“I am pleased, indeed, to greet you and your adherents here, and I will say to you that I was talking only yesterday with several members of Congress in regard to a Suffrage Committee in the House. The subject is one in which I am deeply interested, and you may rest assured that I will give it my earnest attention.”
In interesting himself in the formation of a special committee to sit on suffrage in the House, the President was doing the smallest thing, to be sure, that could be done, but he was doing something. This was a distinct advance. It was our task to press on until all the maze of Congressional machinery had been used to exhaustion. Then there would be nothing left to do but to pass the amendment.
A fourth time that year the determination of women to secure the passage of the amendment was demonstrated. In December, the opening week of the new Congress, the annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association was held in Washington. Miss Lucy Burns, vice chairman of its Congressional Committee and also of the Congressional Union, was applauded to the echo by the whole convention when she said:
“The National American Woman Suffrage Association is assembled in Washington to ask the Democratic Party to enfranchise the women of America.
“Rarely in the history of the country has a party been more powerful than the Democratic Party is to-day. It controls the Executive Office, the Senate and more than two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives. It is in a position to give us effective and immediate help.
“We ask the Democrats to take action now. Those who hold power are responsible to the country for the use of it. They are responsible not only for what they do, but for what they do not do. Inaction establishes just as clear a record as does a policy of open hostility.
“We have in our hands to-day not only the weapon of a just cause; we have the support of ten enfranchised states—states comprising one-fifth of the United States Senate, one-seventh of the House of Representatives, and one-sixth of the electoral vote. More than 3,600,000 women have a vote in Presidential elections. It is unthinkable that a national government which represents women, and which appeals periodically for the suffrages of women, should ignore the issue of the right of all women to political freedom.
“We cannot wait until after the passage of scheduled Administration reforms . . . . Congress is free to take action on our question in the present session. We ask the Administration to support the woman suffrage amendment in Congress with its whole strength.”
This represented the attitude of the entire suffrage movement toward the situation in the winter of 1913. At no time did the militant group deviate from this position until the amendment was through Congress.
It was difficult to make the Administration believe that the women meant what they said, and that they meant to use everything in their power and resourcefulness to see it carried out.