over a kitchen stove.  “Since I have been compelled to earn my own living,” she said, “I have never been engaged in work I like so well.  Teaching school is much harder, and one is not paid so well.”  She expressed her confidence in her ability to manage the engines of an ocean steamer, and said that there were thousands of small engines in use in various parts of the country, and no reason existed why women should not be employed to manage them,—­following the profession of engineer as a regular business,—­an engine requiring far less attention than is given by a nursemaid or a mother to a child.

But to have made the Woman’s Pavilion grandly historic, upon its walls should have been hung the yearly protest of Harriet K. Hunt against taxation without representation; the legal papers served upon the Smith sisters when, for their refusal to pay taxes while unrepresented, their Alderney cows were seized and sold; the papers issued by the city of Worcester for the forced sale of the house and lands of Abby Kelly Foster, the veteran abolitionist, because she refused to pay taxes, giving the same reason our ancestors gave when they resisted taxation; a model of Bunker Hill monument, its foundation laid by Lafayette in 1825, but which remained unfinished nearly twenty years, until the famous German danseuse, Fanny Ellsler, gave the proceeds of a public performance for that purpose.  With these should have been exhibited framed copies of all the laws bearing unjustly upon women—­those which rob her of her name, her earnings, her property, her children, her person; also the legal papers in the case of Susan B. Anthony, who was tried and fined for claiming her right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, and the decision of Mr. Justice Miller in the case of Myra Bradwell, denying national protection for woman’s civil rights; and the later decision of Chief Justice Waite of the United States Supreme Court against Virginia L. Minor, denying women national protection for their political rights; decisions in favor of State rights which imperil the liberties not only of all women, but of every white man in the nation.

Woman’s most fitting contributions to the Centennial Exposition would have been these protests, laws, and decisions, which show her political slavery.  But all this was left for rooms outside of the centennial grounds, upon Chestnut Street, where the National Woman’s Suffrage Association hoisted its flag, made its protests, and wrote the Declaration of Rights of the women of the United States.

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Eighty Years and More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.