The Mother of Discontent: Abigail Scott Duniway’s Rally for Rights
In an impassioned 1878 address to the Territorial Convention, activist Abigail Scott Duniway demanded Washington women be granted the vote, framing the domestic 'insurrection' of disenfranchised wives as a parallel to the American Revolution.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Mr. President and gentlemen of the Convention: I come before you at this auspicious hour, on behalf of a large body of the unrepresented citizens of your embryo commonwealth, to ask you to honor your important public trust by recognizing their inalienable rights and interests. I am commissioned to lay before you the Declaration of Independence from their standpoint. They complain, and I aver with good reason, that notwithstanding the significance of the first clarion cry of the child of liberty, their inalienable, equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not now recognized by your territorial legislation.
My constituents bid me say to you that they especially deplore the growing domestic insurrection among the wives of this soon-to-be sovereign State. They also define the primal cause of this insurrection. You, gentlemen, would be equally rebellious under equal political and financial restraint. We regard the HOME as paramount to all caste, and the domestic hearthstone as the sacred guardian of human liberties. But we have learned that there must be a home to keep, and that we have so often seen the hard-earned home swept from us by bad laws through the unwarrantable jurisdiction exercised over us by the aristocracy of sex, that we find domestic rebellion and insurrection constantly on the increase. Oppression is, and ever has been, the mother of discontent. Enfranchise your women, and Washington shall be the cornerstone of the whole empire.
“Oppression is, and ever has been, the mother of discontent. Enfranchise your women, and Washington shall be the cornerstone of the whole empire.”
Abigail Scott Duniway’s rhetoric mirrors today’s debates about political representation and the economic vulnerability of households. Her argument that the disenfranchisement of women was a root cause of domestic instability remains a potent historical reminder of how civil rights are inextricably linked to economic and household security.
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