behalf of the colored people, in which she said: "My presence on this
platform shows that the gracious spirit of Miss Anthony still survives
in her followers.... When Miss Anthony took up the cause of women she
did not know them by their color, nationality, creed or birth, she
stood only for the emancipation of women from the thraldom of sex. She
became an invincible champion of anti-slavery. In the half century of
her unremitting struggle for liberty, more liberty, and complete
liberty for negro men and women in chains and for white women in their
helpless subjection to man's laws, she never wavered, never doubted,
never compromised. She held it to be mockery to ask man or woman to be
happy or contented if not free. She saw no substitute for liberty.
When slavery was overthrown and the work of reconstruction began she
was still unwearied and watchful. She had an intimate acquaintance
with the leading statesmen of the times. Her judgment and advice were
respected and heard in much of the legislation that gave a status of
citizenship to the millions of slaves set free."
The principal address was made by the Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones of
Chicago, a devoted friend, with whose courageous and independent
spirit Miss Anthony had been in deep sympathy.[52] Tributes were paid
to other devoted adherents to the cause who had died during the year
and Henry B. Blackwell in closing his own said: "The workers pass on
but the work remains." Dr. Shaw took up the words, making them the
text of a beautiful memorial address, calling the long list one by
one, beginning with the Anthony sisters and Mrs. Isabella Beecher
Hooker and naming among the other veteran workers: Rosa L. Segur,
Ohio; Emily B. Ketcham, Michigan; the Hon. H. S. Greenleaf, Professor
Henry A. Ward, Eliza Thayer, Emogene Dewey and Mrs. James Sargent, New
York; Virginia Durant Young, South Carolina; Ellen Powell Thompson,
District of Columbia; Laura Moore, Vermont; Mrs. Henry W. Blair and
Mrs. Oliver Branch, New Hampshire; Susan W. Lippincott, New Jersey,
and many others.
The all-pervading spirit of the convention was that of carrying
forward Miss Anthony's work. The board of officers was re-elected
almost unanimously except that Dr. Jeffreys Myers, who wished to
retire as second auditor, was replaced by Mrs. Mary S. Sperry of San
Francisco. Mrs. Avery, for twenty-one years corresponding secretary,
had returned from a long sojourn in Europe and the desire was so
strong to have her on the board again that the office of second
vice-president was created. At Mrs. Florence Kelley's insistence she
was allowed to yield the first vice-presidency to Mrs. Avery and take
the second place as having less responsibility.
The report of the headquarters secretary, Miss Elizabeth J. Hauser,
told of the sending out of 19,000 letters and 182,264 pieces of
literature within the year. It gave the names of many eminent men and
women who were contributors to this literature, much of which first
appeared in prominent magazines and newspapers, and spoke of the
excellent propaganda work of _The Public_, edited by Louis F. Post. It
emphasized the important accession of the _North American Review_ and
the Harper publications, which had come under the management of
Colonel George Harvey. The report told of the bequest of Miss Anthony
to the National American Association of all the remaining bound
volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, which had been sent to the
headquarters and weighed ten tons.[53] Fifty sets had been sold during
the year. Files of the Reports of the national conventions from 1900
to 1906 inclusive had been placed in one hundred of the largest
libraries in the United States. The association arranged with Mrs.
Harper for the exclusive sale of the Life and Work of Susan B.
Anthony. The convention voted that _Progress_, edited by Mrs. Upton,
should be changed to a weekly and enlarged, and every suffrage club
was urged to subscribe for _Jus Suffragii_, the official paper of the
International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Thousands of copies of new and
valuable literature had been sold. After the press work was turned
over to the headquarters 1,200 copies of articles of national interest
were supplied each week to the fifty-eight State chairmen of the press
committee from July to January and 28,875 copies of 118 news items and
50 special articles were sent to prominent newspapers.
The important work with organizations and their conventions was not
neglected and during the past year they were asked specifically for a
resolution calling on Congress to submit a Federal Woman Suffrage
Amendment, with the following result:
The American Federation of Labor at its annual meeting in
Minneapolis covered this request in a series of carefully worded
resolutions. Other important organizations which gave official
endorsement within the year are the World's Woman's Christian
Temperance Union, National Purity Conference, National Free
Baptist Woman's Missionary Society, Spiritualists of the United
States and Canada, Ladies of the Modern Maccabees, International
Brotherhood of Bookbinders, International Brotherhood of
Teamsters, Patrons of Husbandry, National Grange, and the United
Mine Workers of America. To these we may add the fourteen other
national organizations reported in previous years which have
received fraternal delegates from our association or given formal
endorsement, making a total of twenty-five large associations
which responded favorably to our "convention resolutions"
requests.
For the first time the General Federation of Women's Clubs
invited our president to take part in the program at the
Biennial. Resolutions have been reported to headquarters from the
State W. C. T. U.'s of seven States; the Letter Carriers'
Associations of Illinois, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania; the
State Granges of thirteen States; the State Federations of Labor
of fifteen States. The Prohibitionists of eight States have had
woman suffrage in their party platforms; the Socialists always
declare for it and in California the Democrats, the Independence
League and the Union Labor parties incorporated planks in their
State platforms. The State Teachers' Associations of California
and Illinois, the Sons of Temperance of Connecticut and Illinois,
the Good Templars of Maine, the Congress of Mothers and the
Federations of Women's Clubs of Illinois and New Hampshire are
among other organizations which have acted favorably on some
phase of the woman suffrage question.[54]
Saturday afternoon was devoted entirely to social affairs. They began
with a luncheon given at Hull House by Miss Jane Addams to officers,
delegates and alternates, after which the activities of this
remarkable institution were explained. Systematic sight-seeing was
carried out, groups of the guests being personally conducted to the
Field Columbian Museum, the Art Museum, the big department stores and
other points of interest. One group went to Chicago University, where
Dr. Shaw addressed the students of the Women's Union and the College
Girls' Suffrage Club. Afterwards they were entertained by the Dean of
Women, Miss Marian Talbot. In the evening the Chicago Woman's Club
gave a large reception, its president, Mrs. Blackwelder, and the
chairman of the Social Committee, Miss Clara Dixon, being assisted in
receiving by the officers of the association. Its handsome club rooms
in the Fine Arts Building were placed at the service of the delegates
throughout the convention.
Ministers of Chicago who opened the sessions with prayers were Dr. J.
A. Rondthaler of the Normal Park Presbyterian Church; Dr. Austin K. de
Blois of the First Baptist Church, and the Rev. Jean F. Loba of the
First Congregational Church, Evanston. A number of pulpits in the city
were filled by officers and delegates Sunday morning. The Studebaker
Theater was taken for the regular service of the convention in the
afternoon in order to accommodate the large audience. The Rev. Kate
Hughes of Chicago offered prayer. Dr. Shaw presided and read a message
from Miss Mary S. Anthony dictated a few days before her death, when
Miss Shaw asked her what word she would like to send to the
convention. It said in part:
Until we, a so-called Christian nation, put into practice those
principles of justice which we claim are the foundation of our
national greatness, we cannot hope to inspire confidence in the
people of the world in our lofty pretensions of freedom and fair
play for all. The wrong which today outranks all others is the
disfranchisement of the mothers of the race. So long as this
injustice toward women continues, just so long will men fail to
recognize justice in its application to each other. This one
question puts all else into the background and until we can
establish equality between men and women we shall never realize
the full development of which manhood and womanhood are capable.
Because I believe this so thoroughly I have given the best of
myself and the best work of my life to help obtain political
freedom for women, knowing that upon this rests the hope not only
of the freedom of men but of the onward civilization of the
world. I therefore urge upon the delegates and members of the
National Association not to lose courage, no matter what befalls,
but to work on in hope and faith, knowing well that the time of
the coming of woman's political liberty depends largely upon the
zeal and unwearying service of those who believe in its justice.
The Rev. Herbert S. Bigelow of Cincinnati in a strong address showed
the Value of the Ballot. Miss Addams told with much feeling of the
recent campaign for the Municipal franchise, the objections they had
to meet, the character of the opposition and how hard it was for women
to be patient.
Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch gave an able address under the title "Why Not?" a
study in Prejudice and Superstition, reviewing the objections to woman
suffrage and finding their origin in Orientalism, in the military
ideal, in political expediency. He ended his refutation of all of them
by saying: "All our American institutions will be protected and
benefited when we open the doors and give women, who never should
have been denied it, the right to govern themselves, to govern the
country in conjunction with men and to decide the issues that affect
their own interests. Men have had this right for themselves alone too
long. The day will come, my sisters, when the conscience of the world
will be aroused to such a degree that no one will dare question the
justice of your movement."
Many greetings were received through letters, telegrams and fraternal
delegates. Prof. John A. Scott, representing president A. M. Harris of
Northwestern University, Evanston, brought an invitation for speakers
to address the students and Miss Gordon and Miss Caroline Lexow
responded. In his greeting Professor Scott said: "I believe in woman
suffrage because I believe in the home.... I don't care a whit for the
argument that women with property should have a vote. Property will
always be represented and it does not so much matter whether the
property-holding women have a vote or not but it is of immense
importance to those women who work for their living. That they have no
representation is a great menace to those who are nominally free but
who must compete with slaves. Women are economic entities and they
should be represented. Labor without representation is as wrong as
taxation without representation."
E. M. Nockels, fraternal delegate from the American Federation of
Labor, addressed the convention and read a letter from its president,
Samuel Gompers, expressing the hope of universal suffrage for women.
Mrs. Emma S. Olds brought greetings from the Ladies of the Maccabees
of the World, and Mrs. Martin Barbe, the first vice-president, from
the National Council of Jewish Women. A letter from Mrs. Mary Wood
Swift (Calif.), president of the National Council of Women, gave its
fraternal greetings. A cordial letter was read from Mrs. Mary B. Clay
of Kentucky and telegrams from Mrs. Mary C. C. Bradford, Dr. Frances
Woods, Mrs. Ida Porter Boyer and the Canadian Woman Suffrage
Association. Telegrams of appreciation were sent to Julia Ward Howe,
Clara Barton, Caroline E. Merrick, Emily P. Collins, Col. T. W.
Higginson, Margaret W. Campbell, Judith W. Smith, Caroline M.
Severance, Emma J. Bartol, Armenia S. White, Elizabeth Smith Miller,
Ellen S. Sargent, Sarah L. Willis and Charlotte L. Pierce, all old
and beloved suffrage workers.
The symposium on Industrial Conditions of Women and Children, with
Mrs. Henrotin presiding, occupied one afternoon. She pointed out the
revolution in the work of women by its being taken from the home into
the open market where they had to follow; described their handicaps,
the immense importance of their labor, the business ability that many
had developed, the property they had accumulated, the taxes they pay;
she said if they had a voice in deciding how these taxes should be
spent it would not only be a splendid thing for the city financially
but morally, and urged that they should have the power of the
suffrage. Graham Romeyn Taylor of Chicago paid high tribute to the
work of women's organizations in all movements for civic improvement
and described that of the Women's Clubs in Chicago; spoke of the
Consumer's League also and declared the Women's Trade Union League
most effective of all in bettering the condition of working women. He
predicted close cooperation between this League and the National
Suffrage Association. Miss Alice Henry of Australia spoke very
effectively from her knowledge of the conditions of labor in her own
country and the investigation she was making in the United States.
Miss Casey, president of the Chicago Working Women's Suffrage
Association, gave facts from personal knowledge showing their need of
the vote. James C. Kelliher, former president of the National Letter
Carriers' Association, spoke briefly and to the point. Miss Mary
McDowell of Chicago made the principal address entitled The Working
Women as a National Asset, in which she showed how little conception
Congress and the Courts had of the legislation needed in their behalf
and the sins of omission and commission that had resulted. In closing
she said:
We need a body of facts so strong that the Judiciary will see the
light. We need a body of facts that will teach housekeepers not
to scorn these women because they can not get a cook. We need a
body of facts to teach working men that this work of women is
something which has come to stay. There are going to be more
women earning their living in the future than in the past. These
girls are pioneers in a movement that we do not yet quite
understand. I do not believe that our Heavenly Father permits so
large a movement as these five million women in one country
earning their own living without there being in it something that
is for the best.... As a means to our work we want the suffrage.
We all get very tired of the woman question. I will discuss the
human question with any one but I will not discuss the woman
question, because I think that is past. If women are going into
industry, if they are going to have their places of
responsibility, then they must more and more meet the
responsibility that their brothers have with whom they work. It
is not fair to the working brother to let the girls come in and
cut down the wages and have no sense of responsibility, no
feeling of permanency. It is a very great danger. Therefore,
working women should have the ballot to make them feel that they,
too, are responsible citizens....
All reverence to the work that the suffragists have done! We have
always honored dear Miss Anthony and we all owe gratitude to you
women who have been so long in this cause making a way for the
rest of us. The working women are joining your ranks because they
know that they must do so.
The report of the Congressional Committee, Mrs. Catt chairman, was
read by Mrs. Kelley. It said that after the excellent hearings before
the committees of Congress the preceding winter had no effect it was
decided to ask the cooperation of the General Federation of Women's
Clubs. This was done and its Industrial Advisory Board agreed to send
out a circular letter. The association's Congressional Committee
prepared one which the federation's board sent to 4,000 individual
clubs asking them to question the members of Congress from their
districts as to their opinion of a Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment
and the request was largely complied with. A resolution was adopted
that the association urge concerted action among the State auxiliaries
to secure the submission by Congress of a Sixteenth Amendment
forbidding disfranchisement on account of sex and that they be
recommended to make it a feature of their work to obtain from their
Legislatures a resolution in favor of such an amendment. A telegram of
greeting was sent to Mrs. Catt and she was appointed fraternal
delegate to the Peace Conference in New York in April.
Hard and conscientious work was shown in the reports of the chairmen
of all the committees: Legislation for Civil Rights, Mrs. Lucretia L.
Blankenburg; Peace and Arbitration, Mrs. Lucia Ames Mead; Presidential
Suffrage, Henry B. Blackwell; Libraries, Mrs. Ida Porter Boyer;
Literature, Miss Alice Stone Blackwell; Enrollment, Mrs. Oreola
Williams Haskell; Membership, Miss Laura Clay, and others. Miss Clay
urged that the organization of the political parties be taken as a
model by the suffrage societies. As usual the State reports were among
the most interesting features of the convention, for they gave in
detail the nation-wide work that was being done for woman suffrage. At
this time that of Oklahoma, Mrs. Kate L. Biggars, president, had a
prominent place, as the association had been helping its women during
the past year in an effort to have the convention which was framing a
constitution for statehood put in a clause for woman suffrage. A corps
of able national workers was there for months while the most strenuous
work was done but the only result was the franchise on school matters.
The report on Oregon was read by the corresponding secretary, Miss
Gordon. The campaign there for a woman suffrage amendment to the State
constitution was possibly the most strenuous that had ever been made
for this purpose and the National Association had given more
assistance, financial and otherwise, than to any other, a number of
its officers going there in person. Among them were Miss Clay and Miss
Gordon, who made full reports.[55]
The report of Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, national treasurer, showed
that the receipts of the association for 1906 had been $18,203 and it
had expended on the Oregon campaign $18,075, a sum equal to its year's
income. A portion of the money, however, was taken from the reserve
fund and $8,000 had been subscribed directly for this campaign by
individuals and States. The total disbursements for the year had been
$25,933. The power of the association to rise above defeat and its
courage and determination, so many times shown, were strikingly
illustrated on this occasion when the convention voted to raise a fund
of $100,000 and pledged $24,000 of this amount before it adjourned.
The Resolutions presented by Mr. Blackwell, chairman of the committee,
covered a wide range of subjects, among them the following:
In view of the fact that in only 14 of our States have married
mothers any legal right to the custody, control and earnings of
their minor children, we urge the women of the other States to
work for laws giving to mothers equal rights with fathers.
The traffic in women and girls which is carried on in the United
States and in other countries is a heinous blot upon civilization
and we demand of Congress and our State Legislatures that every
possible step be taken to suppress the infamous traffic in this
country.
We urge upon Congress and State Legislatures the enactment of
laws prohibiting the employment of children under 16 years of age
in mines, stores or factories.
We favor the adoption of State amendments establishing direct
legislation by the voters through the initiative and referendum.
Inasmuch as in the second Hague Peace Conference there will be
offered the greatest opportunity in human history to lessen the
burden of militarism, therefore we request the President of the
United States to approve the recommendations for the action of
that conference which were presented by the Inter-Parliamentary
Union, to-wit: (1) An advisory world congress; (2) a general
arbitration treaty; (3) the limitation of armaments; (4)
protection of private property at sea in time of war; (5)
investigation by an impartial commission of difficulties between
nations before declaration of hostilities.
The convention at one evening session listened to interesting
addresses by Mrs. Mary E. Coggeshall, president of the Iowa Suffrage
Association, Then and Now; Professor Emma M. Perkins of Western
Reserve University (Ohio), Educational Ideals; Louis F. Post, editor
of _The Public_, The Denatured Woman. Mrs. Avery gave a much enjoyed
report of the Congress of the International Suffrage Alliance in
Copenhagen the preceding August. On the last evening addresses were
made by John Z. White of Chicago; Mrs. Upton on What Next? Miss Lexow
on The Place of Equal Suffrage in Higher Education. Dr. Shaw closed
the convention with a few eloquent words of encouragement, hope and
prophecy for the success of the cause to which they gladly gave to the
utmost their time, their labor and the best of everything they
possessed.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] Part of Call: The friends of equal rights will come together on
this occasion with an outlook even more than usually bright. During
the last year full suffrage has been granted to the women of Finland,
the greatest victory since full national suffrage was given to the
women of Federated Australia in 1902. Within the past year the
Municipal franchise has been given to women in Natal, South Africa;
national associations have been organized in Hungary, Italy and Russia
and the reports at the recent meeting of the International Alliance at
Copenhagen showed a remarkable increase in the agitation for woman
suffrage all over Europe. In England, out of the 670 members of the
present House of Commons, 420 are pledged to its support.
In the United States widely circulated newspapers and magazines
representing the most opposite political views have lately declared
for woman suffrage; the National Grange and the American Federation of
Labor have unanimously endorsed it. In Chicago 87 organizations with
an aggregate membership of 10,000 women have petitioned for a
Municipal suffrage clause in the new charter and the men and women
most prominent in the city's good works are supporting the plea.
Men and women are natural complements of one another. American
political life today is marked by executive force and business
ability, qualities in which men are strong, but it is often lacking in
conscience and humanity. These a larger infusion of the mother element
would supply. We believe that men and women in co-operation can
accomplish better work than either sex alone....
ANNA HOWARD SHAW, President.
FLORENCE KELLEY, Vice-President-at-Large.
KATE M. GORDON, Corresponding Secretary.
ALICE STONE BLACKWELL, Recording Secretary.
HARRIET TAYLOR UPTON, Treasurer.
LAURA CLAY, }
ANNICE JEFFREYS MYERS, } Auditors.
[49] The proposition was defeated during the suffrage convention by a
tie, with the chairman, Milton J. Foreman, giving the deciding vote
against it. [See Illinois, Volume VI.]
[50] Miss Anthony helped arrange for the first National Woman Suffrage
Convention and it was held in Washington in January, 1869. From that
time to 1906 she missed but two of these annual meetings, when she was
speaking in the far West under the auspices of a lecture bureau, and
each time she sent the proceeds of a week's lectures as her
contribution.
[51] Through lack of initiative and effort the money for the bust was
never raised. For Mrs. Gannett's report and other matter about the
Memorial Building see the Appendix to this chapter. See also page 442,
Volume VI. Reports on the Memorial Fund were made to the convention
year after year. The intention at first was to create a fund and use
only the interest but immediate demands were so urgent that the money
subscribed was appropriated as needed and an audited account given by
the national treasurer at each annual convention.
[52] In the Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony Chapter LXXIV begins:
"The death of no woman ever called forth so wide an editorial comment
as that of Miss Anthony, except possibly that of Queen Victoria, whose
years in public life numbered about the same. On the desk where this
is written are almost one thousand editorials, representing all the
papers of consequence in the United States and many in other
countries, and they form what may be accepted without reserve as the
consensus of thought in the early years of the twentieth century in
regard to Miss Anthony and the work she accomplished."
Over eighty pages of extracts from these editorials are given and
several memorial poems. A large number of magazines in this and other
countries contained sketches and articles from which quotations are
made. Tributes of her biographer were published in the April numbers
of the _Review of Reviews_ and the North American _Review_, and on the
week following her death in _Collier's_ and the New York
_Independent_.
In Chapter LXXI and following in the Biography are full accounts of
Miss Anthony's death and funeral services.
[53] By vote of the convention these volumes were to be presented to
the club or individual member under whose auspices a new club of not
less than twenty paid up members had been formed and remained in
active existence for not less than a year and was properly certified.
The following year the Executive Committee voted to place 300 sets in
public libraries.
[54] This work was continued year after year until the list became far
too large to publish. Not one organization, save a few connected with
the liquor business, ever adopted a resolution against woman suffrage
except the anti-suffrage societies themselves.
[55] One of the striking features of the recent national suffrage
convention in Chicago was the large number of very close votes on
woman suffrage bills that were announced from different States, all
taking place at about the same time. While the convention was in
session, the Chicago charter convention defeated woman suffrage by a
tie vote. The Nebraska delegates got word that it had been lost in
their Lower House by a vote of 47 to 46, with a tie in the Senate. In
the Oklahoma constitutional convention, where the gambling and liquor
forces as usual lined up against woman suffrage, it came so near
passing that a change of seven votes would have carried it. In the
West Virginia Legislature, where the last time it was smothered in
committee, the House vote this time stood 38 yeas to 24 nays. In South
Dakota the measure passed the Senate and came so near passing the
House that a change of seven votes would have carried it. In the
Minnesota House the vote showed a small majority for suffrage but not
the constitutional one required. All these close legislative votes
followed hard upon the remarkable vote in Vermont, where the suffrage
bill passed the House 130 to 25 and came so near passing the Senate
that a change of three votes would have carried it.--_Woman's
Journal._
CHAPTER VIII.
NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1908.
The Fortieth annual convention, Oct. 15-21, 1908, celebrated a notable
event, as it was the 60th anniversary of the first Woman's Rights
Convention, that famous gathering of July 19-20, 1848, in Seneca
Falls, N. Y., the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The celebration was
appropriately held in Buffalo, the largest city in the western part of
the State, and was one of the most interesting and successful of the
organization's many conventions.[56] The evening before it opened the
president and directors of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy gave a large
reception to the officers, delegates, members and friends of the
association.
The convention met in the Young Men's Christian Association building
but this proved to be entirely too small for the evening sessions,
which were held in the large Central Presbyterian Church. The
excellent program was the work of Miss Kate Gordon, national
corresponding secretary, and the admirable arrangements were due to
Mrs. Richard Williams, president for the past eight years of the
Political Equality Club, with a corps of local helpers, but an
accident on the first day prevented her from welcoming the convention
or taking part in its proceedings. With the national president, Dr.
Anna Howard Shaw, in the chair, it was opened with prayer by the Rev.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell.[57] Mrs. Helen Z. M. Rodgers, a lawyer of
Buffalo, extended a welcome from women in the professions, who, she
said, "had only penetrated the ante-rooms and the annexes--the
teachers never able to reach the salaries paid to men; the doctors
shut out from the advantage of hospital positions; the lawyers allowed
to help interpret the laws but not to help make them." "To get much
further," she said, "we must be invested with full citizenship."
Mrs. John Miller Horton gave a cordial welcome for the City Federation
of Women's Clubs, of which she was president, and for the Buffalo
Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Niagara
Frontier Chapter of the Daughters of 1812 and the Nellie Custis Branch
of the Children of the Revolution, as regent of each of them. She
presented to Dr. Shaw a large cluster of American Beauty roses tied
with the blue and gold of the federation and the blue and white of the
D. A. R., which was accepted in the name of Susan B. Anthony and
reverently laid over her portrait that stood on an easel. Dr. Ida C.
Bender, president of the Women Teachers' Association, spoke earnestly
in behalf of "the army of teachers who are training the future
citizens of the republic," and Dr. Shaw commented: "Political
nonentities can hardly be expected to inspire a political entity with
enthusiasm."
The Western Federation of Women's Clubs gave its welcome through its
president, Mrs. Nettie Rogers Shuler, of whom the _Woman's Journal_
said: "She spoke with an accent of unaffected sincerity and
self-forgetfulness that recalled the spirit of the pioneers." She
referred with pride to the fact that this organization, with nearly
100 clubs and about 32,000 members, was the first Federation of
Women's Clubs to admit suffrage societies. Mrs. Lucretia L.
Blankenburg, president of the Pennsylvania Suffrage Association and
officer of the General Federation, brought its greeting, the first it
had ever sent to a national suffrage convention. Mrs. Frances W.
Graham, president of the New York State Woman's Christian Temperance
Union, gave its greeting and spoke of the close cooperation which had
always existed between the workers for temperance and suffrage. Dr.
Shaw asked that she would convey the cordial greetings and best wishes
of the association to the National W. C. T. U., to whose convention in
Denver she was en route. Mrs. Ella Hawley Crossett, for the sixth term
president of the New York State Suffrage Association, united with Dr.
Shaw in responding to the welcoming addresses and spoke with deep
feeling of the courage and persistence of the pioneers and of the
pride with which the State where the movement for woman suffrage had
its birth welcomed the convention to celebrate the event.
Miss Emily Howland of Sherwood, N. Y., reformer, educator and
philanthropist, a co-worker and friend of the early suffragists, gave
a delightful address on The Spirit of 1848, "herself a living
embodiment of that spirit," in which she said:
"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life
for his friends!" These are the words that come to me as I essay
to speak of the Spirit of '48! Was it not something of this love
which inspired that immortal Declaration made at the Woman's
Rights Convention on July 19-20, 1848? "This," says Mrs. Stanton
in her autobiography, "was the initial step in the most momentous
reform that has yet been launched upon the world--the first
organized protest against the injustice which had brooded for
ages over the character and destiny of one-half of the race. No
words could express our astonishment on finding a few days
afterward that what seemed to us so timely, so rational and so
sacred should be a subject for sarcasm and ridicule in the entire
press of the nation. The anti-slavery papers alone stood by us
manfully."
The Declaration had been signed by many, the audiences being
large, but when pulpit and press ridiculed and reproved do we
marvel that one by one the women withdrew their names and "joined
the persecutors?" Much I fear that our own organization would
shrivel to pitiful proportions if today submitted to the ordeal
from which they recoiled. Indeed even Mrs. Stanton confessed that
if she had had the slightest premonition of all that would
follow this convention, she feared her courage would not have
been equal to it. Fortunate ignorance, if she did not underrate
her bravery, for she and a goodly number of the other signers
were steadfast. They chose to side with truth and take the
consequences.
Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery (Penn.), corresponding secretary of the
International Woman Suffrage Alliance, presented a long and valuable
report of its recent congress in Amsterdam. [See chapter on Alliance.]
The convention then adjourned for the reception given by Mrs. Horton,
whose handsome home on Delaware Avenue was decorated with American
Beauty roses, the dining room with yellow chrysanthemums. She was
assisted in receiving by Dr. Shaw, Mrs. Crossett and Mrs. Allison S.
Capwell, president of the Erie County Suffrage Association.
At the evening session Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller (N. Y.), presided,
daughter of Gerrit Smith, who was a staunch advocate of woman suffrage
from the time the movement for it began. Hundreds were turned away for
lack of room. The convention was officially welcomed to the city by
Mayor J. N. Adams and the welcome on the part of the State was
expressed by Senator Henry W. Hill, a consistent supporter of the
legislative work for suffrage. The principal feature of the evening
was the president's address of Dr. Shaw, of whom the report in the
Buffalo _Express_ said: "The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw has set a new
standard for womanhood. She is one of the most wonderful women of her
time, alert, watchful, magnetic, earnest, with a mind as quick for a
joke as for the truth. She points her arguments with epigrams and tips
the arrows of her persuasion with a jest.... Even the unbelievers are
carried away with her brilliancy, eloquence and mental grasp." There
was no adequate report of her address but she began by saying:
We are scarcely able today to understand what those brave
pioneers endured to secure the things which we accept as a matter
of course. They started the greatest revolution the world has
ever witnessed. During these last sixty years more changes have
been wrought for the benefit of women, more opportunities for
education have been secured and more all-round enlightenment than
in the 6,000 years preceding. There are women who accept these
advantages and the positions that have been obtained because of
this early movement who have no conception of what it has meant
to open the highways of progress for them. Some of those who
oppose the suffrage say: "These things would have come; men would
have given woman these opportunities as civilization advanced."
Why did they not come sooner if men were so willing? Why should
they have grown more in the last sixty years than in all the
years before?... But the women in all this long time of struggle
have not stood entirely alone. There have always been some men to
stand by their side and they owed it to do so, for ever since the
world began women have stood by men in their efforts to achieve
the right. Never was there a great leader who had not some woman
by his side. Woman was first at the cradle, last at the cross and
first at the tomb. Women have stood shoulder to shoulder with men
always in their efforts.... Some tell us that we have not made
great progress. It is impossible to change the attitude of all
the conflicting elements of humanity in three-score years. If
Christianity in 1900 years, with the teaching of such a Leader,
has not yet made Peace Congresses unnecessary, what can be
expected of other reforms?
The secretary's report of Miss Gordon contributed this bit of history:
At this junction of the work a question arising upon the
advisability of securing a petition of a million signatures to
present to President Roosevelt in order to influence a
recommendation of suffrage for women in his annual message, a
request was made that he receive at Oyster Bay a committee from
our association. The President reasonably declined to have his
vacation interrupted with committees but offered to receive our
request in writing. Your secretary accordingly wrote him to the
effect that we wished to know--before going to the labor and
expense involved in securing such a petition--whether its
influence would have any weight in leading him to recommend woman
suffrage in his message. Courteously but emphatically came the
reply that it would not, but at the same time extending an
invitation for the National Association to appoint a committee to
see him on his return to Washington. The committee appointed was
composed of your national treasurer, Mrs. Upton, Mrs. Henry
Dickson Bruns of New Orleans, Mrs. Katharine Reed Balentine of
Maine and your corresponding secretary, and at the appointed time
it was received by the President, who again reiterated his
opinion on the absolute valuelessness of such a petition. In so
doing he ignored what for the women of this republic is their
only right--the right of petition. The interview was fruitful of
no suggestion beyond the time-honored recommendation to "get
another State." Women who worship as a fetish the power of this
right to petition may well catalogue this fallacy with those
other American fallacies that "taxation without representation is
tyranny"; that "governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed," and that the Government guarantees
"equal rights for all and special privileges for none."
Miss Gordon told how the last convention had changed the plan for
forty years of holding the national convention in Washington during
the first session of a new Congress and therefore the corresponding
secretary had been obliged to arrange for representative women to go
there and have a hearing before the committees of Senate and House.
Mrs. Balentine, who was staying in Washington, and Miss Emma Gillett,
a lawyer of that city, took charge and hearings were granted March 3.
They lacked the inspiration of the presence of delegates from all
parts of the country and the convention lost the pleasure and benefit.
The Work Conferences were continued under the name of Round Table
Conferences. The subjects considered were: Increase of membership;
press work; 16th Amendment as a line of policy; finance; State
legislative methods. An organizers' symposium discussed "A comparison
of conditions today with those of ten years ago; the building of a
State association; the personal touch; preliminary arrangements for
meetings."
The usual comprehensive report was made by the headquarters secretary,
Miss Elizabeth J. Hauser, who told of the vast amount of work done,
which included the sending out of 13,000 letters and 207,410 pieces of
literature, exclusive of matter for the press. _Progress_ had been
issued monthly, the Political Equality Leaflets and twenty other kinds
had been published and a card catalogue of 5,696 names completed; the
convention reports edited and distributed, the sales of the Life of
Miss Anthony and the History of Woman Suffrage looked after and an
endless amount of other work done. Miss Hauser told also of the
extensive effort with organizations. Ten great national associations
during 1907, twenty-four State associations and ninety-three labor
unions had passed resolutions for woman suffrage, and thus far in 1908
nine national and thirty-six important State associations had done so.
She gave an equally encouraging report of the work with the press,
which was done through committee chairmen in thirty-two States, who
had furnished thousands of articles to hundreds of newspapers. Part of
this material was local but the national headquarters had supplied
69,244 pages. Suitable matter had been sent to religious, educational
and other specialized papers and over a thousand letters to editors. A
long list was given of the leading magazines which had published
articles on woman suffrage by prominent writers during the year. The
reason was that things were happening in all parts of the world
directly related to this question.
Miss Hauser's report was accepted by a rising vote. She presided at
the Press Conference on how to secure the publication of woman
suffrage in country and in city papers; character of material; what is
the greatest need in press work; should "anti" articles be answered,
etc. Interesting addresses were made on Woman's Share in Productive
Industry by Mrs. Anna Cadogan Etz (N. Y.); A Square Deal, by Mrs.
Grace H. Ballantyne (Ia.); and one by Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, president
of the Michigan State Association, reviewing the extensive work that
had been done in its recent constitutional convention to secure a
woman suffrage clause. Henry B. Blackwell (Mass.) began his report on
Presidential Suffrage by saying: "It was the maxim of Napoleon
Bonaparte to concentrate his military forces upon the point in his
enemy's lines of the greatest importance and least resistance and by
so doing he conquered Europe. This point in the woman suffrage battle
is, under our form of government, the Presidential Suffrage, the vote
for presidential electors."
The great evening of the week was the one devoted to the Commemorative
Program in Honor of the 1848 Convention. This convention was called by
Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock and Martha C.
Wright--the last three Friends, or Quakers--to consider a Declaration
of Sentiments and set of Resolutions which they had prepared and it
adopted both.[58] Those resolutions of sixty years ago were now
discussed by women who represented the two succeeding generations,
still in the midst of the contest which the women who began it
expected to see ended during their lifetime. The session was opened
with prayer by the Rev. Olympia Brown, a veteran suffragist, and the
presiding officer was Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborne (N. Y.), daughter of
Martha C. Wright and niece of Lucretia Mott. Each resolution was
presented and commented on in a brief, pungent speech, the speakers
including Mr. Blackwell, husband of Lucy Stone, both pioneers, and
another pioneer, the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first
ordained woman minister; Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Mrs.
Stanton; Mrs. Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of William Lloyd
Garrison, a pioneer; the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer, an early leader in
Rhode Island, and Miss Laura Clay, at the head of the movement in
Kentucky almost from its beginning. Among the later generation were
the Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane (Mich.), Miss Julie R. Jenney (N.
Y.), Mrs. Ella S. Stewart (Ill.), Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (N.
Y.) and Mrs. Judith Hyams Douglas (La.).
Of most of these addresses there is no printed record. Mrs. Gilman
commented on the resolution that "the laws which place woman in a
position inferior to that of man are contrary to the great precept of
nature," saying in part: "Woman has the same right to happiness and
justice as an individual that man has and as the mother of the race
she has more.... Women have a right to citizenship and to all that
citizenship implies, not only for their own sake but especially
because the world needs them. We have the masculine and the feminine
but above them both is the human, which has nothing to do with sex.
The argument for equal freedom and equal opportunities for women rests
not on the law of the worthy Mr. Blackstone but on the law of nature,
which is the law of God...."
Mrs. Blackwell said in response to the resolution that "as man accords
to woman moral superiority it is his pre-eminent duty to encourage her
to speak and teach in religious assemblies": "You cannot realize how
serious a thing it was to be a minister in early days when St. Paul
was taken literally. I know from personal experience that nearly all
the religious world in those days believed it to be a sin for a woman
to try to preach. My own mother urged me to become a foreign
missionary instead; she was willing to send her daughter away to other
lands rather than have her become a minister at home. At 18 I was
considered as well-fitted for college as the half dozen young men
among my schoolmates who were going to take a college course. At that
time Oberlin, O., was the only college that admitted women. When I
arrived there Lucy Stone had pretty well stirred up the whole
institution. I was warned against her in advance but we soon became
warm friends. One beautiful evening we walked out together and as we
stood in that glorious sunset I told her that I meant to be a
minister. She said: 'You can't do it; they will never let a woman be a
public teacher in the church.' ... One other woman and I graduated
from the theological school. For three years the authorities of the
school put our names into the catalogue with a star and then they
dropped us out and it took forty years to get us reinstated."
Mrs. Spencer said of the resolution that "the same transgressions
should be visited with equal severity on man and woman." "Of all the
notable pronunciamentos at Seneca Falls no resolutions shows a finer
spiritual audacity than this. A delicious flavor of transcendentalism
from beginning to end marks the phraseology. Like the Brook Farm
experiment the Seneca Falls Convention was the outcome of a great wave
of idealism sweeping over the world. It was seen in England and in
Europe. Germany was stirring things up and Italy was seething with
revolution. This new world was eager to put its idealism into
immediate practical living.... Women were looking after their woman's
share of it. They felt that it must be founded on spiritual ideas and
this was a spiritual Declaration of Independence. We honor these
pioneers because women who had been trained to follow and not to lead,
and taught that wives and mothers should buy their security at the
cost of a discarded fragment of their sex, dared to summon men to an
equal bar and to declare that in purity, as in justice, there is no
sex."
Mrs. Stewart treated with delicious wit and sarcasm the resolution of
protest against "the objection of indelicacy and impropriety which is
so often brought against women who address a public audience by those
who encourage their appearance in the theatre and the circus." Miss
Clay discussed with dignity and seriousness the resolution that
"equality of human rights necessarily follows identity in capabilities
and responsibilities." Mrs. Villard spoke of the great privilege of
being the daughter of a reformer and said: "The cause of woman is so
intimately connected with that of man that I think the men will be the
gainers by its triumph even more than women." Mrs. Douglas, a
brilliant young speaker from New Orleans, new to the suffrage
platform, took up the resolution, "Woman has too long rested
satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a
perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and
it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great
Creator has assigned to her," and said in part:
Only one thing can make me see the justness of woman being
classed with the idiot, the insane and the criminal and that is,
if she is willing, if she is satisfied to be so classed, if she
is contented to remain in the circumscribed limits which corrupt
customs and perverted application of the Scriptures have marked
out for her. It is idiotic not to want one's liberty; it is
insane not to value one's inalienable rights and it is criminal
to neglect one's God-given responsibilities. God placed woman
originally in the same sphere with man, with the same
inspirations and aspirations, the same emotions and intellect and
accountability.... The Chinamen for centuries have taken peculiar
means for restricting women's activities by binding the feet of
girl babies and yet there remains the significant fact that,
after centuries of constraint, God continues to send the female
child into the world with feet well formed, with a foundation as
substantial to stand upon as that of the male child. As in this
instance, so in all cases of restriction put upon women--they do
not come from God but from man, beginning at birth.... For
thousands of centuries woman has heard what sphere God wanted her
to move in from men, God's self-ordained proxies. The thing for
woman to do is to blaze the way of her sex so thoroughly that
sixteen-year-old boys in the next generation will not dare ask a
scholarly woman incredulously if she really thinks women have
sense enough to vote. Woman can enter into the larger sphere her
great Creator has assigned her only when she has an equal voice
with man in forming public opinion, which crystalizes customs;
only when her voice is heard in the pulpit, applying Scripture to
man and woman equally, and when it is heard in the Legislature.
Only then can be realized the full import of God's words when He
said, "It is not well for man to be alone."
Mrs. Douglas analyzed without mercy the pronouncements of Paul
regarding women and said: "The pulpits may insist that Paul was
infallible but I prefer to believe that he was human and liable to
err." When she had finished Dr. Shaw remarked dryly: "I have often
thought that Paul was never equalled in his advice to wife, mother and
maiden aunt except by the present occupant of the Presidential chair"
[Roosevelt].
To Mrs. Blatch was given the privilege of speaking to the resolution
so strenuously insisted upon by her mother: "It is the duty of the
women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to
the elective franchise." In the course of an animated speech she said:
Mrs. Stanton was quick to see and, what is greater, quick to
seize the psychological moment, and in that July of 1848 she had
not only the inspiration but the determination to grasp the
opportunity to set forth a resolution asking "votes for women."
How clear was her vision, how perfect her sense of balance!
Property rights might be gained, rights of person protected,
guardianship of children achieved, but without the ballot she saw
all would be insecure. What was given today might be taken away
tomorrow unless women themselves possessed the power to make or
remake laws. Women are getting the sense of solidarity by being
crowded together in the workshop; they are learning the lesson of
fellowship. Brought side by side in the college and in the
business world, they are beginning to learn that they have a
common interest. They know now that they form a class. The
anti-suffragist is the isolated woman, she is the belated product
of the 18th century. She is not intentionally, viciously selfish,
she has merely not developed into 20th century fellowship. She is
unrelated to our democratic society of today.... How shallow, in
the face of that idea of duty in fulfilling our obligations of
citizenship, sound the words of Governor Hughes that "when women
want the vote they will get it!" Want it? That is no measure of
social need. It was death to the nation to have slavery within
its bounds but no one advised waiting until the enslaved negroes
wanted to be free before this dire disease should be cured. The
State needs the attention of women, their thought, their service,
and so it becomes the duty of all who have the best interests of
the State at heart to seek to bind women to it in closest bonds
of citizenship.
In response to Resolution Eleven that, being held morally responsible,
woman had therefore a right to express herself in public on all
questions of morals and religion, the Rev. Mrs. Crane began with fine
sarcasm: "To women has always unquestionably been allowed the being
good. They are called too good to enter the slimy pool of politics.
They are complimented often in the spirit of the man who said to his
wife: 'Angelina, you get up and make the fire; it will seem so much
warmer if laid by your fair hands!' To women is also conceded the
right to be religious and unfortunately it often happens that all the
religion a man has is in his wife's name. Ruskin said: 'If you don't
want the kingdom of heaven to come, don't pray for it but if you do
want it to come you must do more than pray for it.' Women must vote
as well as pray. Whoever is able to make peace in this distracted
world is the one who should be allowed to do it."
A full report of the work among the churches was made at a morning
meeting by Mrs. Lucy Hobart Day (Me.), chairman of the committee,
which showed that eighteen States had appointed branch committees.
These had organized suffrage circles in different churches, encouraged
debates among the young people, arranged meetings, distributed
literature, obtained hearings before many kinds of religious bodies,
secured resolutions and tried to have official recognition of women in
the churches. Ministers had been requested to preach sermons in favor
and many had done so, twenty-five in San Francisco alone. Mrs. Pauline
Steinem (Ohio), chairman of the Committee on Education, reported on
its efforts in organizing Mothers' and Parents' Clubs and working
through these for suffrage; putting pictures of the pioneers in
schools and securing the cooperation of the teachers for brief talks
about them; supplying books containing selections from suffrage
speeches, poems, etc., to be used in the schools. It was also proposed
to see that text books on history and civics are written with a proper
appreciation of the work of women.
Part of an afternoon was devoted to a discussion led by Dr. Rosalie
Slaughter Morton (N. Y.), delegated representative of Prince Morrow
and the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. In an
eloquent address she described the terrible devastation, especially
among women and children, from diseases which until lately had been
concealed and never mentioned. She attributed these conditions partly
to the fact that boys and girls were left in ignorance and this was
often because the mothers were ignorant. The chief cause of the wide
prevalence of these diseases was the double standard of morals, the
belief that a chaste life for a man is incompatible with health and
that the consequences of immorality end with themselves and will not
be transmitted. She urged women to unite in the demand for a higher
standard of morals among men. Mrs. Gilman spoke strongly on the
necessity for more vigorous measures for a quarantine of the infected
and health certificates for every marriage and she laid a large share
of the cause of immorality at the door of the economic dependence of
women. Mrs. Florence Kelley, executive secretary of the National
Consumers' League, whose life was being spent in improving the
economic position of women, said: "How are we dealing with this
monstrous evil? Are we going to wait patiently and rear a whole
generation of children and grandchildren and trust to their gradual
increase in strength of character?" She told of the mothers who bring
up children in the best and wisest manner but the environment outside
the home, which they have no power to shape, nullifies all their
teaching. "That is a very slow way of dealing with a cancer," she
said. "Women have tried for forty years to get the power to have the
laws enforced and that is our greatest need today." A principal
feature of this important discussion was the strong, analytical
address of the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer, in the course of which she
said:
The formation of the New York Society for Sanitary and Moral
Prophylaxis marked an important era. For the first time the
physicians as a whole assumed a social duty to promote purity.
They had done it as individuals, but this was the first instance
of their banding themselves together on a moral as well as a
sanitary plane to enlighten the public as to the causes of social
disease.... Dr. Prince Morrow should be everlastingly honored by
every woman.... I consider no woman guiltless, whether she lives
in a suffrage State or not, if she does not hold herself
responsible for guarding less fortunate women. Corrupt custom has
rent the sacred, seamless robe of womanhood and cast out part of
the women, abandoning them to degradation. We must learn to
recognize the responsibility of pure women for the fallen women,
of the woman whose circumstances have enabled her to stand, for
the woman whom adverse conditions have borne down. We should
oppose the sacrifice of womanhood, whether of an innocent girl
sacrificed with pomp and ceremony in church, or of a poor waif in
the street; and the great protection is the ability of young
girls to earn their living by congenial labor. All the social
purity societies do not equal the trade schools as a
preventive....
We must not look at this matter from only one point of view or
say that we can do nothing about it until we are armed with the
ballot. I am a suffragist but not "high church," I am a
suffragist and something else. We ought to have the ballot, we
are at a disadvantage in our work while we are deprived of it,
but even without it we have great power. We must stamp out the
traffic in womanhood, it is a survival of barbarism. Womanhood is
a unit; no one woman can be an outcast without dire evil to
family life. What caused the doctors to come together in a
Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis? It was because the
evil done in dark places came back in injury to the family
life.... We must make ourselves more terrible than an army with
banners to despoilers of womanhood.... Men are no longer to be
excused for writing in scarlet on their foreheads their
incapacity for self-control. None of us is longer to be excused
for cowardice and acquiescence in the sacrifice of womanhood. Not
even that woman--vilest of all creatures on the face of the earth
I do believe--the procuress, shall be beyond the pale of
sympathy, for she is merely the product of the feeling on the
part of men that they owe nothing to women or to themselves in
the way of purity, and the feeling on the part of women that they
have no right to demand of men what men demand of them. If women
are going to amount to anything in government, they would better
begin to practice here and now and band themselves together with
noble men to bring about this reform.
Of equal interest with Pioneers' Evening and in striking contrast with
it was the College Evening. One commemorated the first efforts to
obtain a college education for women, the other the full fruition of
these efforts in the announcement of a National College Women's Equal
Suffrage League with branches in fifteen States. Dr. Shaw, possessing
three college degrees, opened the session, and the founder of the
League, Mrs. Maud Wood Park, a graduate of Radcliffe College,
presided. "With the exception of Oberlin and Antioch," she said, "not
one college was open to women before the organized movement for woman
suffrage began." She gave statistics of the large number now open to
them and said: "Such facts as these help us to understand the service
which the leaders of the suffrage movement performed for college women
and it is fitting that these should make public recognition of their
debt. It was with this idea of responsibility for benefits received
that the first branch of this League was formed in Massachusetts in
1900. The League realizes that the best way to pay our debt to the
noble women who toiled and suffered, who bore ridicule, insult and
privation, is for us in our turn to sow the seed of future
opportunities for women."
In introducing Dr. Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, dean of the Junior
Women's College of the University of Chicago, Mrs. Park said that she
had half the letters of the alphabet attached to her name representing
degrees. Dr. Breckinridge also paid a tribute of gratitude to the
National Suffrage Association and began her address: "My faith has
three articles. I believe it is the right and the duty of the
wage-earning woman to claim the ballot and to have her claim
recognized to participate in the political life of her community. Her
status as a worker depends in part upon it and only thus can she
protect the interests of her group. I believe it is the right and duty
of the wife and mother to claim the ballot, for as a housekeeper and
carer of her children she cannot do her work economically and
satisfactorily without it. It is easy to see why the wage-earning
women and the housekeepers need the ballot; but why should we, who do
not belong to either of those groups, want it? Every woman should want
it because tasks lie before the public so difficult that they can not
be fulfilled without the cooperation of all the trained minds in the
community, and these problems can be met only by collective action. We
want to get hold of the little device that moves the machinery."
Miss Caroline Lexow, president of the New York branch of the league, a
graduate of Barnard College, a part of Columbia University, "charmed
the audience with her girlish simplicity and with the tribute she paid
to the women who more than half a century ago sowed the seeds which
have yielded so rich a harvest for the women of today," to quote from
an enthusiastic reporter. Of another young speaker the Buffalo
_Express_ said: "To the front of the platform stepped a sweet-faced,
bright-eyed, rosy English girl, Miss Ray Costello, a graduate of
Newnham College, Cambridge University, who spoke on Equal Suffrage
among English University Women. She had captured her audience before
she started to describe the energetic work of the college women." "In
England as in the United States," Miss Costello said, "the pioneers in
the demand for higher education were also pioneers in the demand for
votes. When the action of the 'militant' suffragettes brought the
question into such prominence that the opponents began to state their
objections, the college women were aroused and became more and more
active, but as a whole they were in favor of peaceful rather than
militant tactics." She told also of the growth of favorable sentiment
in the men's colleges.
This was the first appearance at a national suffrage convention of
Mrs. Frances Squire Potter, professor of English in the University of
Minnesota, and her address on Women and the Vote was one of the ablest
ever given before this body which was accustomed to superior
addresses. Limited space forbids extended quotation:
Louis XIV said an infamous thing when he declared: "I am the
State," but he announced his position frankly. He was an autocrat
and he said so. It was a more honest and therefore less harmful
position than that of a majority of voters in our country today.
Can it help but confuse and deteriorate one sex, trained to
believe and call itself living in a democracy, to say silently
year by year at the polls, "I am the State"? Can it help but
confuse and deteriorate the other sex, similarly trained to
acquiescence year after year in a national misrepresentation and
a personal no-representation? This fundamental insincerity of our
so-called democracy is as insidious an influence upon the minds
and morals of our franchised men, our unfranchised women and our
young Americans of both sexes, as hypocrisy is to a church member
or spurious currency to a bank. It is to be remembered that the
evils which are pointed out in our commonwealth today are not the
evils of a democracy but of an amorphous something which is
afraid to be a democracy. Whether the opposition to women's
voting be honestly professed or whether it is concealed under
chivalrous idolatry, distrust and skepticism are behind it....
When pushed to the wall, objectors to woman suffrage now-a-days
take refuge behind one of two platitudes: The first is used too
often by women whose public activities ought logically to make
them suffragists--the assertion that equal suffrage is bound to
come in time but that at present there are more pressing needs.
"Let us get the poor better housed and fed," these women say.
"Let us get our schools improved and our cities cleaned up and
then we shall have time to take up the cause of equal suffrage."
Is not this a survival of that old vice of womankind,
indirection?... The suffrage issue should not be put off but
should be placed first, as making the other issues easier and
more permanent....
This brings me to the other platitude. How often we are told,
"Women themselves do not want it; when they do it will be given
to them." That is to say, when an overwhelming majority of women
want what they ought to have, then they can have it. Extension of
suffrage never has been granted on these terms. No great reform
has gone through on these terms. In an enlightened State wanting
is not considered a necessary condition to the granting of
education or the extension of any privilege. Such a State confers
it in order to create the desire; unenlightened States, like
Turkey and Russia, hold off until revolution compels a reluctant,
niggardly abdication of tyranny.... We have the conviction that
that which has come in Finland and Australia, which is coming in
Great Britain, will come in America, and there is a majesty in
the sight of a great world-tide which has been gathering force
through generations, which is rising steadily and irresistibly,
that should paralyze any American Xerxes who thinks to stop it
with humanly created restraints.
Dr. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, received an
ovation. "The formation of this National College League," she said,
"indicates that college women will be ready to bear their part in the
stupendous social change of which the demand for woman suffrage is
only the outward symbol," and she continued:
Sixty years ago all university studies and all the charmed world
of scholarship were a man's world, in which women had no share.
Now, although only one woman in one thousand goes to college even
in the United States, where there are more college women than in
any other country, the position of every individual woman in
every part of the civilized world has been changed because this
one thousandth per cent. have proved beyond the possibility of
question that in intellect there is no sex, that the accumulated
learning of our great past and of our still greater future is the
inheritance of women also. Men have admitted women into
intellectual comradeship and the opinions of educated women can
no longer be ignored by educated men.... Women are one-half of
the world, but until a century ago the world of music and
painting and sculpture and literature and scholarship and science
was a man's world. The world of trades and professions and work
of all kinds was a man's world. Women lived a twilight life, a
half-life apart, and looked out and saw men as shadows walking.
Now women have won the right to higher education and to economic
independence. The right to become citizens of the State is the
next and inevitable consequence of education and work outside the
home. We have gone so far; we must go farther. Why are we afraid?
It is the next step forward on the path toward the sunrise--and
the sun is rising over a new heaven and a new earth.
The National College Women's Equal Suffrage League was formally
organized as auxiliary to the National American Association, with Dr.
Thomas president, Miss Lexow secretary; Dr. Margaret Long, of Smith
College, treasurer; Mrs. Park chairman of the organization committee;
Dr. Breckinridge, Mrs. C. S. Woodward, adviser to women in the
University of Wisconsin, and Miss Frances W. McLean of the University
of California were among the vice-presidents. Three thousand dollars
were appropriated for its work the first year from the Anthony
Memorial Fund. The following day Mrs. George Howard Lewis gave a
beautiful luncheon at the Twentieth Century Club in honor of Dr. Shaw,
Dr. Thomas and the college women and it included the officials of the
national and State suffrage associations. The tables were decorated
with orchids and yellow chrysanthemums and there were corsage bouquets
of violets for the guests of honor.
The women ministers in attendance and some of the delegates spoke in
various churches Sunday morning. A departure was made from the usual
custom of holding religious services in the afternoon and they were
replaced by an industrial meeting. One of the city papers thus
introduced its account: "Any theatre after a packed house had better
advertise a woman's meeting with the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw presiding.
At the Star Theatre, where an industrial mass meeting was held under
the auspices of the National Suffrage Association yesterday afternoon,
when Dr. Shaw stepped to the front of the stage to call it to order,
men, as well as women, filled all the seats on the ground floor and
packed the galleries and boxes, while many stood during the entire
program and many more were turned away. It was the largest meeting in
the cause of equal suffrage that Buffalo has ever known. After prayer
by the Rev. Robert Freeman and a musical selection by the choir of the
First Unitarian Church, Dr. Shaw announced that the audience would
rise while Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic was sung. She
stood with bowed head as she listened. "Some one asked me this morning
if I am very happy," said Dr. Shaw, "and I said yes, for I have
everything in the world that is necessary to happiness, good faith,
good friends and all the work I can possibly do. I think God's
greatest blessing to the human race was when He sent man forth into
the world to earn his bread by the sweat of his face. I believe in
toil, in the dignity of labor, but I also believe in adequate
compensation for that toil."
The report of the committee on Industrial Problems Affecting Women and
Children was given by its chairman, Mrs. Kelley, executive secretary
of the National Consumers' League, in which she said: "In New York
woman can not be deprived of the sacred right to work all night in
factories on pain of dismissal. Such is the recent decision of the
Court of Appeals. On the other hand the same Court has within a week
held that the law is constitutional which restricts to eight hours the
work of men employed by the State, the county or the city. I wish the
women who think that 'persuasion' is all-sufficient might have our
experience in New York City; we worked for twelve years to get
inspectors who should look after the women and children in stores and
mercantile establishments. At last an act was passed by which
inspectors were to be appointed and for about a year and a half they
really inspected and looked after the children and young girls in the
stores. Then a great philanthropist, Nathan Straus, who was connected
with an establishment employing many young people, got himself
appointed, as he frankly said, in order to get the salaries of the
inspectors stricken out of the budget and to get sterilized milk put
into it. He got the salaries out and the sterilized milk in and then
he resigned. The next year his successor got the sterilized milk out
and there we were, back just where we had been at the beginning. We
had to set to work again and labor for years longer, petitioning all
the changing and kaleidoscopic officials who have to do with the
finances of New York; and one mayor said frankly to us--to the
Consumers' League: "Ladies, why do you keep on coming? You know you
will never get anything--there isn't a voter among you!..." Mrs.
Kelley said the Consumers' League had been investigating the condition
of girls working in stores, away from home, and she gave a
heartbreaking account of their destitution and semi-starvation. "Only
nineteen States protect grown women at all," she said. "I am very
tired of 'persuasion' and from this time on I mean to try other
methods."
Intense interest was manifested in the address entitled Noblesse
Oblige by Miss Jean Gordon, factory inspector for New Orleans, in
which she said in part:
One of the strongest and truest criticisms brought against our
American leisure class is that they are absolutely devoid of a
proper appreciation of what is conveyed in the expression,
"Noblesse Oblige." In no country in the world are there so many
young women of education, wealth and leisure, free as the winds
of heaven to do as they wish. In no country are there more
interesting problems to be solved and one would think such work
would appeal to this very class, especially as most of them are
the daughters of men who by their large constructive minds have
created conditions and opportunities and developed them into the
great industries for which America is justly famous; and it would
seem by the law of cross inheritance that these daughters would
inherit some of the great creative ability of their fathers and
fairly burn to apply their leisure and education to working out
the social problems which are besetting more and more this great
country. But unfortunately, with a few exceptions, they rest
contented with playing the Lady Bountiful and their only
appreciation of the spirit of Noblesse Oblige has been the old,
aristocratic idea of charity....
Think what it would mean to bring their trained minds and great
wealth and leisure to the study of the economic conditions which
are represented in the underpaid services and long hours of their
less fortunate sisters in the mills and factories throughout this
broad land! Think what it would mean if from the protection with
which their wealth and position surround them they took their
stand on the great question of the dual code of morality! Think
what it would mean to the little children being stunted mentally
and physically in our mills and factories, if these thousands of
young women, many of them enjoying the wealth made out of these
little human souls, refused to wear or buy anything made under
any but decent living conditions! Think what it would mean if
they decided that every child should have a seat in school, that
every neighborhood should have a play-ground and a public bath!
Too long the men and women of leisure and education in America
have left the administration of our public affairs to fall into
the hands of a class whose conception of the duties involved in
public service is of the lowest order.... Instead of being
regarded as only fitted for women of ordinary position and
intellect, all offices such as superintendents of reformatories,
matrons and women factory inspectors, should be filled by women
of standing, education, refinement and independent means. Such
women would be above the temptation of graft or the fear of
losing their positions. They are on a social footing with the
manufacturers and no mill or factory owner likes to meet the
factory inspector at a reception or dining in the home of a
mutual friend if he is trying to evade the law. American women of
leisure must awaken to an appreciation of the democratic idea of
Noblesse Oblige.
Mrs. Blatch was introduced as "president of the Self-Supporting
Women's Suffrage League and the only one in it who was not
self-supporting in the accepted sense of the term." "When I hear that
there are 5,000,000 working women in this country," said Dr. Shaw, "I
always take occasion to say that there are 18,000,000 but only
5,000,000 receive their wages." Mrs. Blatch traced the changes of the
years which have made it necessary for women to go out of the home to
earn their bread in factory, shop and mercantile establishments.
"Cooperation is the only way out of the present condition of the
working women," she asserted. "President Thomas said last night that
the gates of knowledge had swung wide open for women. They have not
done so for the working girls." She pointed out the many opportunities
for the boys to learn the trades which are denied to the girls. "There
is only one way to redress their wrongs and that is by the ballot,"
she declared, and in closing she said: "Of all the people who block
the progress of woman suffrage the worst are the women of wealth and
leisure who never knew a day's work and never felt a day's want, but
who selfishly stand in the way of those women who know what it means
to earn the bread they eat by the sternest toil and who, with a voice
in the Government, could better themselves in every way."
The last address was made by Dr. Shaw and even the cold, prosaic
official report of the convention said: "It was one of the greatest
speeches of the entire week." She began by telling of the immense
demonstration in London during the past summer when 10,000 women
marched through the streets to prove to the Government that women did
want to vote, and then she proceeded to tell why American women wanted
it and how they were determined to compel some action by the
Government. In the evening the officers held a reception for the
delegates, speakers and friends in the Lenox Hotel, convention
headquarters.
In the Monday afternoon symposium the stock objections to woman
suffrage were considered by Miss Lexow, Miss Laura Gregg (Kans.), Mrs.
William C. Gannett (N. Y.), Mrs. Kelley and Miss Maude E. Miner, a
probation officer in New York. Miss Miner said in answering the
objection to "the immoral vote": "Is the fact that immoral women would
have the vote a real objection? I do not believe that it is. In the
first place such women are a very small proportion of the whole. Fifty
to one hundred a night are brought into the night court but we see the
same faces over and over again. There are perhaps 5,000 such women in
New York City in a population of four million but there is less reason
against enfranchising the woman than for disfranchising some of the
men, as there are at least 4,000 men who are living wholly or in part
on these women's earnings.... I do not believe that all women who have
fallen would use their votes for evil. I have dealt with 250 of them
and I am often surprised to see how much sense of honor some of them
have and how intelligent they are. At present they are the slaves of
the saloon-keepers, and the Raines law hotels and the saloons are at
the root of the evil. We ought to do more to protect them from such a
life.... It seems to be women's work to deal with such problems and to
secure legislation along these lines and we can only do this by having
the ballot. With it we can do much more in the way of breaking up the
power of the saloon in politics, which is at the bottom of all."
Dr. Shaw was quickly on her feet to say that Miss Miner had touched
upon the vital spot in the whole suffrage movement; that the liquor
interests were at the bottom of the opposition to it and that in the
States where it had been defeated they were responsible. Mrs. Kelley
spoke for The Woman at the Bottom of the Heap, who had even greater
need of the ballot than her more fortunate sisters. Mrs. Gannett, wife
of the Unitarian minister, William C. Gannett of Rochester, N. Y.,
both loving friends of Miss Anthony, considered the assertion that
"women do not want to vote," saying in part:
They tell us that women can bring better things to pass by
indirect influence. Try to persuade any man that he will have
more weight, more influence, if he gives up his vote, allies
himself with no party and relies on influence to achieve his
ends! By all means let us use to its utmost whatever influence we
have, but in all justice do not ask us to be content with this.
Facts show that a large body of earnest, responsible women do
want the ballot, a body large enough to deserve very respectful
hearing from our law-makers, but there certainly are many women
who do not yet want to vote. We think they ought to want it; that
women have no more right than men to accept and enjoy the
protection and privileges of civilized government and shirk its
duties and responsibilities. They say they do not thus shirk,
that woman's sphere lies in a different place, and we answer:
"This is true but only part of the truth." ... Municipal
government belongs far more to woman's sphere than to man's, if
we must choose between the two; it is home-making and
housekeeping writ large, but just as the best home is that where
father and mother together rule, so shall we have the better
city, the better State, when men and women together counsel,
together rule. No mother fulfills her whole mother duty in the
sight of God who is not willing to do her service, to take her
share of direct responsibility for the good of the whole. She can
not fully care for her own without some care for all the children
of the community. Her own, however guarded, are menaced so long
as the least of these is exposed to pestilence or is robbed of
his birthright of fresh air and sunshine.
The hard struggle and toil of our honored pioneers was for
Woman's Rights. We of the coming day must take up the cry of
Woman's Duty. We live in the new age; new obligations are laid
upon us. We must labor until no woman in the land shall be
content to say, "I am not willing to pay the price I owe for the
comfort and safety of my life"; until every woman shall be
ashamed not to demand equal duties and equal responsibilities for
the common weal; until none can be found of whom it can with
truth be said, "They do not want to vote."
Miss Gregg discussed The Real Enemy, and, while endorsing all that had
been said, asserted that "this enemy is among our own sex." "It is not
the anti-suffragist," she said, "she is our unwilling ally, for when
there is danger that we might fall asleep she arouses us by buzzing
about our ears with her misrepresentations. It is not the indifferent
suffragist, she can be galvanized into life. Our real enemy is the
dead or dormant suffragist," and then she preached a stirring sermon
on the necessity for hard, incessant, faithful work by all who were
enlisted heart and soul in this cause.
Mrs. Upton, the treasurer, called attention to the mistaken idea
conveyed through the newspapers that the association had unlimited
funds. The report that it intended to raise $100,000 had been made to
read that it had raised it, and the Garrett-Thomas fund of $12,000 a
year had caused many to cease their subscriptions.[59] The new
opportunities for effective work caused larger demands for money than
ever before and the year 1907 had been the most anxious the board had
known. The expenditures had been larger than the receipts and most of
the balance that was in the treasury had been used. Even this strong
statement, backed by an appeal from Dr. Shaw, brought pledges only to
the amount of $3,600, a less amount than for years, the delegates,
many of small means, still feeling that their former subscriptions
were not necessary. Dr. Shaw then read to the convention a letter to
herself from Mrs. George Howard Lewis of Buffalo, who expressed the
pleasure of the New York State suffrage clubs that the 60th
anniversary of the first Woman's Rights Convention had been held in
this city, at Miss Anthony's expressed wish, and ended: "In memory of
Susan B. Anthony will you accept the enclosed check for $10,000 to be
used as the national officers deem best in the work, so dear to her
and to all true lovers of justice, for the enfranchisement of women?"
As she showed the enclosure Dr. Shaw said: "This is the largest check
I ever held in my hand." The convention rose in appreciation of Mrs.
Lewis's generous gift.
The report of Mrs. Ida Porter Boyer, chairman of the Libraries
Committee, the result of a month's research in the Library of Congress
in Washington and another month in the Public Library of Boston, was
most interesting, as it dealt with old manuscripts and books on the
Rights of Women written in the 16th and 17th centuries. The valuable
report of Mrs. Lucretia L. Blankenburg, chairman of the Committee on
Legislation and Civil Rights, embodied those of presidents of
twenty-three State Suffrage Associations, covering school, labor,
factory and temperance laws, mercantile inspection, juvenile courts,
educational matters, protection of wives and many others relating to
the welfare of women and children, most of them showing advance.
The speakers at the Monday evening session were Miss Harriet Grim,
winner of the Springer prize for the best essay written by an Illinois
college student, who described "The Womanly Woman in Politics"; Mrs.
Katharine Reed Balentine (Me.), daughter of Thomas B. Reed, the famous
Speaker of the lower house of Congress and a staunch suffragist, and
the brilliant orator, Mrs. Philip Snowden of England. Mrs. Balentine
said in beginning her address that now women were voting in Russia she
had the courage to hope that they would sometime obtain the suffrage
in New York, Massachusetts and Maine, and continued in part:
In England the last final argument, that women do not themselves
want the franchise, has in the light of recent events become
ridiculous. On June 13, 15,000 suffragists paraded through the
streets of London and it is said that the woman suffrage meeting
of June 21 was the largest public meeting ever held for any
cause. Fifty thousand women have just stormed Parliament.... No
one now doubts that the women of England want and intend to have
votes. It is said that history repeats itself but this particular
phenomenon--the world-wide claim of women to political equality
with men--has never appeared before; it has no historic
precedent....
Does disfranchised influence, unsteadied by the responsibility of
the ballot and the broadening experience of public service, make
for the greatest good to the greatest number, which is the aim of
true democracy? Can women, and do the average, every-day women in
their present condition as subjects take a very lively interest
in the real welfare of the State? Hardly, and are not men and
children affected by this indifference? It could scarcely be
otherwise. It may be said that average men, notwithstanding their
possession of the ballot, are indifferent to the public weal, but
are they not rendered doubly so by continually associating with a
class that feels no allegiance to the State?... In the political
subjection and consequent political ignorance and indifference of
women, men are unconsciously forging their own fetters. They can
not retain their rights unless they share them with women. This
is the true significance of the woman suffrage movement
throughout the world. It is a vast attempt at the establishing of
real government by the people of republics which, being real,
shall endure; and as such it is as much a movement for men's
rights as for women's.
The "militant" suffrage movement in Great Britain, at this time in its
early stage, was attracting world-wide attention and Mrs. Snowden
devoted much of her address to explaining it, saying in part: "Our
methods may seem strange to you, for perhaps you do not fully
understand. We have the Municipal vote and have used it for many
years. Today an Englishwoman may vote for every official except a
member of Parliament; she may sit in every political body except the
Parliament and we are after that last right. We have 420 members out
of 670 of its members pledged to this reform. When the full suffrage
bill went to its second reading the votes stood three to one in favor.
We want that vote put through but it is the British Cabinet we must
get at to approve finally the act when it has passed the two Houses.
It is the Government we are trying to annoy. Our Government never
moves in any radical way until it is kicked. Sir Henry Campbell
Bannerman, when prime minister, advised the women to harass the
Government until they got what they wanted and that is just what we
are doing today. The Liberal Government, helped into power by at least
80,000 tax-paying women, promised to grant their rights. How have they
kept that promise?"
Speaking of the two "militant" societies Mrs. Snowden said: "Our
policy of aggressiveness has been justified by its results. When we
began almost every newspaper in England was against us. Now, with one
exception, the _Times_, the London papers are all for us. The
'militancy' thus far has consisted chiefly in 'heckling' speakers;
assembling before the House of Commons in large numbers; getting into
the gallery and into public meetings and calling out 'Votes for Women'
and breaking windows in government buildings, a time-honored English
custom of showing disapproval. Many suffragists in the United States,
knowing the contemptuous manner in which those of Great Britain and
Ireland have been treated by the Government, have felt a good deal of
sympathy with these measures." At this convention and the one
preceding sympathy was expressed by Dr. Shaw and others and
resolutions to this effect were adopted.
One of the Buffalo papers said in regard to the election of officers:
"If the way the women vote at the national convention may be taken as
a criterion of what they will do when they gain the ballot, there will
be very little electioneering. Yesterday's election was characterized
by entire absence of wire-pulling. The balloting was done quickly and
there was no contest for any office, the women voting as they wished
and only a few scattered ballots going for particular friends of
voters. The election of the president, first vice-president,
corresponding secretary and treasurer was unanimous and the others so
nearly so that there was no question of result by the time half the
ballots had been counted." Mrs. Sperry retired from the office of
second vice-president and Mrs. Ella S. Stewart, president of the
Illinois suffrage association, was chosen in her place.
The paper on Some Legal Phases of the Disfranchisement of Women by
Mrs. Harriette Johnston Wood, a New York lawyer, was regarded as so
important that it was ordered to be printed for circulation. She
quoted from Federal and State constitutions and court decisions to
prove that "if properly construed the laws specify the rights and
privileges of 'persons' and no distinction is made as to 'sex' in
provisions relating to the elective franchise." She encouraged women
to try to register for voting and qualify for jury service and urged
that bills be presented to legislative bodies covering the following
points: First, that citizens shall equally enjoy all civil and
political rights and privileges; second, that in the selection of
jurors no discrimination shall be made against citizens on account of
sex; third, that representation be based on the electorate and that
non-voters be non-taxpayers; fourth, that husband and wife have equal
right in each other's property; fifth, equal rights in the property of
a child; sixth, in case of separation, equal rights to the custody of
the children. A visit to the Albright Art Gallery and an automobile
ride along the lake front, through Delaware Park and the many handsome
avenues of the city, was a much-enjoyed part of this afternoon's
program.
At one evening session Miss Grace H. Ballantyne, attorney in the noted
City Hall case at Des Moines, Iowa, gave a spirited account of the way
in which the women's right to vote on issuing bonds was sustained.
Mrs. Kate Trimble Woolsey (Ky.), who had resided some years in
England, compared the condition of women in that country and the
United States to the disadvantage of the latter, "where," she said,
"the women did not profit by the Declaration of Independence but on
the contrary lost when the colonies were supplanted by the republic.
In this they discover that a republic may endure as a political
institution to the end of time without conferring recognition, honors
or power on women; that it can exist as an oligarchy of sex, and they
say: 'Why should we be loyal to this government?' Thus through women
republicanism itself is imperiled and I tell you that if an amendment
is not added to the National Constitution giving women the power to
vote, this republic, within the living generation, will find that
prophecy, 'Woman is the rock upon which our Ship of State is to
founder,' will be fulfilled."
As chairman of the Committee on Peace and Arbitration Mrs. Lucia Ames
Mead gave a report of its many activities. In 1907 she had attended a
plenary session at The Hague Peace Conference, which she described in
glowing terms, and she went as a delegate in September to an
International Peace Conference in Munich. In July, 1908, she went to
one in London, where Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood of Washington, D. C.,
presented a paper on the Central American Peace Congress, held in that
city, and the recently established Arbitration Court, which formed the
basis of three resolutions adopted by the congress. She told of the
new society, the American School Peace League to improve the teaching
of history and in every way promote international fraternity, sympathy
and justice.
During business meetings the following were among the recommendations
adopted: To recommend to States to continue a systematic and
specialized distribution of literature; to secure and present to
Congress at an early date a petition asking for a 16th Amendment
enfranchising women, the chair to appoint a committee to superintend
this work; to try to obtain the appointment of a U. S. Senate
Committee on Woman Suffrage favorable to it; to send letters
simultaneously to the President of the United States in advance of the
time for writing his message, followed by telegrams one week preceding
the opening of Congress, expressing the wishes of women for the
ballot; to ask their Legislatures for some form of suffrage and follow
up this request with systematic legislative work; to urge that States
having any form of partial suffrage take measures to secure the
largest possible use of it by women. It was decided to appropriate
$125 for two months' work in South Dakota to ascertain conditions with
a view to the submission of a State amendment.
The resolutions presented by Mr. Blackwell, chairman of the committee,
reviewed the wonderful progress made by women since the first
convention whose 60th anniversary they were celebrating. They told of
the progress of suffrage, as outlined in the Call for the convention,
and said: "When that first convention met, one college in the United
States admitted women; now hundreds do so. Then there was not a single
woman physician or ordained minister or lawyer; now there are 7,000
women physicians and surgeons, 3,000 ordained ministers and 1,000
lawyers. Then only a few poorly-paid employments were open to women;
now they are in more than three hundred occupations and comprise 80
per cent. of our school teachers. Then there were scarcely any
organizations of women; now such organizations are numbered by
thousands. Then the few women who dared to speak in public, even on
philanthropic questions, were overwhelmingly condemned by public
opinion; now the women most opposed to woman suffrage travel about the
country making speeches to prove that a woman's only place is at home.
Then a married woman in most of our States could not control her own
person, property or earnings; now in most of them these laws have been
largely amended or repealed and it is only in regard to the ballot
that the fiction of woman's perpetual minority is still kept up."
Mrs. Catt's powerful address was entitled The Battle to the Strong but
nothing is preserved except newspaper clippings. She ended by saying:
"In all history there has been no event fraught with more importance
for the generations to follow than the present uprising of the women
of the world.... Every struggle helps and no movement for right, for
reform in this country or in England but has made the woman's movement
easier in every other land. We have brought the countries of the world
very close together in the last few years. Papers and cables and
telegraph spread the news almost instantly to the centres of the earth
and then to the obscure corners, so that the women of other nations
know what the women here are doing and what they are doing in every
other part of the world.... The suffrage campaign in England has
become the kind of fanaticism that caused the American Revolution.
These women are no longer reformers, they are rebels, and they are
going to win.... Woman's hour has struck at last and all along the
line there is a mobilization of the woman's army ready for service. We
are going forward with flags flying to win. If you are not for us you
are against us. Justice for the women of the world is coming. This is
to be a battle to the strong--strong in faith, strong in courage,
strong in conviction. Women of America, stand up for the citizenship
of our own country and let the world know we are not ashamed of the
Declaration of Independence!"
A newspaper account said: "And then Anna Howard Shaw stepped forward,
the light of a great purpose shining in her eyes. 'Our International
president has asked for recruits,' she said. 'Never have we had so
many as now.' She spoke of the immense gains to the suffrage cause
within the last few months in America and of the suffrage pioneers and
their sufferings, and ended: 'The path has been blazed for us and they
have shown us the way. Who shall say that our triumph is to be long
delayed? It is the hour for us to rally. We have enlisted for the war.
Ninety days? No; for the war! We may not win every battle but we shall
win the war. Happy they who are the burden-bearers in a great fight!
Happy is any man or woman who is called by the Giver of all to serve
Him in the cause of humanity! Friends, come with us and we will do you
good; but whether you come or not we are going, and when we enter the
promised land of freedom we will try to be just and to show that we
understand what freedom is, what the law is. 'God grant us law in
liberty and liberty in law!'"
FOOTNOTES:
[56] Part of Call: Since we met last in convention women in Norway
have won full suffrage; tax-paying women in Iceland have been granted
a vote and made eligible as municipal councillors; Municipal suffrage
has been given to women in Denmark and they now vote for all officers
except members of Parliament; women in Sweden, who already had the
Municipal vote, have been made eligible to municipal offices; a proxy
in the election of the Douma has been conferred on women of property
in Russia. In Great Britain, where they have long possessed Municipal
suffrage, women have been made eligible as mayors, county, borough and
town councillors and their heroic struggle for Parliamentary suffrage
is attracting the attention of the world.
In our own country during the past year, 175,000 women of Michigan
appealed for full suffrage to its constitutional convention and a
partial franchise was given; in Oregon women obtained the submission
of a constitutional amendment for suffrage to a referendum vote.
Though no large victories were won the advocates of equal suffrage
have never felt more hopeful, as public sentiment is in closer
sympathy with them than ever before. Five hundred associations of men,
organized for other purposes and numbering millions of voters, have
officially declared for woman suffrage; only one, the organized liquor
traffic, has made a record of unremitting hostility to it and the
domination of the saloon in politics has wrested many victories from
our grasp....
We cordially invite all men and women who have faith in the principles
of the American government and love liberty and justice to meet with
us in convention in Buffalo.
ANNA HOWARD SHAW, President.
RACHEL FOSTER AVERY, First Vice-President.
FLORENCE KELLY, Second Vice-President.
KATE M. GORDON, Corresponding Secretary.
ALICE STONE BLACKWELL, Recording Secretary.
HARRIET TAYLOR UPTON, Treasurer.
LAURA CLAY, }
MARY SIMPSON SPERRY,} Auditors.
[57] Other ministers who officiated at different times were the
Reverends Anna Howard Shaw, Anna Garlin Spencer and Olympia Brown of
the convention, and the Reverends Richard W. Boynton, Robert Freeman,
L. O. Williams, E. H. Dickinson and F. Hyatt Smith of Buffalo.
[58] For full account see History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I, page
67.
[59] This fund had been raised primarily to pay salaries to officers
who now had to devote their whole time to the increased work of the
association and who had hitherto for the most part given their service
gratuitously. Dr. Shaw received $3,500; the secretary $1,000, the
treasurer $1,000. This left $6,500 for other purposes each year.
CHAPTER IX.
NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1909.
The invitation to hold the Forty-first annual convention of the
association in Seattle was accepted for two special reasons. The
Washington Legislature had submitted a woman suffrage amendment to be
voted on in 1910; similar action had been taken by the Legislatures of
Oregon and South Dakota, and a convention on the Pacific Coast would
attract western people and create sentiment in favor of these
amendments. The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in progress during the
summer, by causing reduced railroad rates, would enable those of the
east and middle west to attend the convention and visit this beautiful
section of the country.[60] The date fixed was July 1-6.
The eastern delegates assembled in Chicago on June 25 to take the
"suffrage special" train for Seattle and a reception was given to
them at Hotel Stratford by the Chicago suffragists. At St. Paul the
next morning ex-Senator S. A. Stockwell and Mrs. Stockwell, president
of the Minnesota Association, with a delegation of suffragists, met
them at the station and escorted them to the Woman's Exchange, where a
delicious breakfast was served on tables adorned with golden iris and
ferns. Many club officials were there and brief addresses were made by
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Florence Kelley, Miss Laura Clay, Mrs.
Fanny Garrison Villard, Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Miss Alice
Stone Blackwell, Miss Kate M. Gordon and Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton.
Mrs. Villard recalled a visit she had made there twenty-six years
before with her husband, Henry Villard, who had just completed the
Northern Pacific Railroad and his train was making a kind of triumphal
tour across the continent. "St. Paul welcomed him with a procession
ten miles long," she said, "and Minneapolis, determined not to be
outdone, got up one fifteen miles long. It gives me joy to remember
that not only my father, William Lloyd Garrison, but also my good
German-born husband believed in equal rights for women."
The train sped through the Great Northwest and continuous business
meetings were held by the board of officers in what was usually the
smoking car until the next stop was made at Spokane, Washington. Here
the Chamber of Commerce had appropriated $500 for their entertainment.
They were presented with buttons and badges and taken in automobiles
through the beautiful residence district, the handsome grounds of the
three colleges and to the picturesque Falls. Then they saw the fine
exhibits in the Chamber of Commerce and were taken to the Amateur
Athletic Club, whose facilities for rest and recreation were placed at
their disposal. An elaborate banquet followed with Mrs. May Arkwright
Hutton, president of the Spokane Equal Suffrage Club, presiding. Mrs.
Emma Smith De Voe, president of the State Suffrage Association,
welcomed them to Washington, and Mayor N. S. Pratt to the city. "I
have welcomed many organizations to Spokane," he said, "but none with
so much pleasure as this. My belief in equal suffrage is no new
conviction; I have voted for it twice and hope soon to do so again.
The coming of equal rights for women is the inevitable result of
progress and enlightenment." He presented Dr. Shaw with a gavel made
of wood from the four suffrage States bound together with a band of
Idaho silver and expressed the hope that when she used it to open the
convention in Seattle the sound would be like "the shot heard round
the world."
The account in the _Woman's Journal_ said: "Dr. Shaw, in returning
thanks, said: 'It is an apt simile, for the blow will be struck on the
Pacific Coast and it needs to be heard to the Atlantic and not only
from the west to the east but from the north to the south. I hope it
will be answered by men who, having known themselves what freedom is,
wish to give women the benefits of it also. The only man who can be in
any way excused for wanting to withhold freedom from women is the man
who is himself a slave.' She recalled the times when the suffragists
were offered not banquets but abuse and compared them to the pioneer
days of clearing the forest. She closed with a beautiful tribute to
the pioneer mothers and called upon the men to pay their debt to them
next November."
Mrs. Villard, recalling here also her visit of more than a quarter of
a century before, said in part: "Never could I have believed that such
changes could have been wrought since that historic train. Then there
was nothing at Spokane but Indians and cowboys and the beautiful
Falls. I am glad you want women to share the full life of the city.
'The woman's cause is man's.' This movement is as wide as the world
and will benefit men as well as women. I have come on this trip
largely because I like to connect my husband's name not merely with
the building of a great railroad but also with the cause of justice to
women in which he believed. I wish greater and greater prosperity to
Spokane but with her material prosperity let her not forget the larger
things which must go hand in hand with it if cities are not to perish
from the earth."
Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway of Portland, Ore., the renowned suffrage
pioneer of the northwest, was enthusiastically received and in the
course of her interesting reminiscences said: "I remember when 'Old
Oregon' comprised most of the Pacific Northwest. At that time I was
living in a log cabin engaged in the very domestic occupation of
raising a large family of small children.... On my first visit to
Spokane I came by stage from Walla Walla. It went bumping and
careening over the rocks and the one hotel of the village had not
accommodations for the three or four passengers. They made up
improvised beds for us on slats and all the food we had for several
days was bread and sugar, but I enjoyed it for after such a journey
anything tasted good. There was only one little hall in the town and I
was importuned by Captain Wilkinson of Portland to speak. So I hired
the hall for Sunday and he advised me to offer it to a clergyman there
for the afternoon service. I did so and asked him to announce after
his sermon that my meeting would be held in the evening. He accepted
the use of the hall but failed to give the notice. When I asked him
about it he said: 'Do you think I would notice a woman's meeting?' But
we had a good one and almost everybody in Spokane subscribed for my
paper, the _New Northwest_. The next time I came here was to celebrate
the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad. I had the honor of
writing a poem for the occasion and reading it in that little hall and
Henry Villard wrote me a letter about it."
A large evening meeting was held in the First Methodist Church with
Mrs. LaReine Baker presiding. Henry B. Blackwell and Prof. Frances
Squire Potter were among the national speakers. A tired lot of
travellers but happy over their cordial welcome took the night train.
Next day they stopped for a brief time at North Yakima and Ellensburg
and spoke from the rear platform to the crowds awaiting them. Women,
girls and children dressed in white greeted them with banners, songs
and quantities of the lovely roses for which that section is noted and
with fancy baskets of the wonderful cherries and apples. During
several hours spent in Tacoma they had the famous ride around the city
in special trolley cars, supper at sunset on the veranda of a hotel
overlooking the beautiful Puget Sound and a walk through the
magnificent park.
The never to be forgotten convention in Seattle was preceded by an
evening reception on June 30 in Lincoln Hotel, given by the State
suffrage association, whose former president, Mrs. Homer M. Hill,
extended its welcome to the delegates. Dr. Shaw, the national
president, called the convention to order the next afternoon in the
large Plymouth Congregational Church and the audience sang The March
of the Mothers. Mrs. Margaret B. Platt brought the greetings of the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, pointing out that "there are
wrongs which can never be righted until woman holds in her hand the
ballot, symbol of the power to right them." In introducing Mrs. M. B.
Lord to speak for the Grange, Dr. Shaw said she herself was a member
of it. Mrs. Lord said in part: "From the first of it women came into
our organization on a perfect equality and for forty years the Grange
has carried on an education for woman suffrage. It was the proudest
moment of my life when I got a resolution for it through the New York
State Grange. Here in Washington it has increased three-fold in five
years and always passes a resolution in favor of suffrage for women."
Mrs. De Voe gave a big-hearted welcome from the State and Mrs. Mary S.
Sperry, president of the California suffrage association, made a
gracious response. By a rising vote the convention sent a message of
warm regard to Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt of New York, the former
national president, and regret that she was not able to be present.
Dr. Shaw spoke of the "masterly way" in which she had presided at the
meeting of the International Suffrage Alliance in London in May, "her
power and dignity commanding universal respect," and told of the
message of greeting from Queen Maud of Norway and other incidents of
the congress.
Leaving more formal ceremonies for the evening the convention
proceeded to business and listened to the report of the corresponding
secretary, Miss Gordon (La.). In referring to the specialized
literature which had been sent out, she spoke of the letter of the
Brewers' and Wholesale Liquor Dealers' Association, so widely
circulated during the recent Oregon Suffrage campaign, calling the
attention of all retailers in the State to the necessity of defeating
the amendment, and to the postal instructing them how to mark their
ballot, with a return card signifying their willingness. This had been
put into an "exhibit" by Miss Blackwell and her Literature Committee
and Miss Gordon urged that clergymen of all denominations should be
circularized with it. She said: "I believe the association should not
be dissuaded from this undertaking because of the amount of work and
its costliness. The burden of responsibility rests upon us to prove
with such evidence that the worst enemy of the church and the most
active enemy of woman suffrage is a mutual foe, the 'organized liquor
and vice power.' If in the face of such direct evidence
representatives of the church still allow prejudice, ignorance or
indifference to woman suffrage to influence them, then they knowingly
become the common allies of this power."
Miss Gordon gave instances to show the great change taking place in
the attitude of the public toward woman suffrage and said the present
difficulty was to utilize the opportunities which presented
themselves. She urged more concentrated effort from the national
headquarters and a substantial appropriation to enable the chairmen of
the standing committees to carry on their work; also that they should
be elected instead of appointed and be members of the official board,
and she concluded: "It is earnestly recommended that suffragists take
steps to politicalize their methods. The primaries, affording in many
States an opportunity for women to secure the nominations of favorable
candidates; active interest in defeating the election of those opposed
to suffrage; the questioning of candidates, etc., are all instances
where intelligent interest and activity on the part of suffragists
will educate the public far more effectively than debates, lectures
and literature--to see that women are determined to take an active
part in so-called politics, so intimately associated for weal or woe
in their lives."
The reports of the headquarters secretary and national press chairman,
Miss Elizabeth J. Hauser (Ohio) were read by Mrs. Upton. The first in
speaking of the increased demands on the headquarters began: "In no
previous presidential campaign in the United States were the views of
candidates on the enfranchisement of women ever so generally commented
on by the press. Perhaps never before did candidates consider the
question of sufficient importance to have any opinion upon it. Never
before did the newspaper interviewer put to every possible
personage--politician or preacher, writer or speaker, inventor or
explorer, captain of industry, social worker, actor, prize-fighter,
maid, matron, widow--the burning query, 'What about votes for women?'"
She told of about 30,000 letters having been sent out and an average
of nearly 1,000 pieces of literature a day, as many in the first half
of the present year as in all of 1908. The Book Department, in charge
of Miss Caroline I. Reilly, reported that the sales of the Life and
Work of Susan B. Anthony had amounted to $800; 200 sets of the History
of Woman Suffrage had been placed in the libraries of the leading
colleges and universities; 100 copies of the Reports of the last two
national conventions had been put into the libraries which keep the
file.
The delegates to the presidential nominating conventions had been
appealed to by letter for a suffrage plank in the platform but without
result. The Independence Party convention in Chicago voted it down.
The usual work had been done in international and national conventions
and many had adopted favorable resolutions, among them those of the
International Bricklayers' and Stone Masons' Union meeting in Detroit;
the International Cotton Spinners' Union in Boston and the Woman's
National Trade Union League in that city: the National Council of
Women and the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association. The United Mine
Workers of America, meeting at Indianapolis, passed the woman suffrage
resolution by unanimous vote and sent to the headquarters 500 copies
of it, which were promptly mailed to members of Congress. The American
Federation of Labor, representing 2,000,000 members, at its convention
in Denver, followed its long established custom of passing this
resolution. Dr. Shaw attended the National Conference of Charities and
Corrections: Mrs. Julia Ward Howe was received as a fraternal delegate
from the National American Suffrage Association by the General
Federation of Women's Clubs at its biennial in Boston; Mrs. Stockwell
by the convention of the American Library Association; Mrs. Sperry and
Mrs. Alice L. Park of California, by the Nurses Associated Alumnae of
the United States; Mrs. Coryell by the American Baptist Home
Missionary Society, and the association had representatives at many
other conventions. "To summarize, 29 national associations have
endorsed woman suffrage; 14 others have taken action on some phase of
the question; 20 State Federations of Labor, 16 State Granges and
seven State Letter Carriers' Associations have endorsed it. Some of
the States have carried on a very active propaganda in this
direction, securing endorsements from hundreds of local organizations
representing labor unions, educational and religious societies,
Farmers' Institutes, etc."
In the press report Miss Hauser said that 43,000 copies of _Progress_
had been sent out and 52,095 pages of material representing 190
different subjects had been distributed, including 1,262 copies of
Mrs. Catt's address to the International Suffrage Alliance. She told
of the special articles, of the full pages, of the personal work with
editors--a report of remarkable accomplishment, filling eight printed
pages of the Minutes. In concluding she said: "The day of old methods
has gone by and if new methods are to be successfully developed there
must be for press chairman a woman who is not only acquainted with the
philosophy and history of the woman suffrage movement but who is
possessed of the newspaper instinct and the ability to make friends
readily. Nothing but press work should be expected of her and she
should be enabled to get in touch with the controlling forces in the
newspaper world." This report was supplemented with that of Miss
Blackwell, chairman of the Committee on Literature.
As the headquarters were soon to be removed from Warren, Ohio, and
Miss Hauser had resigned as secretary, this was the last of her
excellent reports and the convention sent her a letter of thanks and
appreciation for her admirable work. Dr. Shaw said of her: "There
never was a woman who gave more consecrated service; she dreamed of
woman suffrage by night and toiled for it by day." [Afterward Miss
Hauser went to the headquarters in New York as vice-chairman of the
National Press Committee.]
In the evening Mayor John F. Miller welcomed the convention and
congratulated the association on the personnel of its members in
Washington. "This has been a pioneer State in the woman's rights
movement," he said. "In 1854 Arthur Denny introduced a woman suffrage
bill in the Territorial Legislature. In 1878 the civil disabilities of
married women were removed and this was the first State west of the
Rocky Mountains to say that a wife's property should be her own. Women
here have all the rights of men except to vote and hold office. I do
not know whether woman suffrage will bring in everything good and
abolish everything evil but if it will by all means let us have it."
He closed with a tribute to the mothers in the State.
In an eloquent response Mrs. Villard reminded the Mayor that if a
cause is just the consequences following in its path need not be
feared and said: "I was early taught by my father that moral principle
in vigorous exercise is irresistible. It has an immortal essence. It
may disappear for a time but it can no more be trod out of existence
by the iron foot of time or the ponderous march of iniquity than
matter can be annihilated. It lives somewhere, somehow, and rises
again in renovated strength. The women of this country who are
advocating the cause of woman suffrage are animated by a great moral
principle. They are armed with a spiritual weapon of finest caliber
and one that is sure to win." She told of the great reception given in
1883 to her husband and his guests when they reached Seattle for the
opening of the railroad after its completion; of his response and that
of the Hon. Carl Schurz. She described an address made by a young
girl, the daughter of Professor Powell of the university, the entire
expenses of which Mr. Villard had paid for several years, in which she
said he would be remembered more for what he had done for education
than for the building of the railroad. "In the retrospect of time,"
said Mrs. Villard, "I can see her, sweetly modest and gracious,
standing as it were with outstretched arms inviting the women who are
gathered here today to come and help make the State of Washington
free." Then in an appeal for the pending suffrage amendment she said:
"Many tributes of respect and admiration have been paid to my noble
companion in the great northwest, which are carefully cherished by me
and my children, but I crave one more and it is this--that Mr.
Villard's keen sense of justice and fair play for women shall find
echo in the hearts of the men of Washington, to whose extraordinary
development he gave such powerful impetus, so that in November, 1910,
they will proclaim with loud accord that the women of Washington are
no longer bond but free, no longer disfranchised but regenerated and
disenthralled, equal partners in the unending struggle of the human
race for nobler laws and higher moral standards."
The evening session closed with the president's address of Dr. Shaw,
which the _Woman's Journal_ described as "inimitable" but not a
paragraph of it can be found after the lapse of years. Her speeches
always were inspired by the occasion and only a stenographic report
could give an adequate idea of them. Miss Anthony mourned because this
was not made and others often spoke of it but Dr. Shaw herself was
indifferent. There were pressing demands for money and the endless
details of these meetings absorbed the time and strength of those who
might otherwise have attended to it.
Mrs. Upton in her report as treasurer made a stirring appeal in which
she said: "The most important question before this convention is that
of money. A grave responsibility rests upon the shoulders of each
delegate. She should know how much money we have had in the last year,
where it went and why. More than this, she should decide for herself
how money for the coming year shall be disbursed and suggest ways of
raising the same. No delegate ought to quiet her conscience with the
thought that the judgment of the general officers is the best
judgment. Each State has entrusted into the hands of its delegates
precious business and the responsibility is great and cannot honestly
be disregarded. In the long ago we worked until our money gave out.
Now, as the beginning of the end of our work is in sight, demands for
money are many and if business rules are followed they must be met.
The small self-sacrifices must be continued and larger ways of
obtaining money created. We are all shouting for a fifth star on our
suffrage flag but we must remember that no star was ever placed upon
any flag without cost, without sacrifice. Our fifth star will find its
place because we explain to voters what a fifth star really means.
These voters will not come to us; we must go to them. To go anywhere
costs money. To go to the voters of a large and thinly populated State
means much money. Shall we be content with four stars or shall we
provide the means to get a fifth?"
The total receipts of the past year were $15,420; disbursements,
$14,480. She told of the many ways in which the money was being
used--over $2,000 added to several other thousands spent in field work
in Oklahoma for the next year's amendment campaign; $3,000 to the
College League; headquarters' expenses, literature, posters, etc. Part
of the money came from the Anthony Memorial Fund, part from the fund
raised by Dr. Thomas and Miss Garrett, the rest from individual
subscriptions. The convention, which was not a large one, subscribed
over $3,000. The following recommendations of the Business Committee
were adopted by the convention: Appropriations shall be made for
educational, church and petition work; financial aid shall not be
given to States having campaigns on hand unless there be perfect
harmony within the ranks of the workers of those States; an organizer
shall be sent to Arizona to prepare the Territory for constitutional
or legislative work and a campaign organizer to South Dakota.
There was much interest in the question of returning the national
headquarters to New York City. It was long the desire of Miss Anthony
to do this on a scale befitting so large a city and so important a
cause and the funds had never been available. Mrs. Oliver H. P.
Belmont, who had lately come into the suffrage movement, had taken the
entire twentieth floor of a new office building for two years and
invited the New York State Suffrage Association to occupy a part of
it. She now extended an invitation to the National Association to use
for this period as many rooms as it needed and she would pay the
difference in the rent between these and the headquarters at Warren,
O. In addition she would maintain the press bureau. The advantages of
this great newspaper and magazine center were recognized by the
general officers, executive committee and delegates, the offer was
gladly accepted and a rising vote of thanks was sent to Mrs. Belmont.
Miss Perle Penfield (Texas) read the report of Mrs. Lucia Ames Mead,
chairman of the Committee on Peace and Arbitration. She told of the
tenth anniversary this year of The Hague Conference, which was
attended by representatives of forty-six instead of twenty-six nations
and had made various international agreements that would lessen the
likelihood of war. She spoke of attending the second National Peace
Congress in Chicago in May, at which all the women who took part were
suffragists. Mrs. Mead referred to having spoken eighty-six times
during the year. In pointing out the work that should be done in the
United States for peace she said:
A great campaign of education is needed in the schools and
colleges, in the press and pulpit and in every organization of
men and women that stands for progress. Pre-eminently among
women's organizations, the National American Woman Suffrage
Association, which opposes the injustice of refusing the ballot
to women, should stand against the grossest of all injustices
which leaves innocent women widowed and children orphaned by war,
and which in time of peace diverts nearly two-thirds of the
federal revenue from constructive work to payment for past wars
and preparation for future wars. Thus far this association has
been so absorbed in its direct methods of advancing suffrage that
it has not perhaps sufficiently realized the power of many
agencies that are furthering its cause by indirect means. I
firmly believe that substituting statesmanship for battleship
will do more to remove the electoral injustices that still
prevent our being a democracy than any direct means used to
obtain woman suffrage, important and necessary as these are.
Women, though hating war, quite as frequently as men are deluded
by the plea that peace can be ensured only by huge armaments. It
is a question whether woman suffrage would greatly lessen the
vote for these supposed preventives of war, but there is no
question that more reliance on reason and less on force would
exalt respect for woman and would remove the objection that
woman's physical inferiority has anything to do with suffrage.
Several delegates expressed the need and the right of mothers to
strive to prevent war. Mrs. Duniway, Mrs. Philena Everett Johnson and
Mrs. DeVoe spoke on the pending amendment campaigns in their
respective States of Oregon, South Dakota and Washington. Mrs. Clara
Bewick Colby's subject was the American Situation vs. the English
Situation and she described the conditions in England which caused the
"suffragette" or "militant" movement. Mrs. Florence Kelley, chairman
of the Industrial Committee, spoke on the Wage Earning Woman and the
Ballot. "Because of the decision of the United States Supreme Court in
the Oregon case," she said, "fourteen State Legislatures in the past
year have considered bills for shortening the workday for women and
six have enacted laws for it. South Carolina has taken a step backward
by changing the hours from ten to twelve. Child labor is constantly
increasing in spite of our efforts. I have seen the evolution of
modern industry and it has meant the sacrifice of thousands of young
lives." At the close of the afternoon session the delegates enjoyed
an automobile ride of many miles amidst scenery which many who had
travelled widely declared was unsurpassed in the whole world.
The most brilliant session of the convention probably was that of the
College Women's Evening, with Dr. Shaw presiding. Miss Caroline Lexow
(N. Y.), secretary of the College Women's League, spoke of its
remarkable growth since its organization the preceding year and said
that it now had twenty-four branches in as many States and twenty-five
chapters in as many colleges. She called attention to the fact that no
College Anti-Suffrage Association had ever been formed and said that
college women remembered the words of one of the pioneers: "Make the
best use you can of your freedom for we have bought it at a great
price." Mrs. Eva Emery Dye (Ore.) gave an able address on College
Women in Civic Life. The Law and the Woman was the subject considered
by Miss Adella M. Parker, a popular lawyer, president of the
Washington College League. "I have been looking for years," she said,
"to find any legislation that does not affect women, from a tariff on
gloves to a declaration of war. The great problems which face the
human race demand the genius of both men and women to solve them. The
law needs women quite as much as women need the law." The closing
address on College Women and Democracy by Frances Squire Potter,
professor of English at the University of Minnesota, was a masterly
review of the relation of college women to the life of the present,
and later it was printed by the College League as a part of its
literature. In the course of it she said:
The admission of women began with Oberlin, Ohio, in 1833, then a
provincial institution, religious in its purpose and one where
the boys and girls did the work. From that time on the West was
committed to the co-educational State university. The influence
set back eastward and women demanded admittance successively in
this college and that college. It is to be remembered that they
did not go in naturally and pleasantly but at the point of the
sword and to the sound of the trumpet. And to-day the segregated
college life of the East illustrates the "last entrenchments of
the middle ages." Those monasteries and nunneries of learning
crown the hilltops from Boston to Washington and "watch the star
of intellectual empire westward take its way." ... Following upon
the democratization of the university we now see rising a tide
which is as inevitable as was that first movement, which will
bear the college woman, as it bears the college man, out of the
fostering shelter of the college hall into the great welter of
life, of full citizenship.... Since the colleges of America
opened to women, nothing so vital to the nourishment of this
spirit has happened as the formation of the College Equal
Suffrage League.... There are certain definite things for which a
college woman registers herself in joining this league. First, a
direct return to the country of the energy which it has trained.
A woman's whole education to-day is toward direct results. She
has been educated away from the old indirect ideal of the
boarding-school. There she was taught to be a persuasive
ornament, now she is taught to be an individual mind, will and
conscience and to use these in acting herself. I hold that there
is no more graphic illustration of inconsistent waste than the
spectacle of a college-trained woman falsifying her entire
education by shying away from suffrage.... The time has gone by
when a college woman can be allowed to be noncommittal on this
subject. If she has not thought about equal suffrage she must do
so now, exactly as persons of intelligence were compelled to
think about slavery in the time of Garrison, or about the
reformation in the time of Martin Luther. To those who try to get
out of it it is not unfitting to quote Thomas Huxley's famous
sentence: "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who dare not
reason is a coward; he who can not reason is a fool." ...