Besides the league lists, we have the names of over 1300 prominent men and women who believe in equal suffrage but are not subscribers. In addition we have other lists totaling about 32,000 suffragists whose names are not on our books.
This makes over 68,000 suffragists who, so far as we know, have never seen a copy of the organ of the movement, and have never been asked to subscribe. Each week scores and sometimes hundreds of such suffragists, who are not subscribers, write letters to our office, to the offices of the National Suffrage Association and to other headquarters and offices, asking for information which the Woman's Journal publishes from week to week. Think of the waste! They have the faith but not the knowledge to make converts, to answer objections, to write "copy" for the newspapers, to make addresses, to take part in debates, to write articles for the magazines, and to do the thousand and one things that suffragists must do if the present generation of women is not to go down to the grave unenfranchised as their mothers and grandmothers did.
Think of it! Nearly 70,000 known suffragists who do not subscribe. In the interest of efficiency they ought all to be constant readers of the paper. But how are they to be reached? There are two ways: First, by the officers of the organization to which they belong; and second, by means of letters, sample copies, and follow up letters until the last one of them has enrolled as a regular reader.
But advance work requires funds. No matter how necessary to the cause of equal suffrage it may be to enroll those 68,000 suffragists as readers, the United States Post Office will not sell us stamps for writing to them unless we can make cash payments. Funds for other parts of the work of increasing the circulation are equally necessary, and the work halts for lack of that which reformers always lack.
The Woman's Journal can make suffrage speeches every week in the remote parts as well as in the crowded cities, and it can do this more cheaply than can any other agent of equal quality. But if the paper is to do its part in the general suffrage work, it must be through the body of organized suffragists, and not single-handed. The movement is growing too fast for the management, unaided by organization, to make the obvious and necessary expansion.
=What Papers Live By=
[Illustration: The First Editor of the Woman's Journal Mary A.
Livermore]
One of the well-known facts in the world of publishing newspapers and periodicals is that neither magazines, newspapers nor periodicals of any kind live by the subscription price. Most of them live chiefly by advertisements.
Why, then, does the Journal not carry more advertising? The answer is that it will not take most of the advertisements it can get, and it cannot get most of the advertisement sit wants. In the first place. The Woman's Journal will not accept liquor or tobacco advertisements, or any advertisements of patent medicines, swindling schemes, or matters of a questionable character. Every year it declines a considerable amount of business on this score.
"But," the reader is sure to say, "what about the thousand and one advertisements which are legitimate? There are hundreds and thousands of advertisements of women's products for which the Journal ought to be an excellent medium." In answer to this one might almost say that the better the grade of advertising the harder it is to get. The better grades of advertising require a much larger circulation than we have and a better grade of paper on which to print their advertisements; they naturally want their advertisements to be shown in the most attractive manner. And there are hundreds of publications just as good as ours which can give them the proper display.