Notes
[i] David Browning Culberson (1830-1900), Democrat of Texas and former officer in the Confederate army, served in the House of Representatives from 1875 to 1897. He became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at opening of the first session of the Fifty-second Congress, Ten Democrats, six of them southerners, and five Republicans made up the committee. Ezra Taylor of Ohio and Case Broderick of Kansas were strong supporters of woman suffrage. (BDAC.)
[ii] A reference to the fictional narrator of Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), by the heart of which is Crusoe’s account of a solitary existence on a South American island after a shipwreck. Friday, the name Crusoe gave to a prisoner he freed from the control of pirates, became his companion and servant.
[iii] Frederic Harrison (1831-1923), a follower of Auguste Comte and president of London’s Positivist Society, had recently lectured on “Woman’s True Function,” which he defined as “personal and not general, domestic and not public: … working through the imagination rather than through reason, by the heart rather than by the head.” Women achieved their highest purpose, in the family, within the family, while outside of it they risked becoming “abortive men.” (Oxford DNB; Times [London], 7 September 1891.)
[iv] Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848-1899), a Canadian who settled in England, was a follower of Herbert Spencer, known first for his scientific writing and later for his novels. To an upsurge of antisuffragism in England in 1889, he contributed “Plain Words on the Woman Question,” declaring “that in the best-ordered community almost every woman should marry at twenty or thereabouts” and bear four children in order for the species to reproduce itself. The movement for woman’s rights had misguidedly “subordinated the claims of the wives and mothers to the claims of the unmarried women.” (Oxford DNB; Popular Science Monthly 21 [December 1889]: 170-81.)
[v] In the Woman’s Tribune, this reads, “neither of which a large class of women may ever assume,” and the following sentence ends “relations he may never fill.” In the Boston Investigator, the latter sentence ends, “some of which he might never fill.”
[vi] Investigator reads, “her faculties and forces of mind and body”.
[vii] Both variants read, “where she is the chief factor.”
[viii] Investigator reads: “the signs of coming storms in the firmament over
all.”
[ix] Investigator reads: “their own burdens. Before they can analyze”.
[x] The paragraph continues in Investigator: “When a girl may marry legally at twelve years of age, and barter away all that is most precious to pure and innocent girlhood at the age of ten, you may as well talk of her safety with wild beasts in the tangled forests of Africa as in the present civilizations of England and America, the leading nations on the globe. These desecrated and degraded thus early, learn the bitter solitude of self.”
[xi] Investigator reads, “one’s most bitter disappointments”.
[xii] Investigator reads, “in every situation we conceal, alike in our triumphs and our defeats.”
[xiii] Investigator reads, “a single natural right, and the greatest of these is an equal voice in the Government under which we live.”
[xiv] William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, act 2, sc. 4, lines 960-69. The source of ECS’s synopsis is unknown.
[xv] The paragraph continues in Investigator: “Every day our journals report the wreck of some circle in high life, in which the trusted custodians of social morality and family honor have sacrificed all to personal vanity. Every individual has an ambition to excel in some direction, and so long as a large class of women are trained simply for fashionable life, to dress with taste and attract attention, the foundations of home life must be as unstable as the sands of the sea.”
[xvi] Investigator reads: “The more fully all the faculties of the mind”.
[xvii] Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921), known as Prince Kropotkin, was a Russian revolutionary and anarchist philosopher, who lived in England from 1886 to 1917. In 1887 he published In Russian and French Prisons, recounting his own prison time. ECS called on Kropotkin in London in 1888. (Eighty Years, 409-10.)
[xviii] In Investigator, the sentence ends, “the most exalted sentiments of
patriotism can give.” A paragraph is then inserted: “Two women from high life in England have just been sentenced to solitary confinement for a term of years. They have fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, but none of these can minister now to their needs nor share their solitude. Alone they shudder over the past, and look with dread into the dark and weary days to come, What are the fine-spun theories of man’s protecting power to them now?”
[xix] Investigator reads, “they need the same preparation. To talk of sheltering woman”.
[xx] Gal. 6:2.
[xxi] ECS names events in the final days of the life of Jesus, ending with his words from the cross, from Matt. 27:46 and Mark 16:34.
[xxii] Investigator reads, “but in the tragedies that belong to all human experiences, each mortal stands alone.”
[xxiii] Both printings of the speech in 1892 read, “those faculties not needed in this special walk must lie dormant.” A correction was made in the 1901 printing.
[xxiv] This story might be recent: the eastern shores of Ireland, England, France, Spain, and Portugal endured immense damage from unusual hurricane-force winds that swept across the Atlantic in early November 1891. The Bay of Biscay was hit on November 11. (Monthly Weather Review 19 [November 1891]: 264-65; New York Times, 12, 13 November 1891.)
[xxv] Investigator reads, “Those who escaped, standing on the beach, saw men struggling to reach the shore.”
[xxvi] In Investigator, the next sentence reads, “Women are already the equals of men in courage and heroism.” The text then omits three sentences and resumes at “In music”.
[xxvii] In this and the following sentence, retained in the Tribune, the final nouns are switched; the first ends, “bring back the history of the planetary spheres”; the second ends, “send electric messages around the world.”
[xxviii] The German composers Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), and Robert Alexander Schumann (1810-1856), and the Polish composer Frédéric François Chopin (1810-1849).
[xxix] Investigator reads, “but when we consider the self-dependence of every human soul in all the tragedies of life, we see the need of courage, judgment, independence, skill, in the exercise of every faculty of mind and body strengthened and developed by use in woman, as well as man.”
[xxx] ECS recycled this quotation from her address 27 May 1881 to the Free Religious Association, in Papers 4:85. Although she md1cated m both instances that she quoted someone, the words are widely attributed to her. Her source is as yet undiscovered.