ote to an
exasperated Ohio woman:

The plan you propose, of our getting all the members of suffrage
clubs, and all individual women outside, in each State, to march to
the polls every election day and attempt to deposit their ballots,
sounds very well. But, my dear, it is impossible thus to persuade
the women, after the Supreme Court of the United States has
declared they have no right to vote under the National
Constitution. Your suggestion means a revolution which women will
not create against their own fathers, husbands, brothers and sons.
A whole race of men under a foreign or tyrannical government, like
the Cubans, may rise in rebellion, but for women thus to band
themselves against the power enthroned in their own households is
quite another matter. Hundreds have recommended your plan, so it is
nothing new, but it is utterly impractical. There can be but one
possible way for women to be freed from the degradation of
disfranchisement, and that is through the slow processes of
agitation and education, until the vast majority of women
themselves desire freedom. So long as mothers teach their sons and
daughters, by acquiescence at least, that present conditions need
no improving, you can not expect men to change them. Therefore do
not waste a single moment trying to devise any sort of
insurrectionary movement on the part of the women.

In a letter to Mrs. Stanton she said:

Mrs. Besant lunched with us, and I heard her last evening for the
second time. She is master of the English language, and whether or
not one can believe she sees and hears from the world of the
disembodied what she feels she does, one can not but realize that
she is a great woman and has a wonderful theory of how human souls
return to earth. But I tell her that it seems to me repellent that
we have to come back here through Dame Nature's processes, after a
period of such great freedom in the occult world, and again go
through with teething, mumps, measles, and similar inflictions. The
truth is, I can no more see through Theosophy than I can through
Christian Science, Spiritualism, Calvinism or any other of the
theories, so I shall have to go on knocking away to remove the
obstructions in the road of us mortals while in these bodies and on
this planet; and leave Madam Besant