In 1874 Michigan was the point of interest to all those who had taken part in the woman-suffrage movement. The legislature, by a very large majority, submitted to a vote of the electors an amendment of the Constitution, in favor of striking out the word "male" and thus securing civil and political rights to the women of the State. It was a very active campaign. Crowded meetings were held in all the chief towns and cities. Professor Moses Coit Tyler, and a large number of ministers preached, every Sunday, on the subject of woman's position. The Methodist conference passed a resolution in favor of the amendment by a unanimous vote. I was in the State during the intense heat of May and June, speaking every evening to large audiences; in the afternoon to women alone, and preaching every Sunday in some pulpit. The Methodists, Universalists, Unitarians, and Quakers all threw open their churches to the apostles of the new gospel of equality for women. We spoke in jails, prisons, asylums, dépots, and the open air. Wherever there were ears to hear, we lifted up our voices, and, on the wings of the wind, the glad tidings were carried to the remote corners of the State, and the votes of forty thousand men, on election day, in favor of the amendment were so many testimonials to the value of the educational work accomplished.
I made many valuable acquaintances, on that trip, with whom I have maintained lifelong friendships. One pleasant day I passed in the home of Governor Bagley and his wife, with a group of pretty children. I found the Governor deeply interested in prison reform. He had been instrumental in passing a law giving prisoners lights in their cells and pleasant reading matter until nine o'clock. His ideas of what prisons should be, as unfolded that day, have since been fully realized in the grand experiment now being successfully tried at Elmira, New York.
I visited the State prison at Jackson, and addressed seven hundred men and boys, ranging from seventy down to seventeen years of age. Seated on the dais with the chaplain, I saw them file in to dinner, and, while they were eating, I had an opportunity to study the sad, despairing faces before me. I shall never forget the hopeless expression of one young man, who had just been sentenced for twenty years, nor how ashamed I felt that one of my own ***, trifling with two lovers, had fanned the jealousy of one against the other, until the tragedy ended in the death of one and the almost lifelong imprisonment of the other. If girls should be truthful and transparent in any relations in life, surely it is in those of love, involving the strongest passions of which human nature is capable. As the chaplain told me the sad story, and I noticed the prisoner's refined face and well-shaped head, I felt that the young man was not under the right influences to learn the lesson he needed. Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences?
Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.
My heart was so heavy I did not know what to say to such an assembly of the miserable. I asked the chaplain what I should say. "Just what you please," he replied. Thinking they had probably heard enough of their sins, their souls, and the plan of salvation, I thought I would give them the news of the day. So I told them about the woman suffrage amendment, what I was doing in the State, my amusing encounters with opponents, their arguments, my answers. I told them of the great changes that would be effected in prison life when the mothers of the nation had a voice in the buildings and discipline. I told them what Governor Bagley said, and of the good time coming when prisons would no longer be place's of punishment but schools of reformation. To show them what women would do to realize this beautiful dream, I told them of Elizabeth Fry and Dorothea L. Dix, of Mrs. Farnham's experiment at Sing Sing, and Louise Michel's in New Caledonia, and, in closing, I said: "Now I want all of you who are in favor of the amendment to hold up your right hands." They gave a unanimous vote, and laughed heartily when I said, "I do wish you could all go to the polls in November and that we could lock our opponents up here until after the election." I felt satisfied that they had had one happy hour, and that I had said nothing to hurt the feelings of the most unfortunate. As they filed off to their respective workshops my faith and hope for brighter days went with them.
Then I went all through the prison. Everything looked clean and comfortable on the surface, but I met a few days after a man, just set free, who had been there five years for forgery. He told me the true inwardness of the system; of the wretched, dreary life they suffered, and the brutality of the keepers. He said the prison was infested with mice and vermin, and that, during the five years he was there, he had never lain down one night to undisturbed slumber. The sufferings endured in summer for want of air, he said, were indescribable. In this prison the cells were in the center of the building, the corridors running all around by the windows, so the prisoners had no outlook and no direct contact with the air. Hence, if a careless keeper forgot to open the windows after a storm, the poor prisoners panted for air in their cells, like fish out of water. My informant worked in the mattress department, over the room where prisoners were punished.
He said he could hear the lash and the screams of the victims from morning till night. "Hard as the work is all day," said he, "it is a blessed relief to get out of our cells to march across the yard and get one glimpse of the heavens above, and one breath of pure air, and to be in contact with other human souls in the workshops, for, although we could never speak to each other, yet there was a hidden current of sympathy conveyed by look that made us one in our misery."
Though the press of the State was largely in our favor, yet there were some editors who, having no arguments, exercised the little wit they did possess in low ridicule. It was in this campaign that an editor in a Kalamazoo journal said: "That ancient daughter of Methuselah, Susan B. Anthony, passed through our city yesterday, on her way to the Plainwell meeting, with a bonnet on her head looking as if it had recently descended from Noah's ark." Miss Anthony often referred to this description of herself, and said, "Had I represented twenty thousand voters in Michigan, that political editor would not have known nor cared whether I was the oldest or the youngest daughter of Methuselah, or whether my bonnet came from the ark or from Worth's."
