What Shall We Do With Our Daughters?
by Will Frank
After service with the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, Mary A. Livermore, the great Universalist reformer, joined the women’s suffrage movement. “During the war, and as a result of my own observations,” she said, “I became aware that a
large portion of the nation’s work was badly done, or not done at all, because woman was not recognized as a factor in the political world.” She foresaw a time when, in doing the work of the world, “men and women should stand shoulder to shoulder, equals before the law.”
“I saw how women are degraded by disfranchisement,” she wrote, “and, in the eyes of men, are lowered to the level of the pauper, the convict, the idiot, and the lunatic, and are put in the same category with them, and with their own infant children. Under a republican form of government, the possession of the ballot by woman can alone make her the legal equal of man, and without this legal equality, she is robbed of her natural rights. She is not allowed equal ownership in her minor children with her husband, has no choice of domicile, and is herself the legal property of her husband, who controls her earnings and her children; – her only compensation being such board and clothing as he chooses to bestow on her.”
Her supportive husband, a Universalist minister, and a circle of fair-minded male friends, led her at first to expect that once men were presented with the grievances of women, they would hasten to act justly. “Alas,” she wrote later, “experience has taught me a very different lesson. In the present composition of political and legislative bodies, no cause, whose claims are based only on eternal right and justice, need appeal to politicians, legislatures, or congresses, with expectations of success.”
Livermore wrote articles and organized conventions. Yet her main “call” was to lecture. Her first, “What Shall We Do with Our Daughters,” advocated equal education with young men, “that every girl should be equipped for the future of life with a trade, a profession, or a remunerative vocation, and that the doors of trades, paying employments, and suitable business should b open to them; and that they should be given as equal legal status with young men by the American government.” Her next lecture, “Superfluous Women,” argued “that women should receive so complete a training, that married or unmarried, they would have firmness and fibre, and be able to stand on their own feet, self-supporting, happy in themselves, and helpful to the world.” Decades of lectures lay ahead, as Mary A. Livermore did her part to chart a transformation of American culture.
Source: Mary A. Livermore, The Story of my Life: The Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years,. (Hartford:: Worthington, 1899). pp. 479-486, 492-493, 615-629.