WOMEN IN THE FARMERS' ALLIANCE (1891, by Mary E. Lease)

Farmers interested in combating the railroads' economic control of the Midwestern states formed the National Farmers' Alliance in the 1880s. Speaking out against high shipping costs, outrageous tariffs, and high mortgage rates, the organization quickly garnered significant memberships in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, among other states. Women, actively involved in farm life, were also actively involved in the movement. Mary Elizabeth Lease, a struggling Kansas farmer and mother of four, was a prominent Alliance leader and speaker. An important figure in the Populist movement, Lease was engaged as an orator across the nation.

This selection is taken from a speech Lease gave in 1891 to the National Council of Women of the United States. A radical speaker—she reportedly urged farmers to "raise less corn and more hell"—Lease argued here for political solidarity in the face of corporate interests. In this speech she stressed Christian-based revolutionary thinking and urged her listeners to become actively involved in the fight against unjust tariffs and oppressive taxation.

Leah R.Shafer,
Cornell University

See also Farmer's Alliance .

"Swing outward, O gates of the morning,
Swing inward, ye doors of the past;
A giant is rousing from slumber,
The people are waking at last."

Madam President, Friends, and Fellow-Citizens,—If God were to give me my choice to live in any age of the world which has flown, or in any age of the world yet to come, I would say, "O God, let me live here and now, in this day and age of the world's history." We are living in a grand and wonderful time; we are living in a day when old ideas, old traditions, and old customs have broken loose from their moorings, and are hopelessly adrift on the great shoreless, boundless sea of human thought; we are living in a time when the gray old world begins to dimly comprehend that there is no difference between the brain of an intelligent woman and the brain of an intelligent man; that there is no difference between the soul-power and the brain-power that nerved the arm of Charlotte Corday to deeds of heroism, and that which swayed old John Brown behind his barricade at Ossawatomie; we are living in a day and age when the women of industrial societies and the Alliance women have become a mighty factor in the politics of this nation; when the mighty dynamite of thought is stirring the hearts of men of this world from centre to circumference, and this thought is crystallizing into action.

Organization is becoming the key-note among the farmers of this nation. The farmers, slow to think and slow to act, are today thinking for themselves; they have been compelled to think. They have been awakened by the load of oppressive taxation, unjust tariffs, and they find themselves standing to-day on the very brink of their own despair. In all the years which have flown, the farmers, in their unswerving loyalty and patriotism to party, have been too mentally lazy to do their own thinking. They have been allowing the unprincipled demagogues of both the old political parties to do their thinking for them, and they have voted poverty and degradation not only upon themselves but upon their wives and their children.

But today these farmers, thank God! are thinking, and also their mothers, wives, and daughters, "their sisters, their cousins, and their aunts." We find, as a result of this mighty thought in the hearts of the people, a movement of the great common people of this nation, and that is the protest of the patient burden-bearers of the world against political superstition, a movement which is an echo of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a movement that means revolution,—not a revolution such as deluged the streets of Paris with blood in 1793, but the revolution of brain and ballots that shall shake this continent and move humanity everywhere. The voice which is coming up to-day from the mystic cords of the American heart is the same voice which Lincoln heard blending with the guns of Fort Sumter. It is breaking into a clarion cry which will be heard round the world, and thrones will fall and crowns will crumble, and the divine right of kings and capital will fade away like the mists of the morning when the angel of liberty shall kindle the fires of justice in the hearts of men.

An injury to one is the concern of all. Founded upon the eternal principles of truth and right, with special privileges to none, the farmers' movement could not well exclude the patient burden-bearers of the home. And so we find them opening wide the doors of this new and mighty movement, the Farmers' Alliance, admitting women into the ranks of the organization, actually recognizing the fact that they are human beings, and treating them as such, with full privileges of membership and promotion. And the women who have borne the heat and the burden of the day were not slow to accept the newly offered privileges, undeterred by the fact that the new organization was political, though non-partisan, and they gladly accepted the privileges extended them, until we find today upwards of half a million women in the Farmers' Alliance, who have taken up the study of social and political problems, and are studying and investigating the great issues of the day, fully cognizant of the fact that in the political arena alone can these great problems be satisfactorily settled.

You will wonder, perhaps, why the women of the West are interested so much in this great uprising of the common people, the mightiest uprising that the world has seen since Peter the Hermit led the armies of the East to rescue the tomb of the Saviour from the grasp of the infidel. I will tell you, friends: if you will refer to your old school-maps, you will find that that portion of our country now the valuable, teeming, fruitful West, was twenty-five or thirty years ago marked there as the "Great American Desert, the treeless plain." About that time the women of the East turned their faces towards the boundless, billowy prairies of the West. They accompanied their husbands, sons, and brothers; they came with the roses of health on their cheeks; they left home and friends, school and church, and all which makes life dear to you and me, and turned their faces toward the untried West, willing to brave the dangers of pioneer life upon the lonely prairies with all its privations; their children were born there, and there upon the prairies our little babes lie buried. And after all our years of sorrow, loneliness, and privation, we are being robbed of our farms, of our homes, at the rate of five hundred a week, and turned out homeless paupers, outcasts and wanderers, robbed of the best years of our life and our toil. Do you wonder that women are joining the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor? Let no one of this audience for one moment suppose that this Alliance movement is but a passing episode of a brief political career. We have come to stay, for we are advocating the principles of truth, right, and justice. Our demands are founded upon the Sermon on the Mount, and that other command, that ye love one another. We seek to put into practical operation the teachings of Christ, who was sent to bring about a better day. Then there shall be no more coal kings nor silver kings, but a better day when there shall be no more millionaires, no more paupers, and no more waifs in our streets.