President Wilson’s first session of Congress came together April 7th, 1913. The opening day was marked by the suffragists’ second mass demonstration. This time women delegates representing every one of the 435 Congressional Districts in the country bore petitions from the constituencies showing that the people “back home” wanted the amendment passed. The delegates marched on Congress and were received with a warm welcome and their petitions presented to Congress. The same day the amendment which bears the name of Susan B. Anthony, who drafted it in 1875, was reintroduced into both houses of Congress.
The month of May saw monster demonstrations in many cities and villages throughout the country, with the direct result that in June the Senate Committee on Suffrage made the first favorable report made by that committee in twenty-one years, thereby placing it on the Senate calendar for action.
Not relaxing the pressure for a day we organized the third great demonstration on the last of July when a monster petition signed by hundreds of thousands of citizens was brought to the Senate asking that body to pass the national suffrage amendment. Women from all parts of the country mobilized in the countryside of Maryland where they were met with appropriate ceremonies-by the Senate Woman Suffrage Committee. The delegation motored in gaily decorated automobiles to Washington and went direct to the Senate, where the entire day was given over to suffrage discussion.
Twenty-two senators spoke in favor of the amendment in presenting their petitions. Three spoke against it. For the first time in twenty-six years suffrage was actually debated in Congress. That day was historic.
Speeches? Yes. Greetings? Yes. Present petitions from their constituencies? Gladly. Report it from the Senate Committee? They had to concede that. But passage of the amendment? That was beyond their contemplation.
More pressure was necessary. We appealed to the women voters, of whom there were then four million, to come into action.
“Four million women voters are watching you,” we said to Congress. We might as well have said, “There are in the South Sea Islands four million heathens.”
It was clear that these distant women voters had no relation in the senatorial mind to the realism of politics. We decided to bring some of these women voters to Washington: Having failed to get the Senate to act by August, we invited the Council of Women Voters to hold its convention in Washington that Congress might learn this simple lesson: women did vote; there were four million of them; they had a voters’ organization; they cared about the enfranchisement of all American women; they wanted the Senate to act; suffrage was no longer a moral problem; it could be made a practical political problem with which men and parties would have to reckon.
Voting women made their first impression on Congress that summer.
Meanwhile the President’s “paramount issues”—tariff and currency—had been disposed of. With the December Congress approaching, he was preparing another message. We went to him again. This time it was the women from his own home state, an influential deputation of seventy-three women, including the suffrage leaders from all suffrage organizations in New Jersey. The women urged him to include recommendation of the suffrage resolution in his message to the new Congress. He replied: