So much in brief for the forty years from 1870 to 1910. From July 1, 1910, to September 30, 1912, the financial support of the paper was assumed by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After that it fell to the manager of the paper either to get contributions to meet the deficit each year or to borrow. On October 1, 1912, Miss Blackwell contributed $2,000; on January 31, 1914, she again gave the paper $2,000.
With the exception of these $4,000, I have raised or borrowed each year the necessary money, over and above receipts, to keep the paper going. With the beginning of 1915 Miss Blackwell began to feel that she could not continue indefinitely to make up a deficit, and she began seriously to consider cutting the size of the paper to four pages or making it a monthly.
The 1915 campaigns particularly needed all the aid that the Journal could give, and feeling keenly that the proposed changes would greatly reduce its power of usefulness, the following points were made by Mr. Stevens and myself in further consideration of the matter with Miss Blackwell and a few warm friends of the Journal:
With the single exception of the Irish Citizen, the Woman's Journal is the only suffrage paper in existence which has no organization back of it. Jus Suffragii has the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. The Woman Voter has the New York Woman Suffrage Party. Votes for Women in England has the United Suffragists. The Suffragette had the Woman's Social and Political Union of England. The Suffragist has the Congressional Union. The Headquarters News Letter has the National Suffrage Association.
Now, while the Journal has had no organization with large membership and resources to make it a power, it has shown great vitality as witnessed by the fact that it is the oldest surviving suffrage periodical in the world. Furthermore, it has shown such remarkable growth during the past few years, with no capital put up to promote it and build it up as other businesses are built up, that it seemed apparent that all it needed to make it strong and self-supporting was a reasonable amount of capital, a reasonable amount of time and the wholehearted co-operation of suffragists in general which has been growing in an encouraging degree. It seemed a time for faith and not for fear.
It was accordingly decided to retain the eight-page size, to continue the paper as a weekly and to borrow the money necessary to meet the deficit, believing that the great body of readers of the Journal would approve and sustain this decision when it was brought to their knowledge. They would feel that a backward step should be impossible.
At the present time and covering the indebtedness of the Journal from
October, 1912, to January, 1916, the figures are as follows:
Borrowed in 1915………………….. $10,500
Owed E.L. Grimes Company for printing,
paper stock, mailing, approximately .. 9,000
________
$19,500
The assets of the Journal at the time of the last stockholders' meeting (January 28) included the following: