Our labor was not wasted, however, for the campaign widely advertised the fact that women still possessed the right to serve as school trustees and also to vote for appropriations and the issuance of bonds. We still held, in rural districts, the power of the purse-strings. It was a part of my policy to keep this fact always before the people of the state. Every spring, shortly before the time of the annual school meetings, I prepared a circular which was printed and sent to the three hundred newspapers of New Jersey. We were too poor, as an association, to afford clerk hire, devoted suffragists freely giving their time and labor.
The admission of women to the Bar of the state was secured at this time. Several of us spoke at a hearing of the judiciary committee of the Legislature, but the most telling speech was that of Mrs. Carrie Burnham Kilgore, a lawyer of Philadelphia.
She informed her hearers that, through interstate courtesy, she had been permitted to try cases in New Jersey. “Surely, gentlemen, you will not refuse to the women of your own state the privilege you have accorded to those from a neighboring commonwealth.” This argument produced a great effect on the men learned in the law. Miss Mary Philbrook was very active and energetic in getting the law passed under which she was the first woman to become a lawyer in New Jersey.
My husband gave her her first case—that of a neighbor whose husband had by his will tried to cut off her right of dower. Miss Philbrook won it.
The comments of the “antis,” or “remonstrants,” as we then called them, appealed strongly to one’s sense of humor.
I wrote a farce, “The Judgment of Minerva,” on this theme, and read it before the National Woman Suffrage Convention in Washington and elsewhere. It elicited much laughter. Later it was acted by the College Equal Suffrage League at one of the Boston theaters and by several other suffrage societies.
After serving as president of the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association for eight years, I retired. Mrs. Cornelia Hussey, a devoted suffragist, whose generous financial support had been indispensable to the state association, made me a life member of the National and through the vote of the state association I became its first honorary president. Such recognitions of one’s work are always heartening because they testify to the approval of one’s fellow-workers. The greatest reward is the consciousness that one has done something, be it ever so little, for the “grand old cause of human freedom.”
My husband had been a “Pooh Bah” in Scotch Plains, and I now deserved the title in Plainfield. Our little Unitarian church needed a president for its Women’s Alliance, and during eleven years I held the office. This did not involve long-distance excursions, however. In addition to working for the church, we prepared and read papers. It was a pleasure to meet with this intelligent body of women. In our Plainfield chapter of the D. A. R. I enjoyed serving as regent and vice-regent for some years. As president of the local league I continued my work for suffrage.