Freedom or Death Persuasive Speech
Mrs. Hepburn, ladies and gentlemen: Many people come to Hartford to address meetings as
advocates of some reform. Tonight it is not to advocate a reform that I address a meeting in
Hartford. I do not come here as an advocate, because whatever position the suffrage movement
may occupy in the United States of America, in England it has passed beyond the realm of
advocacy and it has entered into the sphere of practical politics. It has become the subject of
revolution and civil war, and so tonight I am not here to advocate woman suffrage. American
suffragists can do that very well for themselves.
I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain—it seems
strange it should have to be explained—what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women. I
am not only here as a soldier temporarily absent from the field at battle; I am here—and that, I think,
is the strangest part of my coming—as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it
has been decided, is of no value to the community at all.
Now, I want to say to you who think women cannot succeed, we have brought the government of
England to this position, that it has to face this alternative: either women are to be killed or women
are to have the vote. I ask American men in this meeting, what would you say if in your state you
were faced with that alternative, that you must either kill them or give them their
citizenship—women, many of whom you respect, women whom you know have lived useful lives,
women who are in pursuit of liberty and the power to do useful public service?
Well, there is only one answer to that alternative; there is only one way out of it, unless you are
prepared to put back civilization two or three generations: you must give those women the vote.
Now that is the outcome of our civil war.
You won your freedom in America when you had the revolution, by bloodshed, by sacrificing human
life. You won the civil war by the sacrifice of human life when you decided to emancipate the negro.
You have left it to women in your land, the men of all civilized countries have left it to women, to
work out their own salvation. That is the way in which we women of England are doing.
Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won't do it
ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving
us freedom or giving us death.
Now whether you approve of us or whether you do not, you must see that we have brought the
question of women's suffrage into a position where it is of first rate importance, where it can be
ignored no longer.
Life is sweet to all of us. Every human being loves life and loves to enjoy the good things and the
happiness that life gives: and yet we have a state of things in England that has made not two or
three women but thousands of women quite prepared to face these terrible situations that I have
