"SHE FLIES WITH HER OWN WINGS"

The Willamette Valley Chautauqua Association was incorporated in 1895 “for the general promotion of religious, scientific and educational interests.”¹ Each summer, for almost two weeks in July, the association conducted assemblies on the grounds of Gladstone Park in Oregon City. According to its promotional programs, the shaded, seventy-four-acre park with “scenery that invites the tourist from distant lands” boasted “the largest auditorium west of the Rocky mountains,” seating three thousand, with “restaurants, postoffice and telephone on the grounds.” Its program was “second only to the great New York Chautauqua,” with “speakers of national fame” and numerous departments of instruction ranging from music, elocution, art, and kindergarten to the Bible, physical culture, botany, entomology, and English literature. Each season saw special days organized: Christian Endeavor Day, Y.M.C.A. Day, Patriotic Day, College Day, William Jennings Bryan Day, Joaquin Miller Day, and so on. These special days notwithstanding, “[e]very day presents a program complete in itself of science, music, art, wit, oratory, stereoptican views, bicycle riding and athletics.” The chautauqua’s expenses were “the lowest of any assembly in the world”: $1.50 bought a season ticket that included camping privileges. The “wise” patron who sought a “sylvan camping spot” was assured that “a city of tents will be laid out in regular streets and avenues,” while the “fastidious” guest who preferred a luxurious hotel was reassured that Portland was only forty minutes away.

From its inception, the Chautauqua hosted a Woman’s Day, “a congress of women interested in all progress, temperance, equal suffrage and missions,” and women speakers were a familiar sight on the platform.² Also from its inception, Scott Duniway headed the Chautauqua’s equal suffrage department and contributed mightily to the success of Woman’s Day.³

Saturday, July 18–the penultimate day of the 1908 assembly–was Patriotic Day. A “special program” in the morning was followed by an address by Bishop Robert McIntyre of Los Angeles on “The Evolution of Abraham Lincoln” at 2:00, “reunions at various headquarters” at 3:30, and fireworks at 9:30 that evening. Abigail spoke at the reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic that afternoon.⁴

In treating the topic of women and war, this speech ranges widely over a number of related subjects, from aggression in humans and other animals to life in the single-sex army.⁵ Her central argument is that women should not be excluded from the army camp because the “mother instinct” is essential to purify camp conditions and save soldiers from “scarlet women” and the “social evil,” prostitution. Moreover, the case of the army is employed as an object lesson for the purpose of illustrating her broader, long-held and oft-expressed views on the complementarity and equality of the sexes.

The manner in which she develops these ideas here is noteworthy for three principal reasons. First, this speech illustrates well Scott Duniway’s recurrent appeals to nature. Woven throughout is a metaphor of “pure air” that naturalizes the relations between the sexes; in this metaphor, nitrogen and oxygen stand for masculine and feminine, and the proper mix of genders is said to be as requisite for social health as is the proper mix of these complementary gases for biological health. Further, citing numerous examples in other species, she suggests that female “leadership” is entirely natural. These appeals are to a more universal nature than is her habit when celebrating the region of the Pacific Northwest, but they are similar.

Relatedly, this speech illustrates Scott Duniway’s featuring of the scene as the source of motivation. She takes an evolutionary view of the purgation of war from the human species because, she concedes, “man is a fighting animal.” Moreover, when discussing the camp conditions that she wishes to cleanse, she exonerates agents as their cause, asking her audience to blame neither the “scarlet women” nor the soldiers; instead, she attributes their cause to the scene, in this case a general, improper societal mix of gender roles. In these ways, Scott Duniway emphasizes the natural and social scenes as cause of human action.

Third, this speech wavers between principle and expediency and, in so doing, prefigures the contemporary feminist problem of difference. On one hand, while eschewing her typical arguments about Constitutional rights, Scott Duniway nonetheless bases the case for equal rights in lessons of nature that are equally matters of principle, i.e., nature requires it (indeed, it is worth remembering that the Enlightenment doctrine of natural rights underlay the Constitutional principles). On the other hand, equal rights also are defended on the basis of expediency, i.e., what women’s presence will do to benefit the army and soldiers. Lurking behind these disparate appeals is the dilemma that contemporary feminism knows as the problem of difference; that is, are men and women fundamentally the same, or fundamentally different? Arguments from principle flow most easily from the former assumption, and arguments from expediency from the latter. Scott Duniway, again, wavers. She claims that her argument is not a “panegyric upon woman, as woman,” because women are no better or worse than men. However, she also distinguishes the two, claiming that women, unlike men, are not by nature fighting animals. In pursuing both lines of argument simultaneously, Scott Duniway exemplifies the basic tension that even modern feminists struggle to resolve.

The text is taken from a typescript in Scrapbook #2 of the Abigail Scott Duniway Papers. This typescript is of a rough, unpolished draft, with a number of errors that I have endeavored to correct. The typescript also is corrupt, with missing text, in two places.

As all pure air must contain proper proportions of the two elements of oxygen and nitrogen, so all associations of the human family, in war as well as in peace, must contain proper proportions of masculinity and femininity, or they will endanger their own best welfare by engendering poisonous conditions that necessarily work mental, moral and physical harm to the entire race.

When we read the pages of history, reeking as they do with details of carnage and devastation, we are so deeply impressed with the horror of it all that we have no need to be reminded that man is a fighting animal. Yet, when seen at his best, as you always see him when the women he most respects and reveres are present, we are glad to note not only the total subjection of the antagonistic spirit within him that engenders war but the active presence of that protecting chivalry and innate patriotism which so arouse our admiration in times of peace that, much as we shrink from the idea of carnage so long as it does not seen inevitable, we do not hesitate, when protest is no longer possible, to adjust our best endeavors, so far as they will let us, to the amelioration of their condition when war begins.

I am not here as a theorist, to denounce war, or declare it, under all circumstances unnecessary, or unavoidable. The races of men have yet many centuries of experience before them ere swords shall be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and nations shall learn war no more. And, since man is a fighting animal; and since all that is (or was) originally savage and brutal in his nature must be eliminated through the gradual processes of evolution ere we can reach that higher civilization of which the philanthropist is dreaming; and, since men and women together constitute the human family, and are as necessary to each-other as oxygen and hydrogen are to water, or oxygen and nitrogen to air, if they are to be kept pure and self-purifying, they must not be subjected to unnatural separation and indeed cannot be without deleterious results, it logically follows that the mother-instinct, which enacts so necessary a part in the procreation of the races that without it there could be no soldiers, the co-leadership of sagacious, motherly women cannot be denied with impunity when preparations are in progress for mobilizing or deporting great bodies of men in times of war.

We all know that when the proper circulation of air is prevented by any sort of mechanical contrivance, so confining it that it has no natural opportunity to purify itself, it will self-engender noxious gases and poisonous vapors which cause death when inhaled. But how many of us stop to think that the unnatural confinement of men away from the free and natural association with good women, to enjoy which is their inalienable right, causes the deplorable results we so often encounter in the physical wreck of the soldier boy, who left his mother’s side in the proud consciousness of an unstained manhood, only to encounter the vitiated atmosphere of the scarlet woman, who is as sure to loiter in the wake of armies as impure air and water are sure to self-engender poisonous gases if unnaturally conditioned.

It has not been very long since the very flower of our young manhood were mobilized for a considerable time at one of the rallying points not so far from Oregon but members of our Emergency Corps, were able to visit them in camp.⁶ I heard one of these noble, self-sacrificing women say, afterwards that an epidemic of what the army surgeon called measles had broken out in the camp, and many of the dear boys, who were surprised to find themselves down with the infection when they supposed themselves immune-having had measles at home, had no measles at all; but the vulture-like women who tarried in the outskirts of the camp understood! Don’t blame the soldier boys, dear prudish men and women! Don’t even the scarlet woman, who like the fire-damp is the natural result of poisonous environments; but do seek a remedy in the healthful and moral co-association of the sexes, everywhere.

I had the pleasure of listening not long ago, to an instructive course of lectures, given in Portland, under the auspices of our Woman’s Club, by the eminent naturalist, Mr. Seton Thompson [sic].⁷ The lectures were illustrated by numerous snap-shot presentations, on canvas, of the lives and habitats of our near relations, the so-called lower animals, which furnished much food for thought among the auditors. He proved over and over again, by the unerring snap-shot of the camera, that the natural and only well-ordered life of animals is officered by the sagacious mature mother of flock or herd, whose wisdom and foresight in providing for the common protection is never questioned. By what subtlety of reasoning they make their selections of leadership we [who] do not understand their language may not know; but the camera has settled the fact that they are chosen; and those leaders are always of the mother, instead of the father sex.

So at variance [were⁸] those true-to-life portrayals of the camera with age-encrusted theories and practices of men that it was no wonder the picture of a mother doe in a vast herd of elk, leading her thousands of followers of both sexes and all ages to places of safety, among the snow-clad fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains, while the antlered bucks tarried in the rear to fight each-other to a finish, brought storms of laughter and applause from a sex trained for ages in an opposite theory; nor that your humble speaker, who had but recently exhausted purse and nerve and brain in an almost, but not yet successful endeavor to induce men to make a beginning in Oregon to restore the long-entrammeled mother-instinct to its pristine place in the arena of life and liberty⁹, it brought tears that could with difficulty be held inaudible. And I think the best-deserved compliments I have ever received in my life–they certainly were the most gratifying-[were] the voluntary tributes of wise and thoughtful men, who after hearing the lectures and witnessing the illustrations, met me in the vestibule of the theater, and afterwards in the street or at my home and told me that they had instinctively thought of me and my life-long teachings as the pictures were thrown upon the canvas, and they had received a clearer comprehension of what ought to be the accepted relations between the sexes in the human family than they had previously realized.

Dear friends, will you pardon this little display of egotism? Men, Soldiers, brethren! You who have had experience with big herds of horses, bands of cattle and flocks of sheep; have you ever noticed the wisdom and sagacity of an old belled mare? Have you ever observed the certainty with which an old belled cow will guide her band to a place of safety in the face of a blinding storm? And, conversely, did you never see a flock of sheep follow a belled wether over a precipice–leading them pell-mell to destruction? And, did you not wonder, at such a time, why the owner of the sheep had not placed the bell upon the neck of a motherly old ewe? I know you will say the animals follow the bell, and do not think of the leader; but I ask you in all seriousness, did anybody ever bell the mother-leaders of the untamed herds of the wilderness, where nothing but a camera can catch them?

The poet who attributed the rhythm of the wild goose’s “honk, honk,” as he leads the shaped flock through the regions of the air, made better verse than reason, as the camera now teaches with unerring shot, or as the hunter proves when he dissects the leader whose life he has taken with his gun. The leader is now said to be, in such cases–nothing but a goose! William Tell’s apple and George Washington’s hatchet are not the only fables in history.

Once, on a great parade day, in the city of Washington, about a dozen years ago, it is said that our famous war eagle, Old Abe, whom many of you will remember as having once been on exhibition in Oregon, while riding proudly at the head of the procession, distinguished himself and discomfited his regiment by laying an egg! There was a great effort made to keep the incident a secret; but women, who had no interest in hushing it up, got hold of the story and wisely thought it too good to keep; so they delight in repeating it at women’s conventions, and all sensible, fair-dealing men have learned to appreciate and enjoy the joke. Whether it will teach them a needed lesson is another question; but I have my hopes.

I hope no man will imagine for a moment that I underrate the sex to which the Grand Army belongs. You who are at all familiar with my 30 years’ work with pen and tongue need not be again assured of my loyalty to men. All good women like men a great deal better than they can or will like women. There is nothing more unlovable in life than a man-hater–unless it be a woman-hater. Why such monstrosities are born, or why, if so unfortunate as to be born, they do not loathe themselves to death, I cannot tell; but I do believe they are not numerous in any community; and I know you may search for them in vain among the gray haired mothers of our soldiers.

I proudly confess great admiration for the soldier. The man who endangers his life by going to war stirs the mother-heart as no other being can. Never a man has lived who has not by the very fact of his existence, imperiled the life and handicapped the earlier years of his mother. The love of country cannot equal the love of any man’s mother. And when he, by enlisting in his country’s service, goes forth into an untried world, to endure the hardships and per- [sic]¹⁰ from which it has been her chief concern to shield him from babyhood when he loses life or limb in the face of shot and shell, or falls a victim to the deadly ambush of a treacherous foe; when the gallant officer imperils his life in battle, or fever or other deadly contagion strikes her dear one low, the loving sympathy of every mother’s heart is stirred to its profoundest depths.

Soldiers, brethren! We glory in your achievements, we honor you patriotism, we exult in your promotion! We lovingly and patiently nurse you when sick or disabled, and we follow you tearfully and longingly, to the very gates of death. When you fall in battle we bemoan the final tragedy as only mothers can.

But, is this all war means to women? Think of the terrible suspense we endure while awaiting tidings of your fate! Think of the enforced inaction that enhances our anxiety! of the suspense  that chills the heart and chokes the utterance as women gather their children and grandchildren around them when the tidings come that too often clothe the mother soul with the blackness of despair! Think, too, of the double duty that descends upon the bowed shoulders of the elderly matron, who, having struggled through all the earlier years of her devoted life to rear and educate her son–cheerfully exercising self-denial of every sort for his material benefit till her right hand loses its strength and her eye its luster–think of her, awaiting the dreadful tidings that at last come, announcing the fate of the pride of her life, who was to have been the stay and solace of her old age! Think of all this and then, do you ask what war means to women? And, if it could be possible for us to assist you in alleviating any of the horrors of war, just as it has been our province to endow you with being, can you not see how vastly more useful we might be to you and humanity at large if, in our declining years–our cares for a young family having long been out grown, we might be free to use our accumulated mother-wisdom in so assisting you in the management of the home side of the army life that our soldier boys, the flower of the Nation’s manhood might be shielded from the poisoned dreck¹¹ of the scarlet woman whose oxygen of life has been consumed by the pent atmosphere that excludes pure women from the camp? Can you not see how vastly more useful we might be to you, to our sons and to the world if we had the power to utilize the feminine forces you lack in making provision for the comfort and well-being of great armies in the very beginning of a terrible campaign?

My esteemed friend, Mrs. Evelyn H. Belden¹², of Sioux City, Iowa, tells a graphic story of the conditions in which she found a famous camp in the sunny Southland during the opening months of our late war with Spain.¹³ Her son, a soldier, was stricken with fever, and she, by virtue of some sort of manipulation that men call a “pull” which husband enjoyed as a political manager was admitted to the camp to nurse the boy. Hundreds of other mothers sought access to the camp on the same errand, but were denied the dearest wish of their hearts in every case in absence of the pull. But, though admitted, she was not welcomed by the officers in command, who bluntly told her that “decent women had no business there!”

Nobody knows better than a wise mother that it is manifestly impossible to admit women and children to soldiers’ encampments, as a rule. We all admit that woman’s normal sphere is within the home. You show me a wise, patriotic woman and I will show you a woman [who] looketh well to the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness. There are thousands of just such house keepers and home makers in the land, whose hearts go out to the hungry, wounded, sick and suffering soldier, whom it would be as impossible as unnecessary [to] admit personal participation in army life, and many thousands more who must do double duty at home while husband and father are abs[ent] in camp, skirmish and field. Women are not seeking or demanding impossible or impracticable positions. But every mother knows that place where her boy goes ought to [be] a perfectly safe and “decent” place for any mother to visit. The way to purify confined air is provide for proper ventilation. The way to destroy the death damp [at] the bottom of an infected well is to [turn¹⁴] in enough of pure water to flush out the infection.

Of course all men know that we don’t mean to say that all the air surrounding the planet and all the water of the lakes and rivers will be at once diverted from their accustomed channels and henceforth do nothing else but the thing that emergency requires. It is only when the remedy of pure womanhood is suggested as a natural panacea for the “indecent” conditions of camps and armies that most men get frightened and call a halt, lest women would have less sense than the water, or the air.

Mrs. Belden, like Florence Nightingale¹⁵, Mary A. Livermore¹⁶ and Clara Barton¹⁷, who at the beginning of their career in armies failed to see, or understand the sneers of men in authority, exercised judicious blindness. She held herself wisely oblivious to the coarse allusions that smote her ears, never heeding them till her son was convalescent. Then she returned to civil life and took the lecture platform, and remains withal, a charming womanly woman, and is still the same devoted wife and mother and the same acknowledged leader in what the world calls “Society” as she was before the war. No one who hears her story of the mismanagement of that Southern camp can remain oblivious to the crying need of woman as home-maker, in times of war as she has ever been in times of peace. No one who has heard Mrs. Belden’s vivid recital of the mis-management of that Southern camp can remain oblivious to the crying need of the councils and presence of Woman as a home maker in times of war as she has served her loved ones in times of peace. Now, friend: If you were other than the gallant defenders of the truth that your membership in this organization proclaims you, I should expect to hear these remarks construed into a report like this: “The eminent lady found fault with everything connected with the army and its work. She made the gallant soldier and his corps of able commanders appear as a lot of fools, or knaves who don’t know enough, aside from what some woman tell[s] them, to protect themselves from the weather.” I have been as badly misrepresented as this many a time by other men, but never by the Grand Army of the Republic, in camp or anywhere else.

For this reason I am not afraid to repeat to you some of the facts and conclusions of Mrs. Belden’s recitals, only wishing you might have opportunity to hear more. What mother of men says she “would establish a camp for thousands of soldier boys, under a broiling Southern sky, six miles from water, where the only means of had to be hauled in rickety ambulances, by spans of superannuated mules?”¹⁸

We all know that this is a commercial age. And, when the markets get glutted because there comes a time when there are more workers than there is work, there comes a cry of over production. So men starve when barns are bursting and the combination known as the Trust makes terms with transportation companies to even things up at the expense of the already well squeezed consumer. It was for reasons like these that Southern camp got its anomalous location. And–there were others. Can we forget the “embalmed beef” of the Alger dynasty, or the equally flagrant scandals of Kansas, Cuba and the Philippines growing out of transactions that promptly got great coats of whitewash, while the noble philanthropists who “peached” got their labor for their pains?¹⁹

Mrs. Belden says, further: Would women orderlies loiter in the shade of barracks, cutting red tape over trifles, refusing to deal out ice and medicines to soldier boys dying of fever, because, forsooth, some officer higher in rank was away from his post, dancing attendance upon thoughtless girls–on leave of absence?” And the women of the Red Cross society are asking, from all points of the compass, would women officers, if co-associated with the army in the Philippines, think it necessary to enact the part of the procurer in a vain attempt to “regulate” the social evil in the army in such a way that the lower propensities of soldiers might be fostered under official supervision at the expense of the health, purity and often the wretched lives of the unfortunate women of the lower world who, if the supposed-to-be one sexed conditions of the . . .²⁰ does not poison enough of women to supply the demand have recently been ordered as recruits from China and other foreign countries where girls are sold as slaves to the basest uses.

Again, please notice that I am not making an outcry against men or armies, but against the unnatural environments our human institutions, wherein men might, if they would, (and they will, some day), pattern after the sagacious methods of the brutes of the forest and plain, and the fowls of the air, who entrust all sanitary regulations of their well-ordered lives to maternal leaders, with whom the father half of herd and flock and band are always in accord, and who never fight or quarrel with the females of their race, and recognize no such thing as a “social evil”.

But you will insist, though I do not dispute you, that “woman’s sphere is within the home.” For that matter, so is man’s. The man who has no home is like the antlered stag, which, beaten at every turn by his more fortunate competitors, lingers for a few miserable years on the outskirts of the tribe wherein he was born, and then steals away and dies. Some day, every man will be required to be sufficiently industrious and frugal to have earned and deserved a home; and then women, being equal in authority with men, will see that they have homes. Just now, only a small minority of either sex have a home in which to hold a “sphere.”

All men are not soldiers, and only a few men can hold offices, in the army or any where else. Equal rights and opportunities among each other have not destroyed the home instinct among men, neither will such rights among women destroy the home instincts of women; but equal rights between the sexes will enable some men and some women to work together, officially, for the common weal; and the intuition of women and the slower-going sagacity of man will devise means to cultivate the higher nature of man, so that he will as voluntarily restrain his lower nature in the army as elsewhere. I know some of you will say that my dream is Utopian. But the advance dream of every inventor, whether in the field of mechanics or morals has ever been pronounced Utopian. It is said that the first steamship that crossed the Atlantic brought over a lot of scientifically gotten pamphlets to show that such a feat could never be accomplished. We are, by nature great stumbling blocks of exclamation points. Men now living can tell us of the convulsed condition of affairs in Boston when some fool-hardy person first insisted upon allowing girls to attend the public schools, the objection being, first, that their morals would be corrupted by associating with boys, and, secondly that educated women would refuse to attend to their domestic duties and leave the men and children to die of neglect! The good deacons of Plainfield in New Jersey broke up a Sunday school in the Baptist church of that city when Dr. Clemence Lozier²¹ was teaching the little girls to read in her father’s church, because they said, if they learned to read and write they would, when old enough to marry, “Forget their husbands’ names and get their money out of the bank!” Instances might be multiplied indefinitely, but a word to the wise is sufficient.

“How,” you ask, “are changes such as you suggest to be brought about? Women have no knowledge of the arts of war.”

I answer “They need no such knowledge.” Women, in natural conditions are not fighting animals. It is their business to bestow life–not to destroy it. It is their business to sustain the life they bestow–not to invent ways and means [to] cut it off.

First of all, I would have woman free! Free to judge for herself as to what her own destiny or mission shall be. I would have her just as free to work out her destiny as man is, leaving results to the natural law that causes the survival of the fittest. For that reason I

. . .²²

Think you that the mother leaders in the animal kingdom would ever be chosen to guide and protect the herds, if they had to be chosen by the separate vote of the buck, the bull, the horse or the gander? Depend upon it wise would be chosen to do the right kind of army work whenever it was not possible to prevent war, provided both men and women had a voice in the choosing. And they would not be more numerous either than officers in the army. I would have such elderly women as Mary A. Livermore and Clara Barton to establish a training school for Grandmothers who had passed a competitive examination, who, when graduated should be placed in charge of hospital supplies, including luxuries under such rules as would lessen the wide gap between the fare of the soldier and the officer.

I am not here to pass a panegyric upon woman, as woman. Women are by nature no better and no worse than their fathers and sons. But I am here to declare, and I am sure I have over and over proved my contention, that the equal and free association between the sexes in the human family is as necessary as it is in the animal world; “What God hath joined together let not man put asunder”, saith the higher law. I am not here to demand equality of opportunity for men and women for the sake of women alone, or of men alone, but for the sake of both the sexes. The voter[s] of Oregon favored us with over 48% of the vote upon our proposed Constitutional Amendment in 1900.²³ Had they gone just a little further, (as they surely will next time) my humble sermon today would have been devoted to considering ways and means to “Mother” all armies, of which our late Emergency Corps gave you merely an inkling when men in authority allowed them opportunity.

Men, Soldiers, Brethren! We appeal to you as veterans, tried and true! whose gallantry we do not question, whose loyalty to the mothers that bore you we do not doubt! We ask you in all earnestness to rise above the narrow, pessimistic view of a great principle of liberty that men have encrusted over with false conditions they attribute to the science of government which as now constituted is as compared to what it ought to be, as confined and poisoned air is to the free atmosphere of Heaven, or as the death damp in the bottom of an unused well is to the free water that feeds our Oregon Metropolis from snowy heights of our old Mt. Hood.

Let woman, who has been your joy,
Your good right hand and brave defender,
Through all your days as babe and boy,
And never asked you to surrender,
Take her true place, your own beside
When war alarms or woes betide.
Till war, in wiser generations
Shall yield to peaceful arbitrations.

NOTES

1. Apparently the assembly met in practice at least one year before incorporation, and perhaps as early as 1892. 1908 was generally recognized as the fifteenth annual assembly. [↩]
2. The zenith of female oratory may have been the 1905 assembly, fortuitously held on the heels of the N.A.W.S.A. convention in Portland and coincident with the Lewis and Clark Exposition, when Anna Howard Shaw, Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman, and Florence Kelley all lectured. [↩]
3. Apparently the suffrage department experienced an occasional hiatus, perhaps for political reasons. When, following the calamity of 1906, Scott Duniway returned to “still hunt” methods of agitation, all was quiet on the Chautauqua front as well; the programs for 1908 and 1909 list no activity, for example. But in 1912, even though recovering from pneumonia and blood-poisoning in her leg, she chaired a suffrage forum on Woman’s Day, less than four months before the election that finally would bestow the franchise upon the women of Oregon (Moynihan, Rebel 214-15). Abigail spoke on other topics as well: In 1894, she had discussed the labor unrest occasioned by the panic of the previous year in a lost speech entitled, “Avoid the cause of strikes” (see Mss 1530, Chautauquas-Misc., OR Hist. Soc., particularly the folders containing the association’s stock book and programs). [↩]
4. Founded in Decatur, Illinois, on April 6, 1866, by Benjamin F. Stephenson, the Grand Army of the Republic was a fraternal organization of Union veterans of the Civil War that was closely allied with Republican party politics, especially during Reconstruction. By 1890, it had over 400,000 members (Corning 102; Glenn B. Knight, “Brief History of the Grand Army of the Republic“; “Grand Army of the Republic“). Probably some time after the fact, Abigail wrote that this speech was given “before a company of soldiers” in July, 1908. She refers to the GAR in the speech (Oregon City Enterprise 17 July 1908; Oregon City Courier 17 and 24 July 1908; Oregonian 8-20 July 1908). Surprisingly, she is not listed in the 1908 program (Kingston). [↩]
5. This was not the first time that Scott Duniway had voiced her views on men, women, and war. Equal rights advocates frequently were confronted with the anti-suffragist objection that women voting would lead to women soldiering, and Scott Duniway was no exception. On the first day of a Woman’s Congress in Portland, held twelve years earlier (June 8, 1896), she had answered this objection this way: “‘I don’t believe there is a married man in this church who will not testify to the fact that women can fight, vote or no vote.’ Woman, she said, was not an angel, and it was well she was not, for if she were she would hardly be a congenial companion to her mate, the average man of today. After courtship and marriage, man always found that the woman had one thing stronger than her ‘will;’ it was her ‘won’t.’ Men were exempt from military duty on account of stature, too short, or infirm, crippled, bow-legged, knock-kneed. These and many more defects saved them from serving as soldiers, but it did not disenfranchise him from voting. Give women the ballot and you remove the greatest incentive for war” (Pacific Empire 11 June 1896). [↩]
6. A reference to the Spanish-American War. The Oregon Emergency Corps, founded in April, 1898, was a woman’s relief society formed for the purpose of supplying, and providing aid and comfort to, the Second Regiment, Oregon Volunteers. Initially, the soldiers mobilized at the Irvington racetrack in Portland, renamed “Camp McKinley.” In May, they removed to the Presidio in San Francisco, where they prepared to ship out to Manila (Levi Young, “History”; Levi Young, “Oregon”). [↩]
7. Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946): self-taught biologist, nature artist, and writer; a.k.a. “Black Wolf”; born Ernest Evan Thompson in Durham, England; emigrated to Canada, settling near Lindsay, Ontario, 1866; removed to Toronto, 1870, where began observing and gathering materials for book on Canadian birds; attended Ontario School of Art and, briefly, Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in London before moving to western Manitoba, 1882; wrote more than sixty books, almost four hundred stories and illustrations for magazines including Century, St. Nicholas, and Scribner’s; especially interested in wolves; married Grace Gallatin, daughter of Albert J. Gallatin, California steel and fuel magnate, 1896; Wild Animals I Have Known, 1898, made him a celebrity; founded Woodcraft League, teaching children to emulate Indians’ respect and appreciation for nature, which merged into Boy Scouts, 1910, Seton authoring first handbook; resigned in protest of militaristic turn in Boy Scouts, 1915; divorced Gallatin and married long-time associate Julia Moss Buttree, 1935; founded Seton College of Indian Wisdom, later Seton Institute of Indian Lore, near Santa Fe, New Mexico (“The Ernest Thompson Seton Pages”). [↩]
8. The text, in error, reads “with.” [↩]
9. A reference to the failed 1906 suffrage campaign. [↩]
10. Probably “perils” is meant. [↩]
11. The typescript reads, erroneously, “treck.” “Dreck” seems to fit her usage best; a second alternative might be “reck.” [↩]
12. Three-term president, Iowa state suffrage association and chair, legislative committee, 1898-1900; helped organize county conventions in Minnesota and Nebraska, 1899; society editor, Sioux City Tribune, 1900-02; wife of Walter S. Belden, who came to Sioux City, 1887, as bookkeeper for Dunn Collecting and Protective Union, later worked for Wyoming Pacific Improvement Company and Pacific Shortline Railroad, became cashier of Leeds Improvement and Land Company, 1891, president, Globe Printing Company, 1894, and clerk of district court, 1896-1902; moved to Washington D.C., 1902 and spoke at N.A.W.S.A. convention there, 1904; “witty and vivacious” (History of Woman Suffrage 4: 632-34, 774, 804, 5: 109; M. Johnson; Noun 244). [↩]
13. Apparently Belden’s talk on “Women and War” of nine years before, at the 1899 N.A.W.S.A. convention in Grand Rapids (the very convention at which Scott Duniway delivered “How to Win the Ballot”), made an impression on Abigail, who recounts it at some length here. The Southern camp to which Belden refers is Chickamauga, Georgia (History of Woman Suffrage 4: 339-40). [↩]
14. The typescript misspells this “turin,” which is then crossed out and not replaced. [↩]
15. (1820-1910): English hospital reformer; nurse during Crimean War; formed institution for training of nurses at St. Thomas’ Hospital; developed “polar-area diagram,” similar to pie chart, showing that improved sanitation decreases hospital mortality rates; developed Model Hospital Statistical Form; Royal Statistical Society, 1858; honorary member, American Statistical Association, 1874; worked for army sanitary reform, improvement of nursing, and public health in India (Cynthia Audain, “Florence Nightingale”). [↩]
16. Mary Ashton Rice Livermore (1820-1905): born into strict Calvinist Baptist family; became abolitionist while tutoring children on plantation, regarding slavery as “demoralizing and debasing,” 1839-42; married Universalist minister Daniel Livermore to dismay of her family, 1845; three daughters; prize-winning author of Thirty Years Too Late, concerning temperance, 1845, and A Mental Transformation, about religion, 1848; nurse and key organizer, Northwestern Branch, U.S. Sanitary Commission during Civil War; organized first woman suffrage convention in Chicago, 1868; edited Agitator, Chicago suffrage organ, and Woman’s Journal when two merged, 1870-72; president, American Woman Suffrage Association, 1875-78; lyceum speaker, known as “Queen of the American Platform” (Riegel; Charles A. Howe, “Mary and Daniel Livermore”; Lord passim). [↩]
17. (1821-1912): born North Oxford, Massachusetts; taught first in hometown, then in Trenton and Bordentown, New Jersey; worked in U.S. Patent Office, Washington, D.C., c. 1853-56; earned title “Angel of the Battlefield” for efforts on behalf of wounded soldiers and Sanitary Commission during Civil War; introduced to Society of the Red Cross while in Switzerland, 1869, and during Franco-Prussian war; returned to U.S., 1873; founder, in 1877, and president, for twenty-three years, of American Red Cross; instrumental in U.S. ratification of Geneva treaty for Red Cross, 1882 (Curti; M. Roberts; Willard and Livermore 1: 60-62). [↩]
18. Cf. Belden: “If there had been women on the commission, would they have pitched the camp five miles from water? Or provided only one horse and one mule to bring the water for two companies? . . . It is said that suffragists do not know how to keep house. If so, the men who managed the war must all be suffragists” (History of Woman Suffrage 4: 340). Clearly, Belden’s reputation as “vivacious and witty” was well-deserved (Noun 244). [↩]
19. In 1898, President William McKinley appointed a commission, headed by Major General Grenville Dodge, to investigate charges that neglect had led to appalling conditions in military camps, including supply shortages and rampant outbreaks of disease. On December 21, in testimony before this commission, Major General Nelson Miles accused Secretary of War Russell A. Alger and the Commissary Department of knowingly disbursing more than 337 tons of chemically contaminated meat to U.S. troops in Cuba and Puerto Rico, resulting in numerous cases of dysentery, diarrhea, and even death. Although Miles’ charges were supported by many military officials, including Theodore Roosevelt, neither the Dodge Commission nor a subsequent court of inquiry could determine that the beef was tainted, and Miles was censured (Dawn Ottevaere, “Embalmed Beef Scandal,” in Tucker 204-06). [↩]
20. This represents a page break in the typescript. Although the pages before and after are numbered consecutively, a portion of text clearly is missing. [↩]
21. Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier (1812-1888): physician, reformer; born Plainfield, New Jersey; orphaned, 1824; married Abraham Witton Lozier, 1830; conducted charity work for poor in Albany after husband’s death, 1837; graduated from Syracuse Eclectic College with medical degree, 1853; successfully lobbied for first woman’s medical school in New York State, Homeopathic Medical College and Hospital for Women, funded by proceeds of her practice, 1863; president, New York City Woman Suffrage Society, 1873-86; president, National Woman Suffrage Association, 1877-78; died of angina pectoris (Cantor; “Dr. Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier“; “Clemence Sophia Lozier”). [↩]
22. This represents another page break between consecutively numbered pages where text nonetheless clearly is missing. [↩]
23. Here Abigail pointedly ignores the calamity of 1906. [↩]